Rosa Luxemburg and the Silencing of Radical Ancient Economic History
“Ich war, ich bin, ich werde sein.”
Rosa Luxemburg (Róża Luksemburg), the revolutionary socialist and leader of the Spartacist uprising (Spartakusaufstand) is well known; much less known, however, is Luxemburg the historian and philosopher of economic history. In Women Philosophers in the Long Nineteenth Century, Dalia Nassar and Kristin Gjesdal’s write:
She was the flaming revolutionary whose life was prematurely cut off when she, as an antiwar activist, socialist, and leader of the Spartakusbund (Spartacus League, the precursor of the German Communist Party), was savagely beaten and shot in the head by members of the German Freikorps. Less well known are the details of her intellectual life and work. It is for good reason that Hannah Arendt called her ‘the most controversial and least understood figure in the German Left movement.’
Perhaps least known and understood is her work on the ancient history of Greece and Rome. Though she was “one of the first women in Europe to obtain a PhD in economics” (2025: 207), her ideas on the philosophy of labor and economic epistemology are entirely absent from standard textbooks on intellectual history of economics. Even among scholars with socialist sympathies, the historical work of the woman considered by many contemporaries to be “the best brain after Marx” is rarely debated or discussed. Among her work, it is perhaps her ideas on ancient Greek and Roman history – an epoch that she, like Marx and Engles, thought proved the crucible of modern misunderstandings of liberal democracy and republicanism, that is most unknown to the world today. This is both an injustice to history and her life work. To understand her ideas of ancient Greek and Roman history is to understand the debates in the political world of the early 20th century which created the modern liberal, capitalist, colonial democracies which rule much of the globe today. It is also to understand the alternative that Rosa Luxemburg, like most of the revolutionary socialist of her day, believed could alone achieve true democracy for all. Unlike Karl Marx, whose work continued to be discussed (even if rarely and most often in critique) in the field of ‘Classical’ history, Luxemburg’s work is almost completely unknown. How did this happen? How has one of the first women in the history of economics, a Polish Jewish immigrant and one of the most famous Marxist intellectuals in the 20th century, attracted so little interest?
It is not simply a matter of time and the progress of thought. For instance, her contemporary and political rival, Max Weber, is not only celebrated by ancient historians as “the founding father of sociology,” his theories and ideas still shape the research programs and publications at elite research institutions. A brief comparison of Rosa Luxemburg and Max Weber reveals the historical forces that allowed one voice to dominate and the other to be forgotten. The preeminent German historian, Wolgang Mommsen, explained the “thoroughgoing bourgeois spirit” of Weber’s thought in Max Weber and German Politics, 1890-1920, the standard work on the development and consequences of Weber’s political and economic philosophy. Weber believed that German nationalism ought to use militarism to seek power through economic growth, that “imperialism” must be used to “bring the still ‘free’ regions of the globe under the political control of the nation” and “open them to the preferential exploitation of the nation’s industrial and commercial interests.” The same ideas dominate the discourse of modern economic historians of the ancient Greek and Roman world. Scholars also continue to study the ancient Greek origin of Weber’s ideal “plebiscitary democracy,” which is frequently extolled as an ancient ideal which seeks its floruit in democracy today. These professional intellectuals, however, rarely define Weber’s terms. Mommsen provides the following explanation of the idea:
‘Plebiscitary democracy,’ the most important type of leadership democracy, is in its genuine sense a kind of charismatic rule that hides behind the form of rule through the will of the ruled and shelters the legitimacy derived from it. The leader (demagogue) rules in fact on the basis of the support and confidence of his political following to his person as such.” Plebiscitary charismatic legitimacy displaces the rational legitimacy of the parliamentary-constitutional state. The latter becomes a technical means to assure the rule of charismatic elites permanently.
Together with Weber’s theory of the national economy, the plebiscitary democracy offered Germany a model for the Weimar republic. In the estimation of Mommsen, its “undeniably authoritarian tinge,” however, was not “immune to a totalitarian reformulation.” Its foundation on charismatic leadership made it a “Führer democracy,” which did not lead inextricably to the rise of Hitler and National Socialism, but did pave a path for its possibility. This has not kept Classical scholars of great repute from celebrating it as the ideal of Western Civilization. Thus, we must conclude that Weber’s enduring legacy in scholarship reflects the institutional ideals that continue to support his ideas.
There was, however, an alternative ideal of democracy that has failed to receive institutional support and justification. The antithesis of the plebiscitary democracy is “leaderless democracy,” which is “characterized by the ‘effort to minimize the rule of man over man.’” Paul Frölich, who worked with his partner Rosi Wolfstein to keep alive her work and ideas, explained her conception of the democratic socialism in his biography of Rosa Luxemburg:
The goal of socialism is man, i.e. a society without class differences in which people working in community, without tutelage, forge their own fate. It is – in Marx’s words – a ‘association where the free development of each individual is the condition for the free development of all.’ It is not socialism if the means of production are socialized and set into motion according to a plan, but a class or a social stratum autocratically controls the means of production, regiments and oppresses the working masses, and deprives them of their rights. No socialism can be realized in a country where the state power breaks in and gets rid of the old ruling classes and property relations but at the same time subjects the whole nation to a ruthless dictatorship which prevents the working class from being conscious of its particular role… As Rosa Luxemburg expresses in the Spartakus programme: ‘The essence of a socialist society is in the fact that the great working masses cease to be ruled as a mass, and that it itself lives and directs the whole of political and economic life in free and conscious self-determination.’ Socialism is democracy completed.
