What to Learn from Luxemburg and Fanon for Revolutionary Organizing Today — Alex Adamson

In order to be socialist revolutionaries, or anti-capitalists of any kind, Rosa Luxemburg and Frantz Fanon made it clear that anti-imperialism and anti-colonial struggle must be a central part  of our organizing, regardless of our geographical or social location. Both Luxemburg and Fanon stood by the principle of internationalism and they both critiqued essentialisms and narrow nationalisms as hindrances for internationalist struggle against capitalist imperialism. Both revolutionaries offer us models for what it looks like to commit class suicide, rejecting the pull of bourgeois comfortability under conditions of authoritarianism and fascist violence. Both revolutionaries also were committed to a democratic mass politics. They both saw the masses as theoreticians and strategists from whom political parties and leaders must learn and follow or otherwise be in peril.

Luxemburg spent years in prison because of her anti-imperialist organizing against the social imperialists of the SPD majority. She wrote some of the most trenchant affirmations and most trenchant critiques of the Bolshevik revolution and was eventually assassinated because of her role in organizing communists against reactionary reformism that she knew would lead to fascism.

Fanon left us the gift of his 1956 resignation letter from his position in a colonial psychiatric hospital in Algeria. Fanon came to the conclusion that he needed to join the FLN and more directly aid the Algerian national liberation struggle, which he couldn’t do from his position as a psychiatrist who’s job was to help colonized people mentally cope and find ways to assimilate into conditions of ‘absolute depersonalization’. Fanon reached the conclusion that the irrationality of colonialism necessitated severe mental health crises and as such was a sign that colonial society was incurably sick must be totally replaced, not reformed. As Fanon wrote in his resignation letter, “there comes a time when silence becomes dishonesty…the decision I have reached is that I cannot continue to bear a responsibility at no matter what cost, on the false pretext that there is nothing else to be done.”[1]

And yet, both Fanon and Luxemburg made some serious mistakes with respect to organizational strategies for anti-imperialist struggle. These mistakes in judgment came with serious consequences. It can be hard to dwell in the shortcomings of revolutionaries we have found most inspiring and critical for our self-development. But as revolutionary dialecticians and materialists, we must learn as much from our revolutionary ancestors’ mistakes as from their successes. I offer these ruminations with the hope of steering us against easy sectarian answers to questions of anti-imperialist organizational strategy. Each situation must be studied on its own terms and with an understanding of a whole host of social, political, economic, national and international dynamics. Basing our anti-imperialist strategies and solidarity work on idealist abstractions only results in tragedies.

Something remarkable about both Luxemburg and Fanon was their ability to become essential theoreticians and revolutionaries in places they were not from—Luxemburg originally from Poland helping to lead the struggle in Germany, and Fanon originally from Martinique helping to lead the struggle in Algeria. Their effectiveness as theorists and organizers lay in their commitment to fighting and studying the material conditions of wherever they stood. Yet, the most intransigent hurdle to any proper investigation is in being certain that you already understand something completely. Investigation is only possible if you can acknowledge there is something you don’t already know or understand, or in other words in the spirit of Socrates: you have to know that you don’t know. For good reasons, we tend to think we know best what we see as closest to us. Yet our greatest strengths can become our weakest points if we take them for granted.

This mistake for Luxemburg played out in her abstract position against any struggle for an independent Poland. However, she opposed the strategy of national liberation not because she was a reactionary who loved imperialist control over Poland, but because she wrote a dissertation on the economy of Poland and came to the conclusion that it’s economy was so interwoven with Russia and other capitalist countries given it’s long history of imperial exploitation, that capitalism in Poland could only be thwarted through integrated struggle with the proletariat of both Germany and Russia. Her certainty of this position, through her concrete economic studies, led her to further universalize her position against national liberation in Poland to extend to all national liberation struggles as not effective for combatting imperialism. While her position (thankfully) did not win the day, and the Bolsheviks went on to follow Lenin’s argument which make distinctions between reactionary and progressive struggles for national liberation, Lenin still considered Luxemburg and her close diasporic Polish comrades as the more of viable the political parties in Poland.

The Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) was Luxemburg’s party whose leadership was nearly all in the diaspora and not present on the ground in Poland. They took a hard stand against national self-determination despite the demand for it by masses of workers in Poland—having first hand on-going experience suffering various imperialisms. A critical mass of Polish workers demanded self-determination as the baseline for other forms of economic and social change.[2] And yet, writing from prison in Germany after many years of not being in Poland, Luxemburg was still considered by Lenin and his allies to be the authority for Bolshevik policy on Poland. Because of her, they consistently refused to recognize the other much larger Polish Socialist Party (PPS) that also supported the Bolshevik revolution, but whose party program included the demand for Polish self-determination. Lenin, who was not in principle against Polish self-determination, would still side with Luxemburg’s party despite its not really fitting the Bolshevik position on the national question. The PPS-Left wanted to support the Russian Revolution and organize internationally on its behalf, precisely because they were not narrow nationalists. Luxemburg’s abstract diatribes against the PPS eventually meant that an internationalist socialist position in Poland did not win out in organizing the masses, but instead the narrow nationalists achieved a monopoly on mass support and thus positioned themselves against the Bolsheviks. Eric Blanc has argued that the failure of Bolshevik policy and organizational strategy in both Poland and the Ukraine might have been decisive in the downfall of the struggle to internationalize the socialist revolution across more of Europe.

Now to take Fanon’s organizing into consideration, a critical organizational mistake was farther from home but also linked to his theoretical contributions getting the best of him. This had similarly tragic consequences, but this time in Angola. Angolan national liberation revolutionary and poet, Mário Pinto de Andrade, has written about Fanon’s abstract application of his experience of French colonialism and the strategies to overthrow it, as blinding him to understanding the material conditions of Portuguese colonialism and the material conditions of Angola versus Algeria. Fanon became close friends with another Angolan national liberation fighter Holden Roberto. But what he didn’t realize was that even at the time of their first meeting, Roberto was already on the payroll of the CIA, as his anti-communist position was attractive to the US’s present and future capitalist imperialist interests in Angola, particularly in its oil reserves. What drew Fanon to Roberto, against the avowedly Marxist revolutionaries like Andrade who would found People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), was that Roberto postured himself as representing the authentic revolutionary rural peasantry while the MPLA was more focused in urban cities like Luanda and less immediately ready to begin armed struggle.

In particular, Roberto attacked the MPLA for its multiracial composition and claimed it was only a party of ‘assimilados’ not the ‘authentic’ Black African. For example Agostinho Neto, who would later become president of independent Angola as head of the MPLA, was criticized as fundamentally compromised because he was married to a white woman, meanwhile the same argument could have been levied at Fanon. In a moment where support, both in training and in publicity, by the leadership of the FLN would either make or break a party in the eyes of the international anti-colonial movements for Third World liberation, Fanon recommended supporting Roberto’s organization against Andrade and the MPLA. Andrade has critiqued and characterized Fanon’s position as the following: “because [Fanon] thought that [Roberto’s] organization truly mobilized the peasants and us; we were a movement of assimilados, and the assimilados just had to join that movement, which was totally wrong point of view, schematic and wrong.”[3] Also behind Fanon’s choice was no doubt some indulgence in problematic Cold war geopolitical tropes, the Soviet Union would back the MPLA and Fanon was anti-Soviet Union, thus initially anti-MPLA. Hopefully we see here the problem of relying on geopolitical abstractions overlooking the concrete actions and material conditions on the ground. The MPLA was no puppet of the Soviet Union, just as Amílcar Cabral’s PAIGC was no Soviet puppet despite the propaganda of NATO countries that these national liberation struggles were illegitimate.

