It is an understatement to suggest we are living in and through perilous times.  In the face of cataclysmic climate change, we observe a global political shift toward authoritarian and nativist politics; genocidal conflict, economic crises, and the on-going aftermath of a world-wide pandemic.  Capitalism as a social formation and a highly extractive process of production appears both deeply entrenched and highly precarious.  And in a historical moment when the extreme right appears to be consolidating its message and membership, we as Marxist-Humanists need to stay focussed on those humans who are responding, organizing, resisting and dissenting in ways that can appear spontaneous but also have seeds of organization that draw from a historical lineage that may not even be immediately apparent to those participants.

In this sub-report I touch on two key questions: 1) as Marxist-Humanists, what new work and analyses can inform our thinking; and 2) what directions in theory and practice might we pursue in light of the first question?  While all reports and sub-reports are pointing in the direction of these question, among others, my focus will largely be on Rosa Luxemburg and the Complete Works project as it is currently unfolding.  There is something of a renaissance occurring in regard to Rosa Luxemburg’s biography and writing.  Her popularity stems, I think, from a recognition that she holds relevance for our current inter-related social, economic, political and ecological crises. I suspect that it is also the case that the mystique around her– a tragic, violent death, and a life that was marked by imprisonment and sacrifice– continues a kind of romanticism around Luxemburg.  Regardless of why there is a growing interest in Luxemburg, I am somewhat dismayed by how infrequently Dunayevskaya’s work on Luxemburg is cited.[1]  Her 1981 book, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, stands as a significant “corrective” against those who had either dismissed Luxemburg’s theoretical work or focused entirely on her “Red Rosa” personae.  Dunayevskaya’s book was, in fact, the culmination of more than 40 years of engagement and critical thinking about Rosa Luxemburg’s work and its meaning for contemporary times.  If we are to take seriously Dunayevskaya’s development of Marxist-Humanism, we must also acknowledge Dunayevskaya’s interactions, critiques, and “lessons learned” from the post-Marx Marxists she identified as crucial.  One of the most straight-forward arguments that Dunayevskaya makes is that it is important that we not only state what it is that we are against, but clearly outline what it is that we are for. As people today desperately seek alternatives – often looking to the worst sources—this is a particularly timely reminder of a core responsibility for Marxist-Humanists.[2] With specific regard to Rosa Luxemburg, I highly recommend Dunayevskaya’s book– and if you have read it before, it never disappoints and retains a relevance that may not be expected for a work published in 1981, it is worth a re-read. What has always struck me about Dunayevskaya’s treatment of Luxemburg is that it arises from some of her earliest economic studies in the 1940s.[3]  Over nearly 40 years, Dunayevskaya kept thinking about Rosa Luxemburg and critiquing her ideas.  This was not some kind of strange obsession, but rather, a recognition that within Rosa Luxemburg’s work and activism was a whole world of “thinking differently”.

When Dunayevskaya outlined her reasons for taking up Luxemburg in the late 1970s it was threefold:

• To examine the question of spontaneity and organization
• To recover the “feminist” dimension in Luxemburg
• To understand the rise of the Third World and the imperative for a new society

Dunayevskaya was able to bring a clarity to what Leblanc and Scott call “semi-spontaneity”[4], observing that Luxemburg did not see the spontaneous actions of the working class as opposite to the efforts of organization by “the Party” but rather as a moment of critical learning and interaction WITH the working classes.  What was clear to Dunayevskaya when looking at spontaneity and organization through a dialectical lens informed by Marxist-Humanism, was something that bitterly divided Social Democracy and created a significant divide between Luxemburg and the leadership, particularly when it came to the tactic of the political mass strike. Dunayevskaya’s insight, arrived at through the dialectic is an important distinction for Marxist-Humanists.  It was not the case that Luxemburg was “partially” a spontaneist, but that spontaneity and organization are dialectically bound together. Luxemburg’s insight was that what appears as novel and spontaneous, has a history and a series of precursor events and consciousness-raising activities. While she understood that the masses would only move when ready, she urged her comrades to “be ready” – not to lead but to learn from and work with the masses. Following Luxemburg’s insights and Dunayevskaya’s treatment of spontaneity and organization necessarily rejects vanguardism and instead posits a relationship between “the Party” and the masses that is of mutual support rather than relying on top-down hierarchies. Not unrelatedly, Dunayevskaya highlighted the “… total disregard of the feminist dimension of Rosa Luxemburg by Marxists and non-Marxists alike calls for the record to be straightened… there is a need for today’s Women’s Liberation Movement to absorb Luxemburg’s revolutionary dimension, not for history’s sake but for their demands of the day, including that of autonomy”.[5] Further, in light of the 1974-75 financial crisis, she argued that “… the rise of the Third World … [and] the imperative for a totally new society on human foundations … far transcends any single decade’s preoccupation, or any single revolutionary force’s aspirations, be it Labor or Woman, Youth, or the Black Dimension”.[6]

