How Rosa Luxemburg Taught Worker-Militants to Think Differently
150 years since her birth, Rosa Luxemburg is often remembered more as a martyr than a theorist. But as a teacher at a socialist party school she taught worker-militants to see the world like a Marxist — nurturing the intellectual tools that would let them master their own fate.
Rosa Luxemburg addressing a crowd in Stuttgart, 1907. (ullstein bildullstein bild via Getty Images)
For Rosa Luxemburg, political education was hardly just a matter of sitting down in the classroom. In her work The Mass Strike, responding to the 1905 revolution in the Russian empire, she emphasized how the masses learned through experience. As she wrote, “to be able to overthrow [Russian absolutism], the proletariat requires a high degree of political education, of class-consciousness and organization. All these conditions cannot be fulfilled by pamphlets and leaflets, but only by the living political school, by the fight and in the fight, in the continuous course of the revolution.”
Yet if here Luxemburg wrote that “revolutions do not allow anyone to play the schoolmaster,” the following year she became a teacher at the German Social Democrats’ (SPD) national party school in Berlin. There, she taught several cohorts of students, an experience which also informed works like her Introduction to Political Economy, seeking to popularize Marxist economics among militants. The classroom couldn’t make the revolution happen. What it could do was empower militants to think differently, while also enriching party theory with its worker-students’ experiences.
Origins of the Party School
The party school at which Luxemburg taught was founded in 1906, but was far from the first time that the SPD engaged in active political education. In fact, the party’s history can be traced back to workers’ education clubs founded after the 1848 revolution. Most of these clubs were founded by radical liberal intellectuals guided by the idea that educational clubs and institutes for workers could improve their lives through individual cultural and spiritual enrichment. Some of the first workers’ organizations in Germany were the result of workers splitting from clubs founded under bourgeois patronage in favor of running their own independent political and educational organizations.
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