Rosa luxembourg brief biography of marie osmond

Radek went into hiding. Luxemburg's last known words written on the evening of her execution were about her belief in the masses and what she saw as the inevitability of a triumphant revolution: [ 60 ]. The contradiction between the powerful, decisive, aggressive offensive of the Berlin masses on the one hand and the indecisive, half-hearted vacillation of the Berlin leadership on the other is the mark of this latest episode.

The leadership failed. But a new leadership can and must be created by the masses and from the masses. The masses are the crucial factor. They are the rock on which the ultimate victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were up to the challenge, and out of this "defeat" they have forged a link in the chain of historic defeats, which is the pride and strength of international socialism.

That is why future victories will spring from this "defeat". Your "order" is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will "rise up again, clashing its weapons," and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be! The executions of Luxemburg and Liebknecht were the beginning of a new wave of paramilitary warfare in Berlin and across Germany.

Thousands of members of the KPD as well as other revolutionaries and civilians were killed, often as collateral damage. Finally, the People's Navy Division Volksmarinedivision and workers' and soldiers' unions, which had moved to the political far leftwere disbanded. The last part of the German Revolution saw many instances of armed violence and strike action throughout Germany.

Last to strike was the Bavarian Soviet Republic which was suppressed on 2 May For his part in Luxemburg's murder, Private Runge was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for attempted manslaughter and Lieutenant Vogel to two years and four months for failing to report a corpse. However, Vogel escaped after a brief period in custody, with the help of Wilhelm Canaris.

Captain Pabst and Lieutenant Souchon were never prosecuted. In an interview with German news magazine Der Spiegel in and again in his memoirs, Captain Pabst alleged that Defence Minister Noske and Weimar Republic Chancellor Ebert had both covertly approved of his actions, but his account has not been confirmed, nor has his case been examined by the Parliament or Courts of Germany.

InGietinger's research on his access to the previously restricted papers of Pabst, held at the Federal Military Archives, found him as central to the planning of the murder of Luxemburg and the shielding of those who had acted under his orders from subsequent criminal prosecution. According to Russian historian Edvard Radzinsky, in retaliation for Liebknecht and Luxemburg's murder, Soviet Premier Lenin issued orders to Gregory Zinoviev for the immediate arrest and summary execution of four Grand Dukes from the recently deposed House of Romanovall of whom were uncles of the Nicholas IIthe last Tsar.

Despite the pleas of Maxim Gorky on behalf of one of the condemned, the known progressive and noted historian Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovichall four men including Mikhailovich were shot on 30 January at the Peter and Paul Fortress in Petrograd. Shortly after Luxemburg's death, her fame was alluded to by Grigory Zinoviev at the Petrograd Soviet on 18 Januarysupporting her assessment of Bolshevism.

Lenin posthumously praised Luxemburg as an "eagle" of the working class, and stated that her work would serve as an example to other socialist revolutionaries. Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky also publicly mourned Luxemburg's and Liebknecht's deaths. But all the more imperious therefore becomes our duty to shield Rosa's memory from Stalin's calumny that has been caught by the hired functionaries of both hemispheres, and to pass on this truly rosa luxembourg brief biography of marie osmond, heroic, and tragic image to the young generations of the proletariat in all its grandeur and inspirational force.

In the city of Berlin a Liebknecht-Luxemburg-Demonstrationshortened to LL-Demois organised annually in the month of January around the date of their death. During the Peaceful Revolutionthe annual parade in East Berlin honoring the deaths of Liebknecht and Luxemburg was used by East German dissidents as part of their campaign, "to raise their unwelcome demands at embarrassing moments for the regime.

In Januarythe German left-wing parties commemorated the th anniversary of the summary execution of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Luxemburg initially professed a commitment to democracy and the necessity of revolution. Luxemburg's idea of democracy which Stanley Aronowitz calls " generalized democracy in an unarticulated form" represents Luxemburg's greatest break with "mainstream communism" since it effectively diminishes the role of the communist partybut it, similar to the views of Karl Marxstates that the working class must "emancipate" themselves without a higher authority.

Early on, Luxemburg attacked the totalitarian tendencies present in the Russian Revolution claiming that without democratic institutions and protections, "life dies out in every public institution" and further claimed that such a lack of freedoms would lead to a "dictatorship of a handful of politicians". Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party — however numerous they may be — is no freedom at all.

Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.

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Not because of any fanatical concept of "justice" but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when "freedom" becomes a special privilege. Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism.

In an article published just before the October Revolution, Luxemburg characterised the Russian February Revolution of as a "revolution of the proletariat" and said that the " liberal bourgeoisie " were pushed to movement by the display of "proletarian power". The task of the Russian proletariat, she explained, was now to end the "imperialist" world war in addition to struggling against the "imperialist bourgeoisie".

The world war made Russia ripe for a socialist revolution. Therefore, "the German proletariat are also [ According to Luxemburg, the Bolsheviks' strategic mistakes created tremendous dangers for the Revolution such as its bureaucratisation. The awkward position that the Bolsheviks are in today, however, is, together with most of their mistakes, a consequence of basic insolubility of the problem posed to them by the international, above all the German, proletariat.

To carry out the dictatorship of the proletariat and a socialist revolution in a single country surrounded by reactionary imperialist rule and in the fury of the bloodiest world war in human history — that is squaring the circle. Any socialist party would have to fail in this task and perish — whether or not it made self-renunciation the guiding star of its policies.

Bolshevik theorists such as Lenin and Trotsky responded to this criticism by arguing that Luxemburg's notions were classical Marxist ones, but they could not be applied to Russia of They stated that the lessons of actual experience such as the confrontation with the bourgeois parties had forced them to revise the Marxian strategy. As part of this argument, it was pointed out that after Luxemburg herself got out of jail, she was also forced to confront the National Assembly in Germany, a step they compared with their own conflict with the Russian Constituent Assembly.

Following her observation of the October Revolution, Luxemburg claimed that it was the "historic responsibility" of the German workers to carry out a revolution for themselves and thereby end the war. According to Aronowitz, the vagueness of "Luxemburgian" democracy is one reason for its initial difficulty in gaining widespread support. Luxemburg herself clarified her position on democracy in her writings regarding the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union.

The Accumulation of Capital was the only work Luxemburg officially published on economics during her lifetime. In the polemic, she argued that capitalism needs to constantly expand into non-capitalist areas in order to access new supply sources, markets for surplus value and reservoirs of labour. According to Luxemburg, capitalists sought to realise profits through offloading surplus commodities onto non-capitalist economies, hence the phenomenon of imperialism as capitalist states sought to dominate weaker economies.

However, this was leading to the destruction of non-capitalist economies as they were increasingly absorbed into the capitalist system. With the destruction of non-capitalist economies, there would be no more markets to offload surplus commodities onto and capitalism would break down. The Accumulation of Capital was harshly criticised by both Marxist and non-Marxist rosas luxembourg brief biography of marie osmond on the grounds that her logic was circular in proclaiming the impossibility of realising profits in a close-capitalist system and that her underconsumptionist theory was too crude.

The Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organisation was the central feature of Luxemburg's political philosophy, wherein spontaneity is a grassroots approach to organising a class struggleand organisation is a top-down or vanguardist approach to organising a class struggle. She argued that spontaneity and organisation are not separable or separate activities, but different moments of one political process as one does not exist without the other.

These beliefs arose from her view that class struggle evolves from an elementary, spontaneous state to a democratic organisation. Social democracy is simply the embodiment of the modern proletariat's class struggle, a struggle which is driven by a consciousness of its own historic consequences. The masses are in reality their own leaders, dialectically creating their own development process.

The more that social democracy develops, grows, and becomes stronger, the more the enlightened masses of workers will take their own destinies, the leadership of their movement, and the determination of its direction into their own hands. She insisted on setting the class struggle in its historical context, writing "the modern proletarian class does not carry out its struggle according to a plan set out in some book or theory; the modern workers' struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress.

In spite of her own Polish nationality and strong ties to Polish culture, her opposition to the independence of the Second Polish Republic and later criticism from Stalinists have made her a controversial historical figure in the modern Third Polish Republic 's political discourse. After the transformation and change of regime, the factory was privatised in and then split up into four different companies; the factory buildings were sold by and fell into disuse in A minute-long sightseeing tour around areas associated with the life of the Polish revolutionary was organised in Warsaw inwhere a statue of her by Alfred Jesion was also put on display at the Warsaw Citadel as part of the Gallery of Polish Sculpture of the s.

Luxemburg collected plant specimens from up to her death. She had a lifelong interest in botany and the natural world. It was therapeutic to her; she couldn't have coped without it". Luxemburg's personal herbarium, which comprises 18 notebooks, is placed at the Archive of Modern Records in Warsaw, Poland. The latter include plants from the prison vegetable garden or prison flowerbeds which she herself had planted.

Red Rosa now has vanished too, And where she lies is hid from view. She told the poor what life's about, And so the rich have rubbed her out. May she rest in peace. The famous Monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, originally named Monument to the November Revolution Revolutionsdenkmal which was designed by pioneering modernist and later Bauhaus director Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and built in in Berlin-Lichtenberg [ 99 ] and destroyed in The memorial took the form of a suprematist composition of brick masses.

Van der Rohe said: "As most of these people [Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and other fallen heroes of the Revolution] were shot in front of a brick wall, a brick wall would be what I would build as a monument". The commission came about through the offices of Eduard Fuchswho showed a proposal featuring Doric columns and medallions of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, prompting Mies' laughter and the comment "That would be a good monument for a banker".

