Rosa Luxemburg's Letters as Texts of a New Vision of Revolutionary Democracy and Socialism

Abstract

While discussing Rosa Luxemburg's views on socialism and democracy, it has been a standard practice to refer to her political texts, i.e. Social Reform or Revolution , The Mass Strike , The Russian Revolution , the famous pieces which she wrote in Rote Fahne on the eve of the failed German Revolution of 1918, that is, writings specifically political-ideological and programmatic in orientation. In comparison, her letters, the vast range of which is now accessible mainly due to the publication of the Gesammelte Briefe (Collected Letters) in six volumes under the very able editorship of Annelies Laschitza and Guenter Radczun (vols 1 to 5) and Annelies Laschitza (vol. 6) respectively, have commanded little attention. Rosa Luxemburg, however, is not an exception. In the intellectual history of Marxism the emphasis, for obvious reasons, has been traditionally on texts which are explicitly political, the letters occupying a position of secondary importance. Thus, except a few letters like Engels to J. Bloch (21–22 September 1890), Marx to L. Kugelmann (12 April 1871), Engels to H. Starkenburg (25 January 1894), the enormous Marx-Engels correspondence has remained largely unexplored. In the Collected Works of Lenin his correspondence is covered by a large number of volumes but has remained mostly neglected except perhaps such well-known pieces as his “Letters to the Congress” which he dictated in the last days of his life. One possible reason is that letters are largely personal and subjective, in comparison with other writings, specifically meant for serving a distinct political purpose (i.e. Lenin's What is to be Done ? or Rosa Luxemburg's Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy ).