As of writing this post, I just finished up the final pages of Tony Cliff's introduction on Rosa Luxemburg. I have only ever engaged with Luxemburg secondhandedly and I had read What Does the Spartacus League Want?, but I had never delved into her more popular writings in her own words. As with most century-old socialist literature, it can be a bit daunting at times to really get into the material, especially because they were written under completely different material conditions and time periods. However, I found that this introduction by Cliff was a great way to get into Luxemburg. Cliff incorporated direct quotes from a varied of Luxemburg's works and critically analyzed them across many thematic sections. I really enjoyed this approach as it condensed what are usually complex and dense material into a short book that was really digestible and it has only encouraged me to continue my dive into Luxemburg's socialist theory.
My biggest takeaway from this introduction was how Luxemburg's analyses, theories and tactics remain relevant in 2025. While reading the section "Party and Class", the following passage from Neue Zeit - the theoretical organ of the German Social Democratic Party - really struck me:
"The main characteristics of the tactics of struggle of Social Democracy are not 'invented,' but are the result of a continuous series of great creative acts of the elementary class struggle. Here also the unconscious precedes the conscious, the logic of the objective historical process comes before the subjective logic of its bearer." (Cliff, 1959/1980, p. 35)
As the state of the left in the Canadian state continues to falter time after time to bureaucratization and abandonment of emancipatory principles, I feel that these words from Luxemburg are as if they were written today. Luxemburg spent much of her career within the structures of the SDP in Germany, attempting to curtail the reformist and rightward shift led by Kautsky and Berstein, this is almost a tactical lesson for today's revolutionaries. Its almost as if there is a mirror between the early 1900s SPD and the modern NDP. What was once Canada's socialist party of the working class has become afraid of its shadow, bowing down to bourgeois interests and neoliberalism, thinking that shifting to the centre will allow them to grow their power to enact more reforms. This is almost the exact playbook of the SDP of Luxemburg's time, viewing capitalism as controllable through effective and focused reforms. However, if the modern NDP is similar to the SDP, then Luxemburg's role within the organization could shed some light on how revolutionaries can wage successful class war in 2025.