Rosa Luxemburg bibliography

Rosa Luxemburg (5 March 1871 – 15 January 1919) was a Marxist theorist and revolutionary,^[1] whose works mainly revolve around Marxism, socialism, democracy, and capitalism.^[2] Her first major work, The Industrial Development of Poland (1897), was actually her doctoral dissertation at the University of Zurich.^[3] In it, she argued that Russian Poland had become economically integrated into the Russian Empire and that its industrial growth depended fundamentally on access to the Russian market. Although not explicitly a Marxist work, in it Luxemburg argued against Polish nationalism.^[4] Her breakthrough contribution came with Social Reform or Revolution? (1899),^[5] written as a response to Eduard Bernstein's revisionism.^[2] Here, Luxemburg defends Orthodox Marxism against gradualist reformism,^[6] arguing that Bernstein's reformist path would "paralyze completely the proletarian class struggle", resulting not in socialism but only the reform of capitalism.^[7] The text established her as one of the leading Marxist theorists.^[8]

During the early 1900s, Luxemburg increasingly focused on mass action and revolutionary strategy. The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906) draws on her experience of the Russian Revolution of 1905.^[9] In it, she argues that mass strike was not a single, isolated act but a continuous process, a period of heightened class struggle in which the economic and political spheres were inseparable.^[10] The pamphlet was a direct challenge to the German trade union leadership, which saw the mass strike as a threat to their organizations and a recipe for "revolutionary romanticism".^[11] Her most ambitious and controversial economic work is The Accumulation of Capital (1913).^[12] She argued that capitalism, as a closed system, could not realise the surplus value it generated and was therefore dependent on a constant expansion into non-capitalist economies and social strata for its survival and accumulation.^[13]

During World War I, she published The Crisis of German Social Democracy (1915) under the pseudonym "Junius". The pamphlet later became known as the Junish Pamphlet.^[14] In it, she argued that in the age of imperialism, national wars of defence were no longer possible and that the only alternative for the proletariat was international class struggle against the war, summed up in the slogan "socialism or barbarism".^[15] This phrase marked a definitive break from revolutionary fatalism by explicitly posing socialism not as an inevitability but as an objective historical possibility.^[16] In 1918, she wrote The Russian Revolution, but was only published posthumously in 1922. She praised the overthrow of the Romanov's, but criticised the Bolsheviks from a left-wing perspective.^[17] Alongside these major texts, Luxemburg also wrote hundreds of articles, speeches, letters, and pamphlets ranging from political economy and nationalism to women's emancipation, militarism, and party tactics.^[18]