News | History - Party / Movement History - Rosa Luxemburg - Analysis of Capitalism - Social Movements / Organizing - Political Parties / Election Analyses - Southern Cone - Andes Region - Brazil / Paraguay Rosa Luxemburg, the Mass Strike Debate, and Latin America Today

How can Luxemburg’s ideas inform our understanding of contemporary political unrest in the region?

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Marina Kabat,

An assembly of striking public school teachers in Chapecó, Santa Catarina, Brazil, 2015.
  CC BY 2.0, Photo: Vitor Marinho

Some contemporary authors have resorted to using Rosa Luxemburg’s thought as a means of analyzing the political experiences they have subsumed under the notion of “twenty-first century socialism”. In my view, this operation a simplification of Rosa Luxemburg’s political conceptions along with an acritical and apologetic perspective on Latin American bourgeois nationalist governments of the last decade.

Marina Kabat is a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Research—CONICET, a professor at the Universidad of Buenos Aires, and a head researcher at the CEICS—Centro de Estudios e Investigación en Ciencias Sociales. She also co-edits the Marxist journal Razón y Revolución. This article is based on her presentation at “Rosa Luxemburg at 150: Revisiting Her Radical Life and Legacy”, a conference hosted by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung and the International Rosa Luxemburg Society on 4–5 March 2021.

From my perspective, Luxemburg’s writings have much to offer contemporary thinkers who wish to understand the present political process. Much of this legacy is condensed in Luxemburg’s contributions to the debate over mass strikes. At first, in developing her position on this matter Rosa Luxemburg dared to question the orthodox standpoint of the social-democratic movement, which claimed that slow progress towards partial parliamentary advances was the best tactic to reach socialism. This dogma was misleadingly attributed to Engels, thus Luxemburg had to claim that even Engels’s stance should be questioned. I consider this attitude to be fundamentally correct: revolutionaries should each study their own era, analyze the development of capitalism and class struggle in the specific period, and consciously place where they develop their political action rather than simply repeating political dogmas or methods from previous revolutionary processes that took place in other historical contexts.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the mass strike debate implied a discussion regarding strikes with political goals as being a tactic available to the working class. After the frustrated 1905 Russian Revolution it also led to an assessment about the possibility of reproducing the Russian experience in Western countries. Yet in deeper terms, the debate involved an evaluation of what the relation between parties, trade unions, and mass movements should be—in other words, it encompassed the problems inherent in trying to achieve spontaneity and organization within a revolutionary process.

The mass strike debate was invigorated during 1905–06 as political life in Germany was simultaneously rocked by the impact of the Russian Revolution and by the local upheaval of class struggle manifested in a proliferation of economic strikes which tended to incorporate political demands too. In this context, a leftist faction of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) emerged, with Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, and Karl Liebknecht as its leaders. They battled not only against the revisionist current expressed by Bernstein but also against trade union leaders who were the more decisive opponents of mass strikes, as the 1905 trade union Congress of Cologne showed. Rosa Luxemburg then wrote “The Mass Strike”. Her essay’s main contributions to the discourse were the links she built between economic and political fights and the assertion that it was not indispensable to have a perfect and complete organization before launching a mass class strike, and that instead the mass action could help to forge new working-class institutions. This was especially true regarding the most precarious occupations, such as where female work or homeworking prevailed. This perspective is especially worth revisiting in the present moment as we witness a worldwide rebellion of the relative surplus population (expressions of this rebellion can be seen in the yellow vest protests in France, the Occupy movement in the US, or the unemployed movement in Argentina).[1] Dogmatic left-wing parties and overly bureaucratic trade unions turn their backs on these political expressions of the working class. This mistake is particularly dangerous in Latin America, where the relative surplus population is larger than in other countries and has shown more radical political behaviour.

In my view, so-called “twenty-first century socialism” is merely bourgeois nationalist governments that have appropriated previous mass movements and established Bonapartist regimes with a personalist and authoritarian nature. The measures they have taken are reformist ones, thus under their rule the crisis of capitalism has only grown, which explains the election defeats and mass opposition they have faced. Here, once more, Rosa Luxemburg’s approach to the problems of spontaneity, democracy, mass action, reform, and revolution are a very valuable asset to sharpen our political analysis.

The Emergence of the Mass Strike Debate

The debate on the mass strike has its epicentre in Germany where, after the elimination of the anti-socialist laws in 1890, the SPD had significant successes in parliament. The slow accumulation of parliamentary seats was considered at the end of the nineteenth century to be the tried and tested tactic of Social Democracy. Socialists believed that Engels himself had supported this idea, as his prologue to the German edition of Marx’s The Class Struggles in Francesupposedly showed. The leadership of the Social Democrats saw in this text a sacrosanct endorsement of their political positions. Indeed, the prologue as it was understood supported the idea that socialists would attain power gradually through peaceful means. But in reality, this text was largely the product of Kautsky’s pen, who had retouched Engels’s piece of writing before publishing it. This unwanted collaboration angered Engels, who complained that his text was “arranged in such a way that I appear as a mild worshipper of legality at all costs”. [2]

The leftist faction of the SPD, instead of confronting the prologue, limited themselves to affirming that it was misinterpreted. Just after the frustrated German Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg would attack the old Engels-Kautsky writing head-on, which constitutes one of her many merits. [3]

The opponents of mass strikes saw in them a new tactic which was in complete opposition to the tried and tested one. Meanwhile, mass strike supporters at first presented the mass strike as a new weapon in the service of the old tactic: the mass strike was conceived as a mechanism through which the working class could win or defend its right to universal suffrage. This point of view was held by Alexander Parvus and Rosa Luxemburg. In this way, in the beginning, the mass strike does not appear as a drastic alternative to parliamentarism, but as a complement to it.

In the middle, centrists claimed that the workers had to join the SPD en masse before a general strike could be considered. They did not reject absolutely the idea of a mass strike, but they pointed towards many prerequisites. Parvus and Luxemburg argued that it was not necessary to wait for all workers to join the SPD before carrying out a mass strike.

Before the First Russian Revolution, Belgium appeared as the main laboratory for the mass strike. In fact, to a large extent the close relationship between parliamentarism and the mass strike coalesces around the basis of the Belgian example. The strikes carried out in Belgium in 1893 and 1902 in defence of universal suffrage were, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the quintessential example of the mass political strike to which all participants in the debate referred. With the strike of 1892, a significant expansion of suffrage had been achieved. But when the same tactic was attempted in 1902 to further expand those rights, the movement failed. After this defeat, many concluded that the mass strike was an inefficient tactic. For Luxemburg, on the contrary, the failure was due to the socialists’ commitment to the liberals, who determined the programme and the means of the struggle.

Luxemburg also concludes that “if such elementary, purely bourgeois parliamentary forms that do not in any way exceed the framework of the existing order, such as universal suffrage, cannot be conquered by peaceful means, then if the ruling classes appeal to brutal violence to resist a reform purely bourgeois and very natural in the capitalist state, all speculations about a peaceful parliamentary abolition of the power of the capitalist state, of class domination, are nothing more than a ridiculous and childish fantasy.” [4]

In this way, the discussion on the mass strike is linked to the debate on reformism, but it does not imply that the acceptance of this instrument or its rejection divided reformists and revolutionaries. One section of revisionist thought, in which Bernstein participated, accepts the political general strike. In effect, this group conceives the measure as being a support for parliamentarism, provided that it is controlled with a firm hand within legal channels. Instead, the union leaders were the ones who opposed the mass strike most vigorously.

