Re-posted from New Politics.
The effort to issue The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg has reached a critical phase, and we appeal for your help in enabling future volumes to be published.
The Complete Works was inaugurated in March 2011 with the 600-page Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, the largest collection of her correspondence ever published in English. Volume I of the Complete Works, entitled Economic Writings 1, was published in 2013 and contains the first full English translation of one of her most important books, Introduction to Political Economy, as well as eight newly discovered manuscripts on anthropology, economic history, and the theory of crises. Volume II, entitled Economic Writings 2, was published in 2015 and contains a new translation of The Accumulation of Capital and the Anti-Critique.
We are now raising funds to cover the costs of translation of her Political Writings, beginning with three volumes (volumes 3, 4 and 5) devoted to “On Revolution.” They will contain all of her writings on the 1905–06 Russian Revolution, 1917 Russian Revolution, and 1918–19 German Revolution. These reveal Luxemburg at her finest—as a fierce supporter of revolutionary democracy, with a sensitive grasp of spontaneous freedom struggles as well as of non-hierarchical forms of organization. Many of these writings—a large number of them translated from Polish—have never appeared in print since their initial publication, and most have never before appeared in English.
The Complete Works will make her entire body of work available for the first time in any language. All of the writings will be newly translated, with the highest level of scholarly editing. But we cannot continue to commission translations without your support. We need to raise an additional $35,000 to help pay for the translation costs of the next three volumes.
We urge you to make a contribution to the Rosa Luxemburg page of the Toledo Fund.
There is no better way of celebrating Luxemburg’s birthday on March 5 and International Women’s Month.