Rosa Luxemburg
Selected Political Writings
Looker, Robert (ed.) Publisher: Jonathan Cape, London, United Kingdom
Year Published: 1972
Pages: 309pp ISBN: 0-224-00596-0
Dewey: 335.43
Resource Type: Book
A selection of Rosa Luxemburg's writings which highlight her outstanding contributions to the theory and practice of revolutionary socialism.
Abstract: In his introdution, Looker writes:
"Against the crude schematism which posed the party as the active, conscious catalyst which stimulated the inert, unconscious -- or 'trade union' conscious -- class into revolutionary struggle, Luxemburg re-asserted the central Marxist insight that the proletariat makes itself, and its own awareness of itself, in the course of a struggle rooted in the logic of capitalism. Yet this was not to say that socialist consciousness was an automatic or necessary product of the class struggle. Rather, it was a demand that socialists must take the consciousness of the class, not as some passive, reactive element, but as an active and continuously changing reality which must form the central focus of all socialist analysis and activity.
The necessary complement to her analysis of mass action was that theory of creative political leadership which we have already encountered and which now received a more systematic articulation in her work. True, such a leadership cannot create the class struggle, for that struggle is an elemental feature of the capitalist system itself. Equally, it cannot direct that struggle along lines predetermined by that leadership, for the revolutionary struggle is a complex pattern of conflicts spanning decades, not a set-piece engagement between the disciplined armies of capital and labour. However, only conscious socialist politics can hope to lead that struggle towards its ultimate goal, the achievement of a communist society, and such politics demand a creative leadership which is capable of responding directly to each and every manifestation of the class struggle, stimulating that struggle, widening its goals, generating new tactics, etc., in that dialectical inteplay of consciousness and activity which forms the core of the relationship between the revolutionary party and the proletariat."
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