SOURCE: An introduction to The National Question: Selected Writings by Rosa Luxemburg, edited by Horace B. Davis, Monthly Review Press, 1976, pp. 9-45.

Davis is an American author and professor of economics. In the following essay, he discusses how Luxemburg and Lenin differed on the issue of what qualified as nationalism, and how Luxemburg contrasted individual self-determination for the working-class with ethnic group identity.

It is perhaps little known that despite Lenin's attacks on her, the philosophical position so ably expounded by Rosa Luxemburg in her articles of 1908-1909 was never refuted; that it was, on the contrary, adopted by a substantial section of the Bolshevik Party, which fought Lenin on the issue, using Rosa Luxemburg's arguments—and eventually, in 1919, defeated him, so that the slogan of the right of self-determination was removed from the platform of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Later, when the issue...