At the International Socialist Congress in Amsterdam in August 1904, the general strike was accepted as a means of struggle to win or defend the suffrage and it was distinguished from the anarchist general strike. Workers were also warned not to be tempted by the acratic propaganda that seeks to solve everything in a single strike movement, separating fellow workers from their daily work. The congress also rejected the absolute general strike as unfeasible. Despite this timid and limited approval of the mass strike, trade unionists strongly opposed this resolution. [5]

In short, the mass strike appears at this time as being opposed to the anarchist general strike. While for anarchism the general strike constituted the antipode of parliamentary politics, for social democracy it was a complement to it. From this last perspective, the mass strike is understood as a means to conquer or defend political rights and, in that sense, revisionist sectors support it. The most reactionary position was held not by the most prominent revisionists, such as Bernstein, but by the union leaders. With a narrow corporate perspective, they demanded peace and quiet for their organizations to prosper. In contrast, consistent reformers like Bernstein understoood the need for forceful measures to defend or expand suffrage and thereby unleash the potential of the parliamentary tactic they advocate. For this reason, both Luxemburg and Bernstein were targets of union criticism.

It is necessary to clarify that the similarities between them end in the recognition of the usefulness of the general strike to complement parliamentary tactics. The difference lies elsewhere: the most radical faction of the SPD did not rule out the possibility that the events unleashed after a mass strike would lead to the seizure of power by the workers, especially if the bourgeois reaction promoted more radical actions. Hence the discussions between this faction—represented by Parvus, Mehring, and Luxemburg—and the leadership of the SPD, who wanted any possible strike to be confined within bourgeois legality.

The Mass Strike Debate after the 1905 Russian Revolution

In this particular period, external conditions such as the 1905 Russian Revolution converged with the internal situation of Germany. In the latter case, important strikes for economic purposes were combined with mobilizations for democratic demands. In Prussia, a census voting system was enacted that divided the population into three castes, favouring representation by the wealthiest sectors. The influence of the Russian Revolution of 1905 fuelled the agitation for universal suffrage. The possibility of resorting to the mass strike was widely discussed even outside social-democratic circles.

At the 1905 Social-Democratic Free Trade Union’s fifth congress, held in Cologne, Theodor Bömelburg, leader of the construction trade union and one of the most conservative unionists, spoke out against the anarchist general strike, against the mass strike, and against strikes in solidarity. He complained about the aforementioned resolution from the 1904 Amsterdam International Congress. Bömelburg based his rejection of the general strike on the need to ensure political calm for the union organizations to grow.[6] In the end, the congress resolved to consider any attempt to fix a certain tactic through the mass political strike as disposable and strongly recommended that organized workers firmly reject any such attempts.[7]

At the Jena Congress, also held in 1905, August Bebel himself, the highest leader of the social-democratic movement, gave a report on the mass political strike and proposed a resolution stating that, should the political rights of the German working class be curtailed, the party would appeal to the political general strike as a means of defence. In his report, Bebel harshly criticized the apoliticism of the unions. He defended the need to act in order to obtain political rights and to improve the conditions of the party in the parliamentary field. [8] The Jena Congress declared that, in the case of an attack on the right to suffrage or on the right of association, it was the obligation of the working class to decisively use any means necessary to defend itself.[9]

Luxemburg’s initial assessment of the Jena Congress was very positive. In a letter to Leo Jogiches, she affirmed that the congress had followed her intervention and that Jena had been a great victory for them.[10] But, a few days later, she wrote to Henriette Rolland Holst regarding the limitations of the resolution. Luxemburg agreed with her Dutch comrade that the resolution was unilateral, since it tied the mass strike to parliamentarism, and at that time only considered it viable in case of needing to defend rights using force. [11] In any case, Luxemburg’s strategy was to take the slogan which had been voted for in the congress, and give it a more radical interpretation in her propaganda activity.

After the Jena Congress, the Party leadership met in secret with the main trade union leaders and undertook not to call any strike without their consent. Although they later denied having made such an agreement, the Mannheim Congress resolved exactly what had been previously agreed: that it was up to the unions exclusively to decide on the mass strike.

