For Rosa Luxemburg, civilization faced a choice: “socialism or barbarism.” But how to actually achieve socialism was the driving preoccupation of Luxemburg’s life. Economist, journalist, politician, and streetfighter, Luxemburg threw herself into the great debates that roiled the international Marxist movement. She was a vociferous critic of parliamentary reformism, developing instead a singularly powerful internationalist and mass participatory theory of socialist revolution centered on the mass strike. She debated Lenin on problems of political organization and was the first to warn against the authoritarian degeneration of Bolshevism. An acute political economist, she wrote what stands as the first major Marxist attempt to grapple with the centrality of imperialism to the global capitalist system, The Accumulation of Capital. Over two decades of intense political and theoretical activity, she earned the admiration of her allies, the begrudging respect of her adversaries, and the mortal hatred of her enemies (who murdered her in 1919). To this day, Rosa Luxemburg continues to inspire leftists all over the world. But her theoretical and political legacy is also haunted by the failure of the political project she championed. How can we understand Luxemburg’s theoretical and polemical work in the light of the collapse of socialist revolution and internationalism? Is Luxemburg’s revolutionary vision, encapsulated in her famous slogan, still plausible today, with liberal democracy under siege by the reactionary and neo-fascist far-Right?
In this course, we will read Luxemburg’s work against its immediate historical and political context: the imperialist build-up to World War I, the rise and fall of German Social Democracy and the Second International, and the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917. We will ask: What is Luxemburg’s account of imperialism and what are its implications for Marxist theorizing? How did Luxemburg understand the revolutionary politics of her day? What can her decades-long but ultimately failed efforts to steer the ship of German Social Democracy toward revolution tell us about the nature of mass socialist politics? What were Luxemburg’s blindspots and what do they reveal about the limits of Second International Marxism? And what remains alive in her work today? In tackling these questions, we will survey her entire body of work including but not limited to Reform or Revolution?, The Mass Strike, The Accumulation of Capital, The Junius Pamphlet and her extensive writings on Russia. We will supplement these readings with selected correspondence, news articles, pamphlets, and later scholarship as well as writings from her contemporaries and interlocutors including Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kausty, Rudolf Hilferding, Karl Liebknecht, Paul Levi, and Lenin. We will outline Luxemburg’s singular contributions to Marxist theory and socialist politics and consider their implications, resonances, and continued relevance for the twenty-first century.
