The Rosa Luxemburg Reader

edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, Monthly Review Press

Among the major Marxist thinkers of the period of the Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg stands out as one who speaks to our own time. Her legacy grows in relevance as the global character of the capitalist market becomes more apparent and the critique of bureaucratic power more widely accepted within the movement for human liberation.

The Rosa Luxemburg Reader will be the definitive one-volume collection of Luxemburg’s writings in English translation. Unlike previous publications of her work from the early 1970s, this volume includes substantial extracts from her major economic writings—above all, The Accumulation of Capital (1913)—and from her political writings, including Reform or Revolution (1898), the Junius Pamphlet (1916), and The Russian Revolution (1918).

The Reader also includes a number of important texts that have never before been published in English translation, including substantial extracts from her Introduction to Political Economy(1916), and a recently-discovered piece on slavery. With a substantial introduction assessing Luxemburg’s work in the light of recent research, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader will be an indispensable resource for scholarship and an inspiration for a new generation of activists.

Rosa Luxemburg travels into the twenty-first century like a great messenger bird, spanning continents, scanning history, to remind us that our present is not new but a continuation of a long human conflict changing only in intensity and scope. Her fiery critical intellect and ardent spirit are as vital for this time as in her own. With meticulous care, including valuable endnotes, editors Hudis and Anderson project her in the fullness of her being and thought.

—Adrienne Rich

Thanks, Rosa. You go 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

Rosa Luxemburg’s writings continue to be relevant … The Rosa Luxemburg Reader will aptly serve to introduce her perceptive commentaries to a whole new generation of social and political activists.

—Paul T. Vogel, The Midwest Book Review

Contents

Introduction by Peter Hudis and Kevin Anderson

Part I: Political Economy, Imperialism, and Non-Western Societies

1. The Historical Conditions of Accumulation, from The Accumulation of Capital
2. The Dissolution of Primitive Communism: From the Ancient Germans and the Incas to India, Russia, and Southern Africa, from Introduction to Political Economy
3. Slavery
4. Martinique

Part II: The Politics of Revolution: from the Critique of Reformism, Theory of the Mass Strike, Writings on Women

1. Social Reform and Revolution
2. The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and Trade Unions
3. Address to the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party
4. Theory and Practice
5. Writings on Women 1902-14
   • A Tactical Question
   • Address to the International Socialist Women’s Conference
   • Women’s Suffrage and Class Struggle
   • The Proletarian Woman

Part III: Spontaneity, Organization, and Democracy in the Disputes with Lenin

1. Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy
2. Credo: On the State of Russian Social Democracy
3. The Russian Revolution

Part IV: From Opposition to World War to the Actuality of Revolution

1. The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis in German Social Democracy
2. Speeches and Letters on War and Revolution, 1918-19
   • The Beginning
   • The Socialization of Society
   • What Does the Spartacus League Want?
   • Our Program and the Political Situation
   • Order Reigns in Berlin

Part V: “Like a Clap of Thunder”

1. Selected Correspondence, 1899-1917

Notes
Index

Peter Hudis is an organizer for the Chicago-based News & Letters collective, and co-editor of The Power of Negativity, a collection of Raya Dunayevskaya’s writings on dialectic. Kevin B. Anderson is professor of political science at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana, the author of Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism, and co-editor of the ongoing Collected Works of Marx and Engels.