Even at its most progressive moment, the SPD believed that the triumph of strikes by disorganized workers is impossible and flatly rejects solidarity strikes. The SPD conceived of strikes as being limited, peaceful acts, disconnected from other actions. As Carl Legien said, workers must not be seen in the street, they must not show themselves. In turn, the fear that the action of the masses generated in the party leadership was manifested. Not only Legien considered the mere discussion of the mass strike to be “dangerous”. He expressed a set of ideas deeply rooted in the ideology of the German social democracy, that Luxemburg’s text The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions came to discuss.

The Mass Strike and Luxemburg’s Contributions

Rosa Luxemburg wrote The Mass Strike for German readers, with the intention of intervening in the disputes that had agitated social democracy. She studied the Russian Revolution of 1905, concerned with learning tactical lessons which could be applied to the German movement.

Luxemburg questioned the anarchist vision of the general strike as being the only tool for access to power, but at the same time she argued that social democracy had fallen to the opposite extreme by erecting parliament as the only possible means of struggle. She argued that both those who most fervently oppose the mass strike (Bömelburg) as well as those who defend it as a limited means to sustain parliamentarism (Bernstein) shared an anarchist vision of the mass strike. This was an abstract and ahistorical perspective, namely the belief that a mass strike can be decreed or forbidden at will.

Moreover, Luxemburg affirmed that an anarchist conception also underlay the decisions of congresses that believed it is plausible to decree or prohibit a mass strike. Even so, despite the limitations of the Jena resolution, Luxemburg salvaged from this congress the fact that it had recognized that the German proletariat had much to learn from the Russian experience. Mass action did not represent a display of barbarism and political primitiveness, but a useful lesson for Western workers. For this reason, Luxemburg compared the respective situations of the Russian and German proletariat, showing that it was false that the material conditions of the whole German working class were superior to those of their Russian peers.

In this way, she took one of the assumptions of German social democracy and confronted it with the facts. In the same way, she proceeded with the prejudices regarding conflicts led by unorganized sectors: Luxemburg showed how these groups not only managed to triumph but how, as a result of their struggle, the trade unions were born. Thus, it was not necessary to first create a union in formal terms to only later be able to think of a measure of strength. A successful strike could give rise to organizational construction, attract the workers to the union, and force the bourgeoisie to recognize it.

Luxemburg opposed the definition—which a large part of the social-democratic movement then adhered to—of the mass strike as being a single act. For Luxemburg, the mass strike was the form of the revolutionary struggle, the movement of the proletarian masses, and the form in which their struggle manifested in the revolution.

It could be said that a period of mass strike is a revolutionary stage in which mass strikes follow one another by articulating economic and political demands, where particular local movements converge in large actions and then fragment again in a series of minor conflicts. This definition is similar to the one presented by Antonie Pannekoek. However, Luxemburg’s text maintains a certain dichotomy between, on the one hand, defining each of the strikes in the Russian process as a mass strike, and on the other, the conceptualization of the whole process as a “mass strike”. In turn, the mass strike understood in this latter definition is confused with the revolutionary process itself, pushing other possible tactical measures off the horizon or relegating them to the background.

Luxemburg hoped that a period of mass strikes could unfold in Germany. She imagined a scenario similar to the one Parvus had already outlined in his essays on the mass strike: from a movement which started in defence of parliamentary political rights, such a political and activist response can open up a period of broader struggles. In this way, the response in Germany to a coup against the elected government would not stop in its mere restoration. In Germany the struggle would be for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Therefore, trying in advance to limit the form and duration of a mass strike is equivalent to artificially limiting a means of struggle of the proletariat and castrating its potential. Ernest Mandel rightly points out that Luxemburg is the first to systematically raise the need for a change in tactics for the German social-democratic movement. [12] Our perception of this merit is broadened by observing the stony conviction with which social democrats opposed such basic forms of struggle as the solidarity strike.

In summary, The Mass Strike represents a lucid response to the flagrant limitations and prejudices of the German social-democratic movement. In it, Rosa Luxemburg shows that the Western workers’ movement had lessons to learn from the Russian Revolution of 1905. The importance of mass strikes in this historical process was due not to Russian backwardness, but to the effectiveness of this form of struggle, both to obtain reforms and in a revolutionary process. This point, although perhaps obvious in Latin American countries like Argentina with a long tradition of general strikes, was not so clearly accepted or understood in the context of Germany at the turn of the twentieth century.

Applying Luxemburg’s Lessons to Latin America

First of all, I believe that Rosa Luxemburg’s concern for the involvement of the most varied proletarian layers in the class struggle and her concern to achieve their political unity acquires today even greater importance than it did in the times of the Second International. The working class has been fragmented. It is divided, on the one hand, between employed and unemployed workers. On the other hand, the employed workers themselves are fragmented between legally registered workers and those not registered and subjected to greater precarity. [13] This fragmentation has driven various theorists to misleadingly consider different layers of workers as separate social classes, such as the theorizing around the precariat. [14] The differences between the working conditions of legally registered workers and those who work outside of any legal protections is so abysmal that some authors consider the latter workers not as proletarians but as “slaves”. Ultimately, this error is based on confusing what a proletarian actually is with the characteristics of a worker from the countries central to the post-war golden period, which saw the heyday of Fordism and the welfare state. [15]

In Latin America many left-wing political parties still reproduce the error of German social democracy that Luxemburg rightly criticized. They tend to fluctuate between parliamentarism and a short-term corporatism.[16] They usually privilege actions among formally employed workers, especially among classic blue-collar workers such as in the automotive or metallurgical industries, over the most precarious workers. But the formal industrial workers are today a minority in numerical terms and in political terms no longer constitute part of the political vanguard.[17] In their place, the most precarious sectors of the working class, as well as the unemployed, state workers, teachers, and doctors have shown greater dynamism.

At this point, it is worth remembering Rosa Luxemburg’s remark that the most institutionalized sectors of the workers’ movement are not always the most active in a revolutionary process. In fact, current evidence shows us the “dead weight” of the union bureaucracy within the movement.

Secondly, it is convenient to highlight Luxemburg’s fights against the conception of Marxism as a religion, as a crystallized dogma that should not be permanently updated on the basis of the study of new concrete situations. At this point, Rosa Luxemburg’s ability and cunning—to question and confront what was considered to be the tried and tested social-democratic tactic—is a political attitude worth revisiting.

However, highlighting and trying to replicate the critical and creative approach of Rosa Luxemburg cannot throw us towards the opposite tendency, one that in the name of criticizing Marxist dogmatism embraces postmodern and relativist dogmatism. Postmodern dogmatism denies the core beliefs of Luxemburg, those being: the belief in the possibility of a definitive knowledge of reality, Marxism as a science, and social revolution as a political objective.

From a postmodern theoretical framework, Luxemburg has been singled out as an inspiration for the new social movements. As we saw, one of the axes of The Mass Strike is to point out the pre-eminence of the party over partisan organizations that represent particular objectives of the class (be they unions or cooperative movements). On the other hand, Luxemburg always spoke of proletarian masses, including in this group unemployed or disorganized workers’ groups, home-based workers, and women workers. But she downplayed everything related to the participation of non-worker sectors in the revolution. For this reason, she was opposed to the agrarian reform that the Bolsheviks promoted in Russia. Along the same lines, in Reform or Revolution one of her arguments against Bernstein invoked the tendency towards the progressive loss of importance of the middle classes, so that the action of the party should not be directed at them, but at the proletariat. For all this, it is difficult to present Luxemburg as a precursor of social movements defined in general by their polyclassism and the particularism of her political objectives.

The attempt to transform Rosa Luxemburg’s thought into a foundation of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra, MST) implies an even more acute contradiction and a selective “cutting” of her work. Isabel Loureiro performs this operation. [18] For this, she neglects that Luxemburg observed with satisfaction the process of proletarianization of peasants and that she was opposed to all kinds of agrarian reform. Even when she rethinks some of her initial criticisms of the Russian Revolution, she remains critical about the negative consequences of the land reform.

