The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg Volume V

Political Writings 3, On Revolution 1910–1919

Author: Rosa Luxemburg, Helen C. Scott, Paul Le Blanc, Jacob Blumenfeld, Mathias Foit, Nicholas Gray, Henry Holland, Zachary King and Manuela Kölke

The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg Volume V

This volume is the first to contain all of Luxemburg's eloquent writings on the 1917 Russian and 1918-19 German Revolutions

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Summary

This volume is the first to contain all of Luxemburg's eloquent writings on the 1917 Russian and 1918-19 German Revolutions

Description

This volume is the first to contain all of Rosa Luxemburg's eloquent writings on the 1917 Russian and 1918-19 German revolutions. Also contained here are articles, essays, and manuscripts on the European socialist movement prior to World War I and on her efforts to rebuild the socialist movement on revolutionary foundations in its aftermath. Much of this material appears in English for the first time.

Luxemburg's contributions on revolutionary strategy and the transition to socialism reveal a profound commitment to radical democracy, which becomes evident as she elaborates on her lived experience with razor-sharp conceptualizations of the mass strike. Her democratic commitment is also highlighted in her deepening conflict with the bureaucratic conservatism afflicting the German Social Democratic Party. She is horrified yet, at the same time, grimly analytical while surveying the unfolding violence and brutality of World War I. Deeply inspired by Russia's 1917 upsurge, she is nonetheless compelled to analyze and criticize fatal limitations of the Russian Revolution. Swept up in the revolutionary chaos sweeping through Germany in 1918-19, which results in her own martyrdom, she gives voice on the eve of her assassination to the revolution's final testament: "I was, I am, I shall be."

Critic Reviews

Intrepid, incorruptible, passionate and gentle. Imagine as you read between the lines of what she wrote, the expression of her eyes. She loved workers and birds. She danced with a limp. Everything about her fascinates and rings true. One of the immortals John Berger
One cannot read the writings of Rosa Luxemburg, even at this distance, without an acute yet mournful awareness of what Perry Anderson once termed 'the history of possibility Christopher Hitchens

About the Author

Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) was a Polish-born Jewish revolutionary and one of the greatest theoretical minds of the European socialist movement. An activist in Germany and Poland, the author of numerous classic works, she participated in the founding of the German Communist Party and the Spartacist insurrection in Berlin in 1919. She was assassinated in January of that year and has become a hero of socialist, communist and feminist movements around the world.