The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg Volume III: Political Writings 1. On Revolution: 18971905

(Paperback)

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This collection is the first of three volumes of the Complete Works devoted to the central theme of Rosa Luxemburgs life and workrevolution. Spanning the years 1897 to the end of 1905, they contain speeches, articles, and essays on the strikes, protests, and political debates that culminated in the 1905 Russian Revolutionone of the most important social upheavals of modern times. Luxemburgs near-daily articles and reports during 1905 on the ongoing revolution (which comprises the bulk of this volume) shed new light on such issues as the relation of spontaneity and organization, the role of national minorities in social revolution, and the inseparability ofthe struggle for socialism from revolutionary democracy. We become witness to Luxemburgs effort to respond to the impulses, challenges, and ideas arising from a living revolutionary process, which in turn becomes the source of much of her subsequent political theorysuch as her writings on the mass strike, her strident internationalism, and her insistence that revolutionary struggle never take its eyes off of the need to transform the human personality. Virtually all of these writings appear in English for the first time (translated from both German and Polish) and many have only recently been identified as having been written by Luxemburg.

Reviews

The moment has clearly come for a return to Rosa Luxemburg. -- Jacqueline Rose * London Review of Books *
Praise for The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg:

Combining revolutionary fire, sharp polemics, biting irony, sparkling humour, broad historical vision, as well as profound humanity, intimate friendship and burning love, full of poetical images borrowed from Goethe, Mrike, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and other Romantics, these letters are an amazing testimony of the charm and fascination of her personality. -- Michael Lwy * Critique *
One of the most emotionally intelligent socialists in modern history, a radical of luminous dimension whose intellect is informed by sensibility, and whose largeness of spirit places her in the company of the truly impressive. -- Vivian Gornick * Nation *
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 * Atlantic *
Luxemburg's criticism of Marxism as dogma and her stress on consciousness exerted an influence on the women's liberation movement which emerged in the late '60s and early '70s. -- Sheila Rowbotham * Guardian *
Rosa goes on being our source of fresh water in thirsty times. -- Eduardo Galeano
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

Author Bio

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.