What Dunayevskaya’s long engagement with Luxemburg reveals is the complexity of Luxemburg’s thought, but also her blind spots.  From Dunayevskaya’s reading of Luxemburg, these blind spots included a limited understanding or appreciation of the role of Hegel’s thought and philosophy, which can be somewhat accounted for given Luxemburg’s limited access to a full corpus of Marx’s work. It was also the case that Dunayevskaya did not agree with Luxemburg’s approach to the National Question. Moreover, she was highly critical of Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital insofar as she believed that Luxemburg had wrongly understood Marx’s model of accumulation and circulation, and that the corrective posed by Luxemburg relied on an underconsumptionist/effective demand analysis that fundamentally missed the core of Marx’s analysis of the mode of capitalistic production.  That said, Dunayevskaya appreciated the work for its boldness and for the final chapters which not only presciently analyzed the driving forces of imperialism (in both extractive and colonial expressions) but demonstrated an understanding of militarism and imperialism in a manner that was deeply human.  One can certainly wonder what further insights Dunayevskaya would have drawn from Luxemburg (or critiques she may have offered) had she had access to Luxemburg’s complete works.  This leads me back to the first question I posed: what new works and analysis do we now have access to and what can we anticipate in the future?

The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg in English

As has been reported at previous Conventions, Verso is publishing the Complete Works (CW hereafter).  Peter Hudis is the General Editor and has edited or co-edited four of the five volumes already published.  To date, Volumes 1 & 2 covered Luxemburg’s economic writings (a third volume on this thematic is now anticipated later in the series as a result of new work being identified), including a new translation of The Accumulation of Capital.  In his introduction to the inaugural volume, Hudis notes “…it makes sense to begin the Complete Works with the writings that contain her most detailed and analytically specific delineation of Marxian economics.  It is here where her brilliance, originality, and independence of intellect – as well as some of her misjudgements and limitations—are most readily visible”.[7]  Hudis goes on to say, and it is worth quoting:

No one can doubt that Luxemburg had a fiercely independent intellect and personality to the extent that she was not afraid to take issue with even her closest intellectual mentors.  As the entirety of her contribution is made available in the Complete Works, we will be in a better position to judge the validity and strength—as well as the possible weaknesses—of her overall contribution to the struggle for human liberation. Reading Luxemburg critically is undoubtedly what she herself would expect of us, as we try to grasp what the revolutionary critique of capital that she devoted herself to means for today.[8]

Volumes 3 – 5 are grouped under the rubric “Political Writings” and focus on Luxemburg’s writing on revolution.  Co-editors (with Hudis) of Volume 3, Pelz and Schultz write in their introduction to the volume:

Why begin her Political Writings with the theme “On Revolution”? Simply because there is little question that her distinctive concept of revolutionary emancipation is the red thread that defines her originality and contemporary relevance as a theoretician. Revolution, for Luxemburg, was not merely a tool to secure political power and implement social control. It instead represented a process by which working and oppressed peoples shape their destiny and regain their stature as self-determining subjects. All of her work—be it on spontaneity, organization, nationalism, or economics—was integral to a distinctive concept of revolution that is worth reconsidering today.[9]

Volume 3 covers the years 1898 – 1905, and here we find Luxemburg’s earliest thoughts on the 1905 Revolution in Russia.  One of the first pieces in 1905 warns of attempting to read a current uprising/revolution as a replication of history, she writes:

Above all, however, it would be totally wrong for the Social Democracy of Western Europe to see in the Russian upheaval merely a historical imitation of what has long since “come into existence” in Germany and France—especially if it expressed this view with a tasteless shaking of the head like [Joseph] Ben Akiba. In opposition to Hegel we can, with much greater justification, say that in history nothing repeats itself. The Russian Revolution, formally, is attempting to achieve for Russia what the February [1848] Revolution in France and the March [1848] revolutions in Germany and Austria did for Western and Central Europe half a century ago. Nevertheless [the Russian upheaval]—precisely because it is a seriously belated straggler of the European revolution—is of an entirely special type unto itself.[10]

Luxemburg here (and in future writings) defends the efforts of the Russians to realize a revolution – even if it only replicates a “weak” bourgeois constitutionalism in the end.  What becomes very evident as you work through her writings on the 1905 Revolution is that her attention is not, as is the case with the SPD, on the “backwardness” of the Russian proletariat (where such a proletariat even exists) but rather on how the revolutionaries are organizing and thinking the revolution.  This becomes more apparent in Volume 4 (1906 – 1909, co-edited by Hudis and Rein) where Luxemburg provides vibrant accounts of the peoples’ uprising and tactics, which she subsequently turns into the famous pamphlet on The Mass Strike (which is also a new translation).  As the Editors note in the introduction to the volume:

The mass strikes of the Russian Revolution, she held, constitute a new form that compels Social Democracy and the labor unions to rethink their relationship both to the masses and to each other. As against the prevailing notion in Germany that the Russian workers were “backward” because they lacked trade unions or legal political parties, she argued that the mass strike showed they were actually in advance of the “organized” German socialists. She sought to shake up the German party (and the Second International as a whole) from its staid reliance on legal forms of political action and parliamentarism by utilizing the militant tactics employed in Russia.[11]

Not only does Luxemburg exhort her Party and readers to learn from the Russian revolutionaries and the working classes, she is also learning, refining her understanding of how the seemingly spontaneous uprisings need to be both encouraged and meaningfully engaged by the Party.  For the leadership of the SPD, Luxemburg’s faith in “the East” was antithetical to their notion of how a successful revolution would be conducted.  Of course, Luxemburg is ultimately proven right when a successful revolution succeeds in taking state power in 1917. However, it is not coincidental that the writings in this volume also touch on democratic principles and the key provisions of a free and democratic society, setting the parameters for her critique of the Russian revolutionary leadership drafted in 1918.

Finally, Volume 5, which is the last volume “on revolution”, covers 1910 – 1919, the last year of her life.  Now the revolutionary experience has come full circle and lands back at the doorstep of German Social Democracy.  In this volume, we encounter a personally disenchanted but not defeated Rosa Luxemburg. Luxemburg opposed the war and completely rejected the SPD’s stance with regard to what she viewed as entirely an imperialist project.  Luxemburg spent much of the time covered in this volume incarcerated; however, she was actively following the Russian Revolution, of which she drafted her famous critique in 1918.  The years covered in this volume were busy and highly productive for Luxemburg and her attention was often turned to broader questions of social democracy and democratic practice, the economic fallout of imperialist war, and the formation of Spartacus and the German Revolution.  As the Editors note in this volume:

[Volume 5] contains her continued discussion of the mass strike, interventions in debates about Prussian suffrage, and defense of Liebknecht, who also faced persecution from the authorities without a murmur of protest from the SPD. Her words about her comrade resonate with Luxemburg’s own situation: ‘It is clear that the government and its henchmen are planning a judicial murder of Karl Liebknecht! The hated champion of socialism, the indomitable defender of the working class, is to be assassinated by his mortal enemies; removed from the public stage, the troublemaker is to disappear into oblivion!’ The bulk of the remaining materials collected here address the Russian Revolution, which she followed avidly while incarcerated, and the German Revolution, which released her from prison and absorbed all her energies in the final months of her life. Also included here are founding statements on the German Communist Party (KPD), which Luxemburg helped launch in 1918. Much of this was written anonymously and published illegally.[12]

Taken as a whole, Volumes 3 -5 delve more deeply into how a revolution unfolds; how the “Party” in “leading” fails to understand the working classes and even finds itself leading the counter-revolution.  Luxemburg’s observations and experiences of “real” revolution in 1905-06 cement her commitment to working class solidarity and provide a clear articulation what democratic practices should be in place even as the revolution is securing state power.  Of course, the broader context of these “local” revolutions are also ever present as war looms, the international fails, the largest social democratic Party (the German SPD) falls to shambles.  The Rosa Luxemburg in these volumes is also revealed as a human being with all the potential and foibles that define our humanity – she is subjected to petty-chauvinism, imprisoned, and inhuman demands are made of her physical and intellectual person.  Luxemburg is far from a perfect person, saint or martyr.  These volumes take us to the revolutionary crucible, revealing the depth of challenge and the real consequences of revolutionary activity that is fundamentally and irrevocably challenging the capitalist, imperialist and patriarchal order.

Given a conservative estimate that nearly 80% of Luxemburg’s works are unknown in English translation – and that a significant body of her Polish writings are only now being recovered, we can only expect our knowledge of Rosa Luxemburg to grow in the future.  Currently, Volume 6 is being edited (co-editors Čakardić, Rein and Turner) and publication is anticipated in 2025 and nearly all the materials for Volume 7 have been collected and much of it translated.  Volume 6 will be the first volume under the new rubric, “Debates on Revolutionary Strategy and Organization”.  The Editorial Board of the CW anticipates 3 volumes under this rubric, though thematic, each volume will continue to be organized chronologically.  On a further exciting note, the Editorial Board has also decided to pursue a large grant to fund a Volume entitled “On Culture, Culture Wars, and Colonialism”.  This volume will cover 1896 – 1918 and will have a significant section of personal correpondence.  Perhaps one of the most important aspects of this volume is that it will contain about 37 articles from Gazeta Ludowa (Peoples’ Paper), published in 1904.  The Gazeta Ludowa was published twice-weekly and the articles were written by Rosa Luxemburg, though without attribution.  These are typically shorter pieces that address a myriad of global events, women’s emancipation, labour practices, the violence that attends colonialism, the Dreyfus trial and the resistance of oppressed peoples outside of the European working class. The articles in Gazeta Ludowa also allow us to see in “real time” Luxemburg’s opposition to the genocide in southwestern Africa. Moreover, her opposition is not obscured in a dense academic article, but rather, is shared with the Polish workers from the vantage point of a global solidarity among the oppressed.[13]

In light of today’s so-called “culture wars” this volume will be a departure from how Luxemburg’s work is often conceived and will introduce new content translated from Polish that has not previously been available.  The discovery of the Gazeta Ludowa articles also highlights one of the on-going complexities of creating a CW – that is the potential discovery of new material AFTER a particular volume has been published.  As this has already occurred, it is the commitment of the Editorial Board to ensure that the material is included in the next published volume as an Appendix (and such an Appendix exists in Volume 5, for example).

Currently, the estimate is that the CW will span 17 volumes and offer the most complete record of Luxemburg’s writing and correspondence.  This is not a project that will quickly be completed.  While the Editorial Board works toward completing a volume per year, there are considerable restrictions on publishing more than a single volume in a calendar year – not least of which is financial resources.  However, even if the pace were to accelerate, we are facing at least 10 years before the full project can be realized.  To see it through will not only take the dedication of the Editorial Board, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, and the publisher, but it will also require the sustained interest and engagement of those of us who value Rosa Luxemburg as a Marxist thinker who remains relevant, thought-provoking, and an important voice as we think through alternatives to value production while carefully avoiding the errors of movements, parties, and even great thinkers who came before us.

Where do we go from here?

