Rosa Luxemburg Speaks

Just two weeks before her murder, Rosa Luxemburg told her comrades: "Today we can seriously set about destroying capitalism once and for all. "Nay, more; not merely are we today in a position to perform this task, not merely is its performance a duty toward the proletariat, but our solution offers the only means of saving human society from destruction." Such was the conviction that guided her life. To a world just emerging from the holocaust of the First World War her words had a sharp immediacy. Fifty years and several devastating wars later, the alternative she poses - socialism or extermination - still remains the choice facing humanity. - From the introduction by Mary-Alice Waters Introduction by Mary-Alice Waters 1 Reform or Revolution 33 Socialist Crisis in France 91 Stagnation and Progres8 of Marxism 106 Organizational Question of Social Democracy 112 Socialism and the Churches 131 The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions 153 What Is Economics? 219 Peace Utopias 250 The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis in the German Social Democracy 257 Letters from Prison 332 The Spirit of Russian Literature: Life of Korolenko 340 The Russian Revolution 365 Against Capital Punishment 396 Speech to the Founding Convention of the German Communist Party 400 Appendix A- On the Junius Pamphlet by V. I Lenin 428 Appendix B - From "Notes of a Publicist" by V. L Lenin 440 Appendix C-Hands Off Rosa Luxemburg by Leon Trotsky 441 Appendix D- Luxemburg and the Fourth International by Leon Trotsky 451 Glossary of Names and Terms 455 A selection in English of Rosa Luxemburg's speeches and articles, covering some of her more theoretical work and her writings about the major events of her time: the rise of mass social democratic parties, the Russian Revolution of 1905, the First World War and Russian Revolution of 1917, and the failed German Revolution of 1918-1819. (Originally published in 1970.) From her political awakening as a schoolgirl in tsarist-occupied Poland until her murder by thugs in 1919 during the German revolution, Rosa Luxemburg acted and wrote as a proletarian revolutionist. Rosa Luxemburg Speaks takes us inside the political battles between revolution and class collaboration that still shape the modern workers movement.