Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg (March 5, 1870 or 1871 - January 15, 1919, in Polish language Ró?a Luksemburg) was a Polish-born German Marxist political theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary. She was a social democratic theorist of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and later the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. She started the newspaper The Red Flag, and cofounded the Spartakusbund, a Marxist revolutionary group that became the Communist Party of Germany and took part in an unsuccessful revolution in Berlin in January, 1919. The uprising was carried out against Rosa's advice, and crushed by the remnants of the monarchist army and freelance right-wing militias collectively called the Freikorps, which were sent in by the government. Luxemburg and hundreds of others were captured, tortured, and killed.

The Role of the Party

The party, the advance guard of the working class, has only to give the masses of workers the insight that socialism is the means to free themselves from exploitation, and put forth the socialist revolution. The internal contradictions of capitalism, the antagonism between capital and labor, will keep the revolution occupied. The revolution will, however, educate the masses, and will make revolutionaries out of them:

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"History is the only true teacher, the revolution the best school for the proletariat. They will ensure that the "small horde" of the most slandered and persecuted becomes, step by step, that which their world view destines them: the struggling and victorious mass of the revolutionary, socialist proletariat." (The National Conference of the Spartacist League, Collected Works 4, p. 478)

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The task of the party is only to educate the backwards masses towards independence, to enable them to take over power themselves. It is the teaching of the subjective element of the Revolution, that is the consciousness of the working class of their historic mission, which the Party can achieve. The revolution itself can only be brought about through the working class. A Party that speaks for the workers, 'represents' them - for example in Parliaments - and acts instead of them, will get bogged down and itself become an instrument of the Counterrevolution.

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