Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) became a revolutionary activist while
still a schoolgirl in Warsaw. At that time Poland was divided into
three parts, ruled by Russia, Germany, and Austria. Warsaw was
Russian-ruled.

In 1889, Luxemburg left Poland to avoid imprisonment, and went to
study in Zurich (Switzerland), one of the few universities in Europe
which then offered equal opportunities to women.

Many other revolutionary-minded Russian and Polish students were in
Zurich. In 1893 Luxemburg and three comrades - Leo Jogiches, Julian
Marchlewski, and Adolf Warszawski - founded a new Polish Marxist
party there, splitting from the main Polish Socialist Party (PPS)
because of its nationalist ideas. Luxemburg's party, initially tiny,
would eventually win over a big part of the PPS, after 1917, to
become the Communist Party of Poland, while PPS leader Josef
Pilsudski evolved into a bourgeois dictator.

In 1898 Luxemburg moved to Germany. She quickly became a well-known
leader of the German socialist party's left wing, though she still
maintained links with the underground activity of her party in Poland
and was active there in the revolutionary years 1905-6.
Along with Lenin, she was one of the leaders of the left at the
international socialist congresses of those years. Lenin and most of
the left disagreed with Luxemburg's idea that the "right of nations
to self-determination" had become meaningless or impossible in modern
capitalist conditions. They saw that as an over-reaction by Luxemburg
against the PPS's nationalism.

In 1910-11 Luxemburg became the first leader of the left to enter
into open conflict with Karl Kautsky, who was the main theoretical
writer of the German socialist movement and was seen by almost all
the younger left-wingers, including Lenin, as their teacher. In a
long series of articles, she argued for the German socialists to work
towards mass strikes, while Kautsky insisted on more cautious
tactics. Lenin later commented: "Rosa Luxemburg was right. She
realised long ago that Kautsky was a time-server".

In August 1914 the imposing strength of the German socialist movement
was suddenly revealed to be hollow. Its parliamentary representatives
voted to support the government in World War One. Kautsky had
personally preferred not to support the government, but now argued
for "unity" behind the leadership.

Luxemburg and three comrades set out to rebuild the revolutionary
movement. It was not easy. Luxemburg wrote in a letter to a friend:

"I want to undertake the sharpest possible action against the
activities of the [parliamentary] delegates. Unfortun-ately I get
little cooperation... Karl [Liebknecht] can't ever be got hold of,
since he dashes about like a cloud in the sky; Franz [Mehring] has
little sympathy for any but literary campaigns; [Clara Zetkin's]
reaction is... the blackest despair. But I intend to see what can be
achieved".

Despite being jailed from February 1915, she managed to establish an
underground group, Spartacus, which put out illegal pamphlets and
newsletters.

In jail, she had criticisms of the Bolshevik-led Russian revolution.
She disagreed with their policies of freedom for Russia's minority
nationalities, of letting peasants divide up the land, and of
dissolving the Constituent Assembly. But she insisted:

"Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the first, those who went
ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world...

"This is the essential and enduring in Bolshevik policy. In this
sense theirs is the immortal historical service of having marched at
the head of the international proletariat with the conquest of
political power and the practical placing of the problem of the
realisation of socialism...

"In Russia the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in
Russia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to
'Bolshevism'."

As Germany exploded into workers' revolution at the end of World War
One, Luxemburg was released from jail on 9 November 1918. She threw
herself into building a German Communist Party. She was dismayed by
the ultra-left ideas of the party's young activists. They wanted to
boycott the elections being called for a National Assembly, while she
insisted that they had to participate, as part of the patient work
necessary to win a majority before real revolution would be
possible.. But she argued that the more experienced revolutionaries
had to educate and organise the young activists into an effective
party.

She did not have time to do that. In January 1919 a section of the
Communist Party was enticed into a premature and abortive attempt at
a revolutionary uprising in Berlin, and right-wing army officers,
working in league with the reformist Social Democrats, took the
opportunity to murder Rosa Luxemburg on 15 January 1919.