 bourgeois society stands at the crossroads either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism those words echo down the ages as a prophecy and as a challenge they were written over a hundred years ago by a middle-aged woman in a freezing german jail cell a woman who would go on to leave an indelible mark on history rosa luxembourg was a radical a rabble rouser and a revolutionary she was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century and her calls for freedom socialism and democracy scandalized people at the time both from the left and the right so who was this woman whose passion for revolution and justice sent shock waves throughout german society whose thought continues to influence millions around the world today i'm here in berlin a hundred years after her death to find out all accounts of her both praising and damning agree on one thing the fact that she lived a truly extraordinary life especially for a woman of her time she was polis she was jewish she was an immigrant she was a political refugee she was disabled she was a socialist there were so many strikes against her name that should have kept her on the margins that should have shut her up but she never shied away from speaking her mind especially to people who were considered her social superiors the rosa luxembourg foundation is the home to archives charting her life work and legacy she was born in 1871 into a lower middle class family in poland then part of the vast russian empire this was a time of pogroms violent union busting and socialist being hung in the street as a teenager her left wing loyalties caught the attention of the police and she was forced to flee the country she earned a doctorate in economics and eventually found her way to germany there she joined the spd the social democratic party of germany which at the time was a mass movement she quickly cemented a reputation as an impressive public speaker a tireless organizer an activist an educator and a pioneering thinker rosa luxembourg was an extremely prolific figure she was also an extremely charismatic leader of the socialist movement and her contribution goes in many directions so i would say there's three areas in which luxembourg's work is important in economic study of capitalism in connection to imperialism the political study of socialism and the relationship to the national question what makes rosa luxembourg such an original contributor to economics into marx's thoughts she says that the way in which capitalism enters into contradictions and the reasons the conditions for the accumulation of capital have to do with the fact that capital expands to extra european markets so faced with the crisis of overproduction and under consumption within their domestic advanced capitalist markets capitalists seek for investment opportunities abroad and they do this by finding markets that have not been conquered by capital yet and this connects luxembourg's economic analysis to one of her main contributions to the study of marxism which is the link between the analysis of the crisis of capitalism and imperialism imperialist wars rosa's economic work charted capitalism's drive to conquer and cannibalize more territory fueling war and destroying the environment so for her socialism was always bound up with the struggle against colonialism this thinking solidified a firmly internationalist outlook whilst many of her peers were throwing themselves into national liberation struggles rosa luxembourg dismissed this as a kind of bourgeois distraction focused on securing a handful of short-term gains for a handful of relatively privileged workers while just leaving everyone else in the dust and moreover if capitalism is a global system of global destruction only global solidarity can hope to provide any solution luxembourg argued we can't live in a world where capitalism is rendering life literally unlivable so it's on us to change it here in croitsburg i attended the hommage to rosa luxembourg conference where leading scholars gathered with people from all walks of life to celebrate rosa's legacy i have inzwischen fast and i know revolution uh fit me in a marketing industry start sent air um that's what's on today this capitalized the revolution in dufts by for example cosmetics or the revolution in the human communication between digital and internet i think rosa luxembourg was much more about transformation than thought was than thought was than the idea was that there would be a great blow and then all contradictions were removed and the proletariat would be freed and the socialism is coming over us all and that's why i think that if we talk about revolution today then rather in a permanent in a transformative sense in a new movement new self-correcting permanent learning needs around the turn of the century as the spd were beginning to make gains in parliament some prominent leaders like edward bernstein started to distance themselves from the militancy of some of the membership they pushed for gradual wins and cooperation with capital instead of revolution rosa luxembourg took them to task for this approach sparking the now famous bernstein debate she argued that whilst reforms are important abandoning revolutionary goals altogether means propping up a system fundamentally geared towards the destruction of life the bernstein debate was very important because of this debate she became famous in the german social democratic party the bernstein debate was the starting point of developing step by step later a new type of left politics from below from the social movements from um self-organization from a new understanding you see lenin krautsky and all the other sort we should bring the right consciousness into the masses she had a totally different view the masses by their own practice will develop and we should help them to develop their own consciousness she believed that real liberation and real socialism had to be grounded in the kind of self-enlightenment and self-education and class consciousness that came from ordinary working people engaging directly in struggle socialism couldn't come from the top socialism had to come from the kind of power that remains with the masses this kind of thinking is grounded in the staunch conviction that socialism and democracy are fundamentally interconnected and fundamentally inseparable socialism without democracy is just tyranny by another name and democracy without socialism is just a kind of sham hollow liberation for a tiny privileged minority betahudas is one of the leading experts on rosa luxembourg's life and work we live in a time where the language of freedom is so often captured by the right and especially the neoliberal right so in contrast to that what did freedom mean for rosa luxembourg and the socialists around her luxembourg was a firm a supporter and advocate of democracy including liberal democracy she argued that a liberal democratic what we might call a democratic republic is the best form in which to carry out the class struggle because workers cannot organize openly if they cannot form trade unions in there cannot fight for improvements in their everyday conditions if they're subjected to dictatorial or authoritarian conditions in which this kind of political mobilization is not possible it's going to make it much harder to agitate against the system and in fact when you look at the history of the 19th and the 20th century the extent that we have vestiges of democratic rights it's as a result of these social struggles um but that didn't mean that luxembourg thought that democracy within the framework of capitalism could possibly be actualized but she really was one of the most thoroughgoing uh supporters of and advocates of democracy within the marxist tradition but she understood that um uh you don't turn your back you try to use the democratic rights the extent you have them within a bourgeois society but you use them to surpass the confines of bourgeois society at the same time