An advocate of radical democracy and individual responsibility, Rosa Luxemburg remains the most eminent representative of the libertarian socialist tradition. A reevaluation and renewal within the Left has allowed the ideas of Luxemburg to assume greater vitality and relevance today than ever before. This volume provides an essential representative sampling of Luxemburg's writings that have generally not been among those commonly anthologized. That she had a powerful impact on every generation of the 20th century is documented (...) in the accompanying essays, which include scholarly reflections, comradely arguments, and even a loving reminiscence. Paul Le Blanc, who has been active in labor and social movements for many years, explains that the socialism that animated Luxemburg as a thinker and revolutionary activist involved a vision of society in which our economic resources would be socially owned, democratically controlled, and utilized for the benefit of all people. Luxemburg was convinced this goal could only be realized through the struggles of the working-class majority. The goals Luxemburg sought-popular sovereignty, rule by the people, democracy-were lost in the decades following her 1919 martyrdom. Among the selections from Luxemburg are "Martinique," "The Problem of the Nationality Question and Autonomy," "Rebuilding the International," "The Accumulation of Capital," "Letters from Prison," and "What Are the Leaders Doing?" Included are essays by Lelio Basso, Claire Cohen, Raya Dunayevskaya, Luise Kautsky, and Andrea Nye. (shrink)

Rosa Luxemburg is considered as important critic of the economic and political violence which is indispensable to the capitalist system. However, little is written about her concept of revolutionary violence, as is usually the case in the context of her criticism of the Russian revolution. The aim of the article is to reconstruct her views on revolutionary violence based on less known sources. The analysis shows that the Polish Marxist was an original theoretician of revolutionary violence who consiedered (...) the issues of armed uprising and the use of brutal means against counter-revolutionaries in an interesting and unique way. (shrink)

Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg brings together a global community of writers to revisit key aspects of Luxemburg’s thought, from the accumulation of capital, to the mass strike, to her debate with Vladimir Lenin on the meaning of socialism, and her searing critiques of colonialism as inherent to capitalist accumulation.

In this chapter, Rosa Luxemburg examines the basic structure of wage labor. For Luxemburg, wage labor is a condition for the systemic, economical exploitation of one free human being by another. Luxemburg analyzes the capitalists’ thinking about wages, their interest in extending the workday and in lowering the pay, and the conflict of interest between the worker and the owner of capital. She also discusses the role of trade unions in keeping not only the real wages (...) but also the social wages above the level of mere sustenance for the individual worker. (shrink)

Rosa Luxemburg était économiste de formation. Sa plus grande ambition était d’être à la pointe de la recherche en économie politique marxiste. Dans cet article, nous montrons comment Rosa Luxemburg a lu le chef d’œuvre de Marx, Le Capital inachevé, comment elle a critiqué Marx et comment elle a essayé de mettre à jour sa théorie afin de mieux comprendre les changements récents dans l’économie mondiale capitaliste. Pour elle, les marxistes contemporains étaient beaucoup trop timides, hésitant (...) à critiquer et dépasser Marx – comme elle essayait de le faire dans son livre sur l’accumulation du capital. Sa façon d’aborder la question de l’accumulation du capital a ouvert de nouvelles perspectives. Elle n’a pas réussi à présenter une explication consistante de l’économie capitaliste à l’âge de l’impérialisme, mais elle a clairement perçu les difficultés inhérentes de tous les projets coloniaux et impérialistes des grandes puissances de son temps. Car pour coloniser des pays et peuples non-capitalistes, et pour les rendre exploitables pour le capital, il leur fallait d’abord transformer ces économies et sociétés non-capitalistes. (shrink)

This essay will first present a vignette of Luxemburg’s life and work, referring to classic and recent biographies. Following that, section 3 examines concepts of the state and nation in Hegel, Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The subject of section 4 is Luxemburg’s substantial work of political economy, The Accumulation of Capital. It is a most significant achievement, analyzing the contradictions of the capitalist state and its role in driving imperialist expansion and colonialism. Section 5 traces how Luxemburg’s (...) political economy in Accumulation underwrites her interventions in the heated debates over Polish independence. And section 6 concludes with remarks on Luxemburg’s significance for philosophy and political thought. (shrink)

The relationship between Rosa Luxemburg and Hannah Arendt has occasionally been noted but rarely systematically discussed. In fact, there is a profound sense in which Arendt's continuing preoccupation with the significance of the extermination camps owes much to Luxemburg's earlier expressed concern that barbarism was a real possibility. Luxemburg first raised this in the context of the First World War, which she saw as a catastrophe marking a fundamental break with the past and opening the way (...) to terrible new possibilities. The terms that Luxemburg used to describe this catastrophe apply better to subsequent events that Arendt was to analyse, particularly the extermination camps. In explaining how barbarism could occur, Arendt drew extensively on Luxemburg, emphasising the impact of world wars, imperialism and nationalism, though she was of course then to go further in analysing what barbarism meant when it took place. (shrink)

The essay concerns the highly controversial pamphlet of Rosa Luxemburg The Russian Revolution, in which Luxemburg criticizes Lenin’s post-revolutionary policies, in particular his dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, an elected body. The essay reviews the history of the text’s publication and the intense debate, which continues to this day, over whether or not Luxemburg changed her mind on its central critique. At stake in the argument is not only Luxemburg’s evaluation of Lenin’s actions but also (...) the correct weighting to be given to the two components in the central Marxist–Leninist dialectic of revolution: spontaneity and consciousness. In elaborating this point the essay brings in examples from the writings of Lukács and Stalin, and also discusses the dialectic’s centrality in socialist realism. (shrink)

How did Rosa Luxemburg, in herThe Accumulation of Capitaland other writings, analyse the development of the working class and other subordinate classes under capitalism, and how did she view the relationship between these classes and those living in ‘natural economic societies’? Following primary sources closely, the present essay reconstructs and evaluates Luxemburg’s class analysis of global society. It is shown that Luxemburg pioneered a truly global concept of solidarity from below, including the most oppressed – women (...) and colonised peoples. (shrink)

This article challenges widespread uncritical portrayals of Rosa Luxemburg. By examining the politics and practices of Luxemburg and her SDKPiL party in Poland, I show that their commitment to proletarian emancipation was undermined by sectarian and doctrinaire tendencies that contributed to the defeat of Poland’s workers’ revolutions in 1905 and 1918–19. A critical analysis of their approaches to the national question, the Polish Socialist Party, German Social Democracy, and the role of the revolutionary party, undermines the prevailing (...) romanticisation of Luxemburg. I argue that the Polish Socialist Party, Luxemburg’s main political rival, posed a viable Marxist alternative for Poland’s revolutionary movement. (shrink)

: Freedom, understood as active participation in public life, connects the thinking of Rosa Luxemburg with that of Hannah Arendt. Biographically separated through the rise and victory of the totalitarian movements, they both developed a concept of the political that is oriented toward freedom and that demonstrates—in spite of their different historical experiences—essential common features: both authors emphasize the recognition of difference as a presupposition for a critical discussion of norms, traditions, and authorities, for the capacity to make (...) unconstrained judgments, and for the ability to take personal responsibility. (shrink)

En este artículo, nos proponemos revisar la consigna “Socialismo o Barbarie” en el marco del pensamiento de Rosa Luxemburgo y de Cornelius Castoriadis en vistas a resignificar la acción política en el contexto del neoliberalismo contemporáneo. Consideramos al neoliberalismo, más que como un régimen político o económico, como una “forma de vida” que impacta sobre los modos de ser, de actuar y de pensar de nosotros, hombres y mujeres del siglo XXI. Esta nueva configuración del capitalismo, que se afianza (...) con sus guerras y su creciente pobreza, que deja “a la intemperie” a jóvenes, niños, mujeres, ancianos, hace del neoliberalismo una nueva figura de la barbarie. Por ello, se hace necesario volver a pensar la acción política, el quién, el cómo y el dónde ejercerla en vistas a “transformar la sociedad” y hacer de ella un espacio-tiempo habitable. (shrink)

