The Rosa Luxemburg Reader

by Rosa Luxemburg, Peter Hudis (Editor), Kevin B. Anderson (Editor)

Among the major Marxist thinkers of the Russian Revolution era, Rosa Luxemburg stands out as one who speaks to our own time. Her legacy grows in relevance as the global character of the capitalist market becomes more apparent and the critique of bureaucratic power is more widely accepted within the movement for human liberation.

The Rosa Luxemburg Reader is the definitive one-volume collection of Luxemburg's writings in English translation. Unlike previous publications of her work from the early 1970s, this volume includes substantial extracts from her major economic writingsabove all, The Accumulation of Capital (1913)and from her political writings, including Reform or Revolution (1898), the Junius Pamphlet (1916), and The Russian Revolution (1918).

The Reader also includes a number of important texts that have never before been published in English translation, including substantial extracts from her Introduction to Political Economy (1916), and a recently-discovered piece on slavery. With a substantial introduction assessing Luxemburg's work in the light of recent research, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader is an indispensable resource for scholarship and an inspiration for a new generation of activists.

"

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Feminism, History, Economics, Luxemburg

432 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2004

About the author

Rosa Luxemburg (Rosalia Luxemburg, Polish: Róża Luksemburg) was a Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist and activist of Polish Jewish descent who became a naturalized German citizen. She was successively a member of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, the Social Democratic Party of Germany(SPD), the Independent Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party of Germany.

In 1915, after the SPD supported German involvement in World War I, she co-founded, with Karl Liebknecht, the anti-war Spartakusbund (Spartacist League). On 1 January 1919 the Spartacist League became the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). In November 1918, during the German Revolution she founded the Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag), the central organ of the Spartacist movement.

She regarded the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 in Berlin as a blunder, but supported it after Liebknecht ordered it without her knowledge. When the revolt was crushed by the social democrat government and the Freikorps (WWI veterans defending the Weimar Republic), Luxemburg, Liebknecht and some of their supporters were captured and murdered. Luxemburg was drowned in the Landwehr Canal in Berlin. After their deaths, Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht became martyrs for Marxists. According to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, commemoration of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht continues to play an important role among the German far-left.

Reviews

[Peiman E iran · Rating 2 out of 5]

‎دوستانِ گرانقدر، اصلاً این کتاب را نپسندیدم
‎در اکثر صفحات از خواندن متن میشود پی به جنسِ زن بودن و خانم بودنِ نویسنده برد، شاید سلیقه ای باشد.. ولی من دوست ندارم در خواندن کتاب تفاوت جنسیت نویسنده برایم قابل لمس باشد و احساسش کنم
‎ متأسفانه خانم <رزا لوکزامبورگ> پافشاری زیادی بر این موضوع داشت که: به وسیلهٔ برخی اقدامات بی پایه و اساس میشود توده های اجتماعی و مخصوصاً توده های کارگری را آگاه و روشن نمود... که من با این نظریه مخالفم هستم.. و ایراد نویسنده را در این میبینم که از کتاب بیش از اندازه برای تبلیغ این موضوع استفاده کرده است
‎سمت و سوی نویسنده تا پایان کتاب برایم تقریباً ناشناخته ماند... به همین دلیل برسر دو راهی قرار گرفتم که <رزا لوکزامبورگ> یک "مارکسیسم ارتدوکس" بوده است و یا خیر
‎ فکر میکنم کسانی که به اندیشه های "مارکسیسم" علاقه دارند با خواندن کتابِ این خانم، دل زده میشوند و باز جایِ اندکی امیدواری است که در این بازار شلوغ به اصطلاح اندیشمندان مارکسیسمی، مارکسیستهایی همچون <ادوارد برنشتیان>، نیز حضور داشته اند

‎امیدوارم این ریویو جهتِ معرفی این کتاب، کافی و مفید بوده باشه
‎<پیروز باشید و ایرانی>

[Tyler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is another of the books I’ve read whose cover art and picture convey a message. Of all the photographs of Rosa Luxemburg, why did the editors select this one? Have they chosen the right one? We’ll see.

The revolutions of the Arab Spring are the perfect vehicles by which people who think and read about politics (that is, all of us) can revisit an important question: What makes a revolution the real thing? One question people debate intensely is what role leadership plays. This question is Luxemburg’s sweet spot.

