The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume I - (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This first volume in Rosa Luxemburg's Complete Works, entitled Economic Writings 1, contains some of Luxemburg's most important statements on the globalization of capital, wage labor, imperialism, and pre-capitalist economic formations.

In addition to a new translation of her doctoral dissertation, "The Industrial Development of Poland," Volume I includes the first complete English-language publication of her "Introduction to Political Economy," which explores (among other issues) the impact of capitalist commodity production and industrialization on noncapitalist social strata in the developing world. Also appearing here are ten recently discovered manuscripts, none of which has ever before been published in English.

Review Quotes

"One cannot read the writings of Rosa Luxemburg, even at this distance, without an acute yet mournful awareness of what Perry Anderson once termed 'the history of possibility.'" --Christopher Hitchens, Atlantic

"Luxemburg's criticism of Marxism as dogma and her stress on consciousness exerted an influence on the women's liberation movement which emerged in the late '60s and early '70s." --Sheila Rowbotham, Guardian

"One of the most emotionally intelligent socialists in modern history, a radical of luminous dimension whose intellect is informed by sensibility, and whose largeness of spirit places her in the company of the truly impressive." --Vivian Gornick, Nation

About the Author

Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) was a Polish-born Jewish revolutionary and one of the greatest theoretical minds of the European socialist movement. An activist in Germany and Poland, the author of numerous classic works, she participated in the founding of the German Communist Party and the Spartacist insurrection in Berlin in 1919. She was assassinated in January of that year and has become a hero of socialist, communist and feminist movements around the world.

Peter Hudis is a Lecturer at Oakton Community College. He coedited The Letters of Rosa luxemburg; The Rosa Luxemburg Reader; and Raya Dunayevskaya's Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx.