Luxemburg, Rosa
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  1. The Accumulation of Capital 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1913
    Rosa Luxemburg's analysis of the inherent contradictions of capitalist accumulation.
  2. The Accumulation of Capital An Anti-Critique
    The Accumulation of Capital, or What the Epigones Have Made of Marx's Theory
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1915   Published: 1921
    Rosa Luxemburg's reply to the critics of her book The Accumulation of Capital. Originally written in 1915 while Luxemburg was interned in the women’s prison, Barnimstrasse, Berlin, and published after her death.
  3. The Acheron in Motion
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1918
    The healthy class instinct of the proletariat rebels against the schema of parliamentary cretinism. 'The liberation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself,' says the Communist Manifesto. And the'working class' is not a few hundred elected representatives who control society's destiny with speeches and rebuttals.
  4. An anti-clerical policy of Socialism
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1903
    According to Luxemburg, "the incessant guerrilla warfare waged for the last ten years against the priests is for French middle-class Republicans one of the best ways of turning away the attention of the working-class from social questions, and of weakening the class struggle."
  5. The Beginning
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1918
    Revolutions do not stand still. Their vital law is to advance rapidly, to outgrow themselves.
  6. A Duty of Honour
    Against Capital Punishment
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1918
    The existing penal system, which is permeated through and through with the brutal class spirit and barbarism of capitalism, must be extirpated root and branch.
  7. Either Or
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1916
    It is a question of either-or! Either we nakedly and shamelessly betray the International or we take the International in deadly seriousness and attempt to extend it into a firm stronghold, a bulwark, of the international socialist proletariat and of world peace.
  8. The Elections to the National Assembly
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1918
    The great confrontation between capital and labour will determine the course of future history and, in its final result, admits of no other decision than the destruction of capitalist rule and the triumph of socialism.
  9. Foreword to the Anthology: The Polish Question and the Socialist Movement
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1905
    Luxemburg argues that "the proletariat the Poland can and must fight for the defense of national identity as a cultural legacy, that has its own right to exist and flourish." But she maintains that "our national identity cannot be defended by national separatism; it can only be secured through the struggle to overthrow despotism" throughout the entire country [i.e. Russia, of which Poland was a part].
  10. House of Cards
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1919
    Again and again the revolution will bring to the fore the basic question: the general reckoning between labour and capital. And this reckoning is a world historical conflict between two mortal enemies which can be fought out only in a long power struggle, eye to eye, hand to hand.
  11. The Idea of May Day on the March
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1913
    The brilliant basic idea of May Day is the autonomous, immediate stepping forward of the proletarian masses, the political mass action of the millions of workers who otherwise are atomized by the barriers of the state in the day-to-day parliamentary affairs, who mostly can give expression to their own will only through the ballot, through the election of their representatives.
  12. In the Storm
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1904
    The war destroys the appearance which leads us to believe in peaceful social evolution; in the omnipotence and the untouchability of bourgeois legality; in national exclusivism; in the stability of political conditions; in the conscious direction of politics by these statesmen or parties.
  13. The Industrial Development of Poland
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1898
    First published in 1898, under the title Die Industrielle Entwicklung Polens.
  14. The Junius Pamphlet 
    The Crisis of Social Democracy
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1916
    The voting of war credits in August 1914 was a shattering moment in the life of individual socialists and of the socialist movement in Europe. Those who had worked for, and wholly believed in the ability of, organized labour to stand against war now saw the major social democratic parties of Germany, France, and England rush to the defense of their fatherlands. Worker solidarity had proved an impotent myth. Rosa Luxemburg had for years warned against the stultifying effects of the overly bureaucratized German Social Democratic Party and the anti-revolutionary tendencies of the trade unions that played such a large role in the party's policy decisions. She spent much of the war in jail, where she wrote and then smuggled this pamphlet. Published under the name "Junius," the pamphlet became the guiding statement for the International Group, which became the Spartacus League.
  15. Letters from Prison to Sophie Liebknecht
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1918
  16. Life of Korolenko
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1918
    Rosa Luxemburg wrote this article as a preface to her translation, from Russian into German, of Vladimir Korolenko’s autobiographical novel Istoriia Moego Sovremennika (A History of My Contemporary). She undertook this work during her imprisonment for socialist opposition to the imperialist war from 1915 to 1918. The preface was written July 1918 in Breslau Prison
  17. Marxist Theory and the Proletariat
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1903
    A sketch of Marxist theory.
  18. Mass Action
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1911
    No party executive in the world can replace the mass of the party's own energy, and an organisation of a million which, at a great time and in the face of great tasks, would want to complain that it did not have the right leaders would prove its own shortcomings, because it would prove it has not understood the historical essence itself of the proletarian class struggle that consists in the proletarian masses not needing "leaders" in a bourgeois sense, that they are themselves leaders.
