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The Impact Of Rosa Luxemburg

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The impact of Rosa Luxemburg’s materialist conception of history in Social Reform or Revolution, arguably became greater after national independence had been achieved in the nations of the Third World. Luxemburg’s assassination afforded her opponents the opportunity to completely undermine her theory – her work was dismissed by her critics as it was seen to being completely fallacious in its interpretation of the accumulation of capital. However, as Luxemburg’s particular strand of revolutionary Marxism lost its momentum in Europe, it began to pick up traction in the developing nations of the Third World. The strength of her critique of revisionism, thus, lies in its ability to transcend both international boundaries and political epoch’s. …show more content…

A large portion of the Black population who voted for the African National Congress (ANC) in the inaugural democratic election, did so because they believed that a government-approved socialist revolution was on the cards. The ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP), under the leadership of Joe Slovo, had been open about their commitment to their two-stage strategy – the struggles against apartheid and capitalism were two separate battles, that had to be addressed in two separate stages. National liberation would need to be achieved, before the question of a socialist revolution could be addressed. Luxemburg’s critique of revisionism seemed to reign true in this scenario – the struggle against apartheid came to overshadow the struggle for a socialist transformation. The mass revolutionary struggle of the 1980’s came to be replaced by a reluctant acceptance of reformism. The reformists within the South African government argued that capitalism had reached a stage in which it was no longer necessary to call for revolution. While it proved possible to remove the political institutions of apartheid within the framework of capitalism, the partnership between capitalism and racial domination could not be removed without the worker-driven socialist

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