Living at a time when imperialist forces swallow the majority of our being, how important it is to withhold our being is a matter of serious quest. Rosa Luxemburg, whose birthday we celebrate this month (March 5th,1871), cautioned about this imperialist rule and its problems long ago. Today, wars and bloodshed have become so normalised, and the distance between theory and practice is ever widening. The death of a person who is from any other country cannot affect your everyday being, then it means that there is something seriously wrong with your being. The entry point to realising the same is in Rosa and her works. Hence, remembering Rosa Luxemburg comes not just as a political duty of the present, but also as a way of formulating a roadmap on how to live further.
Luxemburg’s life as an organiser and revolutionary shaped her theory. Her experiences in the Russian Revolution of 1905, the 1917 Russian Revolution, and the German Revolution of 1918–19 informed her reflections on how revolutions emerge, how they can succeed, and why they fail (Jacob, 2021). She insisted that socialism must be the result of mass, democratic participation, not the work of a conspiratorial elite or a bureaucratic party apparatus. Throughout, she remained insistent on the ideals of democracy and argued that a party could neither replace the masses nor treat them as passive voters; socialism required the “full mobilisation of the workers as active actors in their own liberation” (Jacob, 2021). This perspective continues to inform debates on grassroots democracy, social movements, and the dangers of authoritarian tendencies (perhaps even within left politics, too).
Luxemburg’s relevance is particularly marked in her critique of authoritarian socialism, where she fiercely opposed the lack of socialist democracy in post‑revolutionary Russia, warning that suppression of dissent and concentration of power would undermine the revolution itself (Munk, 2021). Her famous insistence that “freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently” became a slogan of the East German civil rights movement and is central to her posthumous reputation as a theorist of democratic socialism. Modern scholars highlight how she refused to compromise on two essential elements: freedom and democracy. She regarded revolutions as an ongoing process through which freedom would be founded in a new socialist polity, and she never accepted their corruption by authoritarian rule. This makes her a key reference in contemporary discussions of whether socialism can be reconciled with pluralism, civil liberties, and robust democratic institutions.
In The Accumulation of Capital, she argues that capitalism always had an inherent need to expand into non‑capitalist regions, integrating and destroying pre‑capitalist social forms to realise surplus value. She developed the notion of permanent primitive accumulation, seeing violent dispossession and colonial expansion not as a one‑off historical moment but as a structural feature of capitalism. This emphasis on the non‑European world and on the exploitation of non‑capitalist economies distinguished her from other Marxist theorists of imperialism and paved the way for later Third Worldist and dependency theories (Hutchings, 2021; Hudis, 2023). Contemporary theorists link her insights to concepts like “accumulation by dispossession”, used to describe current forms of land grabbing, privatisation, and resource extraction under neoliberal globalisation. In this sense, Luxembourg provides a conceptual bridge between classical Marxism and present‑day critiques of global development and financialised capitalism.
In her famous formulation of the historical choice between “socialism or barbarism”, Rosa encapsulates a recurring theme that’s a case in point (especially today), which is that it is either the capitalist contradictions that are overcome through socialist transformation, or they will produce increasingly barbaric outcomes – war, imperialist violence, and deepening exploitation (Luxemburg, 2003). Today, when the US, Israel and Iran are at War, Israel and Palestine too, along with a thorough ensuring of increasing monopolisation of not just the finance capital but also the nation that one lives in, all these issues listed were once what Rosa Luxemburg, who is a follower of Marx, cautioned and deliberated upon.
Rosa Luxemburg’s relevance today henceforth lies in a very distinctive combination of a very rigorous critique of capitalism’s global dynamics; an uncompromising defence of democracy and freedom within socialism; and a revolutionary politics centred on mass participation, internationalism, and opposition to militarism and imperialism. In a world marked by resurgent authoritarianism, deepening inequality, and renewed great‑power rivalry, Rosa’s “socialism or barbarism” warning, her analyses of imperialism and dispossession, and her insistence that emancipation must be democratic from below continue to provoke and inspire. Living at a time when fury basks in the majority of the economy, ‘the act of listening to experts who cautioned long back about this fury’ becomes a much-needed duty of the present. Friends, yes, it is time to look back at Rosa Luxemburg and her works!
References:
Hutchings, K. (2021). Revolutionary thinking: Luxemburg’s socialist international theory. In P. Owens & K. Rietzler (Eds.), Women’s international thought: A new history (pp. 52–71). Cambridge University Press.
Hudis, P. (2023). Pathways to social development: Rosa Luxemburg’s studies on the anthropology and sociology of imperialism. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 24(1), 129–142. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2156126
Munck, R. (2021). Luxembourg and global development. In Rethinking development (pp. xx–xx). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73811-2_6
https://www.buechner-verlag.de/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/97s83963177897.pdf
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Sankar Varma is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics, Christ (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru.