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.
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“A marvelous and engaging collection of essays that approach Rosa Luxemburg’s legacy with fresh eyes and illuminate its enduring relevance for the twenty-first century. Michael Löwy elegantly captures the rather neglected philosophical dimension of Luxemburg’s writings by bringing Luxemburg’s dialectical vision of praxis closer to her systemic critique of capitalist accumulation, colonialism, and imperialism and by reminding us of the urgent importance of the categorical imperative of internationalism in times of climate crisis.” —Ankica Čakardić, author, Like a Clap of Thunder: Three Essays on Rosa Luxemburg“This book presents a kaleidoscopic overview of the many contributions by one of the great revolutionaries of the twentieth century. Drawing on decades of engagement with the thought of Rosa Luxemburg, Michael Löwy discusses the many different aspects of her work. The essays collected here contain valuable suggestions for a socialism that is revolutionary, insurgent, and democratic.” —Alex de Jong, co-director, International Institute for Research and Education, Amsterdam“With originality and verve, Rosa Luxemburg: The Incendiary Spark provides a deft exploration of many facets of Rosa Luxemburg’s awe-inspiring life and work. Both an excellent entry point and a sure-footed guide to the intricacies and pertinence of her achievement, this is a volume that showcases the kind of scholarship we have come to expect from the eloquent and knowledgeable Michael Lowy. His vivid and animated style brings to the topic both a fresh urgency and a lifetime of distilled research, all refracted through a sharp and often unsettling gaze that yields success on every imaginable front.” —Alan Wald, H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan
“An incentive to read and reread Rosa Luxemburg... A loving and lucid reading.” —Didier Epsztajn
“The hammer blow of revolution, Luxemburg and Löwy tell us, remains the main challenge of our time, in which catastrophe, misery, and death prevail as a socially necessary logic for the survival of capitalism.” —Actuel Marx
Other books by Michael Löwy, edited by Paul Le Blanc
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Revolutionary Collective
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Marx in Paris, 1871
by Olivier Besancenot and Michael Löwy -
Revolutions
by Michael Löwy -
The Living Flame
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US Trotskyism 1928–1965 Part I: Emergence
Edited by Thomas Bias, Paul Le Blanc, et al.
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US Trotskyism 1928–1965 Part II: Endurance
Edited by Thomas Bias, Paul Le Blanc, et al. -
US Trotskyism 1928–1965 Part III: Resurgence
Edited by Paul Le Blanc and Bryan D. Palmer -
The American Exceptionalism of Jay Lovestone and His Comrades, 1929-1940
Edited by Tim Davenport and Paul Le Blanc -
C. L. R. James and Revolutionary Marxism
Edited by Paul Le Blanc and Scott McLemee -
Revolutionary Studies
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October Song
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Black Liberation and the American Dream
Edited by Paul Le Blanc -
Left Americana
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Trotskyism in the United States
Edited by George Breitman, Paul Le Blanc, et al. -
From Marx to Gramsci
Edited by Paul Le Blanc
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A Short History of the U.S. Working Class
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Lenin and the Revolutionary Party
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Ecosocialism
by Michael Löwy -
Leon Trotsky and the Organizational Principles of the Revolutionary Party
by Dianne Feeley, Paul Le Blanc, et al. -
Unfinished Leninism
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On Changing the World
by Michael Löwy -
The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development
by Michael Löwy -
The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx
by Michael Löwy