## 1. Life




Rosa Luxemburg was born on March 5 1871 in Zamosc, a
predominantly Jewish centre in south-eastern Poland, then occupied by
Tzarist Russia. She was the youngest of five children in a progressive
family of assimilated Jews who were timber merchants. Her father,
Eliasz (Eduard) Luxemburg, like her elder brothers, was educated in
Germany. Her mother, Line, nee Lowenstein, was a well-read and
highly articulate woman with a passion for classical literature,
especially German and Polish, which she tried to inculcate on her
children. Two years after Luxemburg's birth, in 1873, the family
moved to Warsaw. At the age of three, Luxemburg contracted a hip
disease which was wrongly treated as tuberculosis, and caused her to
walk with a limp for the rest of her life. She was bedbound for a
year, a period during which she taught herself to read and write.




At the age of thirteen, Luxemburg joined the
girls' Second High School in Warsaw, one of the country's
elite schools, dominated by the children of Russian officials, where
the use of Polish even among students was forbidden and the places for
children of Jewish families were extremely limited. Luxemburg rebelled
to the oppressive atmosphere in the school, and developed an interest
in the activities of the various illegal revolutionary groups agitating
against both capitalist oppression and the despotic character of
Russian rule. By the time she finished secondary school in 1887, her
"rebellious attitude towards authorities" was already
mentioned in official school reports and deprived her of the gold medal
awarded to the highest performing students (Nettl 1966 [2019: 17]). It is
also likely that during this time, she joined what was left of
*Proletariat*, the first Polish socialist party, at that point
in disarray after the imprisonment and execution of many of its
leaders as a result of the repressive measures taken by Russian
authorities following the assassination of Tzar Alexander II in
1881. Faced with imminent arrest herself, she was smuggled out of the
country in 1889 and migrated to Zurich. There she enrolled in the
faculty of philosophy, switched to law and wrote a doctoral
dissertation on "The Industrial Development of Poland",
where she argued that the integration of the Polish economy into the
Russian empire meant that the interests of the Polish working class
would be held back by championing the cause of national
self-determination - a position to which she would remain
committed her entire life. In Zurich, Luxemburg also met several other
Marxists from Russian and Polish emigres circles, including Leo
Jogisches, her partner for many years and co-founder of the Social
Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP), a Marxist party
characterised by its opposition to the call for Polish independence
and its staunch commitment to proletarian internationalism.




The Swiss years were characterised by a mix of
academic and political work. Luxemburg, just over twenty, was
entangled in a fight against the main Polish Socialist Party (PSP) by
then fully committed to a mixture of progressive nationalism and
Marxism, and for the recognition of the SDKP by the Socialist
International. She conducted the struggle both on the political stage
and in the main organs of international social democracy such as
*Vorwarts* and *Neue Zeit*, as well as in the
political magazine she and Jogisches edited, *Sprawa Robotnic*a
(Workers' Cause). All this meant that when she moved to Germany
in 1898 with the help of a fictitious marriage to the son of one of her
friends, a German national, she was already well known to the
leadership of the largest social democratic party in the world, the
Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD). She rose quickly through
the ranks of the SPD, in no small part due to her sharply critical
interventions in the "revisionist" controversy which shook
the party to its core in the years of transition from the
19th to the 20th century.




In 1905, the first Russian revolution broke up, the "dress
rehearsal" for the subsequent Bolshevik revolution of 1917, in
Lenin's famous sentence. It found the socialist movement deeply
divided. In the West, socialist parties made steady electoral gains,
and united superficially in recognition of the moral authority of the
Second International but were deeply divided in matters of both
principle and tactics. In Russia, there was no direct equivalent to
the debate on reform versus revolution: socialists worked underground
and were divided mainly on questions of membership and party
organisation. The 1905 revolution which broke out after decades of
impoverishment, a series of defeats by Russia in the Russo-Japanese
war, and subjection to authoritarian violence was not so much a single
event as the cumulative result of several years of mass strikes,
border unrest, and demonstrations which forced Marxists to put the
question of party organisation at the centre of their
debates. Luxemburg, recently released from a few months in prison in
Zwickau on a charge of undermining the authority of the German
emperor, followed the events closely. She published several
interventions in which she debated with Lenin on the role of the
masses and the party in revolutionary circumstances, and tried to
persuade her colleagues in the SPD to adopt the mass strike as a
political weapon to advance the cause of workers also in Germany. In
December 1905 she smuggled herself on a military train to the Russian
part of Poland, and tried to reach Warsaw, where martial law coexisted
with a general strike, to resume her work of agitation with the Polish
working classes. Within a year she was arrested again, first confined
to a police prison in the Warsaw town hall then transferred on grounds
of ill-health to the Warsaw Citadel. There she spent a few months
until her release following both her family's intercessions and
payment of the bail, and her reputation as one of the leading
activists of the German SPD. Immediately after her release from
prison she went to St Petersburg then Finland, where she met Lenin and
wrote one of her most famous pamphlets: "The Mass Strike, the
Party and the Trade Unions", reflecting on the lessons of the
1905 revolution. The story goes that when she proposed these ideas to
the SPD Party Congress of Jena in 1905, August Bebel, one of the party
founders, joked that - as he listened to a debate with so much
blood and revolution - he kept "glancing occasionally at
my boots to see if these weren't in fact already wading in
blood" (Nettl 1966 [2019: 310]).




Upon her return to Germany, in 1907, "bloody
Rosa" as she became known to the liberal press was engaged as a
teacher in the Party School, where she taught "Introduction to
Economics" and "Marx's Capital" to rank and
file members of the SPD. Her "Introduction to Economics"
based on lecture notes survives only in fragments but "The
Accumulation of Capital", published in 1913, is one of the most
important works of theory to have emerged from the Second
International. At the same time, her political stance continued to
evolve in a direction opposite to the SPD leadership, whose growing
reluctance to condemn the imperialist ventures of Kaiser Wilhelm II in
Morocco made her vividly aware both of the dangers of stirring
nationalist sentiments to increase support for a possible war, and of
the evasive attitudes of her colleagues toward rising militarism. She
felt increasingly isolated. While the parliamentary party became
entangled in debates around taxation and suffrage reform, she wrote to
advocate the importance of mass struggles, the agitation for a
democratic republic and the conquest of political power by the
proletariat. Her proposals were met with hostility even from erstwhile
allies like Karl Kautsky, and the main party publications refused to
publish her work.