Luxemburg hoped that the proletarianization of rural producers would reinforce the contingents of the working class. The consciousness that she sought to develop is the consciousness of the working class—and not a peasant consciousness and culture. A movement that takes landless rural workers, i.e. proletarians (if they are landless they do not own the means of production), many of whom already live in cities, and proposes that they return to rural production as smallholders and develop a kind of peasant consciousness, is at the antipodes of the political goals of Luxemburg. Of course, even Luxemburg’s ideas could be discussed. But it is one thing to discuss an idea and quite another to misrepresent it in order to use it as an endorsement of completely different standpoints.

Even more problematic is the attempt to present Luxemburg as a source of inspiration or theoretical justification for the pragmatic options taken by the so-called “twenty-first century socialism”. This nomenclature for the Venezuelan governments does not obey a real analysis of their politics—which does not go beyond bourgeois nationalism—but rather is an attempt to legitimize them. Chavism in Venezuela—like other similar governments of the last decades in Latin America—can be characterized as Bonapartism. Bonapartism describes regimes that, in the face of conflicts between social forces in the region, emerge not to boost the revolutionary potential of the masses, but to contain it.

To fulfil this function, the initial language of Bonapartism is more or less radical, and certain concessions are made to the working masses. However, most of these concessions do not transcend the symbolic plane. Even concrete politics which are propagandized as being more radical do not transcend the classic economic measures of bourgeois nationalism, this being the nationalization of certain key companies. These nationalizations do not imply anything other than the collective control of the entire bourgeoisie, through the state, over some natural resource: oil, or gas. Once consolidated in power, the Bonapartists began a shift to the right and promoted fiscal adjustment measures and austerity plans, which generated discontent among the masses. This discontent was then handled in different ways by the various governments, which in some cases leads them to lose elections (as in the cases of the Workers’ Party in Brazil, and Kirchnerism in Argentina). Venezuela manages to retain power by reinforcing authoritarianism. In order to achieve control of the press, the repression of the popular mobilizations of sectors that previously supported Chavism is added. Most of the repression has not been directed towards the bourgeoisie, but towards the working class. This repression is largely carried out by para-police militias such as the FAES (Special Action Forces) that have been deployed against various popular mobilizations including that of teachers who are mobilizing for salary increases. In Venezuela there is no freedom to negotiate collective bargaining agreements and parties or groups that use the word “socialism” in their name are prohibited. There are labour and social leaders who have disappeared, such as Alcedo Mora, and others have been unjustly incarcerated without trial, such as in the case of the union leader Rodney Álvarez, who has been in prison for more than seven years without his trial having yet begun.[19]

Atilio Boron and Marta Harnecker have been the main defenders of Chavism. Both have turned to Rosa Luxemburg to justify their positions. Harnecker quotes Luxemburg to point out that the path to socialism has not been laid out beforehand, and that the Venezuelan path is a possible path. [20] However, acts of repression against socialist organizations and leaders is never a plausible path to socialism, much less one that Rosa Luxemburg subscribed to.

Boron, for his part, quotes Luxemburg’s writings where she criticizes the elimination of the democratic discussion of ideas in the Russian revolutionary field after 1917, to vindicate in contrast the Venezuelan model as a democratic path to socialism instead of a typical revolutionary scheme.[21] However, Boron has not turned to Luxemburg in order to denounce the absence of democratic practices in Venezuela or the repression of socialist leaders.

These same authors, and others who respond to the same theoretical framework, shy away from the analysis of mass demonstrations, mass strikes, and other protests against Bonapartist governments in the region, immediately assuming that they respond to the Right. However, if any of these movements have been capitalized on by the Right in any country (Macrism in Argentina, Bolsonarism in Brazil) it is only because the Left, for fear of confronting the Bonapartist regimes has—with a few honourable exceptions—turned its back on the masses. Thus, if Boron and Harnecker would like to insist on their support of the Chavist regime, it would be clarifying that they refrain from appealing to Rosa Luxemburg to provide a base for their own political affiliation. Once more we are forced to say: hands off Rosa Luxemburg!


