ABSTRACT
Rosa Luxemburg was without question the greatest woman figure in the history of revolutionary socialism. Her impact on the Polish, Russian, and German labour movements was deep and enduring. The polycentric character of the world communist movement and the emergence of a more ‘liberal’ form of communism in western Europe and of an anti-authoritarian student movement in the 1960s helped to give a greater actuality to certain features of the Luxemburgist legacy. Rosa Luxemburg’s intransigence on the national problem may seem at first sight puzzling, particularly as, being Polish-born and a Jewess, she was a member of two oppressed nationalities in the Tsarist empire. The anti-eastern prejudice in the German party surfaced again in 1905 when Rosa Luxemburg began to write a series of articles and pamphets recommending the lessons of the revolutionary mass strikes in Russia to German workers. Rosa Luxemburg was familiar with the existence of a Jewish Workers’ movement in Tsarist Russia as early as 1892.