Rosa Luxemburg's interpretation of Marxism as the unity between theory and practice sets the basis of her "theory of revolutionary action". That expression can be said to encapsulate her political thought, which was developed in an uninterrupted polemic with the economicist determinism of the Second International.Ao interpretar o marxismo como unidade entre teoria e prática, Rosa Luxemburg lança os fundamentos da sua "teoria da ação revolucionária", palavras com que poderíamos sintetizar o seu pensamento político, elaborado numa (...) polêmica ininterrupta com o determinismo economicista da II Internacional. (shrink)

Rosa Luxemburg's interpretation of Marxism as the unity between theory and practice sets the basis of her "theory of revolutionary action". That expression can be said to encapsulate her political thought, which was developed in an uninterrupted polemic with the economicist determinism of the Second International.Ao interpretar o marxismo como unidade entre teoria e prática, Rosa Luxemburg lança os fundamentos da sua "teoria da ação revolucionária", palavras com que poderíamos sintetizar o seu pensamento político, elaborado numa (...) polêmica ininterrupta com o determinismo economicista da II Internacional. (shrink)

Rosa Luxemburg and Communism. There are four topics in Rosa Luxemburg’s writings which are of particular importance from the perspective of a refoundation of communism in the 21th century : internationalism, an “open” conception of history, the importance of democracy in the revolutionary process, and the interest in the “pre-modern” communist traditions. This last aspect of Luxemburg’s thinking is less well known. By confronting the industrial capitalist civilization with the communitarian past of humanity, Rosa (...) Luxemburg broke with linear evolutionism, positivism, social-darwinism and with all the interpretations of Marxism which tend to reduce it to an advanced version of the philosophy of inevitable progress. The issue, in these texts, is, in the last analysis, the very meaning of the Marxist conception of history. (shrink)

This article explores the conceptual commitments underlying Luxemburg’s repudiation of the discourse of disappointment which had overtaken the European socialist movement during the First World War. My analysis brushes against the grain of the traditional interpretation of Luxemburg’s admonitions ‘to be cheerful despite everything and anything’ as arising from her allegiance to a Marxist philosophy of history which decrees that socialism must inevitably prevail and so refuses to give way to disappointment or despair. The philosophy of history which (...) Luxemburg absorbed from Marx, notably through the Eighteenth Brumaire, prophesies the ultimate victory of socialism but ordains that the actual events and experiences through which this victory is prepared will consist in catastrophes rather than conquests. In Luxemburg, I suggest, we can see more clearly how the experience of failure could make the realization of socialism more rather than less certain, and in terms that refer more directly to the inner situation of the socialist activist than the abstract assurances on which Marx relied: failure occasions the opportunity for deeper learning but, more importantly, it is in the experience of failure that the commitment on which the realization of socialism depends is tested and, in Luxemburg’s hands at least, forged. (shrink)

Contemporary democratic theorists have tended to assume that democracy is compatible with and even requires a capitalist economic system. Rosa Luxemburg offers a democratic criticism of this view, arguing that the dominating effects of a capitalist economy undermine the ability of liberal democracy to actualise its ideals of freedom and equality. Drawing on Luxemburg’s writings, this article theorises a model of socialist democracy which combines support for public ownership and control of the means of production with a (...) plural multi-party electoral system and a defence of civil liberties. It recovers Luxemburg’s conceptualisation of a socialist democracy as the extension of democratic principles to major social and economic institutions currently governed by nondemocratic authority structures. It defends this version of socialist democracy from the liberal objection that it violates citizens’ property rights and the Marxist objection that it retains the dominating structures of the state and a coercive legal system. (shrink)