  19. The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1906
    Luxemburg writes that "the mass strike in Russia [in 1905] has been realised not as means of evading the political struggle of the working-class, and especially of parliamentarism, not as a means of jumping suddenly into the social revolution by means of a theatrical coup, but as a means, firstly, of creating for the proletariat the conditions of the daily political struggle and especially of parliamentarism. The revolutionary struggle in Russia, in which mass strikes are the most important weapon, is, by the working people, and above all by the proletariat, conducted for those political rights and conditions whose necessity and importance in the struggle for the emancipation of the working-class Marx and Engels first pointed out, and in opposition to anarchism fought for with all their might in the International."
  20. The Militia and Militarism
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1899
    In militarism, the power and rule of both the capitalist state and the bourgeois class are crystallized; just as Social Democracy is the only party which opposes them in principle, so too, inversely, is the opposition in principle to militarism part of the nature of Social Democracy. To abandon the struggle against the military system amounts in fact to the same thing as renouncing the struggle against the present social order in general.
  21. The National Assembly
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1918
    Today it is not a question of democracy or dictatorship. The question that history has placed on the agenda is: bourgeois democracy or socialist democracy?
  22. Oh! How -- German is this Revolution!
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1918
    The existing penal system, breathing the spirit of brutal class-spirit and capitalist barbarism must be torn up by the roots. A fundamental system of prison-reform must be inaugurated immediately.
  23. The Old Mole
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1917
    The question of peace is in reality bound up with the unimpeded, radical development of the Russian Revolution. But the latter is in turn bound up with the parallel revolutionary struggles for peace on the part of the French, English, Italian and, especially, the German proletariat.
  24. On the Spartacus Programme 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1918
    For us the conquest of power will not be effected at one blow. It will be a progressive act, for we shall progressively occupy all the positions. of the capitalist state, defending tooth and nail each one that we seize.
  25. Opportunism and the art of the possible
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1898
    Opportunism is a political game which can be lost in two ways: not only basic principles but also practical success may be forfeited.
  26. Order Prevails in Berlin
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1919
    Rosa Luxemburg's last article, written just before she was murdered.
    She concludes with the words: "You foolish lackeys! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will 'rise up again, clashing its weapons,' and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing:
    I was, I am, I shall be!"
  27. Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1904
    Rosa Luxemburg's contribution to the debate within the Russian Social Democratic movement on party organization and democratic centralism. Luxemburg joins Trotsky in warning of the dangers inherent in centralism and argues against the concentration of power in a Central Committee. From a Socialist Revolutionary perspective Luxemburg puts forward compelling arguments against Lenin's conception of the revolutionary party.
  28. Our Program and the Political Situation
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1918
    Tthe text of a speech by Rosa Luxemburg to the Founding Congress of the Communist Party of Germany (Spartacus League), made on December 31, 1918.
  29. Peace Utopias
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1911
    What is our task in the question of peace? It does not consist merely in vigorously demonstrating at all times the love of peace of the Social Democrats; but first and foremost our task is to make clear to the masses of people the nature of militarism and sharply and clearly to bring out the differences in principle between the standpoint of the Social Democrats and that of the bourgeois peace enthusiasts.
  30. The Political Mass Strike 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1913
    If we want to prove ourselves worthy of the great coming events then we must not begin at the wrong end by attempting to make technical preparations for the mass strike. When the situation is ripe, the tactic of the mass strike will present itself. Let us not rack our brains about supporting it at the right time. What is necessary is that you watch the party press to ensure that it is your instrument and expresses your opinion and your mood. You must also see to it that our parliamentarians feel a mass pressing them from behind.
  31. Rebuilding the International
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1915
    The only real safeguard for peace depends on the resolution of the proletariat to remain faithful to its class politics and its international solidarity through all the storm of imperialism.
  32. The Revolution in Russia
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1905
  33. Riot and Revolution
    Speech by Rosa Luxemburg on Trial for Inciting to Riot
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1906
    On the twelfth of November 1906 Rosa Luxemburg was tried at the Criminal Court at Weimar for “inciting to the use of physical force” by the speech she contributed to the discussion on the General Strike at the annual Congress of the German Socialist Party held in 1905 at Jena.
  34. The Russian Revolution 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1918   Published: 1961
    The basic lesson of every great revolution, the law of its being, decrees: either the revolution must advance at a rapid, stormy, resolute tempo, break down all barriers with an iron hand and place its goals ever farther ahead, or it is quite soon thrown backward behind its feeble point of departure and suppressed by counter-revolution. To stand still, to mark time on one spot, to be contented with the first goal it happens to reach, is never possible in revolution. And he who tries to apply the home-made wisdom derived from parliamentary battles between frogs and mice to the field of revolutionary tactics only shows thereby that the very psychology and laws of existence of revolution are alien to him.
