Rosa Luxemburg

A detailed historical account and political analysis of the treaty that marked the official conclusion of the First World War on the Eastern Front, in which the author stridently advocates the position of the “left communists” who opposed the treaty and instead called for international revolutionary war, with extensive discussion of the connection between the opposing views on this question in the Bolshevik Party and crucial domestic controversies concerning revolutionary social organization and economic policy.

In this 1995 essay, Robert Kurz examines “fictitious capital”, “unproductive labor”, the “tertiary sector”, “State debt”, “speculative bubbles”, “derivatives”, and “globalization” in the context of the wave of bankruptcies, crashes and bailouts of the 80s and 90s; discusses Rosa Luxemburg’s crisis theory, Keynesianism, Aglietta’s “regulation theory”, and the “neo-liberal” offensive; and predicts a “devaluation shock” that will invalidate the bloated property claims of fictitious capital in a “monetary atomic explosion” heralding “the end of the history of the mode of production based on money”.

Translated preface to the Russian fifth edition of Rosa Luxemburg's works The Accumulation of Capital and her Anti-Critique.

The modern left, bolshevism included, are all children of Zimmerwald. It was at the Zimmerwald conference in 1915 that the revolutionary left thrashed out the issues of its relation to the centrist and reformist wings of the movement and its orientation towards national self-determination... Lenin may have been well in advance of anyone in his call for revolutionary defeatism, but... Lenin's defence of the right of nations to self-determination was no more than a reiteration of orthodoxy and... in their assessment of the real consequences of support for nationalism the European left proved to be more perspicacious than Lenin.