March 5: Red Rosa

Rosa Luxemburg, who co-founded the German Communist Party and was murdered in 1919 in an abortive revolution that she herself opposed, was born in Zamość, Poland on this date in 1871. Luxemburg was a chief theorist of the Polish Marxist movement before becoming a German citizen through marriage in 1898. She joined the Sparticist League after the German Social Democrats proved unwilling to bring an end to World War I through armistice. Luxemburg was an internationalist and an avid anti-nationalist, and had tensions with V.I. Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders over their support of self-determination for national minorities. She extended her opposition to anything but class-based identities to her own Jewishness, to which she was indifferent if not hostile. Luxemburg, writes Stephen Bronner at the Jewish Women’s Archive, was “among the first to analyze the Russian Revolution from an internationalist perspective which stressed the unfulfilled political obligations of social democracy” and challenged Bolshevik authoritarianism.

“You stupid henchmen! Your ‘order’ is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already ‘raise itself with a rattle’ and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I shall be!” —Rosa Luxemberg