TRANSLATORS PREFACE
THE following book represents the first serious attempt to give a full-length biography of the most remarkable woman the international socialist movement has ever produced, and at the same time an account of her ideas and an indication of her permanent contribution to socialist thought.
The author, Paul Frlich, is well known in Germany as a writer on political and historical matters, and he was well equipped to perform his task, difficult though it was. He was born in Leipzig in 1884, the child of a working-class family. Both his parents were staunch social democrats, who continued to work actively for the Social Democratic Party even under Bismarcks anti-socialist laws. Frlich therefore grew up in an atmosphere of socialist ideas and activities, and he entered the working-class movement at an early age. From 1901 down to the present day he has taken an active part in political life. From the very beginning he was deeply influenced by Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, and their followers. In 1907 he began to work as a journalist on the social-democratic Leipziger Volkszeitung, and from this time dates his close co-operation with the famous pamphleteer Karl Radek, which lasted down to the outbreak of the World War. By 1910 Frlich had become an editor of the social-democratic Hamburger Echo, and when war broke out in 1914 he was an editor of the social-democratic Brgerzeitung in Bremen.
During the war he was a prominent member of the small band of men and women who remained steadfastly loyal to the cause of international Socialism. He became one of the leaders of the Left-Wing Radicals, who had their headquarters in Bremen, and he co-operated closely with Rosa Luxemburg and her followers in their opposition to the pro-imperialist and pro-war policy of the official Social Democratic Party. He was present as the representative of the Left-Wing Radicals at the famous international socialist conference in Kienthal (Switzerland) in April 1916, which marked the beginning of the mass-revolutionary movement against imperialist war and culminated in the collapse of the Central Powers. He was an active member of the Left Wing of the revolutionary Marxists, the Lenin Group, and co-founder of the revolutionary-socialist Arbeiter-Politik in Bremen, to which he continued to contribute regularly when already in uniform at the front.
When the Spartakists and the Left-Wing Radicals joined forces to form the Communist Party of Germany, Frlich became a member of the Central Committee of the new party, together with Rosa Luxemburg. He retained this position until 1924. He also represented the Communist Party in the Reichstag from 1921 to 1924 and from 1928 to 1930. As a result of the onslaught on the Right Wing of the Communist Party in 1928 and the subsequent years, he was expelled from the party, together with Brandler, Thalheimer, and others. For some time he was a leader of the Communist Opposition, and then, with a large section of that movement, he joined the Socialist Workers Party (S.A.P.), which had in the meantime been formed as a radical break-away from the official Social Democratic Party, and which is roughly analogous to our Independent Labour Party. Frlich was a member of the Central Committee of this party when he was arrested in March 1933 under the national-socialist rgime. He was held in prison for four months, and for a subsequent five months in Lichtenberg concentration camp. After his release he succeeded in escaping from Germany, and he has since lived in Paris as a political fugitive.
Paul Frlich is the author of a number of important historical and political works, including Ten Years of War and Civil War, and the translator of several well-known socialist classics, including Lissagarays famous History of the Paris Commune. For many years he had worked closely with Rosa Luxemburg, and subsequently he made a special study of her ideas, so that when arrangements were made for the publication of her collected works, her executors and an international committee, consisting of Clara Zetkin, Nikolai Bucharin, Julian Karski, and Adolf Varski, unanimously chose him as chief editor of the venture.
Three volumes of the collected edition of Rosa Luxemburgs works had appeared when Hitlers accession to power in 1933 put a stop to the undertakingfor the moment, at least. Vol. I, The Accumulation of Capital, appeared in 1923; Vol. II, Against Reformism, in 1925; and Vol. III, The Trade-Union Struggle and the Mass Strike, in 1928. Vol. IV, Imperialism and the Danger of War, was held up for a long time owing to political differences between Paul Frlich and the publishers (the publishing house of the German Communist Party), but an arrangement was finally reached, and the book was actually in print when Hitler came to power. The proofs were seized and destroyed together with all other communist and socialist material on which the fascist authorities could lay their hands, and the type was broken up.
Unfortunately, too, very valuable material collected by Frlich in many years of study devoted to Rosa Luxemburgs life and ideas was also lost, but, once in France, Frlich resumed work. He has succeeded in repairing very much of the damage, and the sum total of his studies is now incorporated in this biography. He can be congratulated on having performed an extremely difficult task with great distinction.
EDWARD FITZGERALD.
CHAPTER ONE: YOUTH
1. AT HOME
ZAMOSC IS a little Polish town in the Lublin district, not far from the Russo-Polish frontier. It is a poverty-stricken place, and the cultural level of its populace is low. Even after the great agrarian reform introduced by Tsarism (after the failure of the insurrection led by the Polish nobles in in 1869) in order to play off the peasants against the Junkers, the dependence, sufferings, and difficulties of the lower strata of the population from the days of serfdom still lingered on. The introduction of the monetary system brought this district, far removed as it was from the industrial centres, only the hardships attendant on the destruction of the old order of society, and not the advantages of the new.
And fate laid a particularly heavy hand on the big Jewish population. They shared the common sufferings and miseries of their fellows, the severities of Russian Absolutism, the burdens of foreign domination, and the general impoverishment of the country. And, in addition, theirs was the misery of an outcast and despised race. In a society in which each was the slave of his immediate social superior, the Jew was the despised slave of all, and the kicks and cuffs distributed at all stages in the social scale finally descended with interest to him. Dogged at every turn, intimidated and maltreated by a hateful system of anti-Semitism, his liberty of movement hindered by exceptional laws, the Jew strove to earn a bare subsistence by tenacious and relentless haggling, and to save himself from the hostility of his surroundings by withdrawing behind the ghetto walls of his religion.
In this gloom, lit only by the feeble flickering of Sabbath candles, a narrow fanaticism flourished, fed by pride in a far-away past and by Messianic faith in a better future, and imposing absurd practices on the faithful. It was an out-of-the-way, backward world of resignation and greed, obscurantism, dirt, and poverty.
