Rosa Luxemburg

JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser.

Home
Author
Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg (5 March 1871 – 15 January 1919) was a Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist and revolutionary socialist of Polish-Jewish descent who became a naturalized German citizen. She was, successively, a member of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

In 1915, after the SPD supported German involvement in World War I, she and Karl Liebknecht co-founded the anti-war Spartakusbund ("Spartacus League"), which eventually became the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). During the German Revolution, she co-founded the newspaper Die Rote Fahne ("The Red Flag"), the central organ of the Spartacist movement.

She considered the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 a blunder, but supported it as events unfolded. With the crushing of the revolt by Friedrich Ebert's social democratic government and by the Freikorps (World War I veterans who banded together into right-wing paramilitary groups), Freikorps troops captured Luxemburg, Liebknecht and some of their supporters. Luxemburg was shot and her body thrown in the Landwehr Canal in Berlin.

OTHER AUTHORS

Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya

Late Professor Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya was an outstanding student of Indian philosophy in our times who was a self-proclaimed Marxist, itself unique. Until his death in 1993, he taught at the Cit

Cathy Porter

Cathy Porter was born in Oxford in 1947, and grew up there. She spent a year in Poland before studying Russian and Czech at London University. Since then she has become deeply involved in the politica

Lars T. Lih

Lars T. Lih, Ph.D. (1984) Princeton, is the editor of Stalin's Letters to Molotov, the author of Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921, the chapter on ideology in the fo

K.B. Goel

K.B. Goel (1930–2018) was a Delhi-based Indian art critic who wrote on national-level art from the 1950s to the 1990s. In this period, he closely observed and commented on emerging Indian art and

Michael Denning

MICHAEL DENNING is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and the co-director of Yale’s Initiative on Labor and Culture. He is the author of Culture in t

Sydney Gordon

Sydney Gordon, an editor and writer, later lived and worked in Berlin.

Burhan Sönmez

Burhan Sönmez is a novelist. He has published Kuzey (2009), Masumlar (2011), Istanbul Istanbul (2015) and translated William Blake into Turkish. He won the Disturbing the Peace award from the

P. Govinda Pillai

P. Govinda Pillai (b. 1926) was born in Perumbavoor in the Ernakulam district of Kerala. Leaping into the country’s freedom movement during his student days, Pillai graduated from St. Xavier&

K.A. Manikumar

K.A. Manikumar retired as Professor of History, Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli. He is the author of Vellore Revolt, 1806 (Allied Publishers & VIT University, 2007) and A Colonia