5 March 1871 – 15 January 1919

12 Adar, 5631 - 14 Sh'vat, 5679

A century ago the life of one of the brightest minds in socialism was cut short at the hands of proto-fascists and their collaborators. Her ideas and deeds stand seminal as a shining beacon to us today against the background of a century of pain and destruction. She pointed towards a way out of the mud and trenches of the World Wars to a world free from exploitation and oppression. Independently minded, dedicated, uncompromising, she had much to teach us. Today we give thanks to the memory of Rosa Luxemburg.

Who Was Rosa Luxemburg?

She was a revolutionary, a woman, a Jew, an atheist, a Pole, a German, an immigrant, a disabled person, and more. She was all of those things but allowed none of them to define her. Mostly she wanted to be known as a socialist (“social democrat” in the language then), later a communist, and a theoretician of Marxism (or “historical materialist” as they were then called).

She was an activist and writer of the first order. While other Marxists of her day were busy becoming comfortable with rigid formulas and dry prose, she filled her writings with life, color, creativity, and humor. She spent much of her life speaking before crowds of miners and textile workers, standing on picket lines of striking workers, and handing out leaflets on German and Polish street corners. She never lived “only for myself” but was sure to assert herself at all times against the often misogynistic leaders of the German socialist movement.

Born in Zamość, then part of Russian occupied Poland, to a Jewish family, Luxemburg suffered a hip problem at the age of 5 and would spend the rest of her life with a walking disability. She joined her first, and very illegal, socialist organization at the age of 15. Over the next 33 years of constant political activity, Luxemburg would help found the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, the German Independent Social Democratic Party, and the Communist Party of Germany.

She would be deported and arrested multiple times, spending years in prison for her stand against German imperialism and the German empire. She wrote countless books and articles, each one a treasure trove of important insights for socialist activists today. She would be a key leader of the left-wing of the German Social Democratic Party, standing toe-to-toe against the likes of Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, and Vladimir Lenin. There she confronted and resisted the endless sexism within the male-dominated socialist movement, including from her own partners.

In this we recognize the unique, intersectional role that women have played in socialist and left-wing organizing, and the importance of their resistance. To this day Luxemburg is often infantilized and given only cursory review on the Left. She is often tacked on at the end of lists of more respected male Marxists like Lenin, Engels, Trotsky, Gramsci, and Marx himself, all of whom also usually get the respect of being referred to by their last names while Luxemburg is left with being only “Rosa.” To raising up and paying homage to Luxemburg and her work, we also strive to do the same to her lesser known comrades, also Jewish women, such as Sonja Lerch and Rosi Wolfstein. Both socialist and Jewish spaces are often dominated by men, so when we affirm that the liberation from patriarchy is crucial to the project of socialism, we must put that into practice.

On this centennial of mourning it is our opportunity to reflect upon and study this phenomenal comrade’s achievements.

What is a Yahrzeit?

Yahrzeit is Yiddish meaning “anniversary of death.” The Jewish practice goes back to ancient times of memorializing a person’s passing on the annual anniversary of their death by the Jewish calendar (for those practicing, this would be January 21 in 2019 for Luxemburg’s). The date is an opportunity to celebrate loved one’s life and legacy, as well to meditate on the rupture to the world of losing them. Jews take the opportunity to reflect on how the grief has changed them and how the community at large has come to support them in this time of loss. Lastly, yahrzeit is an opportunity to reflect on the precariousness of our lives and the need to not take any moment or person for granted while they are here. This is a sentiment Luxemburg would share when she said while in prison;

“I want to shout out loud over the prison walls: Oh please, pay attention to this marvelous day! Don’t forget as busy as you may be, as you’re hurrying across the courtyard in pursuit of the day’s pressing tasks, do not forget to quickly raise your head and cast a glance at those great silver clouds and that silent blue ocean in which they are swimming. This day will never, ever come again! This day is a gift to you like a rose in full bloom, lying at your feet, waiting for you to pick it up and press it your lips.”

Yahrzeit’s are traditionally memorialized with lighting of a candle, saying the Mourner's Kaddish and other prayers, speaking the departed’s name at shabbat services, and meditating on the person’s life and deeds. We welcome practicing Jews to take the time to perform these traditional rituals if they wish. For the purpose of this document though we will focus on the that last part of a yahrzeit; a deep meditation on a person’s life, deeds, and what their loss means to us.