rosa luxembourg had absolutely no patience with the feminism of upper-class women which she saw as an attempt to elevate themselves to the status of rich white men whilst leaving their fellow women to rot in factories and die in childbirth rather she believed that gender justice and sexual liberation had to be undergirded by economic justice and economic equality dana mills is a lecturer activist and dancer currently writing a book on rosa luxembourg i caught up with her after one of her performances to talk about rosa's much debated relationship with the so-called woman question the nature of women's oppression under capitalism rosa luxembourg was a woman living in a very unequal time she never had access to a lot of resources that her male comrades had and sexes were used was used against her often in the party including from her very close male comrades and she was aware of that however she goes against what was then considered bourgeoisie feminism which is feminism focused on only on legal rights so at that time we're talking about the struggles to get the right to vote struggle to get women into education she understands that legal rights are really important but they're only a part of the holistic being of a human being so she never puts that at the forefront of her struggle at the same time it's really untrue and insincere i think to say that she was not interested in the woman question and she didn't understand that with regards to herself she was very much in solidarity with her woman comrades you can see how she's really working hard to elevate her woman comrades and to sort of create this kind of sisterhood working together she writes as i said a lot about the patriarchy and how oppression starts really from minute structures within society and she engages with that in various places in her writing throughout her life so i think she has a lot of things to teach us about what it means to be a feminist today so it's feminism away from the the kind of heleric netinesque putting yourself against everyone else it's very much working in concert with other people it's very much thinking about holistic struggles as connected to each other and i think basically the most important lesson is you can never talk about the woman question the feminist question disengage from anything else happening in society it always has to be a holistic struggle rosa remained a committed member of the spd for much of her life but the ideological rifts between herself and the leadership steadily deepened in 1914 the competing imperial forces of europe were gearing up for the bloodiest conflict the world had ever seen and spd politicians voted alongside the government passing war credits and calling off strikes and worker mobilizations to support the war effort for rosa this represented a deep and fundamental betrayal of the movement she and her comrade car leapneck spent the war at the forefront of the peace movement and their anti-war agitation eventually landed them in jail they finally broke from the spd and founded the spartakus league which later became the german communist party julia damphouse is a researcher who runs a series of reading groups with jack bin magazine i caught up with her on a characteristicly rainy berlin day so rosa luxembourg and carle leapneck and others on the left of the spd had a really strong commitment to anti-militarism and this came from like what ends up being a very intuitive concept which is like well what causes wars at that time and arguably still now um the desire for like expanding capitalist enterprise so imperialism their anti-militarism came from this like critique of the function of capitalism of that function of capitalism and also just the simple fact that when you go to war who fights against each other it's the children of the working class who have more in common with each other than with their national bourgeoisie who are the people kind of precipitating this whole thing the peace movement grew in strength as the effects of the war really began to bite the dead piled up the violence that the imperial frontiers began to return home and germany's economy steadily started to crumble it was in these conditions that rosa luxembourg prophesied that a clear choice lay ahead for humanity either socialism or barbarism popular discontent was mounting a series of mass strikes for peace began in january 1918 and eventually ended in the collapse of the german front in october of that year then a series of sailor and soldier mutinies beginning in keel spilled over into a full blown uprising on november the eighth the kaiser abdicated and germany was declared a republic rosa was released from prison the very next day and she threw herself into the fight going to meetings organising shop stewards as she also published a daily newspaper called dirata fauna the red flag this one is a call out to the proletariat of all lands it's really really hard to underestimate the importance of these kinds of newspapers and publications to the revolutionaries at the time as this was pretty much the only way in which people had to communicate to organise themselves when the government was steadily assembling to try and quash the revolution to try and smother it in the cradle the spd stepped in to prop up the collapsing state forming europe's first social democratic government its leader fridrich ebert was now chancellor and the party worked together with other politicians with the military and with the police to quell the revolution by force the spartakas group around rosa luxembourg and carlie connect which had campaigned against the war illegally throughout the war wanted to continue the revolution or at least certainly not lose those gains that they had made in november december at the time of the revolution the uprising and so the spartakas together with other revolutionaries stayed on the streets they armed themselves they occupied newspaper offices to pump out pamphlets demanding much more dramatic transformation than the spd was prepared to offer in the chaos of the days that followed government forces rolled in and crushed the nascent insurgency rosa and car were forced into hiding and on the evening of january 15th 1919 they were discovered by right-wing paramilitaries who separated them tortured them and finally killed them carlie connect was killed here in the dark tear garden and rosa luxembourg was killed 100 meters here before the hotel shot in the head and then they came here with the car stopped here and throw in the landwehr canal the killing of rosa luxembourg and carlie connect was one of the greatest tragedies in in the history of germany because the splitting of the proletarian movement was so big that it didn't come together again and later on in 1933 they didn't have the power to fight together against fascism the paramilitary forces who murdered rosa luxembourg would later go on to form the vanguard of the nazi party and after her death the spd government continued to crack down on its own citizens until the revolution was finally defeated rosa luxembourg lived and died with the hopes of the german revolution and the forces of reaction unleashed against her would eventually form the basis of the violent militarized state known to history as the third rike paul levy later wrote that it was here that german fascism began its unearthly train of the dead that dragged on for years and years but her ideas couldn't be so readily crushed her work continues to influence struggles all across the world and each year thousands gather to heat flowers on her grave to remember her extraordinary life and her message that humanity has an inherent yearning for freedom one which can't be put down with rifles these were her final words written just hours before the soldiers came knocking on her door order prevails in berlin you foolish lackeys your order is built on sand tomorrow the revolution will rise up again clashing its weapons and to your horror it will proclaim i was i am i shall be