The break came in 1914 when WW1 erupted and the
SPD voted in favour of war credits, de facto embracing crude
nationalism at the expense of the internationalist promise of concern
for the whole working class regardless of national boundaries. Workers
once united against capitalists would now kill each other at the border
under different flags. Together with Franz Mehring, Klara Zetkin, and
Karl Liebknecht, the only SPD deputy in the Reichstag to have opposed
war credits until the end, Luxemburg founded the *Spartakus
group* - initially part of the USPD (*Unabhangige
Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands*) the anti-war splinter
faction from the SPD - and which was also known as the International
group after *Die Internationale*, the joint publication which
agitated for an end to the war and developing working class struggle
against capitalism on an international basis. Soon after, Luxemburg was
imprisoned, released, and then imprisoned again. Behind bars, she wrote
"The Crisis of Social Democracy" better known as the Junius
pamphlet or *Juniusbrochure* because of the pseudonym
Junius under which it appeared. It was the synthesis of a life's
critique of the limits of liberal parliamentarism, the pursuit of
compromise for compromise's sake, and the consequences of a
failure to commit to principled internationalism on the side of social
democratic parties which were organised on a national basis.




When Luxemburg was released from prison in November 1918, Germany
looked very different. The success of the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917
which led to the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk between Germany and
Russia sparked mutiny at the border and a series of strikes and
insurrections among the German workers who demanded a democratic
republic. From prison, Luxemburg had greeted the Russian revolution as
"an act of world-historical significance whose traces will be
not be extinguished for aeons" (cited in Frohlich 1940
[2010: 239]). But as her verdict makes clear, she was not hopeful that
the victory would last, in no small part because she lacked confidence
that German social democrats would support their Russian
counterparts. While the *Spartakus* group continued to demand
the creation of a socialist republic based on workers' councils,
the SPD greeted the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II by installing its
leader, Friedrich Ebert as chancellor of the new liberal
parliamentarian republic. From Berlin, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl
Liebknecht published the first issue of *Rote Fahne*, the organ
of the *Spartakusbund*, followed in December by the
announcement of the programme. The contrast between alternatives could
not have been starker: either the "traditional organs of
bourgeois class rule, the federal councils, the parliaments, municipal
councils etc." or the proletariat's own "class
organs: Workers' and Soldiers' Councils" in which
they "occupy all public posts, superintend all public activity,
and measure all the needs of the state by their own class interests
and socialists tasks" (cited in Frohlich 1940 [2010: 273]). A
couple of weeks later the same programme was presented in the
inaugural Congress of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) where
Luxemburg argued in favour of participating in the upcoming January
elections to the National Assembly. She was outvoted. In the first
days of January 1919, another wave of protests saw hundreds of
thousands of workers descend into the streets and occupy train
stations and newspapers. The Spartakists urged caution. Despite the
anarchy in Berlin, Luxemburg, especially, did not think the German
people were ready for a socialist revolution. The Spartakist uprising
mobilised the far right, while, Gustav Noske, the social-democratic
Interior minister ordered the police to crush the protests. With the
help of the Freikorps, the far-right, anti-republican, proto-nazi
paramilitary groups, many activists were arrested and murdered. The
same fate would soon fall on Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. On
the 15th January 1919, they were discovered in their hiding
place, arrested, knocked unconscious with rifle buts then
shot. Luxemburg's body was thrown into Berlin's Landwehr
Canal, from where it washed ashore a few months after.


## 2. Social reform or revolution




Rosa Luxemburg established herself as a major
intellectual figure in Marxist circles with her intervention in the
revisionist controversy, the theoretical and political debate around
the principles and aims of social-democracy that divided the Second
International at the turn of the 19th century. The debate
was sparked by Eduard Bernstein, Friedrich Engels's close friend,
collaborator and literary executor, as well as a senior figure in the
German Social Democratic Party. It unfolded first in a series of
articles published between 1896 and 1898 in *Die Neue Zeit*,
then subsequently consolidated in a volume entitled *The
Preconditions of Socialism* (1899). As the Prussian government
progressively relaxed the Anti-Socialist laws promoted by the then
chancellor Otto von Bismarck, and social democratic ranks continued to
swell, Bernstein tried to revisit some of the core theoretical and
political commitments of Marxism by offering a new analysis of the
transformation of capitalism in the fifty years following the
publication of Marx and Engels's *Communist Manifesto*. He
criticised one of the fundamental pillars of Marxian economics: that
the historical tendency of the rate of profit to fall under the twin
pressure of technological modernisation and an increasingly exploited
labour force rendered inevitable the crisis of the system. This,
Bernstein argued, required social-democrats to abandon their
revolutionary aims in favour of enacting progressive legislation which
sought to represent workers through parliamentary struggle. He insisted
that this was no subversion of the teachings of the founding fathers,
but rather an effort to liberate Marxism from the dialectical
straightjacket in which many socialists of the Second International had
subsequently placed it.




The debate centred around the question of whether
democracy and capitalism were compatible. The starting point for
Bernstein's critique was the Marxist claim that capitalism was a
social system with a tendency to collapse under the pressure of its own
contradictions. In the pages of *Capital*, Marx had written
eloquently about how capitalist economies faced the prospect of ever
more destructive crises due to the twin pressures of technological
modernisation and the tendency of the rate of profits to fall. At the
time of Bernstein's contribution, this methodological commitment
to understanding capital as a system with an inherent propensity
towards crisis was widely shared among the main theorists of the Second
International. To suggest that the argument was false was to strike at
the core of Marxist political economy. But what made the attack
particularly uncomfortable, and difficult to dismiss, was that
Bernstein presented his argument not as a break with Marxist
methodological assumptions but as an internal development of its
normative and empirical requirements. He began by insisting that
dialectics was nothing other than the methodological commitment to
match one's theory to new developments in practice. The history
of capitalist development in the 19th century showed not a
cumulative series of ever sharper failures but a resilient system with
a surprising capacity for adaptation. From an economic perspective
there were a number of new developments with which the Marxist analysis
had to reckon: the intensification of foreign trade, the expansion of
the banking and financial sector, the development of the credit system,
and the emergence of cartels and trusts. From a political perspective,
the consolidation of middle classes, the rise of property owners, and
the expansion of the franchise meant that liberal representation could
no longer be identified with the perpetuation of oppression by ruling
elites. There was now reasonable hope that the gap between the private
and the public sphere, between the ethos of the *bourgeois* and
that of the *citoyen* could be bridged. On the one hand, the
extension of the right to vote to previously disenfranchised categories
of people; on the other hand the strengthening of workers' unions
and cooperatives as well as the prospects of electoral successes for
mass social-democratic parties across Western Europe made it hard to
equate representative democracy with the consolidation of class rule.
 Citizenship emerged as the new concept through which capital
could be put to the service of the democratic state. Representative
democracy and political emancipation were part of the same project, a
project that social-democrats could develop regardless of
"the final goal."




Rosa Luxemburg was not the only one to protest against
Bernstein's reinterpretation of Marxism. His position was
discussed (and rejected) at the Stuttgart Conference of the German
Social Democratic party (1898) where more established members of the
SPD, including Karl Kautsky and August Bebel, also spoke against his
thesis. Luxemburg's intervention, which appeared partially in
article form in *Leipziger Volkszeitung*, and was subsequently
published in 1900 under the title *Social Reform or Revolution*
(second edition 1908) was, however, a point-by-point response. Her
critique targeted Bernstein's arguments as synthesised in the
famous (or infamous) dictum: "the final goal is nothing to me,
the movement is everything."




This, Luxemburg explained, was a false dilemma. "Can
Social-Democracy be against reforms? Can we contrapose the social
revolution, the transformation of the existing order, our final goal,
to social reforms? Certainly not." At the heart of
Bernstein's dilemma, she suggested, was not a tactical choice, a
simple discussion about this or that method of struggle; it was the
"very existence of the Social Democratic movement" as a
distinctive force in the struggle against capitalism (Luxemburg
1900 [RLR: 129]).




But just like Bernstein's arguments were
grounded in apparently Marxist theory so was Luxemburg's
response. She was committed to the idea that socialism is a
"historic necessity", a theory whose desirability is
dictated by the correct interpretation of empirical circumstances.
"Either revisionism is correct concerning the course of
capitalist development, and therefore socialism becomes a
utopia", she wrote, or "socialism is not a utopia; and
therefore the theory of the means of adaptation is false"
(Luxemburg 1900 [RLR: 134]).




To illustrate the latter, her analysis combined
economic and political arguments and focused on the structure of
globalization and the role of nation-states in a financialized economic
system. The conclusions reached however were opposite to those of
Bernstein. While Bernstein had interpreted the development of the
credit and debit system as stabilising mechanisms within a capitalist
order, for Luxemburg the concentration of economic power by monopoly
holders, corporations, banks and other financial institutions were
symptoms of vulnerability rather than an asset. In response to
Bernstein's remarks on the role of credit in avoiding capitalist
collapse, she emphasized that financial capitalism and the availability
of loans aggravates crisis rather than providing a solution to it.
Credit, Luxemburg argued, encourages speculation and widens the gap
between what might be called the real and the fictitious economy.
Indeed, while credit initially stimulates the development of productive
forces, it can also lead to errors of calculation and overproduction,
therefore ceasing to be helpful in the exchange process at the first
symptom of stagnation. Likewise, cartels and trusts, and the other
regulatory mechanisms designed to increase coordination among the
holders of capital can only succeed by eliminating internal competition
in isolated industries, something that cannot be extended to all
sectors of production. Moreover, cartels succeed at increasing the rate
of profit in internal markets only in virtue of expansion outwards, by
selling abroad the products that cannot be absorbed by domestic demand.
In other words, Luxemburg explained, these companies are only able to
sell abroad, at lower rates of profit, the product that cannot be
absorbed by domestic markets. The other face of apparent market
stability in Europe is sharpened competition abroad and anarchy on the
world market - the opposite of what cartels intended to achieve. When
the global market begins to shrink because it has been exhausted by
competition between capitalist countries, the capital that has been
socialised through organisation reverts to private capital and
employers organisations "burst like soap bubbles and give way to
free competition in aggravated form" (Luxemburg 1900 [RLR:
137]). 




From a political perspective, Luxemburg maintained, work for reforms
should not be understood as "a drawn-out revolution," and
revolution should not be understood as "a condensed series of
reforms." Historically, legal reform, she explaned, has served
the purpose of consolidating an emerging social class until the
balance of political forces is such that the existing juridical
relations can be eventually dismantled in favor of new ones. Every
legal order, she maintained, emerges out of a social and political
revolution: "revolution is the act of political creation while
legislation is the political expression of a society that has already
come into being" (Luxemburg 1900 [RLR: 156]). This is precisely
what the terms "reform" and "revolution" mean:
they suggest a radical change in the content of fundamental legal
dispositions rather than in the manner of their realization. Legal
reform and revolution are not different methods of historical progress
that "can be picked out from the counter of history as one picks
out hot or cold sausages" (Luxemburg 1900 [RLR: 156]). Those who
oppose the method of legal reform to the goal of conquering political
power by the workers do not oppose "a more tranquil, calmer and
slower method to the same goal"; they choose "a different
goal" (Luxemburg 1900 [RLR: 157]). They choose to operate within
the legal framework dictated by the old order instead of committing to
establish a new one. The political analysis of revisionism produces a
similar outcome to its economic analysis: it abandons the commitment
to socialism in favour of the preservation of capitalism, and tries to
reduce abuses in the system rather than eliminating the system itself.
To achieve the more radical outcome, it is essential for the
proletariat to have access to political power. The fate of democracy,
Luxemburg insisted, is "bound up with the fate of the labour
movement". While the advocacy of reforms via parliamentary and
trade union mechanisms would prepare the working classes for the
exercise of political power, the fact that these demands were
inscribed in a liberal institutional framework made it impossible to
overcome capitalism from within. The reformist method ended up pitting
socialism against democracy without understanding the nature of legal
revolutions. In turning the dispute from one of content of legal
dispositions to one of style of execution, it ended up losing sight of
both.


## 3. Critique of political economy




Luxemburg's political stance is grounded in
her analysis of capital as a set of economic, political and social
relations with global scope. She developed her contribution to Marxist
political economy in *The Accumulation of Capital: A
Contribution to the Economic Explanation of
Imperialism* (1913) and in her *Introduction to Political
Economy* published posthumously in 1925 and based on her lectures
on the same subject at the SPD party school. Her starting position is
that the core of a capitalist economy is the extraction of surplus
value and the exploitation of workers as a source of accumulation of
profits. As Luxemburg puts it, the distinctive feature of a capitalist
system of production consists in the fact that "only those goods
are produced which can with certainty be expected to sell, and not
merely to sell, but to sell at the customary profit" (Luxemburg
1913 [AK: 35]). To understand how this is possible, she argues, we need
to focus on *total* capital and its continuous transformation
from commodity to money and back to commodity again, in a new cycle of
spiralling profits (Bellofiore 2009). What is required to maintain the
capitalist system, Luxemburg shows, is firstly the ability of
capitalists to make profit guaranteed by the reproduction of capitalism
as a system; secondly, enough demand to meet the offer of new
capitalist commodities brought into the market; and thirdly an
incentive to accumulate based on the prospect of new markets to absorb
increasing production.