While eventually the FLN would come to support and train members of the MPLA, changing their position once the MPLA took up armed struggle, the tragic consequences of supporting Roberto’s reactionary party were already in the works. Roberto’s party would only increase their ability for reactionary and essentialist violence, which included mass murders of mixed race Africans as well as militants of the MPLA. While the MPLA during the period of the liberation struggle was known to be principled—not to steal from the masses, not to rape women, and not to carry out mass murders of civilians, Roberto’s party would become known for its ruthlessness, even kidnapping children to join its mercenary ranks funded by the CIA. The party continued its war against the MPLA even after independence. Meanwhile, the Communist Party of China would join white South Africa in supporting UNITA, Jonas Savimbi’s party, which also didn’t help for a consolidation of internationalist anti-imperialist forces in Angola. Roberto’s party, while getting Third World revolutionary credit because of the support of Fanon, Ghana’s Nkrumah, and Alegria’s FLN, in reality it was doing the work of US imperialism undermining Angola’s ability to forge a humanist and socialist path to self-determination. Mário Andrade, taking up Amílcar Cabral as a foil to Fanon on the question of how to create revolutionary culture, wrote the following questions for Fanon given his friendship and preference for Roberto’s party as it followed some sentiments in Wretched of the Earth:

A question remains: wouldn’t there be in Fanon’s discourse, following from his wager on the spontaneity of the rural masses, a mechanistic vision of the role of armed struggle in national liberation as the ‘automatic’ generator of a necessarily innovative cultural impulse? And to what extent could this new creativity, inspired in a particular tension in the framework limited by war, anticipate the future culture?

I leave you with these questions and offer consideration of these mistakes by Luxemburg and Fanon, not to short change the importance of their revolutionary contributions that are overall extremely prescient and correct—but rather to remind us that we can be “so right” and at the same time manage to be very wrong. While we shouldn’t let the possibility of making mistakes stop us from anti-imperialist organizing, let us remain humble and not take for granted even what might at first sight seem most clear. Let our anti-imperialist organizational strategies always be grounded in the material conditions of their contexts. Let us remain open to follow the analysis that emerges from unexpected uprisings, wildcat strikes, and other forms of creative mass resistance—not to say that these spontaneous actions automatically generate a new world, but they can provide a reality check for our current organizational strategies, especially with respect to anti-imperialist solidarity work.

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Rosa Luxemburg’s Writings on the Nama and Herero Revolt of 1904: Its Lessons for Today – by Peter Hudis

On January 13, 2024, the President of Namibia, Hage Geingob, issued a searing denunciation of the German government’s rejection of the International Court of Justice’s decision to charge Israel with genocide for its ethnic cleansing of Palestine. He stated, “Namibia rejects Germany’s support of the genocidal intent of the racist Israeli state against innocent civilians in Gaza. Germany committed the first genocide of the 20th century in 1904 to 1908, in which tens of thousands of innocent Namibians died in the most inhumane and brutal conditions.”[i]

Geingob was right to link Germany’s genocide against the Herero and Nama people with Israel’s genocide against Gaza and the West Bank (it was one of Geingob’s last acts in office; he died three weeks later). In 1904, German General Lotha von Troth crushed the anticolonial revolt of the Herero and Nama while declaring, “Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or without a gun or cattle, will be executed. I shall spare neither women nor children.” By 1908, 100,000 people—over 80 percent of their populace—had been killed. It became the template for German imperialism in the decades that followed, ultimately culminating in the Holocaust.[ii]

No Marxist of the time paid more attention to the Namibian genocide than Rosa Luxemburg. It has long been known that her magnum opus, The Acccumulation of Capital, published in 1913, attacked German imperialism for seeking “to crush, drive out, or exterminate Black Africans”;[iii] a year earlier, in “Proletarian Women,” she spoke of how “In the Kalahari Desert, the bones of defenseless Herero women are bleaching in the sun, hunted down by a band of German soldiers and subjected to a horrific death of hunger and thirst.”[iv] And in her Junius Pamphlet of 1915, she discussed, “The ‘civilized world’ that has stood calmly by when this same imperialism doomed tens of thousands of Hereros to destruction…when in Tripoli the Arabs were mowed down, with fire and swords, under the yoke of capital while their civilization and their homes were razed to the ground.”[v] But no one knew until very recently that she wrote dozens of articles in 1904 supporting the Herero and Nama revolt as it unfolded.

