Una candela che brucia dalle due parti. Rosa Luxemburg tra critica dell’economia politica e rivoluzione.

Luxemburg’s legacy is customarily reduced to two “errors”: crude economic determinism, and blind belief in the spontaneity of the masses. The paper reconstructs Luxemburg’s arguments about the tendency to the “final” breakdown of capitalism and her criticism of Lenin, and shows how her economic theory and political perspective are different and much richer than usually recognized. The paper shows that firstly, Luxemburg saw the internal link between value, abstract labour and money; secondly, she emphasized the connection between dynamic competition, relative surplus value extraction, and the “law” of the falling tendency of the “relative wage”; thirdly, her theory of the crisis is not underconsumptionist. The paper also assesses Luxemburg political views: her theory of the party, very different from the one held by the Bolsheviks; and her point of view on the trade unions, with reference to a work by Claudio Sabattini. Thus, in the end, Luxemburg’s questions seems to be more interesting than her critics’ answers, her defeats more fruitful than her opponents’ victories.