ABSTRACT
The tradition that Rosa Luxemburg fostered has usually been defeated wherever it has emerged in concrete revolt, while her thought has, on the whole, been ignored in the West and castigated in the East. Rosa Luxemburg was born in the small Polish city of Zamosc in 1871, the year of the Paris Commune. Her father was a middle-class Jew who was cosmopolitan in his views. The unity between the theoretical in Rosa Luxemburg's writing and the concrete needs of political practice formed early, and it was never broken. In concrete terms, the political implications that she drew from her economic research served as the theoretical basis for the journal Sprawa Robotnicza, which Luxemburg and Jogiches founded in 1893. Few individuals—Trotsky would be one of them—ever rose to fame in the socialist world as quickly as did Rosa Luxemburg. Many of Rosa Luxemburg'S friends, and particularly Sonja Liebknecht, were susceptible to personal depression and political despair.
