Rosa Luxemburg was murdered 104 years ago today, on January 15, 1919. She, alongside Karl Liebknecht, were organizing a revolt of the German working class when the Freicorps, precursors of the Nazis, tortured and then killed them. The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) acquiesced in their murders. Rosa had belonged to the SPD, but split from it when its new leaders—Ebert, Scheidemann, and Noske—openly aligned with the German bourgeoisie. (In my dark moments, filled with vindictive rage, I wish these Judases had gotten their just dues and ended up in Hitler’s concentration camps.) Franz Mehring, Karl Marx’s first great biographer, said of the verbal abuse Rosa often suffered in the SPD: “That is really not nice, and even less so because this tasteless knocking of the most brilliant intellect of all the scientific heirs of Marx and Engels can, in the last resort, only be rooted in the fact that it is a woman whose shoulders bear this intellect.” Rosa did not need the brain (or braids) of Kimberlé Crenshaw to know that women suffer from a
— source normanfinkelstein.com | Norman Finkelstein | Jan 15, 2023