Rosa Luxemburg was born on March 5th, 1871 in Poland when it was part of the Russian Empire. She was the last of five children in a lower middle class Jewish family. She was politically active even in High School but was forced to emigrate to Zurich in 1889 and played a part in forming the Polish Social Democratic Party which became the Polish Communist Party. She married in order to become a German citizen and moved to Berlin in 1898 and joined the German Social Democratic Party but from the first, argued against their reformist parliamentary approach, for Rosa Luxemburg, socialism could only ever be achieved by revolution. When revolution burst out in Russia in 1905 she moved to Warsaw to fight for a socialist revolution but was imprisoned. Her experience in Warsaw led to believe in the mass strike as the best means to radicalise the working class and bring about full-blown revolution. When she was released from prison she moved back to Berlin and back into the fold of the German Social Democratic Party only to find herself again in a minority when the party supported Germany’s war effort. It was at this point that she allied with Karl Liebknecht and formed the Spartakus League which sought to end the war through revolution and establish a workers’ government. The league’s theoretical basis was Luxemburg’s pamphlet, the Crisis in German Social Democracy which was written whilst again in prison (but this time a German prison). When she was released she agitated ceaselessly for the revolution she believed in, earning the nickname ‘Bloody Rosa’ in the bourgeois press. In December, 1918 she was one of the founders of the German Communist Party.
Karl Liebknecht
Karl Liebknecht was born on August 13th, 1871 in Leipzig. His father, Wilhelm Liebknecht, was a German socialist, close associate of Karl Marx, and co-founder of the German Social Democratic Party. After university he swore to dedicate his life to the socialist-Marxist cause. In 1904 he defended propertyless peasants who had been accused of smuggling socialist propaganda into Tsarist Russia from East Prussia, and in 1907 he played a principal role in the establishment of the International Union of Socialist Youth Organizations in Stuttgart. But in the same year he was jailed for publishing a pamphlet against militarism. Even though in prison he won a seat in the Prussian Landtag, and in 1912 he entered the Reichstag as the most vocal Social Democratic Party critic the government as well as the loudest voice against the party’s proposed revision of its Marxist doctrine. During World War I he was the first in the Reichstag to vote against war credits and as early as January 1915, was arguing for a civil war. The government conscripted him as a noncombatant and he served on the Russian Front. In 1916 he was expelled from the Social Democratic Party for opposing its leadership. It was this that brought him into alliance with Rosa Luxemburg and he edited the illegal “Spartacus Letters,” the “official” paper of the Spartakus League. On May 1, 1916, Liebknecht participated in a May Day demonstration in Berlin and called for the overthrow of the government and an end to the war and was tried and imprisoned. In October 1918, with the German Revolution in full swing, he was granted an amnesty by Prince Max’s government. The Russian Soviet government celebrated his release from prison by a dinner for him at its embassy in Berlin. Along with Rosa Luxemburg he continued to agitate against the reformism of Ebert’s Social Democratic government and was also a founding-member of the German Communist Party.