Rosa Luxemburg

Suzanne Leonhard, once a militant of the Spartakusbund in Germany and a personal friend of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, was forced to flee Hitler’s Germany because of her underground Communist activities. She sought refuge in the USSR. In October 1936, Stalin’s secret police arrested her and she spent ten years in Stalin’s forced labour camps. On her liberation (living in Western Germany), she wrote a book on her experiences in these camps, One Quarter of My Life. The following extract tells the story of Yelena Ginsburg, one of many Trotskyists who died in Stalin’s jails. She was then...

Click here to download as pdf Click here to download as mobi Click here to download as epub Or read online below: Korea The SR Group 1950-5 SR and state capitalism Cliff on Russia and China 1956 SR and ISL SR in the Labour left, late 1950s SR and peace campaigning The turn to “Luxemburgism” From the Labour orientation to the shop stewards “Linking the fragments” mid and late 1960s 1968: growth and demagogy After 1970 The dispute on Europe 1971 1972-5 Chronology We can periodise IS, and the Socialist Review group which came before it, in the following fashion. • From 1948 to their expulsion in...

January marks the anniversaries of the deaths of three giants of revolutionary socialism — Liebknecht, Luxemburg, and Lenin. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were theorists and organisers of the German working-class revolution of 1918–9. They were executed by the German state, aided by the reformist labour leaders, in January 1919. The articles printed here — Liebknecht’s “In spite of all!” and Luxemburg’s “Order is established in Berlin” — were their last. The “Spartacus” they refer to is the Spartacus League, the Marxist group around Liebknecht, Luxemburg, and Clara Zetkin which founded...

There had been general strikes before 1905. The so-called Plug Riots of July-August 1842 were in fact a spontaneously-spreading general strike over large parts of England against wage cuts and for the ten-hour working day. The Belgian workers launched three general strikes, in 1891, 1893, and 1902, to widen voting rights. But the mass strike movement which erupted in Russia in 1905 after ten years of strikes and agitation by a fresh and growing industrial working class, and after the defeat of Tsarism in its war with Japan, was something else again. It was a new starting point for all...

On 11 September the TUC congress voted for "consideration of the practicalities of a general strike". To be sure, it only said "consider". From "consider" to "do" is a big step. And the unstated hint was that this would be a one-day general strike, a form of protest which in some countries is almost routine. For all those reasons, the TUC decision has stirred little ferment as yet in workplaces or in union branches. It's important, though. It's a recognition that the working class faces a generalised, across-the-board attack from the government and the bosses, and that we need a generalised...

By Ed Maltby Discussion is growing in the British labour movement about shifting the public sector pensions battle from a string of “demonstration strikes”, with long gaps in between, to a more active and self-controlling battle. Elsewhere in Europe, working-class resistance is already developing beyond the stage of occasional set-piece one-day strikes. A debate from 1910 is relevant. It took place within the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), between Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky. The SPD was the largest of the European socialist parties of the time, with 720,000 members, cadres active...

Extract from Rosa Luxemburg: 'The Mass Strike, The Political Party and the Trade Unions', Section VIII. Need for United Action of Trade Unions and Social Democracy Here, Rosa Luxemburg is writing about the need for trade unions and the socialist (called at that time, 'social democratic') party, to act together, and against the idea of trade unions being politically neutral. This particular extract is also useful for considering the nature of the trade union bureaucracy. Click here for notes on 'The Mass Strike', and click here for the full text. The alleged antagonism between Social Democracy...

The recent fights sparked by the economic crisis have inspired some sections of the left to make calls for a general strike. It is a slogan the left has used before. But not everyone uses the call in the same way. For some, a general strike (mass industrial action for a limited or an indefinite period) is the immediate cure-all for a particular problem or for the problems of society in general. For others, the slogan is used to help build some elan around their own organisation and to differentiate themselves from other revolutionaries and in the labour movement. Marxists should have a...

In the context of the fight for the welfare state, how do struggles for reforms intersect with the goal of revolutionary socialism? Click here to download article as pdf .

Rosa Luxemburg's analysis of the impact of British imperialism in South Africa. Click here to download pdf .