The monument was destroyed by the Nazis after they took power. An engraving on the nearby pavement reads "Ich war, ich bin, ich werde sein" "I was, I am, I will be". In a rare moment of agreement, both PDS and SPD delegates balked at this and the battle became so heated that an independent commission was appointed to advise on the question. The commission ultimately recommended the compromise, "that Communists who had died too soon to help bring Weimar down, or the GDR up, should not be purged".

For this reason, both streets and squares in the former East Berlin continue to bear Rosa Luxemburg's name. Dresden has a street and streetcar stop named after Luxemburg. The names remained unchanged after German reunification. At the edge of the Tiergarten on the Katharina-Heinroth-Ufer which runs between the southern bank of the Landwehr Canal and the bordering Zoologischer Garten Zoological Gardena memorial has been installed by a private initiative.

On the memorial, the name Rosa Luxemburg appears in raised capital letters, marking the spot where her body was thrown into the canal by Freikorps troops. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution notes that idolisation of Luxemburg and Liebknecht remains an important tradition of far-left extremism in the Federal Republic of Germany.

FeministsTrotskyists, and other leftists in Germany especially show interest in Luxemburg's ideas. Distinguished modern Marxist thinkers such as Ernest Mandelwho has even been characterised as Luxemburgist, have seen Luxemburg's thought as a corrective to traditional revolutionary theory. Opponents and critics of the far-left have often had a very different interpretation of Luxemburg's murder.

Russian historian Edvard Radzinsky has gone on the record as a very harsh critic of the Soviet Government for spending so much money abroad to fund the efforts of those like Liebknecht and Luxemburg to covertly destabilise and overthrow the Weimar Republic and other Western Governments. In the Soviet Union during the same time, mass starvation was taking place as a result of the Russian Civil War including the Russian famine of People were swollen with hunger, but never mind, the world revolution was at hand.

As Alexander Kerensky and the former Tsarist officer corps had fatally failed to unite for long enough to stop Lenin from seizing power inanti-communist Russian refugees living in the Weimar Republic occasionally expressed envy for the success of the SPD and the Freikorps in temporarily setting aside their political differences, even for just long enough to defeat the Spartacus Uprising, which was seen as an attempted German equivalent to the Bolshevik Revolution.

Infamous, that fifteen thousand Russian officers should have let themselves be slaughtered by the Revolution without raising a hand in self-defense! Why didn't they act like the Germans, who killed Rosa Luxemburg in such a way that not even a smell of her has remained? Due to Luxemburg's importance in the development of theories of Marxist humanist thought, the role of democracy and mass action to achieve international socialism as a pioneering advocate of workers' rights, gender equality, and as a martyr to her cause, she has become a minor iconic figure, [ ] [ ] celebrated with references in popular culture.

The night of his death, Rainer Werner Fassbinder was working on a script about Luxemberg. On 29 MaySpiegel onlinethe internet branch of the news magazine Der Spiegelreported the recently considered possibility that someone else's remains had mistakenly been identified as Luxemburg's and buried as hers. He found the corpse's autopsy report suspicious and decided to perform a CT scan on the remains.

The body showed signs of having been waterlogged at some point and the scans showed that it was the body of a woman of 40—50 years of age who suffered from osteoarthritis and had legs of differing length, as Luxemburg had. A laboratory in Kiel also tested the corpse using radiocarbon dating techniques and confirmed that it dated from the same period as Luxemburg's murder.

The original autopsyperformed on 13 June on the body that was eventually buried at Friedrichsfeldeshowed certain inconsistencies that supported Tsokos' hypothesis. The autopsy explicitly noted an absence of hip damage and stated that there was no evidence that the legs were of different lengths. Additionally, the autopsy showed no traces on the upper skull of the two blows by rifle butt inflicted upon Luxemburg.

Finally, while the examiners noted a hole in the corpse's head between the left eye and ear, they did not find an exit wound or the presence of a bullet within the skull. Assistant pathologist Paul Fraenckel appeared to doubt at the time that the corpse he had examined was Luxemburg's and in a signed addendum distanced himself from his colleague's conclusions.

John Peter Nettl has argued that "organisationally Spartacus was slow to develop In the most important cities it evolved an organised centre only in the course of December These demonstrations, which the Spartakists had neither the force nor the desire to control, were often the occasion for violent, useless or even harmful incidents caused by the doubtful elements who became involved in them Liebknecht could have the impression that he was master of the streets because of the crowds which acclaimed him, while without an authentic organisation he was not even the master of his own troops.

A convention of the Spartacus League began on 30th December, Karl Radeka member of the Bolshevik Central Committeeargued that the the Soviet government should help the spread of world revolution. The convention now discussed whether the KPD should take part in the forthcoming general election. Rosa LuxemburgPaul Levi and Leo Jogiches all recognised that a "successful revolution depended on more than temporary support for certain slogans by a disorganised mass of workers and soldiers".

Nor could a set-back, followed by a period of illegality, even if only temporary, be altogether ruled out. A seat in the Parliament would then be the only means of conducting Communist propaganda openly. It could also be foreseen that the workers at large would not understand the idea of a boycott and would not be persuaded to rosa luxembourg brief biography of marie osmond aloof; they would only be forced to vote for other parties.

Luxemburg, Levi and Jogiches and other members who wanted to take part in elections were outvoted on this issue. As Bertram D. Wolfe has pointed out: "In vain did she Luxemburg try to convince them that to oppose both the Councils and the Constituent Assembly with their tiny forces was madness and a breaking of their democratic faith.

They voted to try to take power in the streets, that is by armed uprising. Emil Eichhorn had been appointed head of the Police Department in Berlin. One activist pointed out: "A member of the Independent Socialist Party and a close friend of the late August Bebel, he enjoyed great popularity among revolutionary workers of all shades for his personal integrity and genuine devotion to the working class.

His position was regarded as a bulwark against counter-revolutionary conspiracy and was a thorn in the flesh of the reactionary forces. Chris Harmanthe author of The Lost Revolutionhas argued: "The Berlin workers greeted the news that Eichhorn had been dismissed with a huge wave of anger. They felt he was being dismissed for siding with them against the attacks of right wing officers and employers.

Eichhorn responded by refusing to vacate police headquarters. He insisted that he had been appointed by the Berlin working class and could only be removed by them. He would accept a decision of the Berlin Executive of the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils, but no other. The Spartacus League published a leaflet that claimed: "The Ebert-Scheidemann government intends, not only to get rid of the last representative of the revolutionary Berlin workers, but to establish a regime of coercion against the revolutionary workers.

Paul Levi later reported that even with this provocation, the Spartacus League leadership still believed they should resist an open rebellion: "The members of the leadership were unanimous; a government of the proletariat would not last more than a fortnight It was necessary to avoid all slogans that might lead to the overthrow of the government at this point.

Our slogan had to be precise in the following sense: lifting of the dismissal of Eichhorn, disarming of the counter-revolutionary troops, arming of the proletariat. Karl Liebknecht and Wilhelm Pieck published a leaflet calling for a revolution. The undersigned revolutionary committee, representing the revolutionary workers and soldiers, proclaims its removal.

The undersigned revolutionary committee assumes provisionally the functions of government. Although massive demonstrations took place, no attempt was made to capture important buildings. On 7th January, Luxemburg wrote in the Die Rote Fahne : "Anyone who witnessed yesterday's mass demonstration in the Siegesalle, who felt the magnificent mood, the energy that the masses exude, must conclude that politically the proletariat has grown enormously through the experiences of recent weeks However, are their leaders, the executive organs of their will, well informed?

Has their capacity for action kept pace with the growing energy of the masses? General Kurt von Schleicherwas on the staff of Paul von Hindenburg.

Rosa luxembourg brief biography of marie osmond: the ideas in Rosa Luxemburg=s famous

In December he helped organize the Freikorpsin an attempt to prevent a German Revolution. The group was composed of "former officers, demobilized soldiers, military adventurers, fanatical nationalists and unemployed youths". Holding extreme right-wing views, von Schleicher blamed left-wing political groups and Jews for Germany's problems and called for the elimination of "traitors to the Fatherland".

The Freikorps appealed to thousands of officers who identified with the upper class and had nothing to gain from the revolution. There were also a number of privileged and highly trained troops, known as stormtroopers, who had not suffered from the same rigours of discipline, hardship and bad food as the mass of the army: "They were bound together by an array of privileges on the one hand, and a fighting camaraderie on the other.

They stood to lose all this if demobilised - and leapt at the chance to gain a living by fighting the reds. Friedrich EbertGermany's new chancellor, was also in contact with General Wilhelm Groenerwho as First Quartermaster General, had played an important role in the retreat and demobilization of the German armies. According to William L.

Shirerthe SDP leader and the "second-in-command of the German Army made a pact which, though it would not be publicly known for many years, was to determine the nation's fate. Ebert agreed to put down anarchy and Bolshevism and maintain the Army in all its tradition. Groener thereupon pledged the support of the Army in helping the new government establish itself and carry out its aims.

On the 5th January, Ebert called in the German Army and the Freikorps to bring an end to the rebellion. Groener later testified that his aim in reaching accommodation with Ebert was to "win a share of power in the new state for the army and the officer corps Ebert was motivated by his fear of the Spartacus League and was willing to use "the armed power of the far-right to impose the government's will upon recalcitrant workers, irrespective of the long-term effects of such a policy on the stability of parliamentary democracy".

The soldiers who entered Berlin were armed with machine-guns and armoured cars and demonstrators were killed in their hundreds. Artillery was used to blow the front off the police headquarters before Eichhorn's men abandoned resistance. Only a few managed to escape across the roofs. By 13th January, the rebellion had been crushed and most of its leaders were arrested.

This included Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknechtwho refused to flee the city, and were captured on 16th January and taken to the Freikorps headquarters. Rosa was taken out shortly afterwards, her skull smashed in and then she too was driven off, shot through the head and thrown into the canal. Physically, the girl Rosa did not seem made to be a tragic heroine or a leader of men.

She had been a precocious child, gifted with many talents. All her life, to the day of her murder in January,she was tempted and tormented by longings to diminish her absorption in politics in order to develop to the full the many other capacities of her spirit. Unlike so many political figures, her inner life, as expressed in her letters, her activities, her enthusiasms, reveals a rounded human being.

She drew and painted, read great literature in Russian, Polish, German, and French, wrote poetry in the first three of these, continued to be seduced by an interest in anthropology, history, botany, geology, and others of the arts and sciences into which the modern specialized intellect is fragmented. At first view the title of this work may be found surprising.

Can the Social-Democracy be against reforms? Can we contrapose the social revolution, the transformation of the existing order, our final goal, to social reforms? Certainly not. The daily struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the condition of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for democratic institutions, offers to the Social-Democracy an indissoluble tie.

The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its aim. His theory tends to counsel us to renounce the social transformation, the final goal of Social-Democracy and, inversely, to make of social reforms, the means of the class struggle, its aim. Does he not continually mention the Social-Democracy and its aims? Does he not repeat again and again, in very explicit language, that he too strives toward the final goal of socialism, but in another way?

Does he not stress particularly that he fully approves of the present practice of the Social-Democracy? That is all rosa luxembourg brief biography of marie osmond, to be sure. It is also true that every new movement, when it first elaborates its theory and policy, begins by finding support in the preceding movement, though it may be in direct contradiction with the latter.

It begins by suiting itself to the forms found at hand and by speaking the language spoken hereto. In time the new grain breaks through the old husk. The new movement finds its forms and its own language. To expect an opposition against scientific socialism at its very beginning, to express itself clearly, fully and to the last consequence on the subject of its real content: to expect it to deny openly and bluntly the theoretic basis of the Social-Democracy — would amount to underrating the power of scientific socialism.

Today he who wants to pass as a socialist, and at the same time declare war on Marxian doctrine, the most stupendous product of the human mind in the century, must begin with involuntary esteem for Marx. But doubly important is this knowledge for the workers in the present case, because it is precisely they and their influence in the movement that are in the balance here.

It is their skin that is being brought to market. The opportunist theory in the Party, the theory formulated by Bernstein, is nothing else than an unconscious attempt to assure predominance to the petty-bourgeois elements that have entered our Party, to change the policy and aims of our Party in their direction. The question of reform or revolution, of the final goal and the movement, is basically, in another form, but the question of the petty-bourgeois or proletarian character of the labour movement.

Only when the great mass of workers take the keen and dependable weapons of scientific socialism in their own hands, will all the petty-bourgeois inclinations, all the opportunistic currents, come to naught. The movement will then find itself on sure and firm ground. One Step Forward, Two Steps Backwardwritten by Lenin, an outstanding member of the Iskra group, is a methodical exposition of the ideas of the ultra-centralist tendency in the Russian movement.

The viewpoint presented with incomparable vigor and logic in this book, is that of pitiless centralism. Laid down as principles are: The necessity of selecting, and constituting as a separate corps, all the active revolutionists, as distinguished from the unorganized, though revolutionary, mass surrounding this elite. It should also have the right to impose on all of them its own ready-made rules of party conduct.

It should have the right to rule without appeal on such questions as the dissolution and reconstitution of local organizations. This way, the Central Committee could determine, to suit itself, the composition of the highest party organs. Lenin reasons that the combination of the socialist mass movement with such a rigorously centralized type of organization is a specific principle of revolutionary Marxism.

To support this thesis, he advances a series of arguments, with which we shall deal below. Generally speaking it is undeniable that a strong tendency toward centralization is inherent in the Social Democratic movement. This tendency springs from the economic makeup of capitalism which is essentially a centralizing factor. The Social Democratic movement carries on its activity inside the large bourgeois city.

Its mission is to represent, within the boundaries of the national state, the class interests of the proletariat, and to oppose those common interests to all local and group interests. Therefore, the Social Democracy is, as a rule, hostile to any manifestation of localism or federalism. It strives to unite all workers and all worker organizations in a single party, no matter what national, religious, or occupational differences may exist among them.

The Social Democracy abandons this principle and gives way to federalism only under exceptional conditions, as in the case of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is clear that the Russian Social Democracy should not organize itself as a federative conglomerate of many national groups. It must rather become a single party for he entire empire.

However, that is not really the rosa luxembourg brief biography of marie osmond considered here. What we are considering is the degree of centralization necessary inside the unified, single Russian party in view of the peculiar conditions under which it has to function. Looking at the matter from the angle of the formal tasks of the Social Democracy, in its capacity as a party of class struggle, it appears at first that the power and energy of the party are directly dependent on the possibility of centralizing the party.

However, these formal tasks apply to all active parties. In the case of the Social Democracy, they are less important than is the influence of historic conditions Lenin says that intellectuals remain individualists and tend to anarchism even after they have joined the socialist movement. According to him, it is only among intellectuals that we can note a repugnance for the absolute authority of a Central Committee.

The authentic proletarian, Lenin suggests, finds by reason of his class instinct a kind of voluptuous pleasure in abandoning himself to the clutch of firm leadership and pitiless discipline. He declares that a similar conflict between centralizing and autonomist tendencies is taking place in all countries where reformism and revolutionary socialism meet face to face.

He points in particular to the recent controversy in the German Social Democracy on the question of the degree of freedom of action to be allowed by the Party to socialist representatives in legislative assemblies In the shape of a committee of conspirators, in the name of a nonexistent Will of the People, it seats itself on a kind of throne and proclaims it is all-powerful.

Pirouetting on its head, it once more proclaims itself to be the all-powerful director of history — this time with the title of His Excellency the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Party of Russia.

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The working class demands the right to make its mistakes and learn the dialectic of history. Let us speak plainly. Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee. With the repression of political life in the land as a whole, life in the Soviets must also become more and more crippled.

Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinions, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule.

Among them, in reality, only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously-at bottom then, a clique affair - a dictatorship to be sure, not however of the proletariat but only of a handful of politicians Such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc.

In the earlier bourgeois revolution where, on the one hand, the political training and the leadership of the revolutionary masses were undertaken by the bourgeois parties, and where, on the other hand, it was merely a question of overthrowing the old government, the brief battle at the barricades was the appropriate form of the revolutionary struggle.

Today the working class must educate itself, marshal its forces, and direct itself in the course of the revolutionary struggle and thus the revolution is directed as much against capitalist exploitation as against the ancien regime; so much so that the mass strike appears as the natural means to recruit, organize and prepare the widest proletarian layers for revolutionary struggle, as the means to undermine and overthrow the old state power, as well as to contain the capitalist exploitation.

The urban industrial proletariat is now the soul of the revolution in Russia. But in order to carry through a direct political struggle as a mass, the proletariat must first be assembled as a mass, and for this purpose they must come out of the factory and workshop, mine and foundry, must overcome the atomisation and decay to which they are condemned under the daily yoke of capitalism.

The mass strike is the first natural, impulsive form of every great revolutionary struggle of the proletariat and the more highly developed the antagonism is between capital and labour, the more effective and decisive must mass strikes become. And therewith in the new form of the revolution there is reached that civilising and mitigating of the class struggle which was prophesied by the opportunists of German social democracy — the Bernsteins, Davids, etc.

It is true that these men saw the desired civilising and mitigating of the class struggle in the light of petty bourgeois democratic illusions — they believed that the rosa luxembourg brief biography of marie osmond struggle would shrink to an exclusively parliamentary contest that and that street fighting would simply be done away with.

The mass strike is thus shown to be not a specifically Russian product, springing from absolutism but a universal form of the proletarian class struggle resulting from the present stage of capitalist development and class relations. From this standpoint the three bourgeois revolutions — the Great French Revolution, the German Revolution of March, and the present Russian Revolution — form a continuous chain of development in which the fortunes and the end of the capitalist century are to be seen.

In the Great French Revolution the still wholly underdeveloped internal contradictions of bourgeois society gave scope for a long period of violent struggles, in which all the antagonisms which first germinated and ripened in the heat of the revolution raged unhindered and unrestrained in a spirit of reckless radicalism. A century later the revolution of the German bourgeoisie, which broke out midway in the development of capitalism, was already hampered on both sides by the antagonism of interests and the equilibrium of strength between capital and labour, and was smothered in a bourgeois-feudal compromise, and shortened to a miserable episode ending in words.

So I began to search for them and, after a while, I found the headquarters of the Spartakusbund, the most revolutionary of all the German Left parties. After my credentials had been carefully inspected, I was taken to see Rosa Luxemburg. A slight little woman, she showed at once a powerful intellect and a quiet grasp of any given situation. She had heard about me and of the fact that I had taken up a strong stand against the Allied intervention in Russia.

She proceeded to question me about the situation in Russia. I told her how the White Counter-Revolution had been beaten on the Volga and thrown back to Siberia, but that Lenin had spoken to me not long before with some apprehension of the possibility of Allied military support for the Russian Whites in South Russia, now that the Dardanelles and Black Sea were open to British and French warships.

Then she asked me a question, the significance of which I did not appreciate at the time. She asked me if the Soviets were working entirely satisfactorily. But a week or two later I began to hear that Rosa Luxemburg differed from Lenin on several matters of revolutionary policy, and especially about the role of the Communist Party in the Workers' and Peasants' Councils, or Soviets.

She did not like the Russian Communist Party monopolizing all power in the Soviets and expelling anyone who disagreed rosa luxembourg brief biography of marie osmond it. Later, I began to see that Luxemburg had much wisdom in her attitude, though it was not apparent to me at the time. Looking back, it seems that she was not so critical of Lenin's tactics for Russia.

She did not want them applied to Germany. Alas, she never lived to use her influence on her colleagues in the Spartakusbund for more than a few weeks after I saw her. In the event of war threatening to break out, it is the duty of the workers and their parliamentary representatives in the countries involved to do everything possible to prevent the outbreak of war by taking suitable measures, which can, of course, be changed or intensified in accordance with the exacerbation of the class struggle and the general political situation.

Should the war break out nevertheless, it is their duty to advocate its speedy end and to utilize the economic and political crisis brought about by the war to rouse the various social strata and to hasten the overthrow of capitalist class rule. Karl Marx made a contribution of lasting service to the theory of economics when he drew attention to the problem of the reproduction of the entire social capital.

It is significant that in the history of economics we find only two attempts at an exact exposition of this problem: one by Quesney, the father of the Physiocrats, at its very inception; and in its final stage this attempt by Marx. In the interim, the problem was ever with bourgeois economics. Yet bourgeois economists have never been fully aware of this problem in its pure aspects, detached from related and intersecting minor problems: they have never been able to formulate it precisely, let alone solve it.

Seeing that the problem is of paramount importance, their attempts may all the same help us to some understanding of the trend of scientific economics. What is it precisely that constitutes this problem of the reproduction of total capital? At first sight it may be difficult to see in what respect the idea of reproduction differs from that of repetition which we can all understand — why such a new and unfamiliar term should be required.

But in the sort of repetition which we shall consider, in the continual recurrence of the process of production, there are certain distinctive features. In August of the same year — barely 22 years old — she made her first major public appearance in the context of the international labour movement. At that point, the mandate was denied. Rosa Luxemburg moved to Germany in A marriage of convenience enabled her to gain German citizenship.

From then on she advocated for Social Democracy at party congresses in Germany, at international congresses, and through her journalistic activities. Moreover, cartels succeed at increasing the rate of profit in internal markets only in virtue of expansion outwards, by selling abroad the products that cannot be absorbed by domestic demand.

In other words, Luxemburg explained, these companies are only able to sell abroad, at lower rates of profit, the product that cannot be absorbed by domestic markets. The other face of apparent market stability in Europe is sharpened competition abroad and anarchy on the world market — the opposite of what cartels intended to achieve.

They choose to operate within the legal framework dictated by the old order instead of committing to establish a new one. The political analysis of revisionism produces a similar outcome to its economic analysis: it abandons the commitment to socialism in favour of the preservation of capitalism, and tries to reduce abuses in the system rather than eliminating the system itself.

To achieve the more radical outcome, it is essential for the proletariat to have access to political power. While the advocacy of reforms via parliamentary and trade union mechanisms would prepare the working classes for the exercise of political power, the fact that these demands were inscribed in a liberal institutional framework made it impossible to overcome capitalism from within.

The reformist method ended up pitting socialism against democracy without understanding the nature of legal revolutions.

Rosa luxembourg brief biography of marie osmond: The Australian Dictionary of

In turning the dispute from one of content of legal dispositions to one of style of execution, it ended up losing sight of both. She developed her contribution to Marxist political economy in The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to the Economic Explanation of Imperialism and in her Introduction to Political Economy published posthumously in and based on her lectures on the same subject at the SPD party school.

Her starting position is that the core of a capitalist economy is the extraction of surplus value and the exploitation of workers as a source of accumulation of profits. To understand how this is possible, she argues, we need to focus on total capital and its continuous transformation from commodity to money and back to commodity again, in a new cycle of spiralling profits Bellofiore What is required to maintain the capitalist system, Luxemburg shows, is firstly the ability of capitalists to make profit guaranteed by the reproduction of capitalism as a system; secondly, enough demand to meet the offer of new capitalist commodities brought into the market; and thirdly an incentive to accumulate based on the prospect of new markets to absorb increasing production.

The closed-system analysis, she suggested, made it difficult to explain how capital could be reproduced and valorized in a capitalist society based only on the exploitation of workers, and related extraction of surplus value. Luxemburg found that this analysis did not do justice to the distinctive structural constraints of capital reproduction. In particular, it did not take account of the necessity to access new markets in order to sell consumption goods that impoverished domestic workers could no longer afford.

Without the guarantee of an ever-expanding market, in a depressed economy with low demand for consumption goods there would be no possibility of capital reinvestment and no outlet for accumulated capital stocks. More specifically, under conditions of pauperisation, inequality, and ongoing exploitation of workers by capitalists, the workers would not be able to generate the demand necessary to absorb the commodities produced by capitalists.

Cheap mass-produced goods that struggle to be sold in the markets of developed capitalist states because of low patterns of consumption become available in other areas of the world. They create investment opportunities that displace traditional ways of organizing economic life, and destroy predominantly agricultural forms of production. They also bring in technological innovations and modernizing projects that modify existing relations of authority and reshape forms of class conflict different from the capitalist one.

Moreover, thanks to its expansion to non-capitalist areas and the disruption of traditional ways of life, there is also increased migration and the possibility of recruiting cheap labour force caused by the disintegration of primitive forms of production and non-capitalist ways of life. Capital needs other races to exploit territories where the white man cannot work.

Such an analysis of racism as an integral component of capitalist exploitation helped her see the oppression of non-white peoples as an ongoing feature of the structural replication of the capitalist system. And while imperial conquest, displacement and war guarantee the direct subjection of whole parts of the world to the political control of more developed capitalist countries, other subtle ways of control — for example, in the form of international loans — create political and economic dependency that places the foreign and economic policy of young capitalist states directly under the influence of their neocolonial masters.

International loans, as she explained, help dependent territories acquire the resources needed to modernise and develop their infrastructure while also financing the export of capital from advanced capitalist countries. However, in a financialized economy, with investment comes speculation, and when hopes of increasing rates of profit are disappointed, debt comes to haunt these vulnerable national economies and losses need to be socialized.

This triggers a new, even deeper, crisis and the beginning of a new cycle of accumulation accompanied by militarism as a weapon in the competitive struggle among nations Toporowski This, they further argued, leads to a mistaken view of the accumulation of capital see for a discussion Brewer 62—64 and Callinicos 36— While Marx intended his scheme of reproduction to be an abstract analysis which brackets away from historical constraints to illustrate the inner contraddictions in the continuous search for profit, Luxemburg conflates this philosophical abstraction with a description of historical reality.

Finallyseveral prominent Marxist economists e. Her remarks on the role of the credit and debit system are crucial to understand the underdevelopment and ongoing reproduction of relations of dependency between core and peripheral capitalist countries. The focus on the development of noncapitalist areas of the world gave Luxemburg a sensitivity to questions of race, ethnicity, and indigenous rights that was uncharacteristic for the Marxism of her time.

Up to that rosa luxembourg brief biography of marie osmond, several Marxists had more or less shared the teleological scheme defended by many Enlightenment philosophers that characterised the process of societal evolution as a transition through different stages of development. Starting with nomadic hunter-gathering forms of life, who were then supplanted by pastoral then agricultural relations, these conjectural histories usually culminated with commercial societies, often considered to be a superior form of social organisation.

Luxemburg was one of the pioneers of a study of racism and cultural appropriation as distinctive yet integrated components of an analysis of capitalism where exploitation and racial subordination are mutually reinforcing. In the manuscript on the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy based on her lectures at the SPD school and published postuhumously, Luxemburg examined at length primitive communism in societies as diverse as Germanic tribes, the Inca empire, British India, French Algeria, and Russia.

She illustrated how collective forms of land ownership had an extraordinary capacity for tenacity and adaptation to changing historical circumstances, showing enduring resilience towards despotism, foreign rule, outside conquest and exploitation. In The Accumulation of Capitalthe examples — of British colonialism in India, the Opium Wars, French colonialism in Algeria, the struggle between Black African peoples and Dutch Boers, the exploitation of Native Americans — serve as a reminder of how capitalism develops against a background of coercion and racial abuse.

While remaining committed to the fight against racism in Europe, as her public pronouncements on the Dreyfus affair demonstrate, she continued to see the struggle against exclusion within her own state as inextricably linked to the condemnation of the racial abuse perpetuated by imperialist powers around the world. The mutual dependence between economic and political power in the presence of globalization and the continous drive to exploit remote areas of the world made Luxemburg a skeptic of theories of political emancipation through national self-determination.

Taking as an example a question closer to home — whether Poland ought to gain independence from imperial Russia — she drew on her knowledge and experience to defend strict international proletarianism and suggested that it was against the interests of the Polish working classes to become a self-determining nation. Her argument was that national self-determination cannot serve an emancipatory purpose if it is divorced from the international labour movement.

That labour movement however ought to take a transnational form and not limit itself to a formal request for national self-determination since, on the face of capitalist development, the formal defence of sovereignty would simply limit the struggle. Luxemburg was enthusiastic about the unique contribution of national culture through art or literary products to the understanding of the historical and social specificities of different nations, as her commentaries on the work of Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz make clear see for a discussion Scott However, her appreciation of such distinctive linguistic and cultural contributions was always distinguished from the issue of nation-state sovereignty — a positiion which put her at odds with mainstream progressive movements in Congress Poland.