Rosa Luxemburg

She was involved in founding the Polish Democratic Party and the Spartacus League - later to become the Communist Party of Germany. She organised, questioned and mentored the likes of Marx and Lenin, to steer the movement towards what she believed to be socialism’s true meaning - a theory of liberation and emancipation from oppression. Although herself a libertarian Marxist, she questioned libertarian feminists such as the suffragettes - suspicious that if given the vote, their allegiance would be with the conservative middle class and not the proletariat. She was also critical of their narrow focus on receiving the vote and right to own property, ignoring issues such the traditional domestic and childbearing roles that defined women.
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​On the Class Struggle:

She was deeply committed to social transformation and understood that the only way to organise the working class in their class struggle was through democracy. She believed that under capitalism, who inherently the subjugates and disenfranchises the working class - democracy becomes meaningless. One can not abolish class struggle without the abolition of capitalism itself.
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This is similar to her position on the women’s vote - where she believed that “women’s suffrage was the goal but the mass movement to bring it about was not a job for women alone, but a common class concern for women and men of the proletariat” (Luxemburg 1971, p239). She believed that “most of those bourgeois women who act like lionesses in the struggle against ‘male prerogatives' would trot like docile lambs in the camp of conservative and clerical reaction if they had suffrage” (Luxemburg 1971, p240).

For Rosa, there was no true democracy without socialism. However, she argued that there was no true socialism without democracy - democracy that would extend to workers control of production and social reproduction. She did not see parliamentary process and contemporary voting systems as tools of democracy, but instead saw them to be a bourgeois sham and illusion. Strikes, revolution and direct action were the proper tools and path towards democracy, socialism and women’s liberation. Unlike popular opinions of radicals and socialists of the time, such as Lenin and the SDP, Rosa believed nationalism was a regressive and distractive force and advocated instead for internationalism. She also believed that a revolution did not need to, and should not, be highly organised and structured - yet another point of contention with Lenin and certain leftist movements in Germany.


On Imperialism and Capitalism

Arguably, Rosa’s most notable theoretical contribution is her critique of capitalism from the lens of imperialism. She saw capitalism as inherently catastrophic in that a capitalist society cannot consume all it produces. In order to continue its necessary growth, it is forced to find new, external and non-capitalistic, markets to consume its excess production.

However, this imperialist expansion ultimately creates new capitalistic markets, and so it must again expand its reach further and find yet new sources. To her, capitalism feeds imperialism, eventually consuming the entire world until collapse. This has sometimes been referred to as ‘vampire capitalism’ as it destroys its own source of demand. Here, Rosa believed she had proved that capitalism undermined itself and that it could not, by its very nature, sustain or balance itself.

Her theory was not universally accepted, either by her contemporary Marxists or today. Many believe, for example, that capitalism is capable of creating non-capitalistic markets such as the State or self-employment (Fine 2012). For her, the question was not how one moves from simple to expanded reproduction via complicated cash reserves and transfer calculations, but simply where capitalists are able to sell the surplus produce to realise its surplus value and thus expand. Rosa was one of the only Marxists of her time to take issue with western imperialism and nationalism which made her opinions unpopular, even amongst her peers.
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An Economist, A Woman... a Feminist Economist?

Rosa was nicknamed ‘Bloody Rosa’ by the bourgeois press and conservative politicians. She received backlash even from amongst her own comrades, both for her economic theories and her personal attributes such as her sex, her disability and her Jewishness. Other socialists wrote - “the blood-thirsty, poisonous soul of Rosa Luxemburg has been burdened with a quadruple resentment: as a woman, as a foreigner, as a Jew and as a cripple”, “the syphilis of the Comintern” and belonging “in a zoo” (Wener Sombart, the German Communist Party and Max Weber, as quoted from (Čakardić 2017, p40-41).

Although taken more seriously for her political teachings, she held a PhD in economics and very much felt it to be her arena. Her fellow leftists sometimes wrote disparagingly of her because of her feisty, egoistic nature, which they found unbecoming of her - a woman. “The poisonous bitch will yet do a lot of damage, all the more so because she is as clever as a monkey [blitzgescheit] while on the other hand her sense of responsibility is totally lacking and her only motive is an almost pervasive desire for self-justification”. She was unapologetically proud of her work and her theories, and although her experience as a woman and an economist, amongst other aspects, shaped her life, the extent to which she was a feminist economist has been debated, given her sometimes dismissive attitude towards feminism.

It has been argued that her theory on Imperialism can also be extended to the household. The commodification of domestic labour is yet another example of capitalism expanding into non-capitalistic areas in order to grow and create more profit, but ultimately to its own demise (Čakardić 2017). Whether one agrees or disagrees with Rosa’s theories, it is interesting to draw parallels with today’s care crisis.


References and Additional Reading:

Rosa’s Life:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/mar/05/rosa-luxemburg-writer-activist-letters
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rosa-Luxemburg
Red Rosa - A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg

Works by Rosa:
Luxemburg, Rosa. 1971. ‘Women’s Suffrage and Class Struggle’. Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, 216–22.
Reform and Revolution - Rosa Luxemburg

Other Resources:
Becchio, Giandomenica. 2019. A History of Feminist and Gender Economics. Routledge.
Čakardić, Ankica. 2017. ‘From Theory of Accumulation to Social-Reproduction Theory: A Case for Luxemburgian Feminism’. Historical Materialism 25 (4): 37–64.
Fine, Ben. 2012. ‘Revisiting Rosa Luxemburg’s Political Economy’. Critique 40 (3): 449–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2012.697765.