Luxemburg's study of the dynamic structure of capital
accumulation begins with a critique of Volume II of Capital. More
specifically, it starts with Marx's analysis of capitalism as a
"closed system" based on a simplified model of relations
of production between capitalists and workers, which abstracts from
the existence of non-capitalist economies. As Marx had put it in
chapter 24 of *Capital*, "we must treat the whole world
of trade as one nation, and assume that capitalist production is
established everywhere and has taken possession of every branch of
industry" (Marx 1887 [1990: 727]). The problem with this
analysis, Luxemburg pointed out, consists in a mistaken understanding
of capital accumulation as a mere question of "the sources of
money when the real issue is the effective demand, the use made of
goods, not the source of money which is paid for them"
(Luxemburg 1913 [AK: 128]). The closed-system analysis, she
suggested, made it difficult to explain how capital could be
reproduced and valorized in a capitalist society based only on the
exploitation of workers, and related extraction of surplus value.




To better explain this point it is important to emphasise that one of
the core ideas in Marx's analysis of accumulation was the
explanation of the reproduction of capital with reference to the
development of technology, competition among capitalists, and their
thirst for maximizing profit. Luxemburg found that this analysis did
not do justice to the distinctive structural constraints of capital
reproduction. In particular, it did not take account of the necessity
to access new markets in order to sell consumption goods that
impoverished domestic workers could no longer afford. Without the
guarantee of an ever-expanding market, in a depressed economy with low
demand for consumption goods there would be no possibility of capital
reinvestment and no outlet for accumulated capital stocks. More
specifically, under conditions of pauperisation, inequality, and
ongoing exploitation of workers by capitalists, the workers would not
be able to generate the demand necessary to absorb the commodities
produced by capitalists. The capitalists' own patterns of
consumption would not help to solve the problem of underconsumption
since the capitalist class is driven by the imperative to accumulate
capital and reinvest in order to keep up with the pressures of market
competition, production, technological modernisation and so on. Given
the tension between "the unlimited expansive capacity of the
productive forces" and "the limited expansive capacity of
social consumption" highlighted in volume 3 of *Capital*,
Marx's own analysis could not explain how the consumption
necessary to increase profits could give rise to an
"enlarged" rather than "simple" reproduction
of capital. The decisive fact, Luxemburg argued, is that surplus value
"cannot be realised by sale either to workers or to capitalists,
but only if it is sold to such social organisations or strata whose
own mode of production is not capitalistic".




Luxemburg's core insight is that the expansion of capital in
noncapitalist areas of the world by way of conquest, trade, violence
or deception provides the kind of outlet that capital needs in order
to be reproduced as a system. Cheap mass-produced goods that struggle
to be sold in the markets of developed capitalist states because of
low patterns of consumption become available in other areas of the
world. They create investment opportunities that displace traditional
ways of organizing economic life, and destroy predominantly
agricultural forms of production. They also bring in technological
innovations and modernizing projects that modify existing relations of
authority and reshape forms of class conflict different from the
capitalist one. Moreover, thanks to its expansion to non-capitalist
areas and the disruption of traditional ways of life, there is also
increased migration and the possibility of recruiting cheap labour
force caused by the disintegration of primitive forms of production
and non-capitalist ways of life. As Luxemburg pointed out,
"since capitalist production can develop fully only with
complete access to all territories and climes, it can no more confine
itself to the natural resources and productive forces of the temperate
zone than it can manage with white labour alone. Capital needs other
races to exploit territories where the white man cannot work. It must
be able to mobilise world labour power without restriction in order to
utilise all productive forces of the globe" (Luxemburg 1913
[AK: 343]).




Such an analysis of racism as an integral component of capitalist
exploitation helped her see the oppression of non-white peoples as an
ongoing feature of the structural replication of the capitalist
system. While Marx had examined colonialism, migration and the
disruption of non-capitalist economies with reference only to the
genesis of capital (the problem of so-called primitive accumulation),
Luxemburg criticised him for failing to see how capitalism, also in
its "full maturity" depends on non-capitalist strata and
social organisations existing side by side. Capital, Luxemburg,
argues, constantly "needs the means of production and the labour
power of the whole globe for untrammelled accumulation"
(Luxemburg 1913 [AK: 346]).




This analysis leads to an understanding of imperialism as the
political expression of competition among capitalists for "what
remains still open of the non-capitalist environment" (Luxemburg
1913 [AK: 465]). Differently from the expectation of classical
economists that the development of commercial relations would bring
peace among nations, Luxemburg showed how "the harmony of
interests between commercial nations in the East were proclaimed to
the sound of gunfire in the Opium Wars" (Luxemburg 1913 [AK:
427]). And while imperial conquest, displacement and war guarantee the
direct subjection of whole parts of the world to the political control
of more developed capitalist countries, other subtle ways of control
- for example, in the form of international loans - create
political and economic dependency that places the foreign and economic
policy of young capitalist states directly under the influence of
their neocolonial masters. International loans, as she explained,
help dependent territories acquire the resources needed to modernise
and develop their infrastructure while also financing the export of
capital from advanced capitalist countries. However, in a
financialized economy, with investment comes speculation, and when
hopes of increasing rates of profit are disappointed, debt comes to
haunt these vulnerable national economies and losses need to be
socialized. This triggers a new, even deeper, crisis and the beginning
of a new cycle of accumulation accompanied by militarism as a weapon
in the competitive struggle among nations (Toporowski 2015).




Luxemburg's reading of Marx as well as her analysis of the
accumulation of capital has attracted several criticisms. It became a
matter of controversy already during the Second International when
authors such as Bukharin and Lenin, inspired by the Austrian social
democratic economist Rudolph Hilferding's analysis of finance
capital, pointed out the flaws in Luxemburg's reading of Marx,
and criticised her for holding a "teleological" view of
capitalism in which the whole system is acsribed a purpose much like
the component parts of it. This, they further argued, leads to a
mistaken view of the accumulation of capital (see for a discussion
Brewer 1990: 62-64 and Callinicos 2001: 36-42). As a matter of
Marxist exegesis, several scholars have also emphasised, that if one
integrates the analysis of *Capital* with Marx's other
writings on colonialism, it is possible to show how
*Capital* volume 1 already anticipated a number of critiques
made by theorists of the Second International and could be productively
deployed to generate a critique of imperalism not too dissimilar from
Luxemburg's (Pradella 2013). Moreover, so defenders of Marx point
out, Luxemburg's critique is methodologically flawed. While Marx
intended his scheme of reproduction to be an abstract analysis which
brackets away from historical constraints to illustrate the inner
contraddictions in the continuous search for profit, Luxemburg
conflates this philosophical abstraction with a description of
historical reality. Finally , several prominent Marxist economists
(e.g., Sweezy 1967) criticised her for focusing on the seemingly
unorthodox premise that "consumption" rather than the
realisation of surplus value is the main concern of a capitalist sytem
thus conflating the question of "where does demand come from to
to realise surplus value" with the question "where does the
money come from to monetise profits" (see Bellofiore 2009 for a
discussion and response).




