Rosa Luxemburg

Description

As an economist and political theorist, Rosa Luxemburg's work still resonates powerfully today Born in Poland in 1871 she became a revolutionary leader in Berlin, co-founding the anti-war Spartacus League and publishing works including Reform or Revolution and The Accumulation of Capital. In this account of her extraordinary life, Dana Mills examines Luxemburg's key and lesser-known works, and quotes from her letters to reveal a woman who was loving in personal relationships and fierce in professional battles. Luxemburg, who lived in grossly unequal times, fought for emancipation for all. What is her legacy today, a hundred years after her assassination in Berlin in 1919 at the age of 47? Luxemburg's emphasis on humanity and insistence on revolution gave coherence, as this compelling biography illustrates, to a fraught life story and a colossal economic and political legacy.

Dana Mills is a political theorist who has taught at Hertford College, Oxford University and Oxford Brookes University. She is also a campaigner for socialist-feminism and anti-racism, a dancer and the author of Dance and Politics: Moving Beyond Boundaries (2016).

"From today's perspective, it is not unreasonable to suggest-as Mills does in Rosa Luxemburg, a compact and admiring biography-that she is a potential role model to the woke generation, an icon to the feminist, environmental, equality, and anticolonialist rebellions. Luxemburg is alive and well and speaking at a street meeting near you. . . . [Mills] sees 'the energy, resilience, and humanism of Rosa Luxemburg reemerging as a counter-force' in our times. . . . Luxemburg deserves better than past categorizations. She was a unique revolutionary, self-made and self-critical, seductive and humane. You will meet the real Rosa here, and it's a pleasure." -- Norman Lebrecht * Wall Street Journal * "Can there be anything new to say about Rosa Luxemburg? In this passionate, fast-moving, and yet scholarly account Mills shows us that there is." * Jewish Socialist * "In these days when NGO politics so looms over the left, the recall to the spirit and approach of an activist from the heroic days of the Marxist movement is refreshing. . . . [A] warm and sprightly book." * Workers' Liberty * "[Mills presents] us right from the first pages with a Rosa Luxemburg that the reader wants to sit down and talk with." -- Katherine Connelly * Monthly Review * "This remarkable life is the subject of Mills's new biography, a study of Luxemburg's personal, political, and academic writings. . . . Mills, an activist, theorist, and member of the Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg editorial board, tells a brisk and more or less chronological story of her subject's life and works, placing particular emphasis on the aspects of Luxemburg's theory and praxis which made her a highly divisive figure even among her socialist contemporaries: her strident internationalism and anti-militarism, her refusal to compartmentalize various forms of oppression, and her striking combination of brazenness and empathy. Concise analyses of Luxemburg's major works are placed in historical and biographical context, and intimate details about her rich, contradictory, and sometimes volatile personal life are occasionally extracted from extensive correspondence to give us a fuller picture of this iconoclastic soul." * Women's Review of Books * "The book is about both Luxemburg's personal life and her political and economic ideas. . . . An interesting and informative read." * Socialist Standard * "Mills brings Rosa Luxemburg to life, exploring her revolutionary thinking and writing, all while helping the reader get to know Red Rosa, who always took brisk walks, loved reading Goethe's Faust, regularly corresponded with V. I. Lenin, and continually worked towards an open and just future." * New Books Network * "Vibrant, meticulous, and well-reasoned-at last we have, with Mills's new book, an English-language biography of Rosa Luxemburg which does credit to the life and work of its subject, one of the greatest economic and political minds of the twentieth century." -- Kate Evans, author of "Red Rosa" "Mills's Rosa Luxemburg provides an impressive overview of Luxemburg's life and work from a feminist standpoint-a task made newly relevant by the emergence of a new generation of activists and theorists in today's movements for social justice and against racism, sexism, and imperialism." -- Peter Hudis, professor of philosophy and humanities, Oakland Community College, general editor of "The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg"