Rosa luxemburg assassination

Just as she rejected a revisionist vision of the party run by experts and basically concerned with incremental socio-economic issues, she opposed the idea of a revolutionary organization based on blind obedience which would erect an “absolute dividing wall” between the leadership and the base. If socialism is to transform workers from “dead machines” into the “free and independent directors” of society as a whole, she argued, they must have the chance to learn and exercise their knowledge. Indeed, this very concern led her to embrace the Russian revolution of 1905, which inspired what is arguably her finest theoretical work, Mass Strike, the Political Party and Trade Unions (1916).

Luxemburg took part in the revolutionary events and experienced first-hand the innovative possibilities of the masses in democratically organizing their milieu. In fact, she saw the mass strike as a way to overcome the “artificial” bifurcation of the economic struggle of the unions from the party’s commitment to a political transformation of the given order. The concept articulates her concern with furthering an organizational dialectic between party and base that would gradually build the self-administrative capacities of workers by helping them develop new democratic institutions and then, at a different stage of the struggle, even newer ones.

This radical democratic vision stayed with her throughout the years of World War I, which she spent in a tiny prison cell. It was there that she wrote a response to the various critics of her imperialism thesis known as the Antikritik (1915), translated Russian authors into German, composed her beautiful letters to friends and lovers, and—under the pseudonym Junius—produced the great antiwar pamphlet The Crisis in German Social Democracy (1916), which mercilessly assaulted the SPD for its willingness to support the Kaiser’s war, its obsession with votes, its cowardice in the face of public opinion and its betrayal of working-class interests.

Her most prophetic work, however, was surely The Russian Revolution. Also written in jail, while she was in ill health and with little information other than from newspapers, it exposed the compromises that would ultimately undermine the Soviet experiment. Opposed to Lenin’s agrarian policy, continuing to reject the use of slogans implying the “right of national self-determination,” her analysis is best known for its demand that the “dictatorship of the proletariat”—as the “transitional” phase of socialist construction— should extend democracy both in terms of republican values and popular institutions that would allow for the direct participation of the working class in administering social life. And yet, she viewed these compromises and deformations as products of the regime’s weakness which itself was born of underdevelopment and isolation. Indeed, Rosa Luxemburg was among the first to analyze the Russian Revolution from an internationalist perspective which stressed the unfulfilled political obligations of social democracy.