“A hundred years after her murder, Luxemburg’s most vital insight remains that socialism and democracy are nothing without each other.”

(Interesting article by George Eaton. It is worth reading. It seems welfare states of Europe followed her advice. f. sheikh)

On the evening of 28 October, as they absorbed the election of far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, British leftists declared “socialism or barbarism”. The slogan was assumed by some to be a Corbynite coinage. But it was first popularised more than a century ago in war-ravaged Europe.

In 1915, writing under the pseudonym Junius to evade prosecution, German Marxist leader Rosa Luxemburg warned: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.”

To Luxemburg’s dismay, rather than uniting in opposition to the First World War, Europe’s left-wing parties rallied behind their national governments. “Workers of the world unite in peacetime – but in war slit one another’s throats,” she observed acidly.

Luxemburg and co-leader Karl Liebknecht responded in 1916 by founding the revolutionary Spartacist League (named after Spartacus, the leader of the largest Roman slave rebellion), a breakaway from Germany’s Social Democratic Party.

Stripped of their original context, Luxemburg’s words – “socialism or barbarism” – have been derided by liberals as a false dichotomy. Did Stalinism not prove that some hideous admixture of both could result? If so, Luxemburg can credibly claim to have foreseen the rise of barbarous socialism. Indeed, her life and work demonstrate.

Luxemburg considered herself a citizen of the world, a view she expressed with unsparing force. Writing from prison in 1917 to her Jewish friend, the socialist and feminist Mathilde Wurm, she declared: “What do you want with these special Jewish pains? I feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putumayo and the blacks of Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play ball… I have no special corner in my heart for the ghetto: I am at home in the entire world.”

But it was to acquire German citizenship – and a place in Europe’s pre-eminent socialist party – that Luxemburg married Gustav Lubeck, the son of a friend, in 1897 (the couple never lived together and divorced five years later).