Introduction Reintroducing Red Rosa

Abstract

For those with a socialist politics that is uncompromising in both its commitment to democracy and its opposition to capitalism, it is common to raise the name of Rosa Luxemburg. A Polish German secular Jew, a Marxist political economist and political theorist, she was the most prominent leader of the left wing of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and a founder of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) and, later, the Spartacus League and the German Communist Party (KPD). Repeatedly jailed for her political activities in both Poland and Germany, she was ultimately murdered with her comrade Karl Liebknecht by the right-wing SPD leadership’s militarist Freikorps (Volunteer Corps) allies in the aftermath of the failed Spartacus Revolt in Berlin in 1919. Luxemburg thus became both a heroine and a martyr of the socialist workers’ movement. Though the Communist International of Josef Stalin, in the 1930s, denounced her as a “counterrevolutionary Menshevik” and sought to eradicate her influence, anti-Stalinist Marxists of various stripes came to her defense, however critically, and would continue to do so in subsequent decades.¹ And even today, more than 94 years after her death, Rosa Luxemburg refuses to finally die.