The book is a collection of Luxemburg’s essays, which reflect the influence of Marx on her thinking yet reveal an astute evolution beyond him. The book has four parts, about 14 items in all, plus a selection of personal correspondence at the end. After that come the editors’ notes, added to the essays to explain references to the personalities and politics of her time. I found these notes useful and the selection of correspondence suitably humanizing.

I expected to plow through some pretty dry writing on my way to Luxemburg’s better known publications, but most of this collection turns out to be interesting in some way. Her later analyses of World War I and Russia are the more absorbing, and her comments about Germany's trajectory are frighteningly prophetic. How apt it is to describe her murder as the last act of the Kaiser and the first of the Nazis.

But her prophecies, if that’s what I should call them, are relevant today because Luxemburg talks about more than just Germany or Russia. She provides a yardstick to judge what is most likely to happen next in any political unrest. The mass strike we see as a signal event preceding any genuine revolution. Yet she denies that anyone can call one. They burst forth spontaneously and are necessarily leaderless. The only thing an organized movement can do is help out whenever the strike does occur. But though it has leaders, no such movement can lead a leaderless revolution, nor should it try.

This argument, emerging from Russia in 1905, sets Luxemburg apart and makes her relevant. The Arab Spring ties in at this point because we saw revolutions take place side by side in several nations, and every one in its own way proves her point. Reading her decidedly sharpens one’s political acuity. She doesn’t answer every question -- such as what happens at the end of a revolution -- but she gets readers through the thicket of confusion and dead ends that chokes modern political discourse.

So about the cover picture. It shows us the young, pretty Luxemburg, not the more matronly one we would expect. But it shows more. Once I finished my copy and looked again at the photo, what struck me was her mouth. It wasn’t the mouth of a fanatic, and it contrasted with the lucid writing between the book covers. Hers is a mouth that betrays the utter vulnerability of its owner, the same vulnerability that afflicts all of us in the face of an inhuman machine that proclaims its invulnerability to all humans.

Luxemburg wasn’t some luminary above the rest of us. She was of us. Her photo shows it and her fate proves it. Her picture and writings light the one light she could offer the rest of us, an appeal to recognize ourselves as united in our humanity. For, as we all know, only that recognition has any chance of effectively confronting something inhuman.

[Six · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ik zou zo graag willen dat ze er terug even bij was, Rosa, en ons zou uitleggen hoe we dit zooitje kunnen oplossen ❤️

[Owen · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's impossible to read this without falling in love with Luxemburg as a writer, thinker, and politician. The closing selection of letters illustrates her remarkable personality and the extraordinary richness of her writing: politically firm and strikingly direct, but also extremely tender and compassionate. The way she writes about the natural world is a revelation, and her love of birds is incredibly endearing.

The bulk of the book is of course of a different type. It begins with selections from her book on imperialism, which are somewhat dry and the theory itself, while pioneering, seems to me to be basically mistaken. The historical writings, though, are a revelation, including some of the clearest and best Marxist discussions of precapitalist development that I've seen.

Part Two covers Luxemburg's greatest contributions: her skewering of Bernsteinian revisionism in Reform or Revolution, her discussion of the 1905 Russian Revolution in The Mass Strike, and her exposing of Kautskyan opportunism in Theory and Practice. While she tends to formulate things in excessively spontaneist ways, never possessing the clear grasp of the role of the Party that Lenin alone brought in these years, she writes with absolute clarity and insight. It's a shame many who proclaim to her hold her as a hero nowadays don't learn the lessons she sought to teach.

Part Three gathers together her worst work, on questions of organisation and Bolshevism. Her criticism of Lenin during the Bolshevik-Menshevik split contains some helpful comments but is basically a misunderstanding of the nature of the division. Lenin responded to her very well. Her work on the Russian Revolution, while much lauded, is very bad for the most part. Two major focuses for her criticism are the Bolshevik policy on national self-determination and agrarian reform. Her comments read as completely divorced from the reality: the Revolution would have been completely unthinkable without Lenin's policies on these questions. A "Luxemburgian" position in this context would have been a recipe for defeat and irrelevance. Similarly, on terror and the Constituent Assembly she seems divorced from the dynamic reality of the moment and the real thrust of Lenin and Trotsky's policy. The section is partially redeemed, though, by her concluding remarks on Bolshevism, where she displays a sharp understanding of the profound meaning and significance of Leninism for the world revolution. In spirit if not in letter, she was by the end of her life a critical Leninist.

The next section covers her writing on war and Revolution. These possess great historical interest and display keen theoretical insights. They are also a literary tour de force. I found this section was especially good for illuminating how central the colonial question was for Rosa and how she understood the period of capitalist decadence as dawning with the turning inward of colonial policy (the bringing of colonial barbarity into the heart of Europe). This is then followed by her letters which, as I mentioned, are wonderful.

The collection is edited well and the introduction is useful. But it's focused on suggesting ways that Luxemburg might be helpful, and reads as sympathetic to her criticisms of Leninism, rather than offering comprehensive Marxist evaluation of her work.

Altogether, a highly recommended collection.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Totally worth having. Included in her are the essentials. Good analysis of evolutionary socialism and imperialism. The plus side is you don't really need to read Luxemburg's accumulation of capital cause that shit is huge!

[Julio The Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thinker, revolutionary and martyr, Rosa Luxemburg lives in the heart and not so much in the head or fist. The main reason to consult this splendid collection of Luxembug's writings is not the obvious one. Her contribution to Marxist political economy, THE ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL, voluminously excerpted, misguided a whole generation of socialist fighters, chiefly Che Guevara and the New Left of the Sixties. Rosa's thesis, that capitalism at home in Europe, and by extension in the United States, faced a do or die moment of crisis, leading capitalists to seek new lands for exploitation in Africa, Asia and Latin America is equally radical and misleading. Trade between the imperialist countries, Britain, Germany and the U.S. is what made for both economic expansion and inter-imperialist rivalry, culminating in two world wars. Nor did "cutting off the hands of imperialism" as Rosa argued and Guevara endorsed, lead to capitalist collapse. This infamous and flawed theory led many Marxists, who should have known better, to support Third World bourgeois nationalist movements, MPLA in Angola, FRELIMO in Mozambique, FLN in Algeria, Sukarno in Indonesia et al, with disastrous and deadly results. Ironically, nationalism is what Luxemburg most despised, witness her polemic with Lenin on the national question and self-determination, yet her economics led her, and her epigones like Che, down that path. Of greater interest in this handy volume are scattered pieces from her pen. A reflection on the Martinique volcano eruption and earthquake of 1902, with casualties surpassing 40,000, leads Rosa to consider how the nations coming to the aid of the islanders, the colonial power, France, plus Britain and Germany, are at that moment plundering Africa and China with more violent results. Luxemburg's take on her own Jewish identity is of special interest. She tells one friend and correspondent, "I am no more or less involved in the world of the Jews than of the Indians of Putamayo, Peru suffering under the mining interests, or the Negroes of South Africa. My home is where clouds, birds and tears live". A high note from a woman whose life and ultimate sacrifice still inspires love and courage from her readers.

[Ethan Monks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Red Rosa, a now personal heroine of mine.

What a woman. What a human being. She rests comfortably alongside Antonio Gramsci as the greatest of the left-Marxists.

A few of her quotes to give you a taste - a lick I suppose - of what this collection offers.

“Freedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently”

“What presents itself to us as bourgeois legality is nothing but the violence of the ruling class, a violence raised to an obligatory norm form the outset”

“Democracy is indispensable to the working class, because only through the exercise of its democratic rights, in the struggle for democracy, can the proletariat become aware of its class interests and its historic task”

“People who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer, and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for the surface modifications of the old society . . . Our program becomes not the realisation of Socialism, but the reform of capitalism, not the suppression of the system of wage labor, but the diminution of exploitation, that is, the suppression of the abuses of capitalism instead of the suppression of capitalism itself.”
(Compare capitalist reformists with slave and feudal reformists - those who wanted to modify systems of oppression rather than abolish them altogether)

[Michael Bellucci · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible collection of Luxemburg’s political and economic writings, essays, speeches, and correspondences. So much to appreciate from her thoughts but her writing on the authoritarian trends of the Russian revolution and what Europe could expect in the aftermath of WWI were eerily prescient and worth a read. It was a great end to this collection to read some of her personal letters to friends and colleagues which showed a very different side of her that one would normally take away from reading her polemics. So many passages to bookmark from this but one that will always stand the test of time is when she wrote: “freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of ‘justice’ but because all that is instructive, wholesome, and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a special privilege.”

[Cihad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant mind. Too pity she is gone too early. Rest in peace.

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Compared to Lenin and Trotsky, Rosa is a breath of fresh air.