[1] Eduardo Sartelli, "La rebelión mundial de la población sobrante. Proletarización, ‘globalización’ y lucha de clases en el siglo XXI", Razón y Revolución, vol. 19, 2009.

[2] Quoted in: Ernest Mandel, Sobre la historia del movimiento obrero, Barcelona: Fontamara, 1978, p. 34.

[3] Rosa Luxemburg, “Discurso en la Fundación del Partido Comunista Alemán”, Berlin 30–31 December 1918; Rosa Luxemburg, ¿Qué quiere la Liga Espartaco?, Buenos Aires: Ediciones La Minga, 2009, pp. 85–86.

[4] Rosa Luxemburg, “Y por tercera vez el experimento belga”, Debate sobre la huelga de masas: Parte 1, Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 1975, p. 112.

[5] Beer (metallurgical union leader), “Intervención en la ‘Discusión sobre la huelga general’”, International Socialist Congress, Amsterdam, 14–20 August 1904, in Rosa Luxemburg et al., Debate sobre la huelga de masas: Parte 2, Córdoba: Pasado y Presente, 1976, p. 133.

[6] Theodor Bömelburg, “La posición de los sindicatos acerca de la huelga general”, in Actas de las deliberaciones del 5° Congreso de los sindicatos Alemanes, Cologne, 22–25 May 1905, and Berlin, 1905, in Rosa Luxemburg et al., Debate … Parte 2, pp. 141–43.

[7] Actas de las deliberaciones del 5° Congreso, pp. 136–37.

[8] August Bebel, “Informe sobre la huelga política de masas (Extracto)”, in Actas de las deliberaciones del Congreso del Partido Socialdemócrata Alemán en Jena, 17–23 September 1905, Berlin, 1905, in Rosa Luxemburg et al., Debate … Parte 2, pp. 161–62.

[9] “Resolución Bebel sobre ‘La huelga política de masas y la socialdemocracia’”, in Actas de deliberaciones … en Jena, p. 147.

[10] Rosa Luxemburg, “Carta a Jogiches”, September 1905, in John Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, Mexico: Ediciones Era, 1974, p. 261.

[11] Ibid., pp. 261–62.

[12] Ernest Mandel, Sobre la historia del movimiento obrero, Barcelona: Fontamara, 1978, p. 34.

[13] Marina Kabat, “From structural breakage to political reintegration of the working class: Relative surplus population layers in Argentina and their involvement in the piquetero movement”, Capital & Class, vol. 38, no. 2, 2014, pp. 365–84.

[14] For a critique of these ideas see: Marina Kabat and Julia Egan, “La clase mutilada. Un debate con las visiones reduccionistas de la clase obrera y su concepción de los movimientos de masas”, Theomai, vol. 35, 2017, pp. 86–104.

[15] Marina Kabat, Agustina Desalvo, and Julia Egan, “The tip of the iceberg: Media coverage of ‘slave labor’ in Argentina”, Latin American Perspectives, vol. 44, no. 6, 2017, pp. 50–62.

[17] Ianina Harari, Nicolás Villanova, and Eduardo Sartelli, “Radiografía de la estructura laboral tras los gobiernos kirchneristas”, Revista Kairos, vol. 2, no. 2.

[18] Isabel Loureiro, “Rosa Luxemburg e os movimentos sociais contemporâneos: o caso do MST”, Crítica Marxista, no. 26, 2008.

[19] Nicolas Grimaldi, ¿Qué es el Chavismo? Buenos Aires: Ediciones RyR, 2020.

[20] Marta Harnecker, “América Latina y el socialismo del siglo XXI”, Guatemala: Secretaría de la Paz, 2010, p. 70.

[21] Atilio Boron, "La izquierda latinoamericana a comienzos del siglo XXI: nuevas realidades y urgentes desafíos", Observatorio Social de América Latina, vol. 5, no. 13, 2004.