SOURCE: "Red Rosa: Bread and Roses," in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. XVI, No. 2, Spring, 1975, pp. 373-86.

[Delany is an American-born Canadian author and educator. In the following essay, she comments on the revival of interest in Luxemburg's ideas and explores what made Luxemburg such a compelling and disturbing figure.]

Now Red Rosa is also gone,
Where she lies is quite unknown.
Because she told the poor the truth,
The rich have hunted her down.
           Bertolt Brecht, "Grabschrift 1919."

A woman, a Jew and a Pole—it sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. Rosa Luxemburg was all three, but as a revolutionary communist she transcends definition by sex, religion or nationality.

Franz Mehring, the colleague and first biographer of Marx, called Luxemburg "the best brain after Marx." When Lenin paid homage to Luxemburg in 1922, three years after her death at the hands of German police, he told "a good old Russian fable":

An eagle can sometimes fly lower than a chicken, but a chicken can never rise to the same heights as an eagle.… In spite of her mistakes, Rosa Luxemburg was and is an eagle, and not only will she be dear to the memory of Communists throughout the world, but her biography and the complete edition of her works … will be a very useful lesson in the education of many generations of Communists.

Yet six years later, Communist Party stalwarts were denouncing Rosa Luxemburg's work as "opportunist deviation" and even as a "syphilis bacillus" infecting the German proletariat. During Stalin's regime she was linked with Leon Trotsky as a heretic and deviant from "official" Bolshevik doctrine. Today in East Germany Luxemburg's reputation has begun to revive in a limited way, though her antibureaucratic stance and uncompromising rejection of all opportunism still make party bureaucracies uncomfortable. Brecht's "Ballad of Red Rosa" does not appear in his official Collected Works.

In the west there has also been a recent revival of interest in Rosa Luxemburg. Several anthologies have appeared, many of her pamphlets are now available in new editions, and the important early biography by Paul Frolich has been reissued. Even this output is far from complete, for Luxemburg was an enormously prolific writer: of pamphlets, newspaper articles, theoretical works, speeches and letters. Much of this material remains unpublished or untranslated, and some was destroyed when Luxemburg's Berlin apartment was ransacked after her murder. Her major work has been taken up by a mixed audience of anarchists, surrealists, spontaneists, feminists, vanguard-party theoreticians, revolutionary groupuscules and disillusioned ex-leftists (I intend no equations here, nor any blanket evaluation). Obviously their motives differ, as consequently does their understanding of Luxemburg's contribution to Marxist theory. Luxemburg's work and her life are full of apparent paradox—like history itself, or like Marxist theory—and it's in part the inadequate understanding of such paradox that permits such a wide range of interpretation of her ideas. It isn't my purpose here to analyze Luxemburg's contribution to Marxist economics, and I am not convinced that it is primarily as an economist that she should be seen. As Luxemburg herself noted, the reader of her economic work must be

a master of national economy in general and of Marxism in particular, and that to the nth degree. And how many such mortals are there today? Not a half-dozen. My work is from this standpoint truly a luxury product and might just as well be printed on handmade paper.

Nonetheless I want to try to explore some of the meaning of this immensely powerful figure from our revolutionary past, and perhaps to suggest some of her importance for our revolutionary future.

She was born in 1871, the same year as Lenin and the year of the Paris Commune whose short life did so much to show the world revolutionary movement what proletarian democracy could and ought to be. Her family—like the families of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky—were cultured and of comfortable means, though far from wealthy. A star pupil in high school, Rosa was denied the traditional gold medal for excellence "because of her oppositional attitude toward authority." In 1889, when Rosa was 19, her involvement in Warsaw with the Proletariat Party and with the new Polish Workers' League was discovered by the Czarist police. It was an offense that carried the punishment of imprisonment or exile to Siberia; so, hidden under straw in a peasant's cart, Rosa Luxemburg left Poland. She escaped to Zurüch, a major center of intellectual life and of international socialist activity.

