Rosa Luxemburg - Time to SMASH the patriarchy!

Two portraits of Rosa Luxemburg, one in grey profile and one in bold red facing forward, above the words Time to SMASH the patriarchy, with SMASH in large distressed red letters. The design pairs a modern feminist slogan with one of the most fearless women of European political history, as a tribute rather than a quotation.

No. Smash the patriarchy is a much later feminist slogan, and Luxemburg never used it. The by Rosa Luxemburg in the design’s name is a playful credit line – she spent her life fighting the powers of her day, was imprisoned for it and was murdered in 1919. Her own famous lines include freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently.

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) was a Polish-born Marxist theorist, economist and revolutionary who became one of the leading figures of German socialism. She wrote Reform or Revolution (1899) and The Accumulation of Capital (1913), opposed the First World War, spent much of it in prison, and in 1918/19 co-founded the Spartacus League’s successor, the Communist Party of Germany.

It comes from Luxemburg’s manuscript The Russian Revolution, written in prison in 1918 and published posthumously in 1922. In a marginal note she insists that freedom only for supporters of a government or members of one party is no freedom at all. She wrote it as a critique of Lenin and Trotsky’s suppression of democracy, which is why the sentence is quoted across the political spectrum.

In the Junius Pamphlet, written in prison in 1915 and published in 1916, Luxemburg argued that the First World War showed the real alternative facing humanity – either a transition to socialism or a collapse into barbarism. She credited the idea to Friedrich Engels. The phrase has since become a slogan for the view that history has no guaranteed happy ending.

She supported women’s suffrage as part of the struggle for democracy and equality. In her 1912 speech Women’s Suffrage and Class Struggle she argued that denying working women the vote was a pillar of class rule. She was a close friend of Clara Zetkin, who led the socialist women’s movement, but she was sceptical of a feminism focused only on middle-class women.

Patriarchy literally means rule of the father. In social theory it describes a system in which men hold primary power in politics, the economy, the family and culture, and in which this dominance is passed on through institutions and norms. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) made the term central to modern feminist theory; socialist feminists link it to class and economic dependence.

On 15 January 1919, after the failed Spartacist uprising in Berlin, Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were arrested and murdered by right-wing Freikorps soldiers. Her body was thrown into the Landwehr Canal and found only months later. The killers were barely punished. Every January thousands of people still visit her memorial in Berlin-Friedrichsfelde.

For feminists, history and politics students, readers of Marx, Luxemburg and Arendt, trade unionists and anyone who admires people who refused to be quiet. It is available as a unisex classic T-shirt, women’s T-shirt, sweatshirt, premium hoodie, mug and sticker.