Notwithstanding these criticisms, the originality of Luxemburg's
contribution to an analysis of the role of finance in the accumulation
of capital, and her emphasis on the monetary character of the
capitalist economy cannot be denied. She was one of the first authors
to contribute to what some have called the "critical school of
finance" which pioneered an analysis of financial crisis as
relatively independent from industrial crisis, anticipating later
debates on the relation between the rate of savings and the motivation
to invest as discussed in the works of John Maynard Keynes, Michal
Kalecki and Hyman Minsky (Robinson 2013). Her remarks on the role of
the credit and debit system are crucial to understand the
underdevelopment and ongoing reproduction of relations of dependency
between core and peripheral capitalist countries. Luxemburg's
analysis of the constant expansion of capital into non-capitalist
economies is still crucial to understand contemporary globalisation
practices, the interconnectedness between global financial crisis and
the pressures of international migration, and to explain how global
dispossession and exploitation work together to advance the interests
of a global capitalist class.


## 4. Anti-imperialism and national self-determination




The focus on the development of noncapitalist areas of the world gave
Luxemburg a sensitivity to questions of race, ethnicity, and
indigenous rights that was uncharacteristic for the Marxism of her
time. Up to that point, several Marxists had more or less shared the
teleological scheme defended by many Enlightenment philosophers that
characterised the process of societal evolution as a transition
through different stages of development. Starting with nomadic
(hunter-gathering) forms of life, who were then supplanted by pastoral
then agricultural relations, these conjectural histories usually
culminated with commercial societies, often considered to be a
superior form of social organisation. Luxemburg was one of the
pioneers of a study of racism and cultural appropriation as
distinctive yet integrated components of an analysis of capitalism
where exploitation and racial subordination are mutually
reinforcing. "The progress of the humanistic era of the
Enlightenment", she remarked sarcastically while commenting on
German colonialism at the end of the 18th century, could be seen in
how the captain of a ship transporting slaves from Guinea to Guyana in
South America, "to alleviate their [the slaves] melancholy and
to keep them from dying off, allowed them to dance on the ship's
deck with music and whip cracks every evening, something to which the
more brutal Spanish traders had not resorted" (Luxemburg 1910
[CW: 209]).




In the manuscript on the *Introduction to the Critique of Political
Economy* based on her lectures at the SPD school and published
postuhumously, Luxemburg examined at length primitive communism in
societies as diverse as Germanic tribes, the Inca empire, British
India, French Algeria, and Russia. She illustrated how collective
forms of land ownership had an extraordinary capacity for tenacity and
adaptation to changing historical circumstances, showing enduring
resilience towards despotism, foreign rule, outside conquest and
exploitation. There was only one contact, Luxemburg pointed out, that
those societies could not withstand: "the contact with European
civilisation, i.e. with capitalism". This encounter, she wrote,
is "deadly, universally and without exception and it
accomplishes what centuries of the most savage Oriental conquerors
could not: the dissolution of the whole social structure from the
inside, tearing apart all traditional bonds and transforming the
society in a short period of time into a shapeless pile of
rubble" (Luxemburg 1910 [CW: 227]).




In *The Accumulation of Capital*, the examples - of
British colonialism in India, the Opium Wars, French colonialism in
Algeria, the struggle between Black African peoples and Dutch Boers,
the exploitation of Native Americans - serve as a reminder of
how capitalism develops against a background of coercion and racial
abuse. At a time in which the German Social Democratic party
celebrated its electoral expansion while hesitating to condemn the
contribution of Germany to the scramble for Africa, Luxemburg wrote
several articles and pamphlets in which she called attention to the
genocide of the Nama and Herero people of Namibia, and criticised the
complicity of Kautsky and the SPD leadership in failing to condemn the
expansion of the Kaiser's imperial projects in Morocco for fear
of losing parliamentary seats. While remaining committed to the fight
against racism in Europe, as her public pronouncements on the Dreyfus
affair demonstrate, she continued to see the struggle against
exclusion within her own state as inextricably linked to the
condemnation of the racial abuse perpetuated by imperialist powers
around the world. Black people in Africa "with whose bodies the
Europeans play a game of catch, are just as near to me" as the
"suffering of the Jews", she emphasised (Luxemburg 1917
[RLR: 390]).




This attention to the global dynamic of capitalist expansion and the
analysis of imperialism as an integral part of the development of
capital are important to explain Luxemburg's distinctive stance
on one of the most important questions that concerned the Marxist
movement: the desirability of national self-determination. The mutual
dependence between economic and political power in the presence of
globalization and the continous drive to exploit remote areas of the
world made Luxemburg a skeptic of theories of political emancipation
through national self-determination. Here she differed from the
mainstream Marxist position on national self-determination (including
Vladimir Lenin's) who had argued in favour of national
liberation movements when these helped advance socialist goals. For
Luxemburg, national liberation movements ended up playing into the
hands of domestic liberal ruling elites and weakening the
international workers' movement. Taking as an example a question
closer to home - whether Poland ought to gain independence from
imperial Russia - she drew on her knowledge and experience to
defend strict international proletarianism and suggested that it was
against the interests of the Polish working classes to become a
self-determining nation. Her argument was that national
self-determination cannot serve an emancipatory purpose if it is
divorced from the international labour movement. That labour movement
however ought to take a transnational form and not limit itself to a
formal request for national self-determination since, on the face of
capitalist development, the formal defence of sovereignty would simply
limit the struggle.




Authors who study Luxemburg's stance on national
self-determination believe that her hostility to it stems from
aversion to nationalism. Her argument however was more sophisticated
(see Brie and Schutrumpf 2021). Luxemburg was enthusiastic about
the unique contribution of national culture through art or literary
products to the understanding of the historical and social
specificities of different nations, as her commentaries on the work of
Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz make clear (see for a discussion Scott
2021). However, her appreciation of such distinctive linguistic and
cultural contributions was always distinguished from the issue of
nation-state sovereignty - a positiion which put her at odds
with mainstream progressive movements in Congress Poland. While the
charge of being a "national nihilist" may be exaggerated,
it is fair to say that Luxemburg's prominence in the Polish
socialist movement, imprinted on the SDKP a sectarian tendency which
many historians have subsequently criticised for undermining the
Polish workers' movement with its distinctive nationalist
commitments (Blanc 2017). Luxemburg always maintained that if the
political and economic power of the Polish proletariat were so weighty
as to make national self-determination a viable alternative, then
surely the workers would also have enough power to rebel against
capital beyond national boundaries. Given the empirical circumstances
of Poland, Luxemburg believed that national self-determination was a
dangerous distraction from the imperative to work with the labour
movement to fight the Russian empire and turn it into a socialist
state. Without socialist governments in Germany, Austria, and Russia,
she argued, independence would deepen the exploitation of Polish
workers. The demand for national self-determination ran the risk of
playing in the hands of liberal ruling elites, distracting Polish
workers and turning them from an entity dominated by Russian capital
to one dominated by Polish capital. This attitude towards nationalism
is also central to understand her stance against the war, leading to
her definitive break with German social democracy whom she accused of
joining forces with nationalist conservatives to support the war
against Russia. As she explained in the 1915 *Junius Pamphlet*:
"So long as capitalist states exist, i.e., so long as
imperialistic world policies determine and regulate the inner and
outer life of a nation, there can be no 'national
self-determination' either in war or in peace" (Luxemburg
1915 [RLR: 325]).


## 5. Political organisation




Luxemburg's analysis on questions of strategy and political
organisation was shaped by her reflections on the development of
capitalism, her emphasis on the global character of that development
and her conviction that any discussion of the issue of political
organisation had to be historically informed and sensitive to the
internal dynamic of the political movements of different countries.
While historical materialism provided the methodological foundation,
Luxemburg's more specific interventions on the questions of the
day (reform vs. revolution, economic vs. political struggle,
spontaneous vs. centralised forms of political organisation) were
shaped by her analysis of two very different experiences of working
class organisation. In Western Europe, the demands of workers were
increasingly driven (and constrained) by representation in the
institutions of liberal parliamentary democracy, their demands
presented in the language of civic rights, their appeals taking the
form of a call to collective democratic responsibilty. In Eastern
Europe, where the struggle for worker's rights took place mostly
underground, political debate was constantly threatened by censorship,
and mass actions were organised in secret and at great risk to
activists' lives. The debate was therefore very different.
Luxemburg's essay on the *The Mass Strike, the Political
Party and the Trade Union*, synthesises the lessons learned from
the Russian revolution of 1905 and reflects on them to better
understand working class organisation as a whole.




The focus of the discussion were political and economic strikes as
methods in the struggle against capitalism. Such strikes, confined to
particular sectors of production or to particular towns, should not be
understood in isolation from each other, Luxemburg argued. The mass
strike, she suggests, should not be seen as "a crafty method
discovered by subtle reasoning for the purpose of making the
proletarian struggle more effective but, *the method of
motion of the proletarian mass*, the phenomenal form of the
proletarian struggle in the revolution" (Luxemburg 1905 [RLR:
192]). While a strike may begin as a series of demands for, say,
reduced working hours or improved pay, those demands for a fairer
distribution are inseparable from the question of workers'
access to political power. As Luxemburg puts it, "the economic
struggle is the transmitter from one political centre to another; the
political struggle is the periodic fertilization of the soil for the
economic struggle" (Luxemburg 1905 [RLR: 195]). This
interdependence between economic and political struggle also meant
that the question of mass strike could not be separated from that of
revolution, observed not from the point of view of public order as
"street disturbances", "rioting" and
"bloodshed" but as a "thoroughgoing internal
reversal of existing class relations" (Luxemburg 1905 [RLR:
195-196]). And yet precisely because the mass strike should not be
understood as an isolated measure to be called at will but was
inextricably linked to the fate of revolution, the decision to bring
it about could not come even from "the highest committee of the
strongest Social Democratic party" (Luxemburg 1905 [RLR:
197]). Of course, Luxemburg conceded that initiative, direction, mass
education and party discipline had a crucial role to play in
revolutionary organisation. But she was convinced that
"revolutions do not allow anyone to play schoolmaster with
them" because, as she argued, "in every individual act of
the struggle so very many important economic, political and social,
general and local, material and psychical, factors react upon one
another in such a way that no single act can be arranged and resolved
as if it were a mathematical problem" (Luxemburg 1905 [RLR:
198]).




This then, is the essence of what has been labelled her theory of the
role of "spontaneity" in political organisation, which is
not so much a theory as an effort to understand the dynamic of
political action grounded in the belief that, in the course of
political mobilisation and activity, oppressed groups are themselves
able to develop the epistemic insight, political tools and collective
motivation required to change the course of history. The lesson for
political parties, Luxemburg argued, was not to focus on the
"technical side", with the "mechanisms of the mass
strike" but to ensure that "they never fall below the
level demanded by the actual relations of forces, but rather rise
above it" (Luxemburg 1905 [RLR: 199]). Reforms, she explained,
provided crucial learning platforms through which the mass of
oppressed people would develop a capacity for autonomous
decision-making, and prepare for the conquest of political power. Yet
such reforms were trials of freedom, they were not freedom itself.




Luxemburg's analysis of political organisation has received
several critiques from contrasting perspectives. On the one hand, it
has been pointed out that while Luxemburg was able to navigate
carefully the choice between national parliamentary representation and
a revolutionary analysis of class conflict that transcended state
boundaries, she opposed the Second International's naive
faith on national social democracy with a no less naive belief on
the democratising effects of a continuously expanding wave of strikes
(Eley 1980: 147). On the other hand, her faith in the spontanous power
of the masses has often been interpreted as the unavoidable
consequence of a certain degree of "determinism" or
"fatalism" embedded in her analysis of the limits of
capital accumulation and its emphasis on an inherent tendency towards
crisis (see for a discussion of this literature Geras 1976 [2015, ch
1]). However, as Norman Geras has pointed out, while some of the
phrasing in her texts resembles standard formulations of *the
Second International* to the extent that the collapse of
capitalism was perceived as inherently unavoidable, and while this
rhetoric could occasionally serve a psychological motivating role,
Luxemburg was far from considering the emergence of socialism a matter
of fatal destiny (Geras 1976 [2015]). On the contrary, she made it
clear that socialism was not going to fall as "manna from
heaven" and that while "we can no more skip a period in
our historical development than a man can jump over his shadow, it
lies within our power to accelerate or to retard it" (Luxemburg
1915 [RLR: 320-321]). The meaning of Engels's famous slogan
"socialism or barbarism", on which Luxemburg commented in
the *Junius Pamphlet* was quite the opposite of determinism:
the vindication of the conscious agency of the oppressed, the
transformation, she argued, of the proletariat from "a powerless
victim of history" to "its conscious guide"
(Luxemburg 1915 [RLR: 321]).




