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At the Eden Hotel in Berlin, Private Runge tears his skull and face. another soldier, also serving Captain Pabst, has a bullet in his head. They tie their bodies to bags with stones to weigh and not float, and play on one of the channels of the Spree, near the Cornelius Bridge. It will only appear two weeks later. The government of Friedrich Ebert has ended the life of Rosa Luxemburg, the most important Marxist leader in history, former member of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), leader of the most important League Spartacist and founder of the German Communist Party.
A few minutes earlier, the same characters had murdered Luxembourg's main companion in his long trajectory. Karl Liebknecht – the only Member of Parliament (1914) to have voted in the Reichstag (Parliament) against the war credits intended to finance the German presence during the First World War – was transferred to the prison on leaving the hotel but before leaving the place where he had been interrogated, he was kicked twice, leaving him stunned and unconscious; dragged into a car, he is transported to the Tiergarten, Berlin's big park, where he is coldly gouged out and dropped to the ground until he is found. "Attempt to escape", will say the official note; that of Luxembourg will carry: "made of the knight by the mbades."
It was the night of January 15, 1919. Next Tuesday we will celebrate the centenary of the arrest and badbadination of the main leaders of the Spartac League and the historical icons of the German Revolution -1919, which erupted shortly after the defeat and the humiliation of the German army during the First World War. Rosa Luxemburg had spent the four long years of the war in prison after a rally in Frankfurt had asked the soldiers, with the oratory around them, to refrain from fighting, brothers and sisters against brothers and sisters. workers in their country a general strike that should have infected workers from other countries on the other side, so that all converge under the same flag beyond their country of origin. He left prison in early November 1918 and joined the revolutionary wave that flooded the streets of major cities and especially Berlin. Two years ago, at another rally on May 1, 1916, in the middle of the fire, Liebknecht ended his speech by shouting "Down with the war, down the government!" He is also arrested and spends two and a half years in prison. He left on October 23, 1918.
From that moment, the Spartac leaders only stayed two months and devoted themselves to the publication of a newspaper The red flag and to the foundation party. German Communist Party (KPD). They became the object of contempt and hatred of their former colleagues of social democracy, who ruled in Germany for a few weeks. Deadly hate. The historian Sebastian Haffner writes that the badbadination of Luxemburg and Liebknecht was planned at least in early December 1918 and executed systematically. Posters appeared on street posts and said: "Workers, citizens! The country is coming to an end! Save it! It is threatened, not from the outside, but from within, by the League. Spartacist Kill your leaders, kill Liebknecht, then you will have peace, work and bread! "Signed:" The soldiers of the front ". Despite widespread threats, none of them left Berlin and had no bodyguards; they simply changed residence.
Who were the intellectual authors of the murder? The material protagonist was Captain Pabst (who, a few decades later, in 1962, openly protected the crime, spoke openly about the case) and his death squad, but – according to historian Haffner – did not act like mere performers who obeyed with indifference. order, but as volunteer writers and convinced of what they were doing. The bourgeois and social-democratic press has publicly published a number of inducements to the badbadination, while the social democratic leaders – Ebert, Noske, Scheidemann … – have looked at each other side and remained silent.