Judaism and Luxemburg’s Identity

Despite being born to a Jewish family and being raised as such, Rosa Luxemburg as an adult never actively identified as a Jew. She was a Marxist, a socialist, a revolutionary, a professor, but not a Jew. As an atheist, her version of “scientific socialism” didn’t have any place for G-d. As a fierce critic of nationalism, the notion of a secular Jewish national identity was foreign to her. Her place was with the oppressed and workers of all countries, not just those of her own heritage alone. She said;

“What do you want with this theme of the “special suffering of the Jews?” I am just as concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the Blacks in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch!” - From Luxemburg’s letters

Rosa Luxemburg would certainly have found it rather funny to hear of socialists celebrating her memory 100 years later with a yahrzeit. But her time was not ours and her spiritual needs were different from many of our own. Judaism in her time was very different from the one many of us grew up with, and the experiences from the Shoah to Pittsburgh had not yet appeared on the horizon for her. To her Judaism was just a reservoir of superstition and patriarchal family structures. To us it is a complex interaction of identity, ancestry, culture, faith, and values of social justice that has lent many of us strength through the horrors of the long 20th century.

It must also be said that Rosa Luxemburg was entirely opposed to some of the same Jewish socialist projects that many in the contemporary Jewish Left look to for inspiration. Aligned with her general opposition to all nationalisms, including cultural nationalism, she was fiercely critical of the Jewish Labour Bund of Lithuania, Poland and Russia, and she openly derided much of its leadership of the time as largely second-rate. Luxemburg believed that liberation for Jews, as well as all other oppressed minorities, needed to be won by the working class as a whole. That cross-ethnic/religious working class solidarity would be able to defeat bigotry and divisions.

But the Jewish identity of the 21st century is something wholly different from that of the late 19th early 20th. Socialist atheists who proudly proclaim their Jewish identity, as well as practicing Jews who are fully committed to the socialist internationalist project, would have been a strange sight for Luxemburg. She would have recognized the conservative Jewish establishment’s reactionary influence on their community - though today the impact of Zionism is far more prevalent than in her time - but the means of left-wing Jewish resistance to that establishment is wholly new.

If we are to re-integrate Luxemburg into a Jewish context, it is worth mentioning the broader Jewish context of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) itself and politics in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Historian Peter Puzler writes:

“Those [Jews], on the other hand, who saw in a new social order, secular and egalitarian, the solvent of Jewish-Gentile conflicts that liberalism and nationalism had failed to provide, also saw in the SPD the vehicle of their salvation. They joined the party, not because of its day-to-day opposition to prejudice and discrimination, but because of its vision of a future in which the grounds for this prejudice and discrimination would have ceased to exist.” - Jews and the German State, 1992

In this time of rising fascist anti-semitism, and right-wing zionist acquiescence to this threat, left-wing Jewish identity, whether secular, religious, or cultural, is taking on new political significance for resistance. We see this emerging form of struggle in left-wing Jewish groups like Jews For Racial & Economic Justice, Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, and us at the DSA Jewish Solidarity Caucus. This is a new form of struggle compared to that of Luxemburg’s time, but it is the content of the struggle itself she would have understood. It is our duty to bring it to life, in words and actions.

Luxemburg’s Words

We respect and honor the dead in part by remembering what they had to say. What their lives helped to put into the world. Luxemburg was one of the foremost Marxist theoreticians, scholars, and activists in history. Her words are as insightful as they are earth shaking. Here is just a sampling of some of her thought:

“The modern proletarian class doesn't carry out its struggle according to a plan set out in some book or theory; the modern workers' struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight... That's exactly what is laudable about it, that's exactly why this colossal piece of culture, within the modern workers' movement, is epoch-defining: that the great masses of the working people first forge from their own consciousness, from their own belief, and even from their own understanding the weapons of their own liberation.” - ‘The Politics of Mass Strikes and Unions’; Collected Works 2

Luxemburg was a firm believer in what Marx saw as a fundamental aspect of socialism, in that, “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.” In short, that the masses of the exploited and oppressed are the only ones who can free themselves from their oppressions and exploitation, and in so doing can free the world. She knew very well the purpose of organization, but she was always critical of its defects. In her exchanges with the Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin, she was quick to point out the flaws and potential risks of stifling workers’ initiative in his conception of a more centralized vanguard party:

