workingclasshistory:

On this day, 5 March 1871, the revolutionary socialist of Polish-Jewish descent Rosa Luxemburg was born. Splitting from the Social Democrats (SPD) when they supported World War I, she co-founded the Spartacus League, which later renamed itself the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), and enthusiastically took part in the German revolution of 1918.
Luxemburg was a critic both of the “ultra-centralism” of Russian Bolshevik Vladimir Lenin, and also of reformist socialists, declaring: “People who pronounce themselves in over of the method of legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modifications of the old society… Our program becomes not the realization of socialism, but the reform of capitalism not the suppression of the system of wage labor, but the diminution of exploitation, that is, the suppression of the abuses of capitalism instead of the suppression of capitalism itself.”
Luxemburg and her colleague Karl Liebknecht were later murdered by the right-wing paramilitary Freikorps acting on behalf of the SPD in the wake of the failed Spartacist uprising of 1919.
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