January 15, 2026 was the 107th anniversary of the torture and
assassination in Germany of the Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. Along
with her comrade and fellow Social Democratic Party (SPD) member Karl
Liebknecht, Luxemburg was killed by a far-right German political establishment
trying to crush the burgeoning revolution sparked by German workers in 1918.
Luxemburg was a trailblazing socialist theorist, economist, Marxist educator of
workers, critical member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and
co-founder of both the Spartacus League and the Communist Party of Germany
(KPD). She was the first Polish woman to complete a doctorate in Political
Science in 1897 titled ‘The Industrial Development of Poland’ which was part of
the bases for her internationalist stance on forwarding the interests of the
Working-class.World War One Luxemburg remained ferociously opposed to the
SPD’s support of World War I with her position being that the war would be one
of Imperialist and capitalist expansion which would prove detrimental to the
working-class from which the majority of imperialist cannon fodder would be
conscripted. As a result, Luxemburg co-founded the Spartacus League, a
revolutionary movement which would galvanize opposition in Germany to
imperialist war. Within the Spartacus League Luxemburg recognised the absolute
necessity of revolutionary political education of the working-class members to
strengthen the revolutionary movement from within. Her opposition to war
spending is particularly relevant today with recent pushes towards increased
military spending such as that in Germany (24% in 2024), UK (5.1%) and even
the Irish state proposing a whopping and ludicrous 11% increase in military
spending – all while the Irish government continues to allow a whole generation of
young people get left behind by the homelessness and housing crises, with a
healthcare system deliberately mismanaged into the ground over decades.
Reform or Revolution Luxemburgs’ seminal 1899 pamphlet ‘Reform or
Revolution’ serves as a rebuttal of the reformist view of the trajectory of
capitalism. This position argued that capitalist adaptation could negate altogether
the necessity of socialist revolution, whereas Luxemburg argues for Marx and
Engels’ scientific socialism where capitalism’s unavoidable and inherent anarchic
tendencies and propensity to periodic boom and bust will become so
unsustainable as to attain the inevitable crisis leading to the impossibility of the
continuation of capitalism. Reform or Revolution’ comprehensively lays out the
clas of ideas that are fundamental to ending capitalism and freeing the working
class from the rotten and oppressive capitalist system .As we face into the
multiple ongoing crises of 2026 – genocide in Gaza and the proposed Imperialist
‘repair and reset’ in Palestine; US threats of annexation and takeover of nations
rich in ‘natural assets’; paramilitary style abductions, murders and incarcerations
of working-class people which have drawn hundreds of thousands to protest in
US cities; European governments shifting shamelessly and transparently to the
right – we see in these struggles the catalyst for what Luxemburg in ‘Reform or
Revolution’ identifies as “the increased organisation and consciousness of the
proletarian class, which constitutes the active factor in the coming revolution.”