1. Becoming a Revolutionary
Rosa Luxemburg was born on 5 March 1871 in the town of Zamość in the south-east of Poland, which at that time was under the domination of the Russian Empire. She grew up in a petty-bourgeois Jewish family, but religion was not observed in family life. There was, however, a focus on education and culture. Only a few years after she was born, the family moved to Warsaw and, at the age of thirteen, she was accepted into a gymnasium. Gymnasiums then were almost exclusively places of education for Russian children. It was extremely difficult for Poles to be accepted, and doubly so for Jews. All teaching was conducted in Russian, and students were forbidden from speaking to one another in Polish.
In her final years at the gymnasium, Rosa Luxemburg began her political involvement with the Proletariat group, and after completing her finals in 1887 she began familiarising herself with the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. However, the Russian secret police were always vigilant in suppressing the work of left-wing political groups. Any revolutionary activity had to be conducted in secrecy. After two years of agitation amongst the students of Warsaw, Luxemburg was confronted with the threat of arrest, and so, in 1889, she escaped abroad, smuggled under the hay of a peasant’s wagon.
She found herself in Zürich, Switzerland, a gathering place for many exiled revolutionaries. There, Luxemburg began her university studies whilst continuing her political work. At the time, Switzerland was the most important centre for revolutionary Russian Marxism. It was here that the precursor of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, the Emancipation of Labour group, was headquartered. Leading this group was Georgi Plekhanov,[1] known to many as ‘the father of Russian Marxism’, having been the first to bring Marxism to Russia. But the milieu of small circles in which the émigrés moved was characterised by the intertwining of the personal and the political. Plekhanov had a hard time working with anybody, something Lenin and Trotsky would later learn for themselves, and he and Luxemburg quickly developed a life-long, personal enmity.
It was also while in Zürich that Luxemburg met Leo Jogiches.[2] From the age of sixteen, Jogiches had been active in revolutionary politics in Vilna, where he was born. Coming from a wealthy family, he brought a considerable sum of money to Switzerland for the purpose of publishing classic Marxist texts. He offered to work with Plekhanov, but the latter refused, thus commencing a relationship of enduring mutual antipathy between Jogiches and Luxemburg on the one side, and Plekhanov on the other. Jogiches and Luxemburg became lovers in a relationship which lasted for many years and, as Jogiches was not a skilled speaker or writer, Luxemburg became the public face of their partnership. However, Jogiches was Luxemburg’s most important political sparring partner, and she discussed most of her ideas and articles with him prior to publication. Jogiches’ main skill was as an organiser. He became one of the ringleaders of the Polish Social Democratic Party and later he would be involved in the secret work of building the Spartacus League in Germany during the First World War.
The SDKPiL
The Proletariat group, in which Luxemburg first became politically active, was destroyed by police repression. However, in 1892, a congress was called to bring all of the exiled Polish socialists together. This congress produced the united Polish Socialist Party (PPS), which unified all the Polish socialist émigré groups and some organisations which operated within Poland. Luxemburg and Jogiches joined the party.
However, Poland was a divided nation, occupied by Germany, Austria, and Russia. The new party failed to overcome these territorial divisions and so the PPS only ever operated in Russian-occupied territory, with separate parties in German and Austrian occupied Poland.
In collaboration with a small group of young students, Luxemburg and Jogiches began the publication of a newspaper, Sprawa Robotnicza (The Workers’ Cause). Whilst Luxemburg was a guiding force for the paper, and had been its editor since 1894, it did not receive any support from the leadership of the PPS, which was in fact hostile towards it. This wariness was an anticipation of a split that would develop in the Polish movement between the PPS leadership and those who supported the line of Sprawa Robotnicza, headed by Luxemburg. The former placed a heavy emphasis on the struggle for independence from Russia, whilst the latter called for collaboration with the Russian working class against the common oppressor, opposing the demand for Polish independence.
The first edition of Sprawa Robotnicza was published shortly before the congress of the Second (Socialist) International in August 1893. The Second International was the international organisation that unified the social-democratic parties of different countries. However, the question of which Russian organisation had the right to be represented at its congresses was always a source of confusion, as there was a host of small illegal groups. Nonetheless, a group that had established a newspaper had a certain right to representation. This was precisely what the Sprawa Robotnicza group demanded. Rosa Luxemburg wrote a minority report for the congress on the development of the Social Democratic Party in Russian-occupied Poland on behalf of Sprawa Robotnicza, in opposition to the official report given by the PPS leadership.
For this reason, the leadership of the PPS was against Luxemburg’s participation in the congress. Their delegation contested her mandate, forcing the congress to pass judgement on whether she ought to be able to participate as a delegate. The PPS leadership made their arguments purely on organisational grounds, claiming that Sprawa Robotnicza and Rosa Luxemburg were completely unknown to the International. Rosa Luxemburg, who had to single-handedly defend her mandate before the whole congress, instead posed the question politically, using this opportunity to present her group’s critique of the PPS’s politics to the congress delegates.
The Belgian socialist leader Vandervelde described the situation in the following manner:
Rosa, twenty-three years old at the time, was quite unknown outside one or two Socialist groups in Germany and Poland […] but her opponents had their hands full to hold their ground against her […] She rose from among the delegates at the back and stood on a chair to make herself better heard. Small and looking very frail in a summer dress, which managed very effectively to conceal her physical defects, she advocated her cause with such magnetism and such appealing words that she won the majority of the Congress at once and they raised their hands in favour of the acceptance of her mandate.[3]
Vandervelde’s recollection of events were perhaps carried away by the impact of Rosa Luxemburg’s intervention – her mandate was in fact rejected in the end and she was forced to leave the congress. But his description speaks about the impression she must have made. She might have failed to get recognition for her mandate, but she succeeded in presenting her case and gave a political response to the attacks against her group. When the Second International held its subsequent congress, in 1896, Luxemburg was present as the delegate of a small but recognised political tendency in the Polish socialist movement. After the experience at the world congress, the Sprawa Robotnicza group decided to break with the PPS and, in March 1894, it formed the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP), which in 1898 fused with the Lithuanian party to form the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL). At the core of the party were Luxemburg and Jogiches, as well as Marchlewski (Karski) and Warszawski (Warski). According to the party’s own statutes, it was constructed on strongly centralised lines, much like those upon which the Bolshevik Party would later be built. Yet, in practice, the party was highly informal and held no congresses in the six years that followed its formation. The same year that the SDKPiL formed, however, Rosa Luxemburg moved to Germany to become active in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD).
Endnotes
[1] Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov (1856-1918) – laid the foundations of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. Followed the Mensheviks after the split in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party and eventually became a social-chauvinist during the First World War.
[2] Leo Jogiches was also known as Leo Tyszko or Tyshka. Most revolutionaries in tsarist Russia used pseudonyms. I have chosen to follow Nettl and use their real names, unless the pseudonym is better known, as in the case of Lenin and Trotsky, for instance. Rosa Luxemburg primarily used her own name.
[3] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 73.