  35. The Russian tragedy
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1918
    There is only one solution to the tragedy in which Russia in caught up: an uprising at the rear of German imperialism, the German mass rising, which can signal the international revolution to put an end to this genocide.
  36. Selected Political Writings
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1972
  37. Social Democracy and Parliamentarism
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1904
    Parliamentarism is far from being an absolute product of democratic development, of the progress of the human species, and of such nice things. It is, rather, the historically determined form of the class rule of the bourgeoisie and – what is only the reverse of this rule – of its struggle against feudalism.
  38. Social Reform or Revolution 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1900   Published: 1908
    Rosa Luxemburg's attack on reformism.
  39. The Socialisation of Society
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1918
    A socialist society needs human beings from whom each one in his place, is full of passion and enthusiasm for the general well-being, full of self-sacrifice and sympathy for his fellow human beings, full of courage and tenacity in order to dare to attempt the most difficult.
  40. Socialism and The Churches
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1905
    Social-Democracy in no way fights against religious beliefs. On the contrary, it demands complete freedom of conscience for every individual and the widest possible toleration for every faith and every opinion. But, from the moment when the priests use the pulpit as a means of political struggle against the working classes, the workers must fight against the enemies of their rights and their liberation. For he who defends the exploiters and who helps to prolong this present regime of misery, he is the mortal enemy of the proletariat, whether he be in a cassock or in the uniform of the police.
  41. The Socialist Crisis in France
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1901
    "The Republic is in danger! That is why it was necessary for a socialist to become the bourgeois Minister of Commerce. The Republic is in danger! That is why the socialist had to remain in the cabinet even after the massacre of the striking workers on the Island of Martinique and in Chalon. The Republic is in danger! As a result, inquiries into the massacres had to be blocked, the parliamentary investigations of the horrors perpetrated in the colonies had to be discarded, and the amnesty law accepted."
  42. Stagnation and Progress of Marxism
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1903
    Only in proportion as our movement progresses, and demands the solution of new practical problems do we dip once more into the treasury of Marx's thought, in order to extract therefrom and to utilize new fragments of his doctrine. But since our movement, like all the campaigns of practical life, inclines to go on working in old ruts of thought, and to cling to principles after they have ceased to be valid, the theoretical utilization of the Marxist system proceed very slowly.
  43. Theory & Practice 
    A polemic against Comrade Kautsky's theory of the Mass Strike
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1910
    Rosa Luxemburg confronts Karl Kautsky on the crucial questions of the General Mass Strike and on the relationship of spontaneity to organization, as well as on the unity of theory and practice. This crucial 1910 debate in German Social Democracy led to Luxemburg's revolutionary break with Karl Kautsky and foreshadowed the collapse of the Second International at the outbreak of World War I.
  44. The Two Methods of Trade-Union Policy
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1907
    To be sure, revolutions and revolutionary struggles cannot be transplanted artificially, by means of ‘good intentions’, into a country. But the examples and lessons of a neighbouring revolutionary country can at least shake the belief that treading softly is the only method of achieving bliss. And well they should.
  45. What are the Leaders Doing?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1919
    It is a revolution with all its externally chaotic development, with its alternating ebb and flow, with momentary surges towards the seizure of power and equally momentary recessions of the revolutionary breakers. And the revolution is making its way step by step through all these apparent zig-zag movements and is marching forward.
  46. What Are the Origins of May Day?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1894
    As long as the struggle of the workers against the bourgeoisie and the ruling class continues, as long as all demands are not met, May Day will be the yearly expression of these demands. And, when better days dawn, when the working class of the world has won its deliverance then too humanity will probably celebrate May Day in honour of the bitter struggles and the many sufferings of the past.
  47. What Does the Spartacus League Want?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1918
    The proletarian revolution requires no terror for its aims; it hates and despises killing. It does not need these weapons because it does not combat individuals but institutions, because it does not enter the arena with naive illusions whose disappointment it would seek to revenge. It is not the desperate attempt of a minority to mold the world forcibly according to its ideal, but the action of the great massive millions of the people, destined to fulfill a historic mission and to transform historical necessity into reality.
  48. What is Economics?
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1916   Published: 1968
    An outline of economics from a Marxist perspective.
  49. What Now?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1912
    We must now give battle on all fronts in the Reichstag to the nationalistic clap-trap that dogged our every step in the election campaign and that lurks in militarism, naval policy, colonialism, threats of war and personal rule.
  50. Women's Suffrage and Class Struggle
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1912
    In any society, the degree of female emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation.