The radical aspects of Rosa Luxemburg’s socialist thinking stem from their conviction to bring accountability and accessibility to revolutionary leadership. In emphasizing the power and priority of the proletariat, Luxemburg’s ideas constitute a radical conscience against the autocratic potentiality of socialist revolution, both within the West and beyond its colonial borders.
Writing in 1902, an exiled Vladimir Ilich Lenin produced a pamphlet, _What is to be done?_ that established the precedent for Luxemburg’s socialist critique. At the outset of communist revolution, The piece speaks to the Bolshevik approach to awakening class consciousness in the Russian populace. Arguing that socialist-democratic ideology did not occur naturally among the working masses, Lenin underscores the need for a strong, unified socialist party to truly achieve the goals of revolution. ~“No revolutionary movement can endure without a stable organization of leaders maintaining continuity” ~Implicit in Lenin’s writings is the assumption that the proper course of communist revolution is available knowledge in the hands of those professional revolutionaries able to lead the people in the right direction. ~" The national tasks of Russian Social-Democracy are such as have never confronted any other socialist party in the world…. The role of vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory…. "~ As a counterpoint to dominant Leninism, Luxemburg’s challenge of Bolshevik leadership is rooted in the emphasis that the business of revolution offers no precedent or blueprint for the transformation of a socialist state and society. Bolshevik leaders, any more than the masses they sought to steward, could not claim absolute knowledge of the trajectory of socialist revolution. ~“The socialist system of society should only be, and can only be, an historical product, born out of the school of its own experiences, born in the course of its realization, as a result of the developments of living history, which – just like organic nature of which, in the last analysis, it forms a part – has the fine habit of always producing along with any real social need the means to its satisfaction, along with the task simultaneously the solution.”~ Indeed, development of the Soviet Union attests to the legitimacy of Luxemburg’s claim. Lenin himself developed an ideological framework of socialism that justified the capitalistic stipulations of his New Economic Program (NEP). Throughout Soviet history, Communist Party leaders have had to adapt the meaning of socialist ideology in order to fit the pragmatic needs of state and economy.
As a Jew, a woman, and a socialist revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg was uniquely poised to consider the meaning of Marx's ideas from the vantage point of disenfranchised segments of the world in or out of Europe. In her groundbreaking book, the Accumulation of Capital (1913), Rosa Luxemburg demonstrated how capitalism expands the domain of its predatory operation globally to exploit resources, abuse cheap labour, expand its insatiable need for new markets, and accumulate ever-increasing surplus value. European imperialism, she suggested, was the military machinery to enable and facilitate this globalization of capital: ~Capital needs other races to exploit territories where the white man cannot work. It must be able to mobilise world labour power without restriction in order to utilise all productive forces of the globe – up to the limits imposed by a system of producing surplus value.~
Without Rosa Luxemburg’s correction of Marx's theory of capital, his blindfolded Eurocentrism would have had two fatal deficiencies. Marx was incurably Eurocentric in the very cast of his critical thinking. Although he was aware of the expansionist proclivities of a capitalist economy, Marx never fully developed a theory of how colonialism was the modus operandi of this capitalist tendency. He could not account for the European longevity of the capitalist system and he would have been irrelevant to the colonial extension of capitalism. Luxemburg's argument that the endemic crisis of the capitalist system propels it to imperialism and colonialism effectively brought the realm of the colonial into the critical apparatus of Marxist thinking.
That Luxemburg’s conviction to bring conscience to power ultimately emboldened her enemies to murder speaks to the potency of her reasoning.
Indeed, Luxemburg’s life and thought serves as a crucial reminder of the importance of asking the right questions of any movement of change, regardless of its revolutionary impact: Whom does progress serve? Who owns the right to determine its character? Though the age of socialist transformation is fixed in history, global events of radical social upheaval that have since unfolded reflect much of the same revolutionary potential that inspired Luxemburg’s ideas. The enduring importance of bringing conscience to revolution, then as now, thus represents her most powerful legacy.