Table Of ContentThe Rosa Luxemburg Reader
The Rosa Luxemburg Reader
Edited by PETER HUDIS and KEVIN B. ANDERSON
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS New York
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson ............................ 7
PART o NE: Political Economy, Imperialism,
and Non-Western Societies
1. The Historical Conditions of Accumulation, from The Accumulation of Capital ... 32
2. The Dissolution of Primitive Communism: From the Ancient Germans
and the Incas to India, Russia, and Southern Africa, from Introduction
to Political Economy .............................................................. 71
3. Slavery .......................................................................... 111
4. Martinique ...................................................................... 123
PART TWO: The Politics of Revolution: Critique of Reformism,
Theory of the Mass Strike, Writings on Women
5. Social Reform or Revolution ..................................................... 128
6. The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions ....................... 168
7. Address to the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party .... 200
8. Theory and Practice ............................................................. 208
g. Writings on Women, 1902-14:
a) A Tactical Question .......................................................... 233
b) Address to the International Socialist Women's Conference .................. 236
c) Women's Suffrage and Class Struggle ......................................... 237
d) The Proletarian Woman ...................................................... 242
PART THREE: Spontaneity, Organization, and Democracy
in the Disputes with Lenin
10. Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy ......................... 248
11. Credo: On the State of Russian Social Democracy .............................. 266
12. The Russian Revolution ......................................................... 281
PART FOUR: From Opposition to World War
to the Actuality of Revolution
13. The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis in German Social Democracy .................. 312
14. Speeches and Letters on War and Revolution, 1918-19
a) The Beginning ............................................................... 342
b) The Socialization of Society .................................................. 346
c) What Does the Spartacus League Want? ...................................... 349
d) Our Program and the Political Situation ...................................... 357
e) Order Reigns in Berlin ....................................................... 373
PART FIVE: "Like a Clap of Thunder"
15. Selected Correspondence, 1899-1917 ........................................... 380
NOTES ............................................................................ 396
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ......................................................... 431
INDEX ............................................................................ 433
Introduction By Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson
On January 12, 2003, over 100,000 people attended a rally in the Berlin sub
urb of Friedrichsfelde to commemorate the life and legacy of Rosa Luxem
burg and Karl Liebknecht. It may come as a surprise that so many turned out
to commemorate these figures, who had been murdered by proto-fascist
forces eighty-four years earlier. Yet the turnout was not completely unexpect
ed, since it occurred in the midst of growing opposition around the world
to the new stage of military intervention signaled by the impending U.S.
invasion of Iraq. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were among the most impor
tant antimilitarist figures in European history, and it is a testament to their
enduring legacy that so many continue view them as a rallying point amid the
challenges of imperialist war and terrorism.
The legacy of Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) extends far beyond her contri
bution as an antimilitarist, however. Her life and work also speak to the search
for a liberating alternative to the globalization of capital. More than any other
Marxist of her generation, Luxemburg theorized capitalism's incessant drive
for self-expansion, focusing especially on its destructive impact upon the tech
nologically underdeveloped world. Her critique of capital's drive to destroy
non-capitalist environments and her fervent opposition to imperialist expan
sion has taken on new importance in light of the emergence of a new genera
tion of activists and thinkers opposed to globalized capital. At the same time,
her intense opposition to reformist compromise, bureaucratic intrigue, and
elitist organizational methods speaks to the search for an anticapitalist alterna
tive that avoids the repressive and hierarchical formations that have defined
radical movements and efforts to create socialist societies over the past hun
dred years. Her insistence on the need for revolutionary democracy after the
seizure of power addresses some of the major unanswered questions of our
time, such as: Is there an alternative to capitalism? Is it possible to stop global
capital's drive for self-expansion without reproducing the horrors of bureau
cracy and totalitarianism? Can humanity be free in an era defined by global
ized capitalism and terrorism? Finally, her position as a woman leader and
7
8 THE ROSA LUXEMBURG READER
theoretician in a largely male-dominated socialist movement has prompted
some new reflections on gender and revolution.
