The Essential Rosa Luxemburg

Reform or Revolution and The Mass Strike

Paperback

9788189654870

Language: English

194 pages

This new, authoritative introduction to Rosa Luxemburg’s two most important works presents the full text of Reform or Revolution and The Mass Strike, with explanatory notes, appendices, and introductions.

One of the most important Marxist thinkers and leaders of the twentieth century, Rosa Luxemburg is finding renewed interest among a new generation of activists and critics of global capitalism.

INR 595.00

Out of stock

SKU

LWB458

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

Helen Scott

Helen Scott is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Vermont where she teaches postcolonial literature and theory. She has published articles in numerous journals including Callaloo, International Socialist Review, Journal of Haitian Studies, and Postcolonial Text, and has contributed chapters to anthologies in postcolonial literature. Her book, Caribbean Women Writers and Globalization: Fictions of Independence, will be published by Ashgate in 2006.

Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg (5 March 1871 – 15 January 1919) was a Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist and revolutionary socialist of Polish-Jewish descent who became a naturalized German citizen. She was, successively, a member of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

In 1915, after the SPD supported German involvement in World War I, she and Karl Liebknecht co-founded the anti-war Spartakusbund ("Spartacus League"), which eventually became the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). During the German Revolution, she co-founded the newspaper Die Rote Fahne ("The Red Flag"), the central organ of the Spartacist movement.

She considered the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 a blunder, but supported it as events unfolded. With the crushing of the revolt by Friedrich Ebert's social democratic government and by the Freikorps (World War I veterans who banded together into right-wing paramilitary groups), Freikorps troops captured Luxemburg, Liebknecht and some of their supporters. Luxemburg was shot and her body thrown in the Landwehr Canal in Berlin.