“Nothing will more surely enslave a young labor movement to an intellectual elite hungry for power than this bureaucratic straightjacket, which will immobilize the movement and turn it into an automaton manipulated by a Central Committee.” - Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy

And when revolution did come to Russia, and Lenin with his Bolshevik Party founded a new workers state, she again raised her pen in critique for how they were going about this herculean task:

“In place of the representative bodies created by general, popular elections, Lenin and [Leon] Trotsky have laid down the soviets as the only true representation of political life in the land as a whole, life in the soviets must also become more and more crippled. Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously – at bottom, then, a clique affair – a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians” - The Russian Revolution

Yet despite these insightful and all too prophetic criticism, Luxemburg was a strong supporter of the Russian Revolution. Most of her writings on it were full of praise for Lenin, Trotsky, and the other Bolsheviks, and their accomplishments. But she believed giving “critical support” had to mean precisely that, being able to criticize comrades when they falter. It is only through frank, honest, and comradely criticisms that we can help each other and improve our work. In today’s activist parlance this would be called “calling in” as opposed to “calling out.” But in all of this Luxemburg was guided by a strong belief in workers’ own ability to lead themselves, and this colored much of her work.

There is no proof that the famous line, “those who do not move, do not notice their chains,” was actually ever said by Rosa Luxemburg. However, it is a sentiment she arguably would have shared and believed in. She did say for instance, “Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters. The essence of political freedom depends not on the fanatics of 'justice', but rather on all the invigorating, beneficial, and detergent effects of dissenters. If 'freedom' becomes 'privilege', the workings of political freedom are broken.” - Ibid

The Mass Strike

It was in workers in motion: organizing, striking, resisting, wherein Luxemburg saw change coming from. While many of her contemporaries were narrowly focused on only mainstream electoral reforms from above, it was the revolutionary potential of workers from below where she turned her sights. Nowhere is more evident than her work on the mass strike.

In 1905, Russia went through a mass convulsion, foreshadowing the later February and October revolutions more than a decade later. Mass strikes spread across the whole country and for a time it looked like the centuries old autocracy of the Tzars was about to crumble. It was, but it would actually take another 12 years to do so. Before 1917 there was 1905, and Rosa Luxemburg was in the thick of it. Here are impressions reporting from the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the mass worker’s upsurge that it represent:

“The mass strike, as the Russian Revolution shows it to us, is such a changeable phenomenon that it reflects all the phases of the political and economic struggle, all stages and factors of the revolution. Its adaptability, its efficiency, the factors of its origin are constantly changing. It suddenly opens new and wide perspectives of the revolution when it appears to have already arrived in a narrow pass and where it is impossible for anyone to reckon upon it with any degree of certainty. It flows now like a broad billow over the whole kingdom, and now divides into a gigantic network of narrow streams; now it bubbles forth from under the ground like a fresh spring and now is completely lost under the earth. Political and economic strikes, mass strikes and partial strikes, demonstrative strikes and fighting strikes, general strikes of individual branches of industry and general strikes in individual towns, peaceful wage struggles and street massacres, barricade fighting – all these run through one another, run side by side, cross one another, flow in and over one another – it is a ceaselessly moving, changing sea of phenomena.” - The Mass Strike

Reform and Revolution

“It is contrary to history to represent work for reforms as a long-drawn out revolution and revolution as a condensed series of reforms. A social transformation and a legislative reform do not differ according to their duration but according to their content.”

Arguably one of Luxemburg’s greatest works that should be required reading for all new socialists is ‘Reform or Revolution’. In this pamphlet, Luxemburg is debating with the moderate German social-democrat Edward Bernstein on the question of if capitalism can be reformed through legislation, workers co-operatives, and union struggles, into socialism. Luxemburg demolishes through these ideas and establishes that there is no way out of capitalism without revolution:

“People who pronounce themselves in favor of the method of legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modifications of the old society. . . . Our program becomes not the realization of Socialism, but the reform of capitalism; not the suppression of the system of wage labor, but the diminution of exploitation, that is, the suppression of the abuses of capitalism instead of the suppression of capitalism itself.” - Reform or Revolution

Luxemburg doesn’t stop there. Her argument isn’t a ultra-left abandonment of any fights for reform or union struggle. Her starting point is that those kinds of reform struggles are not just important but are a prerequisite for a workers revolution. She believed that;

“trade-union and parliamentary activity are important for the socialist movement because such activity prepares the proletariat, that is to say, creates the subjective factor of the socialist transformation, for the task of realising socialism… as a result of its trade union and parliamentary struggles, the proletariat becomes convinced, of the impossibility of accomplishing a fundamental social change through such activity and arrives at the understanding that the conquest of power is unavoidable.” - Ibid

Her framework was always worker self activity. It is working people that bring about a revolutionary change to the social system, not well meaning politicians in the legislature. But for them to be convinced that revolution is necessary on mass they must have also first tried out all other options. They must have become radicalized in reform struggle along the way. This was her version of what some would now call “non-reformist reforms.”

