Rosa Luxemburg on Marxism

“Marxist theory offers us a reliable instrument enabling us to recognize and combat typical manifestations of opportunism. But the socialist movement is a mass movement. Its perils are not the product of the insidious machinations of individuals and groups. They arise out of unavoidable social conditions. We cannot secure ourselves in advance against all possibilities of opportunist deviation. Such dangers can be overcome only by the movement itself – certainly with the aid of Marxist theory, but only after the dangers in question have taken tangible form in practice.”

“It is generally only after their death that the scientific value of most great thinkers is fully recognized. Time gives them their full importance. But there is a very particular reason why, as the day on which we lost the author retreats further into the past, Marxist theory increasingly penetrates social strata and finds new partisans. Marxist theory is nothing but the scientific reflex of the class struggle engendered by capitalism with the inevitability of a law of nature. The continuous extension and the growing strength of this theory are consequences of the law of capitalist development discovered by Marx: any country where capitalism has penetrated or the class struggle has begun is a new field opened to Marxist influence. And this is why today, twenty-five years after Marx’s death, the thunder of the Russian Revolution announces that thanks to capitalism a vast territory has just been annexed to Marxist thought.”