Articles tagged “Luxemburg; Rosa”

In her books, Raya Dunayevskaya saw in the masses the spontaneity and self-movement of the revolutionary subject.

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My main argument is that blaming “greedy capitalists” for the present crisis is completely misguided, misleading, and counterproductive… And we will continue to deflect attention from the inhumanity of capital itself so long as focus on such epiphenomenonal factors as greedy capitalists instead of the structural contradictions of the global capitalist system.

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A decade and a half after the end of apartheid, South Africa remains caught in an assortment of contradictions — foremost of which is the growing friction between the government of Thabo Mbeki and the rise of new freedom struggles. Most striking about those struggles is how seriously many take the ideas of liberation — Editors

A report on the March 12-14 conference on “Rosa Luxemburg’s Thought and Its Contemporary Value” at Wuhan University, China, where discussion focused not only Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital but also, to a surprising extent, on dialectics and humanism as well as feminism — Editors

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The renewal of interest in Luxemburg especially characterised an important international conference in China on her ideas as a whole. Sponsored by the International Rosa Luxemburg Society, the Institute for World Socialism in Beijing and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin, the conference was held on 21–2 November 2004 at the South China Agricultural University in Guangzhou (formerly Canton). It included eighty participants from China, Japan, India, Russia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Norway and the US.

Originally appeared in Historical Materialism, 13:3 (2005)

China’s rapid economic development rests upon the expropriation of rural workers. Worker and peasant resistance is analyzed. At the same time, an international conference on Rosa Luxemburg in Guangzhou emphasized her concept of socialist democracy — Editors

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An assessment of Rosa Luxemburg’s life and work on the occasion of the publication of the Rosa Luxemburg Reader.  Among Luxemburg’s concepts discussed are socialist democracy, her critique of Lenin, and her analysis of imperialism. Recently Eduardo Galeano has referred to her concept of democracy in a critique of Cuba, while Slavoj Zizek has distorted her critique of Lenin in order to attack her — Editors

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Originally appeared in Herramienta: debate y crítica marxista. A translation by Mónica Menacho of Hudis’s 2003 critique of John Holloway’s Change the World without Taking Power — Editors

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Of the many issues facing the effort to rethink the idea of revolution today, few are more vexing than that of state power. Does social revolution center on the political seizure of state power? If it doesn”t, what must be done instead? Can a revolution transform human relations so fundamentally that we will not again be confronted with a statist bureaucracy after the overthrow of the old?

A review of Georg Lukacs’s recently discovered manuscript, published as Tailism and the Dialectic. This previously unpublished book was written as a defense of Lukacs’s  History and Class Consciousness (1923) in response to attacks on it from within the Communist International by Abram Deborin and Laszlo Rudas. Originally composed in 1925 or 1926, Lukacs’s Tailism is somewhat of a disappointment in that it reduces the concept of subjectivity to a defense of the vanguard party. At the same time, Lukacs continues in muted form his earlier critique of Engels’s scientism and the book contains some brilliant insights on Hegel. It is unfortunate that philosophers like Slavoj Zizek and Trotskyist writers like Jonathan Rees have embraced Tailism uncritically today, using it to attack Rosa Luxemburg for having criticized Lenin’s single-party state — Editors

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