The idea that a society can be truly democratic if people have the means to reproduce themselves and to exercise their own labor as they choose is antithetical to the state’s use of violence to protect economic growth and colonial capitalism. Weber and Luxemburg therefore suffered much different receptions by state power. Unlike Max Weber, Rosa Luxemburg did not receive a chair within the university system from which she could address the German nation. Unlike Weber who used his chair to extol the dangers of Polish and Slav immigrants, Luxemburg was a Polish immigrant who came to Germany after receiving her PhD for her study on the economy of Poland. After arriving in Berlin at the end of the 19th century, she quickly became one of the most important writers and orators of the German Socialist party. While Weber quickly gained status articulating a defense of the new ‘objective’ economic science founded on the canon of German nationalism, she fought to defend Marx’s political economy of labor and the power of the working class. While Weber taught aspiring civil servants of bourgeois nationalism in the hallowed halls of Freiburg University, Luxemburg taught Berlin workers in night classes provided by the Socialist Party. When world war one broke out and Weber was using the university as a pulpit to advocate for Germany’s entry into World War One, Luxemburg was imprisoned in Berlin for calling the working class to international solidarity and the refusal to kill each other in the name of nationalism. When Luxemburg was released from prison at the end of the war, she supported the revolutionary aims of the working class revolution. In the final act of her life’s struggle for the revolutionary aims of the German Socialist Party, she participated in the Sparaticist revolt that fought to defend the revolution from the reformist members in the Social Democratic Party suppression. On the revolutionary socialists who sought to support the mass uprising’s call for the power of the proletariat, Weber stated: ‘It is the most crucial thing now whether the mad group of Liebknecht is suppressed or not. They will rebel soon. It cannot be helped. The problem is that we ought to suppress it as soon as possible’ (Weber 1921b: 482). Meanwhile he worked to organize how “to put the bourgeoisie politically on its own feet” (MWG, I/16: 107).
In the days leading up to her assassination of in January, 1919, Max Weber in fact denounced Luxemburg and her socialist comrade, Liebknecht, in a speech that reverberated throughout the newspapers of Germany. “Liebknecht,” he said, “belongs in a madhouse and Rosa Luxemburg in the zoo.” For her contemporaries, it would have been hard not to associate Weber’s “zoo” with the Berlin jail that illegally held Rosa Luxemburg from 1916-1918 for her protests against WW1. It also would have invoked the popular imagery of the zoo used in anti-semitic rhetoric of the period. Whether or not Weber intended his polemic to inspire the violence that resulted, Rosa Luxemburg did not survive the month. Several days after Weber’s speech, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were arrested illegally by the new paramilitary military force, the freikorps (Jan. 15th, 1919). After she was captured, she was tortured, beaten, and shot before her body was thrown into a Berlin canal. Her body would not be found until it washed up in May. Liebknecht, who was killed by firing squad the same day, had his body thrown out on the public street in front of the Berlin zoo. Weber did condemn the murders. However, he was quick to describe their murder as both the natural and deserved end of the revolutionary socialists who refused to join the German social democratic party’s turn to the nationalist, imperial, and republican policies that supported the creation of the Weimar Republic. Their path, Weber ironically argued, paved the way to the death they deserved. And so, the man who dedicated his life to the ideals of German nationalism, militarism, and the war of all against all, concluded: “Liebknecht… summoned the battle in the street. The street killed him.”
Rosa Luxemburg’s murder has cast a long and dark shadow over the history of her life and ideas. Unfortunately, the incentive structure in place to institutionally support scholars who continue to serve the narrative of state capitalism is one reason Luxemburg’s work on ancient history is undeveloped and unknown. Another reason that is perhaps under discussed is the fear her murder intended to engender for those invested or interested in revolutionary, socialist democracy. Together they both (the institutional structures of power and the fear of state terrorism) explain why Rosa Luxemburg’s work in economic history continues to be understudied and unexplored. The lesson, unfortunately, has been learned: the theory of internationalist, revolutionary, and socialist democracy has no place in the university and it is a threat to the very foundations of civilized political order. It is an old story and for the few who are naive, invested, or indifferent enough to serve the ruling class, it continues to provide an explanation of why this is the best of all possible worlds. It is a precondition of civilization itself that the few exercise control over almost all of the natural resources in the world and that the many realize they must not possess the small portion needed to be someone free.
Despite the extraordinary difficulties that have faced the continuation of her work, there are many figures in the last century who have labored to keep her works, life, and ideas alive. The subroza project is dedicated to continuing the tradition of this work. In particular, it is dedicated to preserving, studying, and developing Luxemburg’s ideas on the development of private property, class, slavery, and what these mean for the study of democracy. We hope that others will be inspired to join our work and to contribute to the revitalization of the revolutionary socialist study, which Luxemburg understood to be the continuation of Marx and Engles’ historical materialism, of the ancient Greek and Roman history. The relevance of this historical period was much different to Rosa Luxemburg than it is to most contemporary Marxist scholars. It was in ancient Greece that Luxemburg argued we are able to most clearly see the development of class society and it develops in its permanent form from slavery. Her ideas differ from Marx and from Engles and it is important to understand what her own theory of the origin of class was and how she used the historical resources of her time to investigate the question. It is a question that stemmed from Rosa Luxemburg’s defense of revolutionary socialism against reformism and it was one she ultimately articulated in order to show that true democracy will never be achieved so long as we fail to understand the slave-democracy that arose in ancient Athens and how it serves to treat exploitation and domination as the natural, necessary foundation of modern democracy.