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Thursday, 22 September 2005 00:00 |
Rosa Luxemburg ranks along side Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Lenin,
and Leon Trotsky as one of the great thinkers who founded the Marxist
tradition. She was, along with Karl Liebknecht, on the left-wing of
the German Social Democratic Party and then, during the German
Revolution of 1918, a co-leader of the German Communist Party until
she was murdered by the Frei Korps (forerunners of the Nazis) on
January 15 of that year.
Rosa Luxemburg ranks along side Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Lenin,
and Leon Trotsky as one of the great thinkers who founded the Marxist
tradition. She was, along with Karl Liebknecht, on the left-wing of
the German Social Democratic Party and then, during the German
Revolution of 1918, a co-leader of the German Communist Party until
she was murdered by the Frei Korps (forerunners of the Nazis) on
January 15 of that year. Among other things, she had this to say:
"We [revolutionary socialists] have always distinguished the social
kernel from the political form of bourgeois democracy; we have
always revealed the hard kernel of social inequality and lack of
freedom hidden under the sweet shell of formal equality and freedom -
not in order to reject the latter but to spur the working class into
not being satisfied with the shell, but rather, by conquering
political power, to create a socialist democracy to replace bourgeois
democracy - not to eliminate democracy altogether." |
