Rosa Luxemburg, 1870-1919.

The Polish-born "Red Rosa" is perhaps best known as one of the leaders in the 1919 Spartacist Revolution in Germany which ended with her murder while in the custody of the German army. She had been the founder of the Polish Social Democratic Party and headed the left wing of the German Social Democratic Party.  

Although her early challenge to Engels on the tactics of the left and her role in the 1919 German Revolution are perhaps best known, it is in her role as a Marxian theoretician that she concerns us here.  Luxemburg was no fan of the "revisionist" theory of Eduard Bernstein and was, together with Kautsky, the main defender of Marx against Bernstein's critiques - stressing again the issues of imperialism and finance capital which she felt Bernstein had overlooked. Her attack on Bernstein in Social Reform or Revolution (1899) was a very effective - if bitter - destruction of the revisionist arguments.

In her famous treatise, The Accumulation of Capital (1913), she entered into the "crises debate".  Her particular contribution was to note that in a "closed" capitalist system, eternal accumulation of capital is impossible as it cannot absorb all the surplus value it produces.  By accessing non-capitalist socialist formations, this breakdown could be forestalled.   Thus, Luxemburg sets forth her theory of Imperialism as the conflict between capitalist nations for a places to dump their excess consumer goods and thus forestall crises.  

As a result, she argued that much of the pre-war instability arose from the "capitalist-imperialist" conflict among the great European powers.   Luxemburg was the main leader of the "Spartacus League" formed during the World War I to counter the German Social Democrats' support of the war.  She was duly arrested for her opposition and released only in 1918 -- just in time for her to lead the ill-fated German revolution of 1918 with Karl Liebnicht. 

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