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
Luxemburg’s 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 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.”