“Capital knows no other solution to the problem than violence”
Rosa Luxemburg on Capitalism, Colonialism, and War
Rosa Luxemburg was born in 1871, in the Polish city of Zamość, the fifth child of an educated Jewish family that was prosperous enough to keep domestic servants. Her grandfather had established a timber business, and he sent his children, including Rosa’s father, to be educated in Germany. The eastern half of Poland, including Zamość, which is located about 150 miles southeast of Warsaw, was then part of the Russian Empire. When Rosa was still a toddler, her parents moved the family to Warsaw, where the schools were better than in Zamość. Around the age of three, she developed a hip disease that confined her to bed for a year and left her with a permanent limp. The ailment didn’t dampen her spirits or hamper her intellectual development. According to her first biographer, Paul Frölich, she could read and write by the age of five, and not long after that, she was teaching the family servants to read.1 Writing was an early passion. She submitted at least one piece of writing to a children’s magazine. In 1884, when she was thirteen, Kaiser Wilhelm I visited Warsaw, and she wrote a poem to mark the occasion. It ended:
Just one thing I want to say to you, dear William
Tell your wily fox Bismarck
For the sake of Europe, Emperor of the West,
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