“Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently”
On 14 January 1919, the day after the Spartacist uprising fell, Luxemburg's final article appeared in Die Rote Fahne. To the victors' cry of 'Order prevails in Berlin!' she answered: 'I was, I am, I shall be!' Arrested that night, murdered the next day.
Polish-born German revolutionary, and the Bolsheviks' sharpest comradely critic. From prison she defended the Russian Revolution while warning against the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the suppression of the press. Murdered by Freikorps troops during the January 1919 Berlin rising.
Career Timeline
- 1893Co-founds the Polish social democracy
- 1898–1914Theorist of the SPD left; the revisionism dispute
- 1899Published Reform or Revolution
- 1906The Mass Strike
- 1913Published The Accumulation of Capital
- 1915–18Jailed for anti-war work; writes on the Russian Revolution from prison
- 1918.12Co-founds the German Communist Party
- 1919.1Murdered by Freikorps troops in the January rising
Related historical events
Against Polish nationalism: the break with the PPS
In 1893, the 22-year-old Rosa Luxemburg gathered with Polish socialist exiles in Zurich to found the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP). The programme she drafted squarely rejected the central demand of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS): Polish national independence. Her argument was that the partitioned Polish lands had already been organically integrated into the Russian, German and Austrian empires, and that capitalist development had rendered the nation-state an economic anachronism.
The conflict erupted at the Third Congress of the Second International in Zurich that same year. The PPS delegation challenged Luxemburg's mandate as the delegate for the SDKP newspaper Sprawa Robotnicza. Small and frail, she climbed onto a chair to make herself seen. Witnesses recalled 'magnetism in her eyes and such fiery words' as she defended her cause. The congress voted to reject her mandate, but the moment registered as something larger: a clash not over procedure but over principle: internationalism versus nationalism.
For Luxemburg, the demand for Polish independence was a trap that divided the working class. She insisted Polish workers must struggle together with Russian workers, and that national liberation would come only with the abolition of capitalism. This position brought her into tension not only with the PPS but also with Russian Marxists. Even Plekhanov and Engels looked askance at her uncompromising hostility to the Polish national cause.
The 'national question' dispute followed her for life. Even after joining the German SPD, her internationalism rested on the foundation laid in those Polish years: that national independence was a romantic delusion. When she wrote, 'I have no special corner of my heart for the ghetto. I feel at home wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears,' it was not merely a personal confession but a political declaration. Internationalism was not an abstract ideal for her: it was the product of the first political battle she fought and lost, as a young Polish exile who refused to put nation before class.
"Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently" — a warning from prison
In the autumn of 1918 Rosa Luxemburg sat in Breslau prison, her third year of confinement for anti-war work. From there she wrote the sharpest comradely critique the Russian Revolution ever received.
Fiercely defending the Bolshevik seizure of power, she nonetheless turned on Lenin's and Trotsky's measures. The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly risked not proletarian dictatorship but 'the dictatorship of a handful.' The suppression of the press was unacceptable because 'freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently.' Distributing land to the peasants would strengthen private smallholding, not socialist agriculture.
The manuscript could not be published at the time. It saw daylight only after her murder in January 1919. Under Stalin it was banned; Cold War liberals brandished it against the USSR. Yet her text resists easy appropriation by either side. It remains uncomfortable because the person who loved the Bolsheviks most asked them the sternest questions.
'Socialism without the participation of the whole proletarian mass, run by decrees from a handful, is not socialism.'