Introduction: Rosa Luxemburg and Polish Marxism

The ideas of Karl Marx reached Poland relatively quickly. Paradoxically, for Polish nationalists, the suppression of Polish independence in 1795, confirmed at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, had brought Polish intellectuals into the cosmopolitan elite of Europe, where the political discussions that emerged into revolution with the French Revolution were continued. Polish emigrés gathered in the capitals of Europe, while dissidents in Poland looked to developments in St. Petersburg, Vienna and Berlin that would influence social change in Poland. As Russian Poland industrialised, a new urban working class emerged that reflected the ethnic mix of Polish society containing a large Jewish component, as well as every language and religion that was to be found in the lands to the South of the Baltic Sea. With the failure of the 1863 uprising, to the question of national independence were added all the social questions of poverty, unemployment, female and working class emancipation.