“Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of ‘justice’ but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a special privilege.”
Biography
Works
1894: What Are the Origins of May Day?
1896: The Polish Question at the International Congress in London
1896: Social Democracy and the National Struggles in Turkey
1898: The Industrial Development of Poland
1898: Opportunism and the art of the possible
1898: Speeches to Stuttgart Congress
1899: A question of tactics
1899: Speech to the Hanover Congress
1899: The Dreyfus Affair and the Millerand Case
1899: Militia and Militarism
1900: In Defense of Nationality
1900: Reform or Revolution
1901: The Socialist Crisis in France
1901: To the National Council of the French Worker’s Party
1902: Martinique
1902: The Eight Hour Day at the Party Congress
1903: An anti-clerical policy of Socialism
1903: In Memory of the Proletarian Party
1903: Marxist Theory and the Proletariat
1903: Stagnation and Progress of Marxism
1903: Lassalle and the Revolution
1904: In the Storm
1904: Social Democracy and Parliamentarism
1904: Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy [aka Leninism or Marxism?]
1905: The Polish Question and the Socialist Movement
1905: The Revolution in Russia
1905: Socialism and the Churches
1906: The Mass Strike
1906: Riot and Revolution
1906: Blanquism and Social Democracy
1907: Two Methods of Trade-Union Policy
1908: 25th anniversary of Marx’s death
1908: The First May as a Day of Working-Class Struggle
1908: On the Question of Budget Approval
1908: The Party School
1909: The National Question
1909: Revolutionary Hangover
1909: Special Problems of Poland
1910: The Next Step
1910: Attrition or Struggle? (Part 2, Part 3, concluding remarks: alternate translation)
1910: Theory & Practice [A polemic against Comrade Kautsky’s theory of the Mass Strike]
1911: Concerning Morocco
1911: Peace Utopias
1911: Mass Action
1911: An Amusing Misunderstanding
1911: To the Unity Conference of the Socialist Organisations in Manchester
1912: Women’s Suffrage and Class Struggle
1912: The Fallen Women of Liberalism
1912: What Now?
1913: The Idea of May Day on the March
1913: Down With Reformist Illusions—Hail the Revolutionary Class Struggle!
1913: The Political Mass Strike
1913: Lassalle’s Legacy
1913: The Accumulation of Capital
1914: German SDP and the War (with Karl Liebknecht, Franz Mehring and Clara Zetkin)
1915: The Accumulation of Capital: An Anti-Critique
1915: Rebuilding the International
1915: The Junius Pamphlet (The Crisis of Social Democracy)
1915: Theses on the Tasks of International Social-Democracy
1916: Either/Or
1916: Dog Politics
1917: The Old Mole
1918: The Russian Revolution
1918: Life of Korolenko
1918: The Russian tragedy
1918: Oh! How – German is this Revolution!
1918: The Beginning
1918: A Duty of Honor (Alternate Translation: Against Capital Punishment)
1918: The National Assembly
1918: A Call to the Workers of the World (Alternate Translation: Manifesto of the German Spartacists)
1918: The Acheron in Motion
1918: Five Letters from Prison
1916–1918: Letters from Prison to Sophie Liebknecht
1918: The Socialisation of Society (Alternate Translation: What is Bolshevism?)
1918: What does the Spartacus League Want?
1918: The Elections to the National Assembly
1918: Our Program and the Political Situation (Alternate Translation: On the Spartacus Programme)
1919: What are the Leaders Doing?
1919: House of Cards
1919: Order Prevails in Berlin
Posthumous publications:
1922: Letters to Karl and Luise Kautsky from 1896 to 1918 (PDF)
Introduction and Postscript and Appendix by Luise Kautsky
Acknowledgements
Many of Luxemburg’s works are still in copyright as they have been translated within the last thirty odd years and we are therefore most grateful to a number of publishers who have allowed us to place her works on the Marxist Internet Archive. We must thank Bob Looker and Random House for sixteen articles in Rosa Luxemburg, Selected Political Writings, edited and introduced by Robert Looker, 1974 and to Dick Howard and Monthly Review Press for six articles from Selected Political Writings, Rosa Luxemburg, 1971 together with eight articles from The National Question: Selected Writings by Rosa Luxemburg, edited and introduced by the late Horace B. Davis, 1976. None of the interesting and informative background material in the introductions to these books is on the MIA and readers will have to find them in print form. Dick Howard has pointed out that he has updated and reworked the materials in the Introduction to the 1971 book as a chapter in his work The Marxian Legacy (2nd edition, 1988). We would also like to thank Peter Hudis and News and Letters for permission to publish Theory and Practice. We are also very grateful to Tessa DeCarlo who has given us permission to put her translation of The Industrial Development of Poland, originally published by Campaigner Publications in 1977. She has slightly revised and edited this version.
Finally Monthly Review Press have produced a new edition of Luxemburg’s works, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, 2004, ISBN 1-5837-103-X. Edited by Hudis & Anderson, it contains, in addition to a scholarly introduction and improved versions of some already published works, some totally new translations by Passmore and Anderson including a number of writings on women, slavery and the Russian Social Democracy. There is also a fine collection of her letters, all new translations called Letters of Rosa Luxemburg produced by Humanities in 1998. Both of these are not available online but are worth reading.
There is a vast corpus of her work in German. The MIA would be delighted to publish any previously untranslated material. We have also listed above some of her English copyrighted works, in an attempt make people aware of the number of these we need to get online.
Critiques of Luxemburg
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