SOURCE: "Freedom and Revolution: Rosa Luxemburg," in Revisionism: Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas, edited by Leopold Labedz, Frederick A. Praeger, 1962, pp. 55-66.

Carsten is a German-born historian. In the following essay, he discusses Luxemburg's pamphlets in relation to the ideals of the German Social-Democratic party.

Among the rather unimaginative and pedestrian leaders of the German Social-Democratic Party of the early twentieth century—who were occupied with the task of achieving better living conditions for the workers and passing high-sounding resolutions against the evils of bourgeois society (which did not oblige anybody to take any action)—one was entirely different: a fiery woman of Jewish-Polish origin, small and slender, slightly lame from a childhood disease, an orator who could sway the masses, a professional revolutionary who seemed to belong to the Russian world from which she came rather than to modern Germany. Rosa Luxemburg was born on...