These writings appeared in the Polish-language newspaper Gazeta Ludowa, which she edited from 1902 to 1904. It was published in Poznan, a mainly Polish-speaking town of 120,000 that was then part of the German Empire. Although Luxemburg worked tirelessly on behalf of the Polish socialist movement, it is often passed over in English-language discussions of her work—and nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to her contributions to Gazeta Ludowa.

Luxemburg became editor of this weekly 4-page newspaper in 1902, as part of an effort to win Poles in Germany to the cause of revolutionary socialism. At her insistence, the German Social Democratic Party reluctantly provided funds to publish it—no mean feat, given that many of its leaders preferred to “Germanize” the Poles. In 1904 it became a twice-weekly, covering such topics as the Russo-Japanese War, developments in the international socialist movement, and German settlers seeking to “cleanse” Silesia and South Prussia of its Polish populace.

Those of us issuing The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg knew for some time that she wrote perhaps a dozen articles in Gazeta Ludowa (all published anonymously). But we didn’t know which ones, since it was hard to find any original copies. Thanks to the prodigious work of Jörn Scheutrumpf in Berlin, almost all of the issues have been found. And after careful analysis, it turns out that she composed not a dozen pieces but at least 80% of the articles in each issue between January and June 1904. She had many fewer colleagues in Poznan than she let on to the SPD, so most of the work of producing the paper fell on her shoulders.

But what really surprised us is that virtually every one of the 26 issues published in 1904 contained detailed articles and commentaries by her on anti-colonial revolts in southern Africa. The following headlines scream out: “Colonial Barbarism in Congo,” “Revolt of the Natives in Africa,” “Uprisings of the Blacks,” “A Herero Victory Against Germany,” “Uprisings in Africa are Growing,” “New Victims of German Colonialism,” etc.

One might ask, why expend so much time and energy on this? After all, she had a lot on her plate in 1904: she was a prolific writer for the German socialist press, intensively engaged in theoretical debates in the Second International, worked tirelessly to elect SPD candidates in parliamentary elections while running her underground party in Russian-occupied Poland, etc. It is hard to imagine how she found time to write almost the entire contents of a twice-weekly newspaper in a modest-sized provincial town of 120,000.

It isn’t that the Polish working class didn’t know about the evils of colonialism, since Poland had been partitioned between Prussia/Germany, Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire for over a hundred years. But it’s not as if the first thing Polish workers worried about when rising in the morning to work in the factories or mines were revolts by Black people in southern Africa. Her audience wasn’t sophisticated intellectuals or party hacks in Berlin. It was the Polish proletariat. And she felt it was imperative that they learn not just the source of their own oppression but of the oppression meted out by German imperialism against Africans.

Poznan may have been a provincial place, but Luxemburg wanted her Polish audience to be anything but provincial-minded. She wanted them to know about and solidarize with anticolonial struggles by people of color in lands with which they had had no apparent connection.

Namibia was colonized by Germany beginning in 1884. In the following years its policy of systematic land confiscation forced indigenous farmers off the land and dispossessed the pastoral Hereros of their cattle, the mainstay of their economy and way of life. In response, the Hereros launched a revolt on January 12, 1904, led by its charismatic leader Samuel Maharero, killing more than 100 German settlers in Okahandja. Five days later, Luxemburg reported in Gazeta Ludowa, “The uprising in the German colonies in Africa is taking an increasingly threatening turn. Several hundred warriors of [the Herero] tribe have gathered at Okahandja, and they are all well-armed with rifles and ammunition… The Hereros number 65,000 heads, so if the news is confirmed, it will not be an ‘uprising’ or ‘rebellion’ but a proper African war.”[vi]

Luxemburg consistently defended Africans against what she called the “barbarism” of the German settler-state. She wrote on March 24, 1904: “The reactionary press is trying to spread the most horrific stories, claiming that the Hereros kill defenseless women and children, and mistreat the fallen… In truth, the Hereros behave much more humanely than the Germans. Even the German missionaries now testify that the colonists could learn from the Africans in terms of morality. Thus, the [so-called] ‘savages’ of Africa are more civilized than the Germans.”[vii]

The revolt continued for several months, despite repeated attacks by the German military and white settlers. She wrote on March 31, “400 soldiers and officers were sent from Berlin and are now at sea, rushing to the African desert, where they will elevate the ‘authority of the German homeland’ by exterminating the natives. Meanwhile, in Owikokorero, infamous for the recent defeat of the German army in Africa… the Herero forces are entrenched in a strong, inaccessible position.”[viii] She applauded the successful ambush of German troops there on March 13.

Faced with these setbacks, the Kaiser sent General von Trotha along with 10,000 fresh troops to Namibia on June 11; he was already infamous for his brutal suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in China. Luxemburg discussed his imminent arrival on May 15, quoting at length a speech by August Bebel which denounced the war as “one which the Germans brought on themselves.”[ix] She summed up her view as follows: “In Africa the Germans order Blacks to be hunted to take away their soil and honor, after which their freedom, peace and livelihood are taken away. The farmers and workers from Pomerania, from Posen, from Bavaria, to whom no Black person has ever done anything bad, are now hunting down the poor Black people somewhere in the sandy desert of Africa, murdering, robbing and raping the women…. The mistreatment of soldiers in peacetime, the war crimes, the politics of military conquest—these are all just flowers and fruits of a single branch, of militarism, which grows on a single bush, that of the capitalist economy.”[x]

Luxemburg continued to report on events in Africa up to Gazeta Ludowa’s last issue on June 30, 1904. It included reports on anti-colonial revolts in South Africa and Cameroun and the destructive impact of Belgian imperialism in Congo. The publication ended when Luxemburg was sentenced to prison sentence for insulting the German Emperor.

Gazeta Ludowa never had a large readership—at its height it had 200 subscribers with a press run of 400. Nevertheless, this forgotten page of her political biography underlines the importance of opposing capitalism and imperialism wherever it occurs—including when very far from home.

That she did so is remarkable, given her opposition to calls for national self-determination on the grounds that only an industrial proletariat unified on class lines could achieve a transition to socialism. It was no less remarkable given the number of socialists at the time who supported imperialism, and even those who did not (and there were many) paid little or no attention to sub-Sahara Africa, as if Africa ended at the southern border of Egypt. Even Lenin, who did so much to promote struggles for national self-determination, referred to her discussion of sub-Sahara Africa in her Accumulation of Capital as “sensational, flashy, and empty.”[xi]

What Luxemburg expressed in her writings in Gazeta Ludowa, and which we can draw upon for our organizing today, is a universal vision of liberation that brooks no compromise with any power or tendency that fails to hear the cries of the oppressed, no matter how distant they may appear to our day-to-day concerns. As Frantz Fanon put it, freedom is indivisible: you cannot claim to truly oppose capitalism-imperialism without opposing all forms of colonialism, imperialism, and genocide, and solidarizing with those resisting it—whether it be Palestinians or Ukrainians, Bosnians or Native Americans, Sudanese or Uighurs. As Raya Dunauevskaya, the founder of Marxist-Humanism put it, without such a universal vision of liberation that opposes all forms of dehumanization, “activism spends itself in mere anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, without ever revealing what it is for.”[xii]

Hopefully, you will all have the chance studying these writings for yourself, once we get to publish the entirety of Luxemburg’s writings in Gazeta Ludowa in a forthcoming volume of The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg.

[1] Frantz Fanon, Towards the African Revolution (New York: Grove Press 1964), 54.

[2] For more the details of Polish socialist party politics, see Eric Blanc, Revolutionary Social Democracy.

[3] Mário Pinto de Andrade, “Mário Pinto de Andrade – An Interview” in The Revolution Will be a Poetic Act (Cambridge: Polity Press 2024), 182.

