Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had imagined that a mass strike of the proletariat would be led by a professional vanguard outside or “above” the working class, while to anarchist theorists, revolution was sparked through extraordinary acts of destruction and propaganda. To Luxemburg, neither idea was the right way to understand or