{"id":125658,"date":"2019-01-14T12:00:25","date_gmt":"2019-01-14T12:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=125658"},"modified":"2019-01-13T14:37:40","modified_gmt":"2019-01-13T14:37:40","slug":"rosa-luxemburg-murdered-15-jan-1919-i-was-i-am-i-shall-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/01\/rosa-luxemburg-murdered-15-jan-1919-i-was-i-am-i-shall-be\/","title":{"rendered":"Rosa Luxemburg, Murdered 15 Jan 1919: I Was, I Am, I Shall Be!"},"content":{"rendered":"

100 years since her death, Rosa Luxemburg\u2019s life and writing are more than ever an inspiration for all who believe, like her, another world is possible. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

14 Jan 2019 – Every January since 1919 (except during the Nazi era, when the graves were desecrated), thousands gather at the graves of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Berlin\u2019s Friedrichsfelde Cemetery to mark the anniversary and remember their brutal murder.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The murder of revolutionary leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht on 15th January 1919 at the hands of the proto-Nazi Freikorps marked the end of the Spartacist Week \u2013 the failed workers\u2019 uprising in Berlin. Incredibly their murder was ordered by a Socialist (SPD) government. Whilst internecine battles on the Left came to dominate the twentieth century, this betrayal was so shocking not just because it was the first, but because it came from the party widely regarded as the spiritual home of the international Socialist movement.<\/p>\n

The SPD was the oldest and largest organisation of its kind in Europe, and the one in which Marx and Engels had been most personally involved. But after years in the political wilderness outlawed by Bismarck\u2019s draconian regime it had evolved in a direction far removed from its revolutionary roots. Although maintaining a large membership and considerable party apparatus it had developed an ideology \u2013 the \u2018revisionism\u2019 of theorist Edward Bernstein \u2013 essentially loyal to the imperial German state whilst maintaining the language of Marxism. In response, a young Jewish woman who had fled from repression in Poland \u2013 Rosa Luxemburg \u2013 wrote the pamphlet \u2018Social Reform or Revolution?\u2019 that summarised the crisis facing the party.<\/p>\n

This crisis came to a head in August 1914 when the SPD delegates in parliament shocked the Socialist world by voting to support the Kaiser\u2019s war policy. Socialists in France, England and Russia had pledged to prevent war between their ruling classes, but when put to the test the Socialist 2nd International effectively disintegrated along patriotic lines. Rosa Luxemburg briefly contemplated suicide \u2013 but instead split from the SPD, along with Karl Liebknecht and other radicals, to form the Spartacist League.\u00a0 Another larger group \u2013 the USPD or independent Socialists \u2013 also broke away adopting a halfway position between the revolutionary Spartacists and the \u2018moderates\u2019.<\/p>\n

Finally in November 1918 after four years of war, German society crumbled both at the front and at home \u2013 the working class took to the streets in a series of strikes, and the navy mutinied.\u00a0 Naturally they initially turned to the largest and \u2018official\u2019 opposition group \u2013 the SPD. And when the Kaiser abdicated and the generals tried to prop up the old order by negotiating an armistice, the ruling class sought an alliance with these \u2018moderate\u2019 Socialists to avert the threat of a Bolshevik-style revolution. So the SPD found itself thrust into the position of running the country \u2013 and two months of revolution and counter-revolution began.<\/p>\n

Large-scale strikes and demonstrations continued and the mutineers \u2013 organised in the \u2018People\u2019s Naval Division\u2019 \u2013 refused to be disarmed.\u00a0 Other demobilised and disaffected soldiers adopted\u00a0 ultra-nationalism and a hostility to the Left as the \u2018betrayers\u2019 of Germany; they organised themselves in Far Right paramilitary groups \u2013 the Freikorps. Street violence grew between these groups, with the Socialist leaders now in government actively encouraging the Freikorps to \u2018keep order\u2019.<\/p>\n

Unable to co-operate with these SPD \u2018moderates\u2019, the USPD left the coalition government. Turning on their former comrades, Socialist leaders Ehbert and Noske now backed by the former monarchists and the army high command, openly called for the crushing of the Left organisations \u2013 particularly the Spartacist League, which although not uncritical of the Bolsheviks, had been inspired by the Russian Revolution and re-launched itself as the German Communist Party.<\/p>\n

On January 5th the government ordered the removal from office of the Berlin police president, a member of the dissident USPD. In response the USPD, the Communists and the shop stewards movement jointly organised a strike and demonstration of 500,000 in the capital. Critically at this point Karl Liebknecht and the Communist leadership called for an insurrection to seize power. Rosa Luxemburg argued against them, claiming such a move was not only premature but also potentially disastrous when the forces of the right were gathering strength. In the end she threw herself in her with her comrades; arguing that events were now in motion and that standing on the sidelines would be a worse mistake than waiting for the right moment. Days later, at Noske\u2019s orders, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were taken prisoner by the Freikorps and summarily executed: Liebknecht\u2019s body was dumped anonymously at the city morgue and Luxemburg\u2019s was found months later in the Landwehr canal.\u00a0 In Berlin the conflict on the streets continued, but by February the Freikorps had regained control\u00a0 \u2013 30,000 of them had entered the city and 3,000 workers had been killed.<\/p>\n

The consequences of defeat were enormous. In Germany whilst the Communists were to steadily gain support until another unsuccessful revolution in 1923, the Left were bitterly divided. Most importantly the Far Right had been accepted by the weakened ruling class as the maintainers of order and as a bastion against revolution. Over the following years the Freikorps morphed into the Brown-shirts of the Nazi party.<\/p>\n

For Europe as a whole, the failure of revolution in the West isolated the Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union and accelerated its degeneration.\u00a0 And Rosa Luxemburg\u2019s murder robbed the revolutionary movement of a leader who was developing a Marxism distinct from the Bolshevik model that reflected the different traditions of the western working class movement. Never fully developed, her theory of \u2018revolutionary spontaneity\u2019 is still debated amongst Marxists to this day.<\/p>\n

After 1945 her memory was ironically appropriated by the Stalinist East German state \u2013 a regime she would have detested. Wary of the danger of elevating the role of \u2018the party\u2019, she believed unswervingly in the working class\u2019s ability to repeatedly assert its own revolutionary potential \u2013 even in the face of defeat. Famously on the evening of her murder, almost certainly knowing that the rising had failed and that she personally faced death, she wrote:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built\u2026Order reigns in Berlin! You stupid henchmen! Your \u2018order\u2019 is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already \u2018raise itself with a rattle\u2019 and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I shall be!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Red Rosa<\/strong><\/p>\n

Illustration from Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg<\/em> by Kate Evans. Published by Verso<\/a> .<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

Source: Journeyman<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 prruk.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

100 years since her death, Rosa Luxemburg\u2019s life and writing are more than ever an inspiration for all who believe, like her, another world is possible. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":125659,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[148],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125658\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}