This belief in the power of the oppressed masses, and the role of
spontaneous action in developing revolutionary organisation informed
Luxemburg's response to her colleagues in the German social
democratic party and her call to combine parliamentary initiatives
with the defence of the mass strike as the focal point of
revolutionary organisation. The extent to which these views were
reflected in her attitude to the Polish workers movement, with regard
to which Luxemburg is sometimes criticised for her rigidity and
sectarian stance, is a contested question (Blanc 2017). However, there
is no doubt that her political experience with both Polish and German
organisations, played an important role in the analysis of the
political developments in Russia, from the revolution of 1905 to the
Bolshevik conquest of power after October 1917. Initially sceptical of
the possibility that a workers' government in Russia could last
for a long time, Luxemburg nevertheless praised the Bolsheviks for the
symbolic importance of showing to the world that a revolutionary
programme led by the proletariat was worth fighting for despite the
constraints imposed by circumstances. She also urged her colleagues in
the SPD to abandon their caution and support the Bolsheviks with
greater conviction that the oppressed people of Russia would
eventually be able to find their orientation despite what many
considered to be "unripe circumstances". As she put it in
her essay on the Russian revolution, writen while in prison during
World War I but published after her death in 1922, "when the
proletariat seizes power, it can never again follow Kautsky's
good advice to dispense with a socialist transformation of a country
on the grounds that'the country is unripe'". What it
needs, she argues, is to "immediately embark on socialist
measures in the most energetic, the most unyielding and the most
ruthless way; in other words, it must exercise a dictatorship, but a
dictatorship of the class, not of a party or of a clique - and
dictatorship of the class means: in full view of the broadest public,
with the most active, uninhibited participation of the popular masses
in an unlimited democracy" (Luxemburg 1922 [RLR: 25, see also
307-308]).




Luxemburg interpreted the demand for a dictatorship of the proletariat
in the same way Marx and Engels had done, as a transitional emergency
institution required to realise democracy in a society rigged by class
struggle (see for a broader discussion of the concept Ypi 2020). She
strongly believed that the dictatorship of the proletariat should be
brought about by the masses of the oppressed in their effort to
liberate themselves, and that it should not be inflicted on them by a
small circle of revolutionary elites. This commitment to freedom as
reflected in the practical activity of the working class movement
rather than a static goal to be approximated with the right tools was
also reflected in her criticism of centralized models of political
organization, motivating her scepticism towards the idea of a vanguard
party championed by Vladimir Lenin. For Lenin, the political vanguard
consisted of a selection of the most disciplined, intellectually
sophisticated, and motivated revolutionaries whose role was to
cultivate "agitation" with the aim of transforming
workers' mobilisation to achieve short-term goals into a wide
ranging struggle aiming to secure their access to political
power. Only a party guided by a small elite of revolutionaries aware
of the twin dangers of both opportunism (too much compromise) and
sectarianism (too little compromise), Lenin argued, was capable of
giving the working class movement a compass with which to orient
itself in the long-term (Lenin 1929 [1987: 95]). As Lenin puts it, the
professional revolutionary is not merely a trade union secretary but a
"tribune of the people", able to react to injustice
regardless of where it takes place or which group of people it affects
so as to "group all these manifestations into a single picture
of political violence [...] in order to explain to everyone the
world-historical significance of the struggle" (Lenin 1929
[1987: 113]).




Luxemburg was one of the first to draw attention to the risks of
progressive isolation from the wider movement that this conception of
partisanship entailed. Although she applauded the October Revolution
of 1917 for showing that the idea of a working class state was no
hopeless utopia, she insisted that without connection to and guidance
from the masses, the party would soon reach a state of bureaucratic
stalemate, separate from the concerns of the rest of society which
would endanger the very freedoms that socialists promised to
realise. As she memorably put it: "Freedom for supporters of the
government only, for members of one part only - no matter how
numerous they might be is no freedom at all. Freedom is always freedom
for those who think differently" (Luxemburg 1922 [RLR:
305]). This freedom to think differently, she believed could only
flourish if it remained connected to democracy understood as rule by
the oppressed people, maturing the skills, epistemic insight and views
necessary to guide them in circumstances of revolutionary
transitions. She believed that political education of the mass of the
oppressed, and the ability to develop their views through practice was
essential to working class rule. While a liberal democratic order
could maintain its stability thanks to the cooperation of an already
educated elite, the challenge for a movement of the oppressed was to
develop the knowledge necessary to develop a new political order in
the course of transforming the old one. This is why, democratic
practice and the idea of historical experimentation as a learning
process was crucial. Not, as Luxemburg put it, because of any
fanaticism about the "concept of 'justice' but
because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political
freedom depends on this essential characteristic", and
"freedom" effectively loses its meaning once it becomes a
privilege (Luxemburg 1922 [RLR: 305]). Active participation in public
life required guaranteeing general elections, freedom of the press and
assembly, and an uncensored exchange of opinions without which public
life "gradually falls asleep" and only buraucracy is kept
alive.



While remaining sensitive to the historical circumstances that
constrained the Bolsheviks (war, the pressure from the outside, the
difficulties in the development of the working class movement in
Russia, and the infancy of its democratic institutions), Luxemburg was
one of the first Marxist theorists to highlight the importance of
combining the struggle for socialism with that for democracy, and to
warn against the dangers of divorcing the two. The history of
socialist states in the 20th century has proved her
right. The concentration of power in the hands of a narrow elite of
party officials, the lack of transparency and accountability of
institutions, their progressive isolation from the demands of the
people, ultimately led to their demise. The ongoing importance of
Luxemburg's writings on the Bolshevik revolution lies not so
much in her commentary on a historical experiment of which she always
doubted the capacity to survive historical constraints. It consists in
what they tell us about the ethics of revolution and the difficulties
of constructing a movement of the oppressed which must realise freedom
in circumstances in which it may lack the historical maturity,
material and epistemic means that the maintenance of the status quo
makes available.


