Rosa Luxemburg b. 5th March 1871: scourge of bureaucrats, cynics & empty rhetoricians*
It’s the 153rd anniversary of the birth of Rosa Luxemburg. She was murdered by German Freikorps on 15th January 1919. Luxemburg was a leading member of the socialist Second International but unusual in the grouping in opposing the First World War.
On the 50th anniversary of her death on 15th January 1969 The Guardian published an appreciation by its then European Editor John Palmer* the first couple of paragraphs I repeat below:
Rosa Luxemburg is a strangely unsung martyr in the official Socialist pantheon. An outstanding leader of the Second International, she has been quietly forgotten by the official Social-Democratic Labour parties. A Marxist theorist and revolutionary on a par with Lenin, she has alternatively been regarded with suspicion and indifference by official Communist historians.
Yet her ideas, along with those of Trotsky, are having a renaissance among the young revolutionary New Left which is making itself felt both west and east of the Iron Curtain. This is no coincidence. In her lifetime Luxemburg was the scourge of bureaucrats, cynics and empty rhetoricians..
Fortunately the complete works of Rosa Luxemburg are now being published in English by Verso and Partners
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