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Rosa Luxemburg: The Incendiary Spark: Essays
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.
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.
190 pages, Paperback
Published March 5, 2024
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About the author
Michael Löwy
185 books119 followersFrench-Brazilian Marxist sociologist and philosopher. He is presently the emerited research director in social sciences at the CNRS (French National Center of Scientific Research) and lectures at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS; Paris, France). Author of books on Karl Marx, Che Guevara, Liberation Theology, György Lukács, Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka, he received the Silver Medal of the CNRS in 1994.
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April 18, 2024
Not a bad collection of essays. "Rosa Luxemburg and Internationalism" in particular stood out.
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