No War But Class War

“Shamed, dishonored, wading in blood and dripping with filth, thus capitalist society stands. Not as we usually see it, playing the roles of peace and righteousness, of order, of philosophy, of ethics - but as a roaring beast, as an orgy of anarchy, as a pestilential breath, devastating culture and humanity - so it appears in all its hideous nakedness.”

The collapse of the international socialist movement and the plunging of the world into the horrors of World War One hit Luxemburg hard. All around her she saw her former socialist comrades and allies get caught up in the jingoistic carnage of that great meat-grinder. But from day one, despite the state censorship, despite the repression, despite the hordes of fanatical patriots, and despite the betrayers in the socialist movement, Luxemburg threw herself into anti-war activism. She knew that the only way to end the ceaseless carnage of capitalist war was to end capitalism itself.

“The world war today is demonstrably not only murder on a grand scale; it is also suicide of the working classes of Europe. The soldiers of socialism, the proletarians of England, France, Germany, Russia, and Belgium have for months been killing one another at the behest of capital. They are driving the cold steel of murder into each other’s hearts. Locked in the embrace of death, they tumble into a common grave.

“Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles! Long live democracy! Long live the Tsar and Slav-dom! Ten thousand tarpaulins guaranteed up to regulations! A hundred thousand kilos of bacon, coffee-substitute for immediate delivery!” ... Dividends are rising, and the proletarians are falling. And with every one there sinks into the grave a fighter of the future, a soldier of the revolution, mankind’s savior from the yoke of capitalism.

“The madness will cease and the bloody demons of hell will vanish only when workers in Germany and France, England and Russia finally awake from their stupor, extend to each other a brotherly hand, and drown out the bestial chorus of imperialist war-mongers and the shrill cry of capitalist hyenas with labor’s old and mighty battle cry: workers of the world unite!” - The Junius Pamphlet

I was, I am, I shall be!

Rosa Luxemburg and her political collaborator Karl Liebknecht were murdered a century ago to crush a revolution and stifle hope for a future outside of capitalism.

World War One ended not because of well meaning politicians or some genius strategy from the generals, but because the soldiers and sailors of Germany refused to fight any longer. They mutinied in their tens of thousands and in less than a week had ended over four years of senseless imperial carnage and the German empire while they were at it.

This German Revolution of November 1918 would open up a whole period of revolutionary ferment. Luxemburg and her associates in the Spartacus League, the precursor to the German Communist Party she would help found, got to work to carry what started as a revolution against war and empire onwards to a revolution against capitalism. She and her collaborators said;

“What is being prepared by the ruling classes as peace and justice is only a new work of brutal force from which the hydra of oppression, hatred and fresh bloody wars raises its thousand heads.

“Socialism alone is in a position to complete the great work of permanent peace, to heal the thousand wounds from which humanity is bleeding, to transform the plains of Europe, trampled down by the passage of the apocryphal horseman of war, into blossoming gardens, to conjure up ten productive forces for every one destroyed, to awaken all the physical and moral energies of humanity, and to replace hatred and dissension with internal solidarity, harmony, and respect for every human being.

“If representatives of the proletarians of all countries could but clasp hands under the banner of Socialism for the purpose of making peace, then peace would be concluded in a few hours. Then there will be no disputed questions about the left bank of the Rhine, Mesopotamia, Egypt or colonies. Then there will be only one people: the toiling human beings of all races and tongues. Then there will be only one right: the equality of all men. Then there will be only one aim: prosperity and progress for everybody.

“Humanity is facing the alternative: Dissolution and downfall in capitalist anarchy, or regeneration through the social revolution. The hour of fate has struck. If you believe in Socialism, it is now time to show it by deeds. If you are Socialists, now is the time to act.” - A Call to the Workers of the World

But there were those who would have none of this. While the workers, sailors, and soldiers were forming councils to build up their own form of self-rule from below, the mainstream politicians were working feverishly to reassert capitalist “liberal” order from above. A new German government was formed under the pro-war, moderate “socialist” Friedrich Ebert that worked quickly to reign in the revolution and put a stop to Luxemburg and her fellow Spartacus-Communists.

