ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates the tragedies surrounding the untimely timeliness of Rosa Luxemburg. It focuses on the development of her theories of the party-class relations in response first to the 'revisionism debate' prompted by Eduard Bernstein, and then in sympathy with Lenin's revolutionary commitment, but through a critique of his notions of organization and revolution. The chapter shows how her theory and historical evaluation of imperialism created revolutionary expectations that, against the background of Second International failure and Bolshevik success in 1917, profoundly yet adversely affected twentieth-century Marxist thinking about working-class subjectivity and the nature of a properly revolutionary organization. Most notably, this climate of unfulfilled expectations set the stage for the emergence of a 'Western Marxist' theoretical tradition for which the first article of faith, allegedly proven by Lukacs, was the reification of working-class consciousness, in another tragic irony, a standpoint against which Luxemburg had spent most of her life struggling.
