Hello, you're very welcome to Longreads, a Jacobin podcast where we look in depth at political topics and thinkers.

My name is Daniel Finn, and the features editor here at Jacobin, and I'll be presenting the show.

It's now the century and a half since the birth of Rosa Luxembourg, the anniversary fell on March 5th this year.

The great Polish-born revolutionary has been a reference point for generations of socialists.

But some people might wonder if her key political ideas, developed as they were in the early 20th century, have stood the test of time.

Our guest today would give an emphatic yes to that question.

Lea Ippi is a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics.

Her book, Free, about the experience of growing up in communist Albania, will appear this autumn, along with her study of a manual Kant.

I began by asking her about the relevance of Luxembourg for political theory more than a century after her death.

Rosa Luxembourg was described as one of the most brilliant intellects of all the scientific heirs of Marx and Engels by one of her colleagues.

And she's certainly one of the most original and also most influential thinkers in the history of Marxism, and was also one of the key figures of the socialist movement in the 20th century.

And what makes her really stand out and original is a combination of intellectual rigor with political integrity.

And this ability, which is rare for Marxist, to merge deep theoretical insight with also political vision.

She was equally committed to knowledge and truth, but she was also committed to militant activism and to the pursuit of the worker's cause.

And her contributions are among the most original in a range of areas of Marxist thinking from hardcore debates around economic issues, the accumulation of capital, to the critique of globalization in relationship to colonialism, to the question of self-determination, to the question of the relationship between democracy and revolution,

to the challenges of parliamentaryism and parliamentary reform, to the question of strikes and trade unions and the political organization, political parties, and a whole other range of areas.

So she's an interesting and original Marxist whose intellectual fortune to go back to your initial question has followed in a way the intellectual fortune and political fortune of socialism in the 20th century.

She was very prominent and was hurled as one of the heroes of the working class movement in the German Democratic Republic and in Eastern Europe during the communist period was marginalized and relatively forgotten in the kind of dark 90s where people thought that history had come to an end.

And there was no interest in discussions of socialism that were theoretically rigorous and interested also in the question of revolutionary transformation as much as they were in reformists.

And I think more recently her ideas have been rediscovered and become more prominent again because scholars have returned to her work as an intellectual and an activist who is interesting to think about the most urgent questions of our time in an original and rigorous way.

So she's interesting because she has been both appropriated and distorted both by Western Marxists who were keen to kind of chart alternative facts to state socialism, but also by socialist states who were attracted to her theory of capitalist crisis and her critique of social democracy.

So in the aftermath of the financial crisis, the current coronavirus crisis and so on and in the context of an ongoing electoral decline of traditional social democratic parties, her work has been rediscovered and has enjoyed a kind of revival as a source of critique of the global political economy.

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