## 6. Women's emancipation




Historically interpreted as a Marxist theorist at best indifferent to
the question of women's emancipation, recent scholarship has
been more nuanced in their assessments of Luxemburg's
contribution to feminism (Dunayevskaya 1981; Ettinger 1987; Haug
2007). As with the case of national self-determination, her position
on gender issues is more sophisticated than a simplified reading of
her texts affords. It is well known that Luxemburg often rejected
calls from her colleagues in the Second International to be
exclusively involved with what they called the "women
question". However, as many of her articles, political
interventions and letters make clear, Luxemburg was a fierce champion
of women's rights and of the contribution that advocacy for
women representation made to socialist emancipation more
generally. What she did reject is the kind of tokenistic feminism
which limited itself to the suffrage campaign and isolated the
question of female emancipation from the critique of capitalism. As
she put it, bourgeois women "who act like lionessess in the
struggle against 'male prerogatives' ... are nothing
but co-consumers of the surplus value their men extort from the
proletariat". These "parasites of the parasites of the
social body", she wrote "are usually even more rabid and
cruel in defending their 'right' to a parasite's
life than the direct agents of class rule and exploitation"
(Luxemburg 1902 [RLR: 240]).




Like her colleagues Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai who were
actively contributing to the development of socialist feminism,
Luxemburg also believed that under capitalism women were doubly
oppressed: in the family and in the workplace. Like them, she did not
think that conflicts over gender could be reduced to the antagonism
between men and women but argued that they have deeper roots in in a
capitalist system where only paid labour is considered productive. In
this she could be seen as an early pioneer of social reproduction
theory, offering an analysis of capital accumulation in which the
commodification of domestic labour is a crucial step in the
progressive expansion of capitalist relations to non-capitalist realms
such as the household (Cakardic 2017).




While Luxemburg did not make this argument directly, her defence of
women's rights was coupled with a harsh critique of the
capitalist system which viewed domestic labour, i.e. the labour
traditionally performed by working women as unproductive, and in which
proletarian women lacked even the basic political rights to support
their calls to end economic exploitation. This is why, when Belgian
social democrats agreed to an alliance with the liberal party which
led them to abandon the demand to give votes to women, Luxemburg
condemned the agreement in the harshest terms. She insisted that women
suffrage would not only improve democratic representation in general
but also "clear out the suffocating air of the current,
philistine, family life that rubs itself off so unmistakably, even on
our Party members, workers and leaders alike" (Luxemburg 1902
[RLR: 236]). 




Yet Luxemburg's arguments in support of women representation
were never confined to a demand for abstract legal recognition in
liberal parliamentary democracies. She was vividly aware that the few
privileges extended to Western feminist campaigners might come at the
price of the ongoing exploitation of women in other parts of the
world. In an article entitled "Proletarian Women", she
wrote movingly about the struggles of women in German Africa where
"the bones of defenseless Herero women are bleaching in the
sun" and about "the high cliffs of Putumayo" where
"the death cries of martyred Indian women, ignored by the world,
fade away in the rubber plantations of the international
capitalists" (Luxemburg 1914 [RLR: 245]). In this sense,
Luxemburg's calls to advance women's struggle, were part
of her more general argument that the demand for social rights
obtained through parliamentary representation ought to be part of a
more radical critique of capitalism where the key is access to
political power and a profound transformation of both the economic and
the political structures of society. Within existing capitalist
institutions, she insisted, there could be no true gender and racial
emancipation. The only secure foundation for the rights of women, she
argued, was for them to join the social democratic movement where they
could affirm their equality through mass orgnisation and protest
alongside men, and where they could shake the pillars of the existing
legal order before it grants them "the illusion of ...
rights" (Luxemburg 1914 [RLR: 244]).


## 7. Influence and legacy




Rosa Luxemburg's ideas are still relevant today because they
belong to a tradition of socialist thinking whose main concern is with
freedom, its development in the course of global history, the
obstacles to its realisation, and the different types of oppression
that capitalist society entrenches, enables or fails to
abolish. Luxemburg's analysis of freedom as a philosophical
concept is never explicitly brought out in her writings, but often
appears embedded in a notion of historical agency - both
individual and collective - which shares the humanism of
classical Marxism. Socialism, Luxemburg argued, "is the first
popular movement in the world that has set itself a goal and has
established in the social life of a human being a conscious thought, a
definite plan, the free will of mankind" (Luxemburg 1915 [RLR:
320]).




For her, as for Marx and others before him, human beings have a unique
moral authority grounded on freedom which provides the basis for a
radical critique of existing capitalist institutions as well as the
impetus to struggle for a genuinly free society. Capitalism hinders
freedom because it establishes global patterns of domination and
oppression which sacrifice the freedom of many to the wellbeing of a
few. Crucially for Luxemburg though, freedom is not simply an
end-state, a condition to aspire to at the end of a journey of
political emancipation; it is also actively practiced when those who
suffer from injustice express their will through forms of political
activism that play an educating role. In this sense, the process of
political emancipation must be self-guided rather than directed by
others because the experience accumulated through political practice
serves as a learning platform in which collective freedom, before
being institutionalised externally through political and legal
mechanisms, is appropriated internally and exercised through social
activism.




While Luxemburg's writings are scattered
and sometimes difficult to read, this commitment to freedom provides
the moral and political compass with the help of which we can
understand her contribution to a range of questions: from the limits of
liberal parliamentarism to the value of self determination, from the
dynamics of global capital accumulation to the persistence of
imperialism, from the problem of political organisation to the issue of
revolutionary transition. Although like many Marxists of her
generation, Luxemburg was less interested in abstract theoretical
analysis and more in how to deploy that analysis as a tool for
political change, her reflections remain a crucial starting point to
develop critical thinking in at least three domains. Firstly, there is
the question of how to think about political power in the context of a
global capitalist structure facing continuous crisis, and where the
burdens of that crisis are distributed disproportionally on oppressed
groups of people whose different identities do not neatly overlap with
the boundaries between nation states. Luxemburg's remarks on
imperialism and capitalist accumulation offer a productive starting
point to think about social justice in a way that is historically
nuanced, sensitive to the development of global capitalism and
that escapes the methodological nationalist straightjacket that often
characterises liberal thinking on unequal development. The second is
the question of political organisation, the relevance of education, and
the costs of transition from one system of laws to another. Here
Luxemburg's analysis is useful to think about the ethics of
revolution and to orient the debate about how to learn from the trials
and failures of progressive movements of the past in a way that
combines radical commitments with awareness of the necessity of
compromise. Finally, her writings are crucial to alert us to different
forms of oppression that still afflict our world, and to think about
them in an intersectional way that brings together the concerns of
gender, race and class. They enable us to articulate a richer analysis
of the capitalist system which is genuinely inclusive of the history,
theory and practice of oppressed groups of people in different parts of
the globe and that tries to unify these concerns instead of isolating
them from each other. For all these reasons, and despite the unique,
tragic, circumstances in which she lived and died, Rosa Luxemburg is a
contemporary rather than a martyr.