This Reader shows the full range of Luxemburg's contributions by includ
ing for the first time in one volume substantial extracts from both her economic
and political writings. Several key texts, here translated into English for the first
time, deal with 1) the impact of capitalist globalization on precapitalist commu
nal forms of social organization, 2) women's emancipation as an integral
dimension of socialist transformation, and 3) critiques of the hierarchical orga
nizational methods that have defined so much of the history of Marxism. Final
ly, our selections from her correspondence attempt to convey her humanism
and depth of vision. As a whole, this Reader aims to provide a resource for
those trying to rethink the problems of radical social transformation today.
I
Rosa Luxemburg was one of the most original characters ever to participate
in the socialist movement. Born on March 5, 1871, to a Jewish family in
Zamosc, in the Russian-occupied part of Poland, she joined the revolution
ary movement as a teenager, becoming active with Proletariat, one of the first
organizations of Polish Marxists. She was smuggled out of Poland in 1889
when the group was crushed by government forces. She attended the Univer
sity of Zurich from 1889 to 1897, where she wrote a doctoral dissertation enti
tled The Industrial Development of Poland. Her activity in Polish
revolutionary emigre circles in Switzerland and France in the early and mid-
189os already displayed the characteristics of political independence and
theoretical assertiveness for which she later became renowned. In 1893 she
attended the Third Congress of the Second International in Zurich, where
she encountered such luminaries as Frederick Engels and Georgi Plekhanov,
the founder of Russian Marxism. She argued against national self-determina
tion for Poland, insisting instead on "strict" proletarian internationalism-a
position that placed her in direct opposition to the most prominent socialist
figures of the time, as well as to Marx's own writings on Poland.
It was also in Zurich, in 1890, that Luxemburg met the Polish revolution
ary Leo Jogiches (1867-1919), who became her comrade and lover for the
next seventeen years, and remained a close colleague until the end of her life.
Jogiches, who joined the socialist movement in Vilna in 1885, was an out
standing strategist and organizer in the Polish, the Russian, and later the Ger
man, revolutionary movements. He worked closely with Luxemburg on
INTRODUCTION 9
many fronts, from offering constructive commentary on drafts of her articles
and essays to propagating their ideas through tireless behind-the-scenes
organizational work in the revolutionary underground. As the Luxemburg
scholar Felix Tych has noted, the importance ofjogiches' contributions have
tended to be underestimated, in part because he published little under his
own name.1 Yet he too was an original character. Luxemburg's close friend,
the socialist feminist Clara Zetkin, once noted that Jogiches "was one of
those very masculine personalities-an extremely rare phenomenon these
days-who can tolerate a great female personality."2 The passionate and
stormy relationship between Luxemburg andjogiches, both during and after
their period of intimacy, reveals much about Luxemburg as woman, as
thinker, and as revolutionary. As she once noted, "I cleave to the idea that a
woman's character doesn't show itself when love begins, but when it ends.":l
Luxemburg's independent character came fully to the fore upon her move
to Germany in 1898, where she became active in the German Social Democ
ratic Party (SPD), then the largest socialist organization in the world. As a
Polish-Jewish woman, she encountered considerable resentment and oppo
sition from many party leaders, who referred to her in terms of a "guest who
comes to us and spits in our parlor."4 Undeterred by such obstacles, she
plunged directly into one of the most important disputes of the day, over
Eduard Bernstein's effort to "revise" Marxism.
At the time Bernstein was one of the leading figures in Marxism; Engels had
designated him as his literary executor. It therefore came as a shock to see Bern
stein argue in a series of articles in 1896-98 that the central theses of Marx's
work were now out of date. Bernstein wrote that Marx's predictions about the
inevitable breakdown and collapse of capitalism were no longer borne out by
experience, as seen in the decreasing frequency of economic crises. He argued
that the formation of the credit system, trusts, and monopolies showed that the
"anarchy" of the capitalist market was being overcome and that capitalism was
moving on its own towards "socialized" production. Bernstein also contended
that the ability of trade unions to obtain higher wages would eventually sup
press the rate of profit to the point where capitalist exploitation would come to
an end without the need for a social revolution. He based his views on political
as much as economic considerations. Bernstein argued that the growing power
of Social Democracy, with the SPD having become a mass party with millions
of members and supporters, showed that the capitalist order was capable of
reform through legal and parliamentary means. He concluded, "For me the
movement is everything, the goal is nothing."