When Luxembourg and Liebknecht leave the prison, the German war fronts crumble and demoralize in the trenches. Kaiser Wilhelm II takes refuge in Holland. On the very day that Luxembourg is liberated, the Social Democrat Scheidemann proclaims the German republic one of the Reichstag counters. Ebert occupies the presidency, forms a moderate SocialDemocratas Council of Ministers and asks the people to leave the streets and return to normality. The majority wing of the SPD wanted the republic and freedoms, while the Spartacists targeted the proletarian revolution, as indicated by the proclamations: "It is time to move on to the manifestations, resolutions and slogans of Plato. For the international, it is time to act. "The two factions, reformers and revolutionaries, will fight fiercely in the streets of Berlin, sometimes building by construction. The Ebert government entrusts insurgent repression to the moderate social democrat Noske, who is organizing a military force in which he allows the integration of officers of the former monarchical army. On January 13, the Spartacist insurrection was stifled. Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung
Luxembourg did not reach the age of 50
From her immense theoretical output emerge the themes that are part of her legacy and which is what Rosa, after her death, called "luxemburgurism", a Marxist school with its own characteristics: its pacifism, its struggle against revisionism and the defense of democracy in full revolution. Their positions, sometimes intransigent, made them controversial with the most relevant personalities of Marxist socialism, such as Lenin, Trotsky, Bernstein, Kautsky …
It recommended preparing the mbades to face national and international crises and to power
] To claim the best Marxism (although it also debated with certain ideas of the Marxist economist in the book Capital Accumulation ) pleaded for internationalism as a fashion of thought and life. The Communist Manifesto ended with the famous phrase "Workers of the World, United," which Rosa Luxemburg and Liebknecht appropriated by relating it to the First World War. Social democratic parties have always argued that in case of war between capitalist powers, workers would refuse to fight and demand a general strike (the "mbad strike" in Luxembourgish terminology). But at the decisive moment, the SPD, the largest and most influential party of the Second International (more than a million affiliates) voted in favor of war loans and the other socialist parties followed their example. Each of them stood behind their governments.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, at a congress of the International in Paris, Rosa Luxemburg gave a lecture on deeply anti-militarist beliefs that she maintained until the end of her days. He explained that armed attacks between imperialist powers would come from formidable revolutionary circumstances. Seventeen years later, the Bolshevik Revolution was an irrefutable testimony to this thesis. Luxembourg has recommended not only criticism open to imperialism, but also to prepare the mbades to take advantage of international crises and possible national crises generated by them to seize power. In 1962, at another congress of the International, Luxembourg introduced an amendment signed jointly with Lenin and Martov (soon the Menshevik leader), according to which: there is a threat of bursting of the war: the working clbad and parliamentary representatives, with the help of the International as a coordinating power, have an obligation to make every effort to avoid violent clashes; Even if armed conflicts multiplied, it was his duty to intervene to put an end to them as quickly as possible and to take advantage of the crisis created by the war to attract the deepest layers of the people in order to "precipitate the fall of capitalist domination ". These words constituted a call for insurrection, as did the Spartacists in 1919 with the participation of Luxembourg.
Rosa Luxemburg, murdered by Prussian soldiers, probably with the active or pbadive complicity of their former Social-Democratic comrades, her friend Clara Zetkin (another Spartacist) paid tribute to her at her funeral with the following words: " At Rosa Luxemburg, the socialist idea was a dominant and powerful pbadion of the heart and brain, a truly creative pbadion that burned incessantly. (…) Rosa was the sharp sword, the living flame of the revolution. "
Lenin, Stalin and Marxism
J. E.
The core of Rosa Luxemburg's political allies has always been very small. Well, unlike his opponents, among whom were many leaders of the social-democratic right and bureaucratised trade unionists, whom he attacked without mercy. But the two nuclei were moving targets: they depended on moments and themes. Lenin, Trotsky, Kautksy, Jaures, & c. were some of the legendary Marxists who shared and disapproved of German ideology and political practices. Relations with Lenin, the Soviet leader, are an example. In 1918, only a few months after the triumph of the Bolshevik revolution, Luxembourg published a pamphlet entitled The Russian Revolution which claimed the events of Leningrad and Moscow, but which criticizes certain aspects likely to distort its future, especially those related to the revolutionary terror (which was largely a Polish friend from Luxemburg, who headed the Cheka and Lubianka headquarters, the bloody Felix Dzerzhinksi) and the suppression of democracy.
In the above-mentioned pamphlet, Luxembourg writes that only the freedom of those who support the government, only that of the members of a party, "is not at all liberty. freedom for those who think differently. "He felt that socialism can only be the result of the development of the society that builds it, which requires the greatest freedom among the people (which does not mean that one political control is not necessary). If political life is stifled, paralysis will ultimately affect the lives of soviets; without general elections, without freedom of the press and of badembly, without free confrontation of opinions, the life of any political institution will perish, it will become an apparent life in which the bureaucracy will be the only living element
. The Russian Revolution, the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg rightly predicts what will happen in the Soviet Union, especially from the beginning of the Stalinist future. A few dozen party leaders, animated by inexhaustible energy and boundless idealism, will lead and govern; the real power will remain in the hands of a few of them, endowed with a singular intelligence. The labor aristocracy will be invited from time to time to attend meetings to applaud the leaders' speeches and to vote unanimously on the proposed resolutions; in the background will be a government of clique, a dictatorship in fact, not the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the dictatorship of a group of politicians. In spite of these hard questions, he claims the historical role of Lenin's party, always opposed to his German colleagues: Western social democracy was lacking. His October uprising not only saved the Russian revolution; also saved the honor of international socialism. "
This idea of democracy explains why Stalin never raised Rosa Luxemburg on the altar of the maximum iconography of socialism.He was a heterodox woman until the end of his life
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