Democracy and Dictatorship: Rosa Luxemburg’s Path to Revolution

Abstract

This chapter argues that Luxemburg’s central theoretical contribution during the German Revolution was to outline a method of revolutionary transformation in which the socialist revolution was understood not merely as a struggle for institutional power, but as the construction of a new way of life and new cultural understandings which would guarantee the liberation of a people’s “spirit.” Rather than envisaging the revolution as a single act, Luxemburg imagined a long process of economic and social change in which an active and mobilised population would overthrow the bourgeois social order and create new institutional and cultural forms for a post-capitalist society. For this process not to collapse into civil war or counter-revolution, it was essential for Luxemburg that it be carried out by a majority of workers with a commitment to basic political freedoms and democratic socialist institutions.