Rosa Luxemburg

The British Trotskyist group Socialist Resistance has published a book, October 1917 — Workers in Power (Merlin 2016), which defends the key decisions of the Bolsheviks, while making some reasonable criticisms of the regime created after the civil war. The collection of essays is useful in many respects, but feels somewhat stale and has a number of notable gaps. A centre-piece of the book is Ernest Mandel’s essay, October 1917: Coup d’etat or social revolution? Mandel, who died in 1995, did a good job explaining why the Bolsheviks had won majority support among workers (and indeed wide...

Antoinette Konikow was a Ukrainian-born American socialist, and a founding member of the Communist Party USA. She was expelled from the Communist Party in 1928 for being a Trotskyist, and remained active as such until her death in 1946. In this article, Konikow describes Rosa Luxemburg, with whom she studied in Zurich. Physically she was small, slender. A neglected hip disease in childhood left her with a limp. On her arrival to address large gatherings, committees meeting her for the first time would become crestfallen. How could such a frail being make an impression on the speaker’s platform...

Few adherents of the radical tradition need to be convinced of the importance of Rosa Luxemburg. A committed Marxist who opposed the dead-ends of both parliamentary reformism and “revolutionary” dictatorships imposed from above, her writings have been read and reread by generations of activists striving to find a pathway out of existing society. A brilliant economist who is widely authored the most in-depth treatment of the integral connection between capitalism and imperialism, her Accumulation of Capital and Anti-Critique is pivotal in understanding the dynamic that explains capital’s...

[Note: This is perhaps the first socialist response in English to the publication, in 1922, of Rosa Luxemburg's critical comments on the Russian Revolution. Writing in 1918, she had chosen not to publish these political judgments. They were first published by Paul Levy, who had been expelled from the Communist International in 1921. Irrespective of its name, Labour Monthly was a Communist Party Publication, edited by Rajani Palme Dutt, who would be the Party's main theorist for the next half century. This article shows the degree of freedom to think and write that there was in the Communist...

Rosie Woods reviews The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, published in March 2011 by Verso Books. Many women on the left have their own heroines, women from the past who have inspired them. Sylvia Pankhurst, Clara Zetkin, Minnie Lansbury... Mine has always been Rosa Luxemburg. The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg showed me her personal side. Here are letters written to a variety of friends, lovers and comrades, dating from 1891 until 1919, the last written just four days before her murder by the Freikorps (German far right paramilitaries). They are an interesting and at times very moving insight into her...

'Reform and Revolution' is one of Rosa Luxemburg's best-known works, her major contribution to the debate between Marxists and 'revisionists' at the turn of the century in Germany. In this previously untranslated article, which is effect an appendix to 'Reform and Revolution', she takes issue with the praise of old-style British trade unionism by the leading German revisionist Eduard Bernstein. Bernstein had lived in Britain for some years, and based many of his ideas on the experience of the British labour movement at the end of the 19th century... Click here to download pdf .

1. From the moment when the workers of our country and of Russia began to struggle bravely against the Czarist Government and the capitalist exploiters, we notice more and more often that the priests, in their sermons, come out against the workers who are struggling. It is with extraordinary vigour that the clergy fight against the socialists and try by all means to belittle them in the eyes of the workers. The believers who go to church on Sundays and festivals are compelled, more and more often, to listen to a violent political speech, a real indictment of Socialism, instead of hearing a...

Calling Polish independence a “utopia” and repeating this ad nauseam, Rosa Luxemburg exclaims ironically: Why not raise the demand for the independence of Ireland? The “practical” Rosa Luxemburg evidently does not know what Karl Marx’s attitude to the question of Irish independence was. It is worth while dwelling upon this, so as to show how a concrete demand for national independence was analysed from a genuinely Marxist, not opportunist, standpoint. It was Marx’s custom to “sound out” his socialist acquaintances, as he expressed it, to test their intelligence and the strength of their...

In the wake of the 1905 revolution, Rosa Luxemburg staunchly defends the Bolsheviks against the Menshevik accusation that the Bolsheviks are "Blanquists". Comrade Plekhanov has published in the [Polish newspaper] Kuryer a detailed article in which he accuses the so-called Bolsheviks of Blanquism [1]. It is not our job to defend the Russian comrades against whom comrade Plekhanov brings up the artillery of his erudition and his dialectics. For sure they can do that themselves. But the problem in question calls forth a few remarks which may be of interest to our readers, and so we give them some...

These notes on "The Mass Strike" are taken, with thanks, from Chris Cutrone . The interpolated "discussion points" (in bold) are our additions, for use in educationals.