Rosa Luxemburg was born in Zamosc in Russian Poland into a Jweish middle-class family. She was educated at a Warsaw Gimnazium and participated in revolutionary activities from the age of 16. In 1889 she was forced to flee to Switzerland, where she she received a doctorate from Zürich University (1898). In 1982 she helped to found the Polish Socialist Party and was one of its leaders.

A german citizen by marriage she become in 1898 a leader of the left wing of the German Social Democratic Party and participated in the second International and in the 1905 revolution in Russian Poland. In 1906 she was arrested in Warsaw but released then on health grounds. She returned to Germany where she taught at SD party school and developed ideas about general strike as a political weapon. In 1912 appeared her major theoretical work, The Accumulation of Capital, in which she tried to prove that capitalism was doomed and would inevitably collapse on economic grounds.

After differences with moderate German socialists, she founded with Karl Liebknecht the radical Spartacus League in 1916. Two years later the organization became the German Communist Party.

During the World War I Luxemburg spent long times in prison, writing her SPARKAKUSBRIEFE and DIE RUSSISCE REVOLUTION, where she welcomed the October Relolution as a precursor of world revolution. After the Spartacist uprising in Berlin, Luxenburg and Liebknecht were arrested in 1919. While being transported to prison she and Liebknecht were murdered on the night of 15/16 on January 1919 by German Freikorps soldiers.

For further reading: Rosa Luxemburg by J.P. Nettl (1966, 2 vols.)

Selected works:

• DIE INDUSTRIELLEENTWICKLUNG POLENS, 1989 (doctoral thesis)
• SOZIALREFORM ODER REVOLUTION, 1899 - SOCIAL REFORM OR REVOLUTION
• DIE AKKUMULATION DES KAPITALS, 1913 - ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL, tr. 1951
• SPARTKUSBRIEFE, 1916
• DIE RUSSISCHE REVOLUTION, 1922 - THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND LENINISM AND MARXISM