[i] See Donald Matthys, “Namibia Slams Germany’s Support of Israel Against Genocide,” Namibian, January 14, 2024, https://www.namibian.com.na/namibia-slams-germanys-support-of-israel-against-genocide-claim/

[ii] For an outstanding historical novel about the Namibian genocide, see Uwe Timm’s Morenga, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: New Directions, 2003). It was first published in Germany in 1978.

[iii] The Accumulation of Capital, in The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Vol. 2, eds. Peter Hudis and Paul Le Blanc (London and New York: Verso Books, 2015), p. 297.

[iv] “Proletarian Women,” in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, eds. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson (New York: Monthly Review Books), p. 244.

[v] Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis of Social Democracy, in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, eds. Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson (New York: Monthly Review Books), p. 339.

[vi] “Wiadomości kolonialne,” Gazeta Ludowa, No. 5, January 17, 1904.

[vii]  “Powstanie Herero,” Gazeta Ludowa, No. 24, March 24, 1904

[viii] “Przegląd polityczny: Powstania w Afryce,” Gazeta Ludowa, No. 26, March 31, 1904.

[ix] “Wiadomości z Parlamentu,” Gazeta Ludowa, No. 39, May 15, 1904.

[x] Gazeta Ludowa, No. 28, April 7, 1904, p. 1.

[xi] V.I. Lenin, “Comments Concerning Rosa Luxemburg’s Book, The Accumulation of Capital,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/apr/rl-acc-capital-notes.htm

[xii] Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (New Jersey: Humanities Books, 1981), p. 194.

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The people-centered anti-imperialist politics of Luxemburg and Fanon — by Ndindi Kitonga

As revolutionary philosophers, Fanon and Luxemburg offer us important theoretical tools that remain relevant to organizing for a new society. I’ll briefly discuss their dedication to on-the-ground anti-imperialist struggles, questions of organization, and their commitment to developing and practicing a living and emancipatory Marxism.

Revolutionary subjects of history

For both Fanon and Luxemburg, people are to be understood as active subjects and not prisoners of history, and that achieving socialism is a human endeavor that goes beyond overcoming private property relations or changing the nature of how we work.

Luxemburg and Fanon understood the revolutionary potential for human subjects beyond the traditional Marxist understanding of the day.  Luxemburg recognized the advanced revolutionary character of the 1905 uprising both in its peasant revolts and in its mass strikes by partially proletarianized Russian workers who were considered “backward” by the German socialist establishment of her time. She was heartened and further politicized by the vibrant movement, writing, “The role for which the peasantry had proved itself incapable became the historical task of the urban, industrial working class in Russia, and this class became the pillar of the movement for freedom and revolution. The untiring underground work of enlightenment performed by Russian Social Democracy brought about in a few years what a century of the most valiant revolts by the intelligentsia could not, namely the shaking of the foundations of the old stronghold of despotism.”[1]

Throughout Fanon’s work-life, he was committed to the anti-imperialist struggle of colonized and racialized subjects, joining in their efforts to free themselves, to reach for what he calls a “new humanism”. Fanon was interested in “stretching Marxism” as a way of understanding the particularities of colonial-capitalism. He also considers the peasantry and the urban lumpenproletariat as revolutionary subjects of colonial Algeria.

These insights would not have developed if Fanon had merely applied Marxist philosophy to his understanding of colonial relations. Instead, he looked at the situated lived experiences of human subjects and their struggles at that time to make his assertions. He reminds us that racism and colonial subjection must be fought both materially and psychically since epidermalization (the experience of having one’s identity reduced only to one’s skin color) is experienced both psychologically and economically, saying that, “genuine disalienation will have been achieved when things in the materialist sense have resumed their rightful place”.

This open understanding and development beyond dogmatic Marxism. is important. Thinkers like Fanon and Luxemburg encourage us out of the notion that present-day class society is a determined transitional stage to move through before attaining the absolute, a classless society. Issues of coloniality, race, and gender are important particulars that can not be abandoned. We do not move from the particulars to the universal in a linear march, assuming that these antagonisms will be addressed the day after the revolution.

The struggles against ICE, against police brutality, for racial justice, for indigenous sovereignty, and for Palestinian liberation might not appear to have obvious class character, but they are necessary for building socialism, especially if it is the type of socialism Luxemburg espouses. In the 1915 anti-war, anti-imperialist, and pro-working-class manifesto, the Junius Pamphlet, she writes, “Socialism is the first popular movement in world history that has set itself the goal of bringing human consciousness, and thereby free will, into play in the social actions of mankind.”[2] She goes on to eschew mechanistic Marxism, saying, “ The victory of socialism will not descend from heaven. It can only be won by a long chain of violent tests of strength between the old and the new powers. The international proletariat under the leadership of the Social Democrats will thereby learn to try to take its history into its own hands; instead of remaining a will-less football, it will take the tiller of social life and become the pilot to the goal of its own history.”[3]

Like Fanon, she is articulating a people-centered socialism that assumes an agentic, non-bureaucraticized role for those working to emancipate themselves not only from the clutches of capital but from dehumanization on every level.

The nation, anti-imperialism and international solidarity

Fanon famously defended struggles for national liberation and national consciousness-building. As a revolutionary humanist and good analyst, Fanon also understood that nation-building after colonization would not be without its stumbling blocks. Even after many African nations won their independence, there was much work to be done before a new society could be realized. To begin with, Africans who had acquired some intellectual and technological capital during colonization were not willing to betray their class interests for the collective whole. In some cases Freedom struggles that were fought under the banner of “socialism” were abandoned once the sober challenge of building nations that had suffered decades of resource depletion and underdevelopment emerged. And in most new nations, the ties with former colonizers would not/could not be easily severed as it might result in economic collapse. Fanon anticipates this phenomenon, noting that bourgeois leadership in newly independent nations does not in fact have the capital required to overcome the new nations’ problems, resulting in some of the aforementioned problems. Unfortunately, his words are practically prophetic. If national consciousness leads to incomplete freedom from colonial structures, unchecked, it can breed new forms of nationalism that only serve capital and its sergeants—and this is what happened, hence the Fanonian warning, “But if nationalism is not made explicit, if it is not enriched and deepened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and political needs, in other words into humanism, it leads up a blind alley.”

Luxemburg was an unwavering anti-imperialist and among the most attuned of her generation to the suffering of colonized persons. Luxemburg, however, does not defend the national project or explore positive aspects of nation-building over reactionary ones. Again in the Junius pamphlet, she proclaims, “to the socialist, no nation is free whose national existence is based upon the enslavement of another people, for to him colonial peoples, too, are human beings, and, as such, parts of the national state. International socialism recognises the right of free independent nations, with equal rights. But socialism alone can create such nations, and can bring self-determination of their peoples.”[4]

Unfortunately, Luxemburg’s analysis and insistence on internationalist working-class solidarity over (and not in concert) with even positive nationalisms misses the mark.

Nevertheless Luxemburg’s sentiments mirror what other socialists would need to address and resolve in coming decades. For instance, there were many contradictions and questions to work out concerning the new independent African states of the 1950s-70s that can not be explored here. Not all of the revolutionary left supported Africans’ quest for independence on nationalistic terms and instead asked the colonial subjects to abandon aspiration for national identity for the sake of international solidarity and a commitment to the workers of the world. Here Leninism (both as an ideology and a strategic program) found a hold in places in Africa partially because of the USSR and Eastern bloc support for Africans’ struggles for independence. The question of eschewing one’s national or local struggle for a collective international solidarity continues to plague the left. A question worth working out on the American left for our time would be, “what does critical international solidarity actually mean when human subjects are seeking liberation based on nationalistic terms?” especially in the light of the current movement for Palestinian liberation and indigenous sovereignty across both colonial and settler-colonial contexts.

