FOR WHICH SHE DIED

FORTY years ago last Thursday there died a woman who takes her place with Lenin and Trotsky as a great revoluticnary representative of Marxism and the ‘working class in the twentieth century.

Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish woman who spent most of her political life in the German Social-Democratic Party, was a brilliant theoretician and writer in the fields of economics and politics—and also a great woman of action, with the revolutionary qualities of complete fearlessness and devotion to the cause of her class, right to the point of death.

This delicate woman steeled herself to great heroism, and from the very beginning never gave a single thought to her ‘self-interest’ or personal ‘success’ outside the working-class movement.

At the age of 22 she was so feared by the established socialist leaders as a ‘rebel’ that she wes excluded from the 1893 international conference at Zurich.

Her fight against those ‘revisionists’ who denied the class struggle and advocated socialism by gradual reform began just after this) with her book ‘Reform or Revolution’, directed against Bernstein.

At that stage the leaders, Bebel, Kautsky and others, rejected Bernstein in words; § but Rosa Luxemburg was one of the few who realized that they were taking the same direction themselves. In 1907 she wrote this about the party leaders: Rosa ‘They have completely pledged them- Luxemburg selves to parliament and parliamentarism, and whenever anything happens which transcends the limits of parliamentary action they are hopeless—no, worse than hopeless, because they then do their utmost to force the movement back into parliamentary channels, and they will furiously defame as an “enemy of the people” anyone who dares to venture beyond their own limits.’

Her fight against this kind of ‘socialism’ ended in the tragedy of her assassination at the hands of thugs employed by a government of the leaders of the Social-Democratic Party itself.

A party with millions of members, dozens of newspapers, cultural clubs, mass women’s and youth organizations and co-operatives, and avowing Marxist principles—this party in 1914 supported ‘the Fatherland’ in the imperialist war.

Rosa Luxemburg was one of the few who had seen the writing on the wall with the incorporation of the party and trade union leaderships into the capitalist system.

Clear parallel for us For us in Britain there is a clear parallel. Our leaders too have become written into the system. They are part of the established institutions. And so. the lessons of Germany are urgent and. vital for us.

Offered power in 1918, the reformist leaders in Germany CONSCRIPT, IN UNIFORM, SPOKE AGAINST IMPERIALIST WAR AT BERLIN