was seen very much as an advocate of much greater democracy, both in the
movement itself, and in the post-revolutionary regime. For this reason she was
a great inspiration to most non-Soviet communist and Marxist movements. In
particular the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which was until the
early 1960s defiantly Marxist in theory, was infused with her spirit, because it
seemed a way of being non-revolutionary, democratic, and yet still true to
Marxism. While debates about what ‘true’ Marxism is are necessarily sterile, it
does tend to be forgotten that she was only one of many leaders of the
communist movement in the early part of this century who had disagreements
with Lenin, and she was, nevertheless, an economic determinist who co-
operated in a violent revolution. An example of how her importance probably
is more symbolic than theoretical is that another anti-Lenin Marxist revolu-
tionary,Trotsky, completely ignored her while she was alive. Only years after
her death, when founding a Fourth International (seeinternational social-
ism), did he suddenly ‘discover’ their similarity of position, because his Fourth
International was itself an attempt to weld together all the dissident Marxists,
for many of whom she had become a patron saint.
Luxemburg, Rosa