In Zurüch Luxemburg made enduring friends and enemies. Among her enemies was Georgii Plekhanov, leader of the Russian exile group and "grand old man" of the revolutionary movement abroad; for personal and political reasons Plekhanov was antagonistic to Luxemburg and her friends. And, most important, Luxemburg met Leo Jogiches, the young Polish revolutionary who was her lover for many years and her lifelong comrade in the Polish socialist movement.

The dissertation with which Rosa Luxemburg earned her doctorate was a study of the industrial development of Poland during the nineteenth century. It was a pioneering effort, still used by modern historians in the field, which became an important part of Luxemburg's argument against the claims of the Polish nationalist movement for independence from Russia. The dissertation demonstrated that Poland's economic growth depended on the Russian market, so that separation would lead to economic chaos. Further, the ideological emphasis on patriotic nationalism would divert the Polish proletariat from class struggle and the struggle for socialism, thus benefiting the bourgeoisie. Luxemburg's position, then, was that Polish communists should lend no support to the movement for national independence in Poland.

This stance was one of the mistakes that Lenin mentioned in his eulogy of Luxemburg, for the Bolsheviks consistently supported the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, while at the same time recognizing the reactionary nature of nationalism—"national egoism," in Lenin's phrase—and the equally retrograde influence of such mystical trends as pan-Islamism. Luxemburg's mistakes here were several. She confused support for national liberation with capitulation to nationalism. And, in her zeal to avoid the reformist mistake of limitation to democratic demands, she recoiled to the opposite (ultra-left) extreme of rejecting the democratic demand—rather than, as Lenin urged in his writings on the question, taking up the democratic demand for national liberation, supporting it, and combining it with the struggle for socialism. Stalin's analogy to the religion question is helpful: the Bolsheviks will defend freedom of religion, while simultaneously agitating against religion as an ideology hostile to the interests of the proletariat. Similarly, the revolutionary party will support the right of nations to self-determination while agitating for its own program. The Bolshevik position implied neither (as Trotsky put it) "an evangel of separation," nor political support to the bourgeoisie of a colonial country even if that bourgeoisie is waging a struggle for national independence. Here the key principle is the organizational and propagandistic independence of communists within the movement: to support militarily the struggle for national liberation, while simultaneously exposing and opposing the colonial bourgeoisie and pushing the struggle toward socialist revolution.

It was partly through her polemics against Polish independence and her leadership of the Polish group that the young Rosa Luxemburg established her reputation as an important member of the international socialist movement. On completing her degree in 1898, she decided, against the advice of Jogiches, to continue her revolutionary career in Germany. The specific reasons for her decision are not known, but it must have been clear that Germany, with its rapidly growing (though already internally divided) socialist party, its developed capitalist economy, and its well-organized working class, offered the serious prospect of socialist revolution in the near future. It was in Germany that Luxemburg developed into one of the most formidable and creative leaders of world socialism, both a brilliant theoretician and a militant strategist. She sustained that position until she was arrested and murdered by army officers during the abortive German revolution of 1918-19, when working-class militancy made her leadership (and that of her comrade Karl Liebknecht, who died with her) a serious and immediate threat to the government. She and Liebknecht were arrested in Berlin on 15 January 1919, beaten, and shot; Jogiches met the same fate two months later. Rosa's body was dumped into a canal, not to be recovered for another four months. In Goebbels' bookburning of 1933 her works were thrown into the fire along with those of Marx and Engels, Wilhelm Reich and the rest of Europe's greatest artists, scientists and revolutionaries.

