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What is the International Luxemburgist Network?
Why this organization now?
Statement of Agreement

The International Luxemburgist Network is a new organization of militants who are in general agreement with the ideas of Rosa Luxemburg. Our aim, as members of the working class, is to help in the organizing of a world revolution to end capitalism, contributing our perspectives based on radical socialism and democracy.

We have organized this network around Luxemburg’s concepts because we believe that these concepts are central to understanding and acting on the present world situation. We think that those who agree in this viewpoint need to work together to exchange views, formulate new ideas, disseminate them within the working-class movement and to coordinate action and organizing. Obviously, we are not, nor do we try to be, the only activists who base themselves on the work of Rosa Luxemburg. Neither do we believe that Luxemburgism can be a dogma. All militants can exhibit freely their ideas, since freedom is an indispensable condition for the construction of socialism. But there are a few key ideas that we agree on:

Luxemburg’s conception of the democratic self-organization of the working class is vital today as an alternative to the Leninist notion of a vanguard of professional revolutionaries, separate from the working class and itself guided by a centralized body of experienced leaders. We reject all such top-down, hierarchical organizations, because such hierarchy only mirrors the separation under class society of those who decide from those who work. It can never overturn such a society. Only organizations that are democratic and give the power to make decisions to the workers themselves can help to organize a new society in which all decisions are made democratically, and power is in the hands of the many, not the few.

The democratic organization and unification of the working class arises out of workers’ collective action in mass strikes, as Luxemburg first showed a century ago. The process of self-organization and mass transformation of consciousness that she described has been demonstrated repeatedly in the mass strikes of 1918, 1936, 1968 and many other years, up to the present. It is through this process, not just through electoral or labor-union action, that the workers can form themselves into a class capable of leading society. These struggles can form the democratic organs of direct workers’ power—workers’ councils or assemblies—that can, in a revolution, become the governing bodies of socialist society.

At a time of global economic collapse, Luxemburg’s theory of the accumulation of capital makes it clear how and why capitalism has reached it ultimate limits. The continued existence of capitalism thus will lead humanity into a prolonged period of decline and ultimately, if allowed to continue, into a new Dark Age of barbarism. Her analysis shows why revolutionary transformation, an end to capitalism and the social ownership of all wealth are essential today. Capitalists’ concessions to the working class in this period will occur in struggles, but will only be temporary unless power over the economy is taken away from the capitalists.

Finally, the unification of the working class is essential if it is to take power. Luxemburg’s uncompromising opposition to all forms of nationalism and to the myth of national self-determination is a critical basis for our consistent opposition to all the divisions of today based on sex, religion, nationality, sexual orientation or skin-color. Like Luxemburg, we believe that workers everywhere have the same interests.

Critical as it is, Luxemburg’s work grew out of a living, evolving tradition of Marxist working-class thought that includes the work of many others before, during and since her time. We draw on that larger tradition, not on her work alone.

We encourage all those who generally agree with the ideas of Rosa Luxemburg as summarized here to contact us and to join this Network.