Spontaneity, self-mobilization and organizing

For Luxemburg, spontaneity and organization are inexplicably and dialectically linked to each other. It is not a question of one or the other but the dialectic, or as Luxemburg scholar Sandra Rein interprets as“ a moment of critical learning and interaction WITH the working classes.”[5]

It is then up to us in organizations not to tail, not to assume top-down leadership, but to be ready with theory, organizational structures, proposed alternatives, our labor, love and capacity for when spontaneous revolts arise, so those moments remain opportunities to our movement. What appears to be spontaneous is imbued with lessons and insights of past movement-activities, consciousness-raising and previous organizational work. We must also move with a sense of urgency. Dunayevskaya’s Spontaneity and New Beginnings report was originally titled, “It’s Later, Always Later—except when spontaneity upsurges and you realize it is here and now, and you aren’t there and ready.”[6] Our current moment urges us to stay ready so we don’t have to get ready.

Fanon’s concern for the revolutionary organization/party transforming into the opposite post-revolution is guided by his persistent commitment to the peoples’ self-led emancipation and his understanding of how totalizing colonialism and imperialism can be. In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon is concerned with betrayal that comes with former revolutionaries turning into a new national bourgeois leadership class in so-called postcolonial contexts. He writes, “in certain regions the party is organized like a gang whose toughest member takes over the leadership. The leader’s ancestry and powers are readily mentioned, and in a knowing and slightly admiring tone it is quickly pointed out that he inspires awe in his close collaborators. In order to avoid these many pitfalls, a persistent battle has to be waged to prevent the party from becoming a compliant instrument in the hands of a leader. Leader comes from the English verb “to lead,” meaning “to drive” in French. The driver of people no longer exists today. People are no longer a herd and do not need to be driven. If the leader drives me I want him to know that at the same time I am driving him.”[7]

Both Fanon and Luxemburg confidently call out opportunism, careerism, co-optation, and backsliding that occur among the leadership class of the revolutionary party when some wins are gained.

Here I assert that the party or the organization is for the self-development, efficacy, and utilization of the people. Not the other way around or as Fanon affirms, “the party is an instrument in the hands of the people.”[8]

Luxemburg pushes back on SPD repeatedly with theoretical and grounded insights informing the party on their removal from the passions, insights, agendas, and concerns of the masses they’re supposed to be leading.

Of course, Luxemburg is known to have written, “the worst working class party is better than none,”[9] which denotes her commitment in the face of the ideological differences, disrespect, and chauvinism she faced. And yet she was not a dogmatic vanguardist.

Neither Fanon nor Luxemburg developed a theory of organization per se, but in their work is a call for our individual organizations to practice less sectarianism and more forbearance, sharpen our analysis, and decenter our egos so our formations can potentially be instruments in the hands of the people, theoretical learning centers and experimental containers towards their emancipation and not merely maintaining the organization or party for its own sake.

Closing

If Marxism is to be a breathing, living philosophy of emancipation, we should look to the scholarship, activism, philosophy, and praxis rooted in self-activity of the masses, dynamic class struggle, organizing, enduring critique and self-critique, and anti-imperialist democratic thought. Fanon and Luxemburg are two revolutionaries who embrace a liberatory, people-centered Marxism. They offer rich philosophical ground and examples from their own organizing lives that remain relevant for our current struggles against imperialism, colonialism, and the domination of capital.

[1] The Revolution in Russia (1905) https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1905/02/08.htm

[2] https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/ch01.htm

[3] https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/ch01.htm

[4] https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius,/

[5] Sandra Rein, “Rosa Luxemburg in Perilous Times”, IMHO Journal, Aug 13, 2024. https://imhojournal.org/articles/rosa-luxemburg-in-perilous-tim,es/ and Luxemburg Saw Reform as a Means and Revolution as the Goal

[6] Raya Dunayevskaya’s “Spontaneity and New Beginnings“, Perspectives Report to News & Letters Committee, 1977.

[7] Fanon, Franz. [1961] 2004. Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Richard Philox. New York: Grove Press.

[8] Fanon, Franz. [1961] 2004. Wretched of the Earth, trans. by Richard Philox. New York: Grove Press.

[9] Rosa Luxemburg, letter to Henriette Roland Holst (August 1911) in The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, 311.

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Based on presentations at the Socialism 2026 Conference in Chicago