Rosa Luxemburg: The Incendiary Spark: Essays

· Haymarket Books
eBook
220
Pages
Eligible

About this eBook

Renowned Marxist scholar Michael Löwy offers an indispensable assessment of an enduringly fascinating revolutionary.

Vibrant, insightful, and wide-ranging, Löwy’s essays illuminate the heroic, tough-minded idealist and martyr, Rosa Luxemburg. Active in the labor and socialist movements of Germany, Poland, and Russia, Luxemburg had international standing as an original and sharp-minded theorist during her life and remains one of the most admired and studied revolutionaries in the Marxist tradition.

Löwy follows Luxemburg in blending diverse intellectual disciplines—philosophy, history, political science, sociology, anthropology, and economics—to make sense of global realities in her time and our own. Luxemburg’s creative intellectual endeavors were shaped by her genuine devotion to the free development of all people, and her fierce opposition to all forms of tyranny and authoritarianism. These commitments guided her analyses of exploitation and mass struggle, the dynamics of trade unions and of bureaucracy, the origins and impacts of economic crisis, the nature of war and imperialism, and the interconnections of reform and revolution.

In accessible and stimulating prose, Löwy explores Luxemburg’s many political and theoretical contributions, as well as her links to revolutionaries including Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukács, José Carlos Mariátegui, and Leon Trotsky. Through Löwy’s expansive engagement with Luxemburg‘s political trajectory and influence, we are able to see her wrestle with political problems that remain relevant today.

About the author

Michael Löwy is a French-Brazilian Marxist sociologist and philosopher, and emeritus research director in social sciences at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. His many books include The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx and On Changing the World.

Paul Le Blanc, long-time activist and Professor of History at La Roche College, is the author of a number of widely-read studies, including Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, From Marx to Gramsci, and Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience. With Michael Yates he has written the widely-acclaimed A Freedom Budget for All Americans and has co-edited a selection of Leon Trotsky’s Writings in Exile.

Rate this eBook

Tell us what you think.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Centre instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.