This tension between workers power and liberal capitalist rule would erupt in mass demonstrations, insurrections, and civil war multiple times from 1918-1923. The first such eruption occurred in January of 1919 in what’s sometimes called the Spartacus Rising. It would cost the life of Rosa Luxemburg.

The general outline is that workers in Berlin, feeling that they had been cheated by the new moderate “socialist” government, came out in a mass demonstration after a provocation. Members of the Spartacus League\Communist Party - notably Karl Liebknecht - got ahead of themselves, thinking this was their moment to carry the revolution to its furthest, and tried to turn the demonstrations into a insurrection. Luxemburg, who always had a clearer head on her shoulders than most of her male comrades, thought this was foolish, that the rest of Germany wasn’t ready for a revolution just yet. But her comrades didn’t heed her advice and she was forced to go along with the outcome of their poor decision.

The government of moderate “socialist” Friedrich Ebert reacted with total violence. Ebert crushed the Spartacus Rising and the mass worker demonstration with the full force of the old imperial German military, along with a new actor, the Freikorps. The Freikorps were a paramilitary group of hyper-nationalists and ex-imperial officers who would become the bedrock from which the Nazi SS, SA, and other fascist gangs would emerge. Heinrich Himmler, Ernst Röhm, and the future commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp were all members of the Freikorps.

It was with this proto-Nazi force that Friedrich Ebert used to crush the revolution and murder Rosa Luxemburg and her closest associates on the night of January 15, 1919. In this way Luxemburg was effectively the first Jewish victim of the Nazi terror that would stretch from her murder, through Kristallnacht, the horrors of the Shoah, all the way to 11 martyrs in Pittsburgh.

But also in her death is encapsulated the full tragedy of the inter-war working class movement. Following the Russian Revolution and end of World War One, there was real possibility that capitalism was finally at its death throes and socialism would have the day. Revolutions were popping off from Germany to Hungary, Italy to Turkey, Seattle to Ireland, Spain to China. The old world was dying and a new world was ready to be born. But it wasn’t to be. In each case, even in Russia where it all started, the revolutions were strangled in their respective cradles by either “well meaning” liberalism or outright fascism.

But for a time there was hope. And Rosa Luxemburg expressed that hope, even during temporary defeats and setbacks. These are her last written words at the time of the crushing of the Spartakus Rising;

““Order prevails in Warsaw!” “Order prevails in Paris!” “Order prevails in Berlin!” Every half-century that is what the bulletins from the guardians of “order” proclaim from one center of the world-historic struggle to the next. And the jubilant “victors” fail to notice that any “order” that needs to be regularly maintained through bloody slaughter heads inexorably toward its historic destiny; its own demise….

“What does the entire history of socialism and of all modern revolutions show us? The first spark of class struggle in Europe, the revolt of the silk weavers in Lyon in 1831, ended with a heavy defeat; the Chartist movement in Britain ended in defeat; the uprising of the Parisian proletariat in the June days of 1848 ended with a crushing defeat; and the Paris Commune ended with a terrible defeat. The whole road of socialism – so far as revolutionary struggles are concerned – is paved with nothing but thunderous defeats. Yet, at the same time, history marches inexorably, step by step, toward final victory! Where would we be today without those “defeats,” from which we draw historical experience, understanding, power and idealism? Today, as we advance into the final battle of the proletarian class war, we stand on the foundation of those very defeats; and we can do without any of them, because each one contributes to our strength and understanding….

“How does the defeat of “Spartacus week” appear in the light of the above historical question? Was it a case of raging, uncontrollable revolutionary energy colliding with an insufficiently ripe situation, or was it a case of weak and indecisive action?

“Both! The crisis had a dual nature. The contradiction between the powerful, decisive, aggressive offensive of the Berlin masses on the one hand and the indecisive, half-hearted vacillation of the Berlin leadership on the other is the mark of this latest episode. The leadership failed. But a new leadership can and must be created by the masses and from the masses. The masses are the crucial factor. They are the rock on which the ultimate victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were up to the challenge, and out of this "defeat" they have forged a link in the chain of historic defeats, which is the pride and strength of international socialism. That is why future victories will spring from this "defeat."

"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 with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be!” - Order Prevails in Berlin

Luxemburg’s Legacy

Leon Trotsky once remarked that the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia would not have happened if Lenin wasn’t present to move things along. The potential was there, but there are times and places when it comes down to a certain person to make real those potentialities. The inverse of this observation can also be true, as the gaping hole of possibilities felt in the absence of Rosa Luxemburg in the events that followed her death shows us.

We will never know what could have been if Luxemburg had survived, what other ways history could have turned if only she was there to set things a little more right. We can only guess and dream. What follows is just three pieces of speculation, but speculation coming from real respect for the power of one special individual:

The German Communist Party that Luxemburg helped to found would spend the years after her death stumbling from one costly mistake to another. Every step they took was meant to lead the German working class to revolution, yet again and again they failed. During this time the lack of experienced political leadership in the Party, with a deep sense of foresight and the political mood of the masses, as well as an unblemished respect from German workers, was often felt. Luxemburg was one person, but one person who had proven time and again her ability to see through the noise and know which way the wind was blowing. Her leadership could have made a world of difference during the years when a second German Revolution was still possible.

As the revolution in Russia stagnated and rotted away from the inside, it spread the authoritarian corruption we now know as Stalinism to the other communist parties around the world. During this time the Russian communists were able to win over communists internationally largely due to prestige. They had been successful in their revolution when others hadn’t, so whatever they said must be right, right? In this time the only people that could be held up as the equals in terms of intelligence and political achievements to the Russian communists was probably Rosa Luxemburg and maybe Karl Liebknecht. To have had especially Luxemburg - who had never shied away from telling it as it is and calling out the authoritarian tendencies of her comrades - on hand could have done much to counter the rise and spread of Stalinism throughout the world communist movement.

When night fell on the 20th century, and the Nazis were about to rise to power, there was still a chance that things didn’t need to go the way they did. The Nazis never won a majority in a free and fair election in Germany, and the combined vote tallies of the Communist and Social Democratic Parties outnumbered them as late as 1932. If the left had a figure like Luxemburg capable of bridging the gap, who knew the importance of a united front of the working class, they may have been able to combine their forces and push back the fascist wave. Instead, weighed down by a decade of inter left infighting, led astray by Stalinist sectarianism, and haunted by the death of Liebknecht and Luxemburg at the hands of some of the same moderate “socialists”, the Communist and Social Democratic Parties of Germany allowed Hitler to seize power without firing a shot in defense.

This is all speculation, but speculation meant to remind us that all of us are needed and nothing is preordained. Anyone of us can be the right person at the right time to change history. It can be in any small way or a large way - the activist that made the meeting happen that got the mass movement going, the worker that recruited the first of their fellows to the union that launched a mass strike, the speaker who inspired a crowd full of people to take their chances and build a new world. But all of these small and large acts requires real people.

Don’t Mourn, Organize!

When the great Industrial Workers of the World songwriter and activist Joe Hill was to be executed for a crime he didn’t commit, he sent a telegram to IWW leader Bill Haywood, “Goodbye, Bill, I die like a true blue rebel. Don't waste any time mourning. Organize!"

This has become a motto for the left at times of loss or mourning. We remember and pay respects for our fallen through organizing, through carrying on their light through struggle. It is in this vein we end this meditation with announcements and calls to action. The light and memory of Rosa Luxemburg is carried onwards with all the work we are doing today.

For those who want to learn more about or join the Jewish Solidarity Caucus of DSA please visit our medium page medium.com/@jewishsocialism and our twitter @solid_jews.

“The Jewish Solidarity Caucus is a hub for organizing as Jews in the struggle against capitalism and for the freedom and dignity of all. We seek to renew the Jewish socialist tradition, to combat antisemitism, and to forge solidarity between Jews and other oppressed people. Jews have complex individual and communal identities and backgrounds, and it is clear that Jewish liberation is bound to that of all oppressed people

“Jewish liberation is bound to that of all oppressed people. The injustices we face may differ in specifics and scale, but they are no less enmeshed in the same dominating structure. If we are to possess our past in its fullness, we must take up the struggle for a better and more beautiful world fought for by our forebears in sweatshops and factories alongside and in solidarity with other oppressed people. We cannot be free while others are in chains and capitalism alienates us from our neighbors. An attack against any oppressed group is an attack on all. We must build a world in which all people live in freedom and dignity.”