Rosa Luxemburg: The Incendiary Spark - by Michael Löwy (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"This remarkable collection of essays by a remarkable thinker will aid us with the rethinking needed to find our way out of the present contradictions we find ourselves in."
-Peter Hudis, Jacobin

"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 Čakardic, 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

About the Author

Michael Löwy is a French-Brazilian Marxist sociologist and philosopher, and emeritus research director in social sciences at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. His many books include The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx and On Changing the World.
Paul Le Blanc, long-time activist and Professor of History at La Roche College, is the author of a number of widely-read studies, including Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, From Marx to Gramsci, and Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience. With Michael Yates he has written the widely-acclaimed A Freedom Budget for All Americans and has co-edited a selection of Leon Trotsky's Writings in Exile.