Ine Legacy of Rosa Luxembure b Norman Geras (New Left Books, £4.50) is the third major work by a Trotskyist militant to be published by New Left Books this year — the others are Livio Maitan's Party, Army and Masses in China and Ernest Mandel's Late Capitalism. And it acnieves a notable task - to rescue some of the chief theoretical and political positions of Rosa Luxemburg from the confusion. misuse and misrepresentation Unfortunately, as Geras shows, this contuson ane misrenresentation nasn only been confined to the Stalinists and reformists. Trotskyists also - in thei justifiable desire to rescue her from the Stalinists' picture of her as a semialar CHISE ODDOnCHE of Lenin. or the reformists' portrait of her as a sort of soupca up ich-wing noera — nave too often obliterated the truly distinctive and unique views of Luxemburg.
For example, as the second essay in the book demonstrates, Luxemburg's views on the Russian Revolution have frequently been taken to be more or less the same as trotsky s, waen in reanty ency were much closer in their essentials to Lenin s - a lact wnich merely goes to show that Trotsky was right as against both Luxemburg and Lenin.
Rosa Luxemburg Finally, in an outstanding chapter on *Bourgeois Power and Socialist DemocOn the Relation of Ends and TaLy.
Means', Geras shows that Luxemburg's famous notes on the Russian Kevolution. which those who wish to fit her into the "Leninist or trotskyist moura generally prefer to forget, are in fact an outstandingly original analysis of the relation between political methods and the goal of the emancipation of the proletariat. Geras Dois our mar ar tom makus conces sions to liberalism: 'Her concern about Treecom is mantesty within the dictatorship of the proletariat rather than over a principle above the dictatorship of the proletariat' (p 178). too easily been seen as necessarily involving 'centrism versus revolutionary Marxism', *Bolshevism sort.
It is party, and Lenin nad a wrong concepuor entryism, and so on. Ferocious ness — clearly not correct Marxist ones. greatest of all revolutionaries. He also interim government.
of the real situation of debate which In the narrow sectarian world imposed sen coverning on revolutionaries by the long dominance statelets which will of Stalinism, any struggle of ideas has all Line rumare the various population versus Menshevism' Interests of and similar world historic self-labelling.
In fact they have involved nothing of the sufficient to note that Karl Liebknecht thought that dialectical materialism was rubbish, Luxemburg had a completely wrong position on the theory of imperialism and the national question,