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Rosa Luxemburg is an icon of the socialist movement who died a martyr’s death in 1919. But she was also a brilliant and highly original political thinker whose ideas about capitalism and how to oppose it are strikingly relevant to today’s world.
In 1905, revolt across the Russian Empire threatened to topple the tsar — but also prompted a formidable reactionary backlash. For Rosa Luxemburg, it showed the need for working-class leadership in the fight to democratize society.
Too much writing about Rosa Luxemburg nowadays focuses on her personal letters and relationships at the expense of her ideas. It’s good to humanize our heroes, but we risk belittling the significance of a revolutionary thinker whose understanding of socialism should be a touchstone for today’s left.
Rosa Luxemburg’s work The Accumulation of Capital described the havoc that capitalism wreaked upon what we now call the Global South. Today’s socialist and environmental activists can draw valuable insights from Luxemburg’s understanding of the world system.
A new edition of Rosa Luxemburg’s writings, most of which have never appeared in English before, gives us a unique perspective on her thought. Luxemburg believed that a socialist revolution would have to be democratic or else it would be doomed to failure.
On the 100th anniversary of her murder, Rosa Luxemburg’s incredible life provides us with a model — not necessarily of what to do, but of how to do it.
150 years since her birth, Rosa Luxemburg is often remembered more as a martyr than a theorist. But as a teacher at a socialist party school she taught worker-militants to see the world like a Marxist — nurturing the intellectual tools that would let them master their own fate.
One hundred and fifty years ago today, the Polish Marxist thinker and organizer Rosa Luxemburg was born. She is, without question, one of the towering figures in the entire history of the socialist movement.
On January 15, 1919, the leaders of the German revolution were murdered by far-right soldiers enraged by the rising socialist movement. The man who masterminded the killings was Waldemar Pabst — a fanatical nationalist officer whose paramilitaries became the rank and file for Nazism.
The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg reveal a revolutionary who was deeply committed and defiantly humane.
When Germany pledged to oppose South Africa’s genocide case against Israel, the Namibian government reminded German politicians of their state’s genocidal record in Africa. Rosa Luxemburg exposed the crimes of German colonialism while they were happening.
The revolutionary thought of Rosa Luxemburg continues to inform and inspire anticapitalist movements today.
Today marks 150 years since the birth of Polish-Jewish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. In this 1906 article, published by Jacobin in English for the first time, she drew on the ongoing revolution in the Russian Empire to explain the working class’s power to overthrow the capitalist order.
Rosa Luxemburg saw the fight for social reform as a vital means of mobilizing the oppressed. Yet only revolutionary transformation could make their victories permanent.
We shouldn't try to resurrect the social-democratic politics of the past. What we need is a socialist movement that pairs radical demands with mass, militant action.
Synthpop icon Molly Nilsson speaks about the future of creative pursuits in a neoliberal world, her hatred of pessimism, and her admiration for revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg.
It’s important to place the leading figures of Marxism in the context that shaped them. That context has to include the repressive state structures and extreme inequalities of Europe in the early 20th century, which made revolution seem inevitable.
Europe’s radical left has been bitterly divided over the question of European integration. But wishful thinking aside, the structures of the European Union can’t be used to achieve socialist goals. Sooner or later, any left government will have to confront and defy its economic straitjacket.
Microfinance and fintech have been sold as innovative solutions to poverty in the Global South. But for the most part, they’ve just enriched wealthy investors at the poor’s expense.
Despite his close relationship with Rosa Luxemburg, early KPD chairman Ernst Meyer is rarely remembered among the historic leaders of the German left. Yet his writing on “revolutionary Realpolitik” offers key insights for socialist strategy today.