In 2021, feminist theorists Drucilla Cornell[14] and Jane Anna Gordon published an edited book entitled Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg.[15] In the Editors’ introduction, they explained that “Creolizing as an approach to political theory draws insight and orientation from creolizing processes in and beyond the Caribbean… combined in ways that were unpredictable and surprising, yet recognizable … [it] takes two primary forms … historical and reconstructive… stages conversations …  [and] is not undertaken randomly.  Having in hand the five volumes of the CW works offers us an opportunity to think historically (what did Rosa Luxemburg actually write; what was her practice?) AND reconstructively (what insights, lessons, theoretical breakthroughs or impasses does this new material afford?).  What new conversations might we imagine?  For example, I began this sub-report by noting that Raya Dunayevskaya had a long conversation with Rosa Luxemburg that began in the early 1940s and lasted until Dunayevskaya’s unexpected death in 1987.  What began as a very critical “discussion” around Rosa Luxemburg’s theoretical failures in the Accumulation of Capital and what Dunayevskaya viewed as a mistaken position on the National Question, ended with a focus on spontaneity and organization and a recognition of women’s liberation as “force and reason”.

As we continue to move through these “perilous” times, I see emerging a conversation that looks to Luxemburg for a historical understanding of imperialism, strategy and tactics, and recognizes in Luxemburg a deep humanity that sees the damage done to individuals, people, and the environment.  This is a conversation that can inform how we view the resistance to capitalism as it emerges among a variety of new social actors rather than the traditional working class.  I hear Dunayevskaya’s voice here, too, pushing Luxemburg and pushing us toward the Absolute, an understanding of a wholeness that must inform a new society.

[1] Internationally known feminist, Frigga Haug, is a notable exception.  Professor Haug’s book (in German), Rosa Luxemburg und die Kunst der Politik (2002), includes her introduction to the German edition of Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution and we are anticipating an English edition in the near future.

[2] For an elaboration on this point, see Peter Hudis, 2024 Report to the IMHO Convention.

[3] See, “Luxemburg’s Theory of Accumulation. How it Differed with Marx and Lenin” (1945-6), https://rayadunayevskaya.org/ArchivePDFs/436.pdf.

[4] See, “Introduction: Rosa Luxemburg and the Marxist Tradition” by Helen C. Scott and Paul Le Blanc” in The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 5, Political Writings 3: On Revolution—1910-1919, 2024, pg 7(epub) and throughout.

[5] Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, University of Illinois Press, 1991, introduction, pg ix.

[6] Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, University of Illinois Press, 1991, introduction, pg x.

[7] Peter Hudis, “Introduction: The Multidimensionality of Rosa Luxemburg” in The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 1, Economic Writings 1, pg 4 (epub version).

[8] Peter Hudis, “Introduction: The Multidimensionality of Rosa Luxemburg” in The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 1, Economic Writings 1, pg 6 (epub version).

[9] Peter Hudis, Axel Fair-Schulz, and William A. Pelz (eds), “Introduction by William A Pelz and Axel Fair-Schulz” in The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 3, Political Writings I: On Revolution—1897-1905, pg 7 (epub version).

[10] Rosa Luxemburg, “The Revolution in Russia [January 22, 1905]” in Peter Hudis, Axel Fair-Schulz, and William A. Pelz (eds) in The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 3, Political Writings I: On Revolution—1897-1905, (epub version).

[11] Peter Hudis and Sandra Rein (eds), “Introduction: Rosa Luxemburg’s Concept of Revolution” in The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 4, Political Writings 2: On Revolution—1906-1909, pg 6 (epub version).

[12] Helen C Scott and Paul Le Blanc (eds), “Editorial Foreword” in The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 5, Political Writings 3: On Revolution—1910-1919, pg 6 (epub version).

[13] For further discussion, see: Hudis, “Rosa Luxemburg Exposed the Colonial Genocide in Namibia”, Jacobin, February 6, 2024, https://jacobin.com/2024/02/rosa-luxemburg-namibia-genocide-imperialism-capitalism.

[14] Sadly, Drucilla Cornell passed away in 2022.

[15] Drucilla Cornell and Jane Anna Gordon (eds), Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg, Rowman and Littlefield, New York, 2021.