Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg was born in Zamość, a small town in Poland under the ruling of Russia, on March 5, 1870. She was the youngest child of Elias Luxemburg and Lina Lowenstein. Along with her parents, elder sister and 3 brothers, Rosa moved to Warsaw in 1873. She suffered from a hip disease, which left her with a permanent limp due to incorrect diagnosis, at a very young age. Her sister was also limped while her 3 brothers were extraordinarily good looking. Injustice, conceivably injustice of nature, alarmed her since she was an adolescent. She wrote during her teenage years "My ideal is a social system that allows one to love everybody with a clear conscience. Striving after it, defending it, I may perhaps even learn to hate". At the age of 16, she graduated from the girls' gymnasium in Warsaw. Her achievement as the top student of her class was shorn of for the reason of "an oppositional attitude toward the authorities. By then, she was reasonably involved in socialist movement. She unveiled the phenomenon of constant humiliation, violence and discrimination in Warsaw during the preliminary phase to industrialization: the spitefulness of the first batch of factory workers, the violence of the police when impeding strikes etc. Rosa escaped to Switzerland in 1889. She met the legendary Vera Zasulich, who shot General Trepov and G.V.Plekhanov, the renowned Russian Marxist theorist. In 1898, Rosa married Gustav Lubeck in turn to get the citizenship of German. She then settled in Berlin where she joined the Social Democratic Party. As a devoted revolutionary, Rosa campaigned with Karl Kautsky against the revisionist Eduard Bernstein, who stands still on his view that in a industrialized country, socialism should be attained through trade union and parliamentary politics. Rosa and Leo Joqiches founded the first influential Polish Marxist workers' party, the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland ( SDKP) in 1903