The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume I: Economic Writings 1

Description

This first volume in Rosa Luxemburg's Complete Works, entitled Economic Writings 1, contains some of Luxemburg's most important statements on the globalization of capital, wage labor, imperialism, and pre-capitalist economic formations. In addition to a new translation of her doctoral dissertation, "The Industrial Development of Poland," Volume I includes the first complete English-language publication of her "Introduction to Political Economy," which explores (among other issues) the impact of capitalist commodity production and industrialization on non- capitalist social strata in the developing world. Also appearing here are ten recently discovered manuscripts, none of which has ever before been published in English.

Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) was a Polish-born Jewish revolutionary and one of the greatest theoretical minds of the European socialist movement. An activist in Germany and Poland, the author of numerous classic works, she participated in the founding of the German Communist Party and the Spartacist insurrection in Berlin in 1919. She was assassinated in January of that year and has become a hero of socialist, communist and feminist movements around the world.

One cannot read the writings of Rosa Luxemburg, even at this distance, without an acute yet mournful awareness of what Perry Anderson once termed 'the history of possibility.' -- Christopher Hitchens * Atlantic * Transports us directly into the private world of a woman who has never lost her inspirational power as an original thinker and courageous activist ... reveals that the woman behind the mythic figure was also a compassionate, teasing, witty human being. -- Sheila Rowbotham * Guardian *