Rosa Luxemburg’s reputation and ideas still play a vital, if controversial, role in modern Marxism. She was involved in the Bolshevik movement and the development of Marxism into an active revolutionary movement and creed from the beginning, helped build a post-war attempt at revolution in Germany, in 1918, and was murdered by soldiers when the uprising was crushed. Her real importance, apart from as a romantic martyr symbol, was that she repeatedly criticized Lenin and his Russian version of communism, especially after their coming to power in 1917. Although in many ways she was a perfectly orthodox Marxist, stressing the inevitability of a proletarian revolution, she was seen very much as an advocate of much greater democracy, both in the movement itself, and in the post-revolutionary regime.
For this reason she was a great inspiration to most non-Soviet communist and Marxist movements. In particular the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which was until the early 1960s defiantly Marxist in theory, was infused with her spirit, because it seemed a way of being non-revolutionary, democratic, and yet still true to Marxism. While debates about what ‘true’ Marxism is are necessarily sterile, it does tend to be forgotten that she was only one of many leaders of the communist movement in the early part of this century who had disagreements with Lenin, and she was, nevertheless, an economic determinist who co-operated in a violent revolution. An example of how her importance probably is more symbolic than theoretical is that another anti-Lenin Marxist revolutionary, Trotsky, completely ignored her while she was alive. Only years after her death, when founding a Fourth International (see international socialism), did he suddenly ‘discover’their similarity of position, because his Fourth International was itself an attempt to weld together all the dissident Marxists, for many of whom she had become a patron saint.
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