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Rosa Luxemburg
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Rosa Luxemburg was the youngest of five children of a lower middle-class Jewish family in Russian-ruled Poland. She became involved in underground activities while still in high school. Like many of her radical contemporaries from the Russian Empire who were faced with prison, she emigrated to Zürich (1889), where she studied law and political economy, receiving a doctorate in 1898. In Zürich she became involved in the international socialist movement and met Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov, Pavel Axelrod, and other leading representatives of the Russian social democratic movement, with whom... she soon began to disagree. Together with a fellow student, Leo Jogiches, who was to become a lifelong friend and sometime lover, she challenged both the Russians and the established Polish Socialist Party because of their support of Polish independence. Consequently, she and her colleagues founded the rival Polish Social Democratic Party, which was to become the nucleus of the future Polish Communist Party.
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Next to Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg was the most important representative of the left-wing socialist, anti-militarist, and internationalist positions in the Social Democratic Party (SPD) of Germany before 1918. She was a passionate and convincing critic of capitalism as well as anti-democratic and dictatorial tendencies within the Bolsheviki. She confronted the compelling logic of economic laws and political strategies with the utopia of a new world. According to Luxemburg, this new world needed to be created in spite of widespread despair, deprivation of rights, cowardliness and the corruption of power.
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Rosa Luxemburg has the well-deserved reputation of being one of the most radical defenders of democracy and one of the most uncompromising critics of the market economy in the labor movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The People’s Republic of China has the reputation of being one of the strongest authoritarian governments and of having embarked on one of the most sweeping advances of the market economy in the early 21st century.
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There are those who try to use the differences that Rosa Luxemburg had with Lenin and the Bolsheviks as a point of division, separating themselves from the communist movement. Those attempts would have been wholeheartedly rejected by Luxemburg herself.
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Rosa Luxemburg, already well known as an innovative intellectual and talented speaker in the party, came to the fore in the struggle against Bernstein. Rosa was born in 1871 in Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire. From the age of 16 she had been involved in working class politics and she was a founding member of the Social Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania. In 1897 she moved to Germany to work in the SPD. She entered the debate with enthusiasm and became the sharpest critic of Bernstein's opportunist attack on the "final goal". She wrote a pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution which remains today the classic statement of the revolutionary case against reformism.
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Although Rosa Luxemburg held that in one fashion or another the whole mass of people must take part in the construction of socialism, she did not recognize the soviets as typifying the organizational form which would make this possible. Impressed as she was in 1905 by the great mass-strikes taking place in Russia, she paid little attention to their soviet form of organization. In her eyes, the soviets were merely strike committees in the absence of other more permanent labor organizations. Even after the 1917 Revolution she felt that "the practical realization of socialism and an economic, social and juridical system is something which lies completely hidden in the mists of the future." (12) Only the general direction in which to move was known, not the detailed concrete steps that had to be taken to consolidate and develop the new society. Socialism could not be derived from ready-made plans and realized by governmental decree.
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Rosa Luxemburg