1. Becoming a Revolutionary¶
Core Argument¶
The opening chapter of this biographical study traces Rosa Luxemburg’s formation as a revolutionary from her origins in Russian-occupied Poland to her emergence as a leading figure in the Polish Marxist movement. Born in 1871 into a petty-bourgeois Jewish family in Zamość, Luxemburg’s early life was marked by the national oppression of Poles under Tsarist rule. Her education at a Russian-language gymnasium in Warsaw, where Polish speech was forbidden, provided an early encounter with imperial domination. By her final school years she had joined the underground Proletariat group and begun studying Marx and Engels. Facing arrest in 1889, she fled to Zürich, then a hub for Russian Marxist exiles and home to Plekhanov’s Emancipation of Labour group.
The chapter establishes Zürich as the crucible of Luxemburg’s political development. There she met Leo Jogiches, a wealthy émigré organiser from Vilna who became her lifelong political partner and lover. While Jogiches lacked Luxemburg’s rhetorical skill, he was her essential collaborator, funding Marxist publications and later playing a central role in the Polish Social Democratic Party and the Spartacus League. The text notes the intensely personal nature of émigré politics: Plekhanov’s refusal to work with Jogiches generated a lasting enmity between the two camps.
The core narrative thrust concerns the split within Polish socialism over the national question. After the Proletariat group’s destruction, a 1892 congress formed the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), which Luxemburg and Jogiches initially joined. However, Luxemburg’s newspaper Sprawa Robotnicza soon came into conflict with the PPS leadership, which prioritised Polish independence from Russia. Luxemburg’s faction instead argued for solidarity with the Russian working class against the common oppressor, rejecting the demand for national independence as a bourgeois distraction. This political divergence came to a head at the 1893 congress of the Second International, where the PPS challenged Luxemburg’s mandate. The chapter reproduces Vandervelde’s vivid description of the twenty-three-year-old Luxemburg standing on a chair to defend her position, winning the congress’s sympathy even though her mandate was ultimately rejected. By 1896 she secured recognition, and in 1894 her group formed the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP), later the SDKPiL. The chapter closes with Luxemburg’s move to Germany to join the SPD, setting the stage for her subsequent career. The polemic is directed against the PPS’s nationalist orientation, which Luxemburg and Jogiches opposed as incompatible with internationalist Marxism.