Rosa Luxemburg has been traditionally considered as a utopian visionary, whose understanding of socialism was guided by a kind of mixture of romanticism, anarchism and idealism. In the mainstream tradition of Marxism, in most of the established communist parties even today she is looked upon with a feeling of deep suspicion at least for three reasons: first, because of the distorted presentation of the Lenin-Rosa Luxemburg debate on the party Luxemburg is considered an opponent of Lenin and an enemy of the very idea of organization; second, with Stalin's coinage of the expression “Luxemburgism” in the 1930s Rosa Luxemburg was linked up with Menshevism and Trotsky and virtually hounded out of the Comintern-controlled international communism; third, her critique of some of the key issues concerning the Russian Revolution, as found in her The Russian Revolution (1918) was considered as a dangerous threat to the established Stalinist model of socialism that had been built up in the Soviet Union.

My submission is that it is precisely in this so-called irrelevant, utopian and “Menshevik/Trotskyist” outlook of Rosa Luxemburg that one can discover the clues to a vision of socialism which inaugurated the heritage of an alternative understanding of Marxism with a revolutionary humanist face, as distinct from liberalism, social democratic revisionism as well as Stalinist authoritarianism. It is through the lens of Rosa Luxemburg that it is possible to understand what went wrong with Soviet socialism and how we can reposition our understanding of socialism in the twenty-first century.