The great revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg has often been misrepresented, when not openly slandered, by bourgeois academics and Stalinists as an opponent of the October Revolution – or as an advocate for a ‘softer’, ‘anti-authoritarian’ Marxism, as opposed to that of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Some contribute to distorting Luxemburg’s legacy through the invention of ‘Luxemburgism’, as a set of ideas opposed to Bolshevism.

In this session, Marie Frederiksen, author of a new biography of Luxemburg, will explain the true content of her political thought, and how it developed as the international class struggle unfolded. A class-conscious revolutionary and staunch defender of Marxist theory to the end, Luxemburg waged a battle against revisionism, opportunism, class-collaboration national chauvinism and pacifism, always on the side of the socialist revolution. Marxists today must reclaim Luxemburg’s revolutionary legacy.

Recommended Reading:

• Reclaiming the revolutionary legacy of Rosa Luxemburg
• Rosa Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks: dispelling the myths
• The Revolutionary Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg – Marie Frederiksen