The central struggle in Rosa Luxemburg's political life in Germany was the struggle against reformist revisionism; that is, against the abandonment of socialist revolution and class struggle in favor of legal and parliamentary reforms. Until World War I, "social democracy" had been the general name for scientific or Marxian socialism as distinct from such other currents as, say, Fourierist or Owenite utopian socialism. Thus Lenin's party was the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party. What set scientific socialism apart from other programs for social change was, first, the dialectical and materialist understanding of history and of capitalist social relations (that is, relations of production, together with the class structure and political institutions that followed from these relations of production). Second, the understanding of the revolutionary tendency of the working class because of its position in capitalist society as the productive but exploited class. Third, understanding the necessity of revolution in order to expropriate the capitalist ruling class, smash the bourgeois state, and establish new, genuinely democratic forms of social life.

Reformist revisionism began its major theoretical development in the European socialist movement in the work of the German social-democrat and pacifist Eduard Bernstein who, even while revising the most basic economic and political premises of Marxist theory, continued to pose as a sincere socialist. Briefly Bernstein's argument runs as follows. By means of various adaptive mechanisms such as the credit system, improved communications, and employers' organizations (cartels, trusts), capitalism can avoid the recurrent crises which Marxist economics sees as inevitable. Thus capitalism becomes flexible enough to satisfy everyone, including the proletariat. In addition, the trade union activity of the organized working class will gradually improve its lot to the point where "the trade union struggle … will lead to a progressively more extensive control over the conditions of production," while through legislation the capitalist "will be reduced in time to the role of a simple administrator" (the quotations are from Konrad Schmidt, a follower of Bernstein). Class struggle can thus be eliminated by parliamentary reforms, and capitalism can survive indefinitely. The net effect of enough reforms would be socialism—no revolution required.

The best short exposure of this sleight-of-hand is still Rosa Luxemburg's polemic against Bernstein, "Reform or Revolution," first published in 1899. The pamphlet examines the economic assumptions and the practical political consequences of revisionism, counterposing the correct Marxist analysis of the question. It shows, for example, how credit and cartels, far from suppressing the anarchy of capitalism, intensify and precipitate its crises. In particular they "aggravate the antagonism existing between the mode of production and exchange by sharpening the struggle between the producer and the consumer"—a principle whose concrete operation affects us now in the artificially inflated prices of housing, food and other consumer commodities, and in such carefully engineered "shortages" as the recent oil crisis. Nor will the trade union movement lead steadily to a proletarian paradise, for as capitalism proceeds through its decadent phase the demand for labor power will increase more slowly than the supply. Moreover, losses suffered on the world market will be compensated for by reduction of wages. So that unemployment and falling wages (real wages, if not nominal wages) can be expected, and the trade union movement will find its effort to protect the proletariat doubly difficult. Some of these problems are taken up in more detail by Lenin in Imperialism, the Latest Stage of Capitalism (1917).

This is not, of course, to say that revolutionary communism minimizes the importance of reform struggles, of safeguarding the gains made by the organized working class, or of defending all democratic rights. Indeed, as Luxemburg notes in her Introduction to "Reform or Revolution," it is only in Bernstein's work that one finds for the first time the opposition between the two indissolubly linked aspects of socialism. In fact, she writes,

the daily struggle for reforms… and for democratic institutions, offers to the Social-Democracy the only means of engaging in the proletarian class war and working in the direction of the final goal—the conquest of political power and the suppression of wage-labor. [For Social-Democracy] the struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its aim.

The difference from revisionism, then, is that revisionism declares the stated aim of socialism to be impossible, unknowable, or unimportant: "The final goal, no matter what it is, is nothing; the movement is everything." Yet since, as Luxemburg notes, "there can be no socialist movement without a socialist aim, [Bernstein] ends by renouncing the movement" as well. It remains painfully familiar; one thinks of Herbert Marcuse's recent advice in Counter-Revolution and Revolt to young revolutionaries: to abandon mass action and "labor fetishism" and retreat to the universities.

Perhaps the worst practical consequence of the growing influence of revisionism in the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD) was its inability to deal correctly with the outbreak of World War I. In 1914 the SPD, along with the socialist parties of other countries, went patriotically in support of the national war effort, instead of refusing to participate in a war among imperialist nations. When the SPD voted war credits to the government its theoretical and practical bankruptcy became as obvious to many as they had been for some time already to Rosa Luxemburg. Social-democrat has since remained the term for those who want to reform capitalism rather than destroy it. Such reformists allied with the bourgeoisie to protect interests now their own. Indeed it was with the complicity of an SPD government (to which power had been handed over in November 1918) that Luxemburg and Liebknecht were arrested and killed.

Obviously the collapse of German social-democracy cannot be laid entirely at the feet of Bernstein. In the Introduction to his recent (1972) edition of Luxemburg's political writings, Robert Looker points out that "a stress on the insidious influence of revisionism … mistakes symptoms for causes." Looker is surely correct in citing as important contributing factors the history of the German labor movement and the history of the SPD from the nineteenth century on. Still, the 1899 controversy with Bernstein and the 1914 abdication of a proletarian class line were symptoms of the same disease: opportunism. As Luxemburg wrote in "Either/Or," a Spartacus League pamphlet of 1916, "The proud old cry, 'Proletarians of all countries, unite!' has been transformed on the battlefield into the command, 'Proletarians of all countries, cut each other's throats!' " And the Marxist principle that all written history is the history of the class struggle, now had "except in time of war" added to it ("Rebuilding the International," 1915). This was the demise of the Second International, as Lenin, Luxemburg and other revolutionary socialists recognized. At the Zimmerwald Conference (September, 1915) the foundations of the Third International were laid, though not until 1919 was it officially established.

In spite of their shock and outrage at the party's defection, Luxemburg and other comrades were not paralyzed. Those who were committed to Marxian economics, to dialectical materialism and to revolution formed an opposition faction within the party, the Spartakusbund (Spartacus League), named after the famous leader of a Roman slave revolt. Their tasks were to mount a revolutionary opposition to the party leadership especially around the war issue, to propaganzide among the masses for a correct line, and to organize actions against the war.

In 1916 Rosa Luxemburg was again arrested (taken into "protective custody"), and it was in prison that she heard the news of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.

For three years Europe has been like a musty room, almost suffocating those living in it. Now all at once a window has been flung open, a fresh, invigorating gust of air is blowing in, and everyone in the room is breathing deeply of it.

This was her enthusiastic welcome to long-awaited revolution, in the famous essay "The Old Mole" (May, 1917). It seemed that the old mole—revolutionary history—having gone underground for the time in Germany, had now surfaced in Russia. Its reappearance there would and must herald similar events in Germany; not only by force of example, but because, as the Bolshevik leaders knew all too well, the success and even survival of their revolution depended on the rapid development of revolutions in other countries. They confronted the dangers of military invasion, economic strangulation, political compromises: these meant either more European revolutions in a fairly short time, or a worldwide setback for the international socialist movement as well as for the Russian revolution itself. Naturally the notion of "socialism in one country," Stalin's invention, was never considered a realistic solution; nor is it dialectically possible, and hence has no basis in the Marxist-Leninist tradition. Rather it represents both an absolute failure to understand the dialectic of revolutionary process, and a most opportunistic attempt to transform the concessions and defeats of the Russian revolution into iron principle and virtue. Without denying that some of these concessions may have been necessary for the survival of the new state, one has nonetheless to call a spade a spade. As Luxemburg acknowledged even while (again incorrectly) denouncing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (in "The Russian Tragedy," September, 1918),

Admittedly Lenin and his friends deluded neither themselves nor others about the facts. They admitted their capitulation. Unfortunately they did deceive themselves in hoping to purchase a genuine respite at the price of capitulation.…

Such a deceptive slogan as "socialism in one country" could not have been and was not seriously entertained by the victorious Bolsheviks in 1917, though the idea (if not the explicit wording) was put forth by some Mensheviks and revisionists. "Imperialism or socialism! War or revolution! There is no third way!" was Luxemburg's battle cry.

The proletarian rising of November 1918-January 1919 seemed to fulfill these hopes. As a participant in what he calls "the German Revolution," Paul Frolich writes, with vividness and pace, of mass risings in Berlin and other major cities, of Workers' Councils, of the revolutionary alliance of sailors and factory workers, of the Kaiser's abdication, and the proclamation by Karl Liebknecht of the Socialist Republic of Germany.

But, having shown its head all too briefly, the old mole disappeared in Germany with the defeat of the November rising. As Luxemburg foresaw it might, it soon went underground in Russia too, after Lenin's death, and it is a favorite speculation among Rosa's biographers what her position might have been had she lived through the periods of the Third (Stalinist) and Fourth (Trotskyist) Internationals.

Luxemburg's criticism of the Bolshevik party has been a thorny question on the left. Her position, and Lenin's too, has often been caricatured and oversimplified, as in Bertram D. Wolfe's introduction to his edition of two Luxemburg tracts. Wolfe goes so far as to publish Luxemburg's 1904 piece "Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy" under the theatrical and misleading title given it by a later publisher: "Leninism or Marxism?"—as if a revolutionary of Luxemburg's calibre would formulate the problem so mechanically. It seems to me that Luxemburg never understood as profoundly as Lenin did two things: first, the necessity for "iron discipline" within a vanguard party so that the party can be a unified fighting force and avoid the tragic capitulation of the Second International; and, second, the unpleasant necessity to make certain compromises, such as Brest-Litovsk, or NEP, to ensure the immediate survival of the Russian Revolution so that genuine socialism could be built. Lenin, of course, was always painfully aware of the differences between dictatorship of the proletariat as it existed under his leadership, and full socialism: it is a constantly recurrent theme in his writings of the twenties.

It is important to bear in mind and, as far as possible, to duplicate the very finely balanced dialectical sensibility that permits support and criticism to exist simultaneously, in all their complexity, without taking the easy way out by a crudely mechanical solution (whether fanatical enthusiasm or outraged rejection). The Bolsheviks existed, for the moment, "in the center of the gripping whirlpool of domestic and foreign struggle, ringed about by countless foes and opponents." In such circumstances, Luxemburg reiterates time and again, one does not expect perfection. Yet Rosa Luxemburg is also thinking of the long run, always pressing ahead to the long-range implications, the possibilities. As George Lukacs remarks, "She constantly opposes to the exigencies of the moment the principles of future stages of the revolution." Some may view the idea of perfection as a luxury which few revolutionaries can afford. I suggest that Rosa Luxemburg saw it as a costly necessity and tool of the trade, without which there is no long-range criterion for specific situations—worse, no principled guide to practical action, hence no ability to predict or control events, hence passivity and virtually certain defeat. Is this utopian? Only if we extend the "no place" of utopia into "never": it depends on your sense of possibility. At the same time, the vision of perfection can lead, and it sometimes led Luxemburg, into ultra-left, hence incorrect, positions.

Operating, then, from the sense of maximum possibility, Rosa Luxemburg wrote "The Russian Revolution." Fourteen years earlier, in 1904, she had published in Iskra, the Bolshevik theoretical journal, a review of One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, "written by Lenin, an outstanding member of the Iskra group." There she had argued that "the military ultra-centralism" of the Bolshevik tendency would paralyze the party, rendering it "incapable of accomplishing the tremendous tasks of the hour." In 1918, the success of the Russian Revolution forced Luxemburg to revise at least part of her earlier judgment. In "The Russian Revolution" (1918) she addressed herself to the Bolsheviks in power. On one hand she eulogized their clear-sightedness and discipline:

The Bolshevik tendency performs the historic service of having proclaimed from the very beginning, and having followed with iron consistency, those tactics which alone could save democracy and drive the revolution ahead. All power exclusively in the hands of the worker and peasant masses, in the hands of the soviets—this was indeed the only way out of the difficulty into which the revolution had gotten; this was the sword stroke with which they cut the Gordian knot, freed the revolution from a narrow blindalley and opened up for it an untrammeled path into the free and open fields.

The party of Lenin was thus the only one in Russia which grasped the true interest of the revolution in that first period. It was the element that drove the revolution forward, and thus it was the only party which really carried on a socialist policy.

… The "golden mean" cannot be maintained in any revolution. The law of its nature demands a quick decision: either the locomotive drives forward full steam ahead to the most extreme point of the historical ascent, or it rolls back of its own weight again to the starting point at the bottom.… This makes clear the miserable role of the Russian Mensheviks … etc., who had enormous influence on the masses at the beginning, but, after their prolonged wavering and after they had fought with both hands and feet against taking over power and responsibility, were driven ignobly off the stage.

Now, after the Chilean coup of September 1973, our generation can add to this, that those who hesitate to take full power are driven brutally off the stage, along with thousands of revolutionary workers who sacrifice their lives in the process.

Besides praising, Luxemburg criticized the Bolshevik land-reform as inadequate and tending to create a conservative stratum of land-owning peasants. She also protested the suspension of certain democratic rights, especially for the opponents of soviet rule: such interference with free public life and political debate would certainly, she said, cut the party off from its vital roots in the masses and turn it into an authoritarian bureaucracy. In both cases she was right theoretically but wrong practically—defeated, I would suggest, by that characteristic vision of perfection which enabled her to ignore the exigencies of the particular moment. Indeed one could argue that her criticism is inconsistent, inasmuch as the compromise land-reform did constitute one of Lenin's efforts to halt bureaucratic degeneration by satisfying, through temporary measures, a relatively backward part of the population who would otherwise have to be dealt with by force and bureaucracy.

The bureaucratic degeneration of the Russian revolution after Lenin's death in 1924 does not necessarily prove, as Frolich claims it does, that Rosa Luxemburg was prophetically correct in all her criticism of the Bolsheviks. Such a claim omits the necessary scrupulous analysis of world events, of the Russian situation at any given moment, and of the individuals involved. Certainly to use her work in support of an anti-vanguard or "spontaneist" position, as some groups and individuals have recently done, is dishonest and crude in the extreme. Moreover it ignores the importance of correct leadership which Luxemburg stressed throughout her life and which, after all, provided the impetus for her struggle against revisionism in the party. What was required was a leadership both disciplined enough and flexible enough to work with the spontaneous energies of the masses, to prepare the masses for the assumption of state power, and to direct its spontaneous energies toward that goal. This, like so many other Marxist positions, appears paradoxical to the fragmented or mechanical consciousness; as a dialectical appreciation of reality it is, I believe, correct.

Paul Frolich's book is not new. Originally published in Paris in 1939, London in 1940, and Frankfort in 1967, it appears now in the definitive new edition and retranslation (the translator is Johanna Hoornweg). It is an extremely thorough political biography by a close associate of Rosa Luxemburg, for, with her, Paul Frolich led the revolutionary Spartacus League, participated in the 1918 rising, and helped found the German Communist Party (KPD). With clarity and detail Frolich sets out the historical and political context in which Luxemburg lived and worked.

As a biography, though, Frolich's book presents an almost one-dimensional view of its subject, and that dimension is the political. One gets no sense from Frolich's pages of the passion and inner conflict that emerge from Luxemburg's correspondence. All of the personal material is collected in a single chapter, where Frolich briefly documents Luxemburg's love for music, poetry and botany, her talent for painting, her romantic streak, and the intensity of her personal relations. Yet by confining this material to one chapter, Frolich sets it apart from her political life and makes it seem trivial.

Frolich never alludes to sexual relations, not even the tempestuous long-term union with Leo Jogiches, to whom Rosa wrote nearly a thousand letters over a period of twenty years—intensely personal letters full of passion and wit as well as history in the making. He does not mention Jogiches' extreme possessive jealousy (which had both a sexual and a professionally rivalrous component), nor the breakup of their relationship over Jogiches' friendship with another woman, nor Rosa's romantic rebound affair with Konstantin, the 22-year-old son of her close friend and comrade Clara Zetkin. Her expensive tastes and love of luxury, her sarcasm often at the expense of friends, her craving for privacy and order—all these traits are omitted.

For these reasons it is not Frolich but J. P. Nettl's splendid two-volume biography (1966) that presents the recognizable human being, the political woman rather than the political machine. Partly the lacunae in Frolich's biography can be explained, as the author himself points out in his preface, by the loss or inaccessibility of a good deal of material, particularly correspondence and manuscripts: there is simply a lot that Frolich did not know. Beyond this, though, one senses that Frolich wanted us to concentrate on the important historical and political issues without being distracted by mere curiosity. Though such an approach is not always wrong, it does imply a certain elitism here. It suggests, falsely, that great revolutionaries have easily escaped or transcended the personal difficulties that bourgeois society imposes on all its members. Frolich's presentation suggests further, and equally falsely, that the personal dimension is not really worth the attention of serious political persons.

The tone of Frolich's biography is sustained eulogy—as Nettl remarks, it is "an exercise in formal hagiography," and everywhere Rosa is described in glowing superlatives. Clearly she was an extraordinary person in many respects. Everyone who knew or met her agrees on that, from Lenin to Rosa's housekeeper, and Frolich himself must often have felt the force of her intellect and personality. But Frolich's method tends to undercut his aim, for the exemplary figure instructs not by distance but by closeness to us—not by being without faults, but by overcoming them. Frolich's Rosa Luxemburg is an unattainable ideal. So that it is not in his biography that one finds a clear evaluation of Luxemburg's personal and political limitations (even though he does concede certain errors in her criticism of the Bolsheviks). For such an evaluation Frolich must be supplemented with other sources. Her letters show both the domineering and the sentimental aspects of her nature. Georg Lukacs' 1922 essay "Critical Observations on Rosa Luxemburg's 'Critique of the Russian Revolution' " (in History and Class Consciousness) argues that Luxemburg's overestimation of the proletarian character of the Bolshevik revolution resulted in certain errors in judging the Bolsheviks in power. The writings of Lenin and Trotsky are an indispensable guide and an important corrective to her errors. And Nettl sheds light everywhere.

If, as Georg Lukacs declares in the opening sentence of "The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg" (1921), "It is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality," then certainly Rosa Luxemburg's work remains permanently relevant in demonstrating the dialectical method. Lukacs concludes: "The unity of theory and practice was preserved in her actions with exactly the same consistency and with exactly the same logic as that which earned her the enmity of her murderers: the opportunists of Social Democracy." Thus the essay itself progresses from focus on theory to focus on practice. Yet in his Preface to the new edition (1967) of History and Class Consciousness (in which the Luxemburg essay appears), Lukacs performs a self-criticism in which he notes "a—Hegelian—distortion, in which I put the totality in the centre of the system, overriding the priority of economics." The paradox that Lukacs notes here is as relevant today as Luxemburg herself, for his distortion will be repeated by many. Its source, as Lukacs says, is the ongoing conflict in his life between "Marxism and political activism on the one hand, and the constant intensification of my purely idealistic ethical preoccupations on the other." That or similar conflict still describes the condition of many intellectuals today. It is never a waste of time to read Luxemburg. But to read her without the desire to become what she was—a revolutionary communist in theory and in practice—is to read her in bad faith, to approach her merely as a curiosity, to ignore the concrete meaning of her work and her example. The day before Luxemburg died an article of hers appeared in Die Rote Fahne. Its last words were:

Order reigns in Berlin! You stupid lackeys! Your "order" is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will rear its head once again, and, to your horror, will proclaim, with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I will be!

To understand Luxemburg is to understand that those sentences are not mere rhetoric, but a statement about history which lays a claim on anyone who reads it.