Rosa Luxemburg

Overview

• [[Revolutionary socialist]] thinker
• Part of the [[German Revolution]]
• Marxist critiques
  • what are the limits to capitalist expansion
  • expanded reproduction
  • surplus value turning into active capital - disagrees that this is endless
  • there are more than just workers and capitalists in a vacuum
  • someone has to consume the leftover surplus value - who is it?
    • social strata or societies that do not engage in capitalist production
• "[[Socialism or Barbarism]]"
• Capitalism containing inner contraditions that are seeds of its own self-destruction
  • Luxemburg makes many accurate predictions off the back of this
  • metabolism happens exponentially across the world stage
• Betrayed by the social democratic left
• Murdered

Rosa Luxemburg practiced a class struggle social democracy that struggled for radical reforms, and combined mass strikes and parliamentary action. Luxemburg practiced dialectics of party/movements, organisation/spontaneity, intellectual leadership/masses.

– [[Communicative Socialism/Digital Socialism]]

Sounds like much to say on [[Beyond the horizontal and the vertical]].

Anti-imperialism

• imperialism: political expression of process of accumulation of capitalism in competitive struggle over unspoiled remains of the non-capitalist world environment
  • an international expression of capitalism
• colonialism is a form of imperialism
• capitalism drives imperialism and colonialism
  • it's the process of extracting commodities, resources and labour power from primitive social relations and absorbing it in to the capitalist wage system
  • defile natural economy
  • so many examples of capitalist-fueled imperialism
  • the accumulation of capital knows only violence

See [[Anti-imperialism]].

Internationalism

• internationalist view of political and economic frameworks of Marxism

Works

• The Accumulation of Capital
• The Mass Strike
• Reform or Revolution
  • rejecting Bernstein
  • overtly reject capitalism through socialist revolution
  • will be ignited through growing class consciousness
  • believe in party structure
    • democratic in how she views that transition
    • believe in councils
    • but have to actively and democratically involve majority of oppressed of working class

Views on vanguardism

Her longing persists: a vanguard firm enough to gain power yet supple enough to wield it humanely.

– [[Vanguard Stacks: Self-Governing against Digital Colonialism]]

Misc

Her first loves were zoology and botany. ([[Red Rosa]])

Resources

• Red Rosa: the graphic biography of Rosa Luxemburg
• Rev Left Radio: Red Rosa: The Life and Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg
• Revolutionary Left Radio: Red Rosa: The Political and Economic Theories of Rosa Luxemburg