Orthodox Marxists and the First World War: Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg

Abstract

The aim of this article is to elucidate the theoretical and practical positions that the Orthodox Marxists–Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg according to Lukács–developed during the First World War within the international proletarian movement. In order to understand these positions, this work gives an account of the criticism they made of the chauvinist and opportunist currents, which abandoned the dialectical method in their research, within the Second International on war and peace. The positions reached by both Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin are the product of their correct understanding and fidelity to Marx’s way of proceeding in his works, in other words, to the dialectical method. In the absence of analyses of the correlation of class forces on an international scale from a perspective of the concrete totality, even within social movements that claim to be “leftist”, it becomes essential to return to the study of orthodox Marxists, with concrete dialectics, on international relations to understand both subjectively and objectively the capitalist mode of production today in transition to a new pattern of capital accumulation.