Revolução e Terror andaram sempre de braços dados? Uma parcela significativa do que foi outrora a esquerda acredita que sim e propõe o fortalecimento da democracia como alternativa à revolução, vista como fonte do totalitarismo. Este artigo procura contribuir para esse debate, mostrando a alternativa revolucionária e democrática apresentada por Rosa Luxemburg. Para ela, a democracia não é um valor universal abstrato, mas justamente o resultado de um processo revolucionário em que as massas proletárias, atuando com irrestrita liberdade, (...) lançam os fundamentos de uma "nova época". Entretanto, a revolução alemã, em que Rosa Luxemburg e Karl Liebknecht tiveram um papel central, fracassa e ambos são assassinados. Derrota que traça, de certa forma, o destino da Alemanha contemporânea.Y aurait-il un lien indissoluble entre révolution et terreur? De nos jours, une partie de ce qui a été autrefois la gauche y croit Contre l'idée de révolution, saisie corne la source du totalitarisme, on propose le renforcement de la démocratie. Cet article a l'intention de contribuer à ce débat en montrant l'alternative révolutionnaire et démocratique présentée par Rosa Luxemburg. Pour elle la démocratie n'est pas une valeur universelle abstraite mais justement le résultat d'un processus révolutionnaire où les masses prolétariennes, agissant dans la plus large liberté, lancent les fondements d'une "nouvelle époque". Néanmoins la révolution allemande où Rosa Luxemburg et Karl Liebknecht ont eu un rôle de premier plan avorte et ils sont assassinés. Cette défaite trace, d'une certaine manière, le destin de l'Allemagne contemporaine. (shrink)

Contemporary democratic theorists have tended to assume that democracy is compatible with and even requires a capitalist economic system. Rosa Luxemburg offers a democratic criticism of this view, arguing that the dominating effects of a capitalist economy undermine the ability of liberal democracy to actualise its ideals of freedom and equality. Drawing on Luxemburg’s writings, this article theorises a model of socialist democracy which combines support for public ownership and control of the means of production with a (...) plural multi-party electoral system and a defence of civil liberties. It recovers Luxemburg’s conceptualisation of a socialist democracy as the extension of democratic principles to major social and economic institutions currently governed by nondemocratic authority structures. It defends this version of socialist democracy from the liberal objection that it violates citizens’ property rights and the Marxist objection that it retains the dominating structures of the state and a coercive legal system. (shrink)

Rosa Luxemburg defended a view of spontaneism as a way of according strategic priority to popular initiatives over the directives of vanguard parties. But she never worked out a theory of spontaneism, and consequently it has typically been dismissed as lacking solid grounds. In this paper, I take an initial step toward rehabilitating spontaneism by rethinking its assumptions concerning historical agency in embodied habitual terms. After first outlining Luxemburg’s view of spontaneism itself, I consider individual embodied action (...) and focus on the sort of spontaneity that is exhibited in various forms of skilled expertise. This spontaneity reflects an acquired habitual predispositionality that is never a matter of mindless automaticity, and which in certain cases can involve significant degrees of improvisational creativity. Bringing this to light secures a basic plausibility for spontaneism at the level of individual agency by showing how socially transformative action could possibly be engaged in spontaneously. (shrink)

The article seeks to explain why spontaneity, a concept that political theorists have given scant attention to, matters. It argues that it matters because it delivers a capacity for producing democratic change that is urgent to reflect on amidst a prevailing mood of grief over a democracy lost. To stimulate this reflection, the article engages with Rosa Luxemburg’s work, showing how her understanding of spontaneity as an initiative that delivers something for democracy lays the groundwork for a theoretical (...) orientation that allows us to notice the effects of spontaneity on democracy without overplaying its short-lived nature. (shrink)

This remembrance of the life and work of our friend and colleague, Drucilla Cornell, is a view of her through the lenses of Rosa Luxemburg, Hannah Arendt and through her lively participation in the Caribbean Philosophical Association. As a result, it focuses on her as a philosopher who had mastered the Western tradition of transcendental philosophy. From that base, she engaged the traditions of Western Marxism and Feminism, and was deeply engaged in mastering the traditions of Caribbean Marxism (...) and creolizing theory. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie Jahrgang: 5 Heft: 1 Seiten: 14-37.

This book is neither a biography of Rosa Luxemburg, nor a detached, objective study of her thought. The reader unfamiliar with Luxemburg’s life or writings will vainly look for the missing pieces or the balanced evaluation. As we know from her previous works, Raya Dunayevskaya does not believe in critical detachment. She writes in the kind of polemical style, introduced by Marx and since Lenin carried to ever higher pitch, which features invective as its principal figure. As (...) for the form, her book, in spite of continuously numbered chapters, consists of three different essays of which the first is connected with the other two only by occasional statements of the main subject’s position on women’s liberation and on the significance of Marx’s dialectic. (shrink)

Philosophia brings together, for the first time, the work of three major women thinkers of this century, producing a developing commentary on the human condition as an alternative to the mainstream, masculine, philosophical tradition.

This volume is divided into three parts. In the first, Ms. Dunayevskaya unfolds the story of Luxemburg’s life as “theoretician, as activist and as internationalist.” In the second part she briefly discusses the Women’s Liberation Movement as a historical subject and thus as “revolutionary force and reason.” In the third part she focuses on Marx as the theoretician of “revolution in permanence.” Throughout the book, history, philosophy, and critique are interwoven into a whole. Whether a coherent whole emerges from (...) Dunayevskaya’s careful work, or the book consists of three welcome but not well-related contributions to Marxist and feminist scholarship is not clear. (shrink)

The ongoing project to issue the Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, which will make all of her writings available in English translation, provides a critical lens to re-evaluate aspects of Luxemburg’s theoretical contribution that has often been passed over in much of the secondary literature on her. Of foremost importance in this regard is the distinctive contribution that she made to the understanding of how to achieve a transition to socialism in a developing society that remains surrounded (...) by the capitalist world market and imperialist powers. This paper aims to show that her reflections during and after the 1905 Revolution, especially as reflected in a series of rarely studied articles and essays in the Polish revolutionary press, provides an important corrective to how the transition to socialism was understood by other Marxist currents. (shrink)

This volume is divided into three parts. In the first, Ms. Dunayevskaya unfolds the story of Luxemburg’s life as “theoretician, as activist and as internationalist.” In the second part she briefly discusses the Women’s Liberation Movement as a historical subject and thus as “revolutionary force and reason.” In the third part she focuses on Marx as the theoretician of “revolution in permanence.” Throughout the book, history, philosophy, and critique are interwoven into a whole. Whether a coherent whole emerges from (...) Dunayevskaya’s careful work, or the book consists of three welcome but not well-related contributions to Marxist and feminist scholarship is not clear. (shrink)

La plupart des discussion sur l’internationalisme radical de Rosa Luxemburg s’intéressent surtout, et parfois uniquement, à son attitude négative – en effet très discutable – envers les droits politiques des nations. Ce qui manque dans cette approche, c’est le côté positif de son point de vue, sa riche contribution à la conception marxiste de l’internationalisme prolétarien, et son refus obstiné de céder aux sirènes du nationalisme et du chauvinisme. Un internationalisme qui se traduit notamment par son refus de (...) l’Union sacrée belliciste en 1914-1918 et son soutien aux luttes émancipatrices des peuples colonisés. (shrink)

Este artigo tem como objetivo mostrar o erro de Rosa Luxemburg em sua crítica aos esquemas de reprodução de Marx em O Capital. Em sua obra, O Capital, Marx demonstrava que a reprodução econômica da sociedade capitalista era um processo exclusivamente endógeno, conduzido inteiramente pela classe trabalhadora e pela classe capitalista. Segundo ele, a sociedade capitalista produzia e reproduzia os seus próprios fundamentos sem a necessidade de uma terceira classe social externa ao sistema. Rosa Luxemburg considerava (...) que essa concepção de Marx era uma abstrata e separada da economia real. De acordo com ela, a acumulação de capital é impossível sem a existência de uma terceira classe de consumidores externa ao sistema, a qual funcionaria como classe compradora da mais-valia destinada à acumulação. Este artigo mostrará que essa concepção tem origem na falta de compreensão sobre a natureza dialética do método de exposição de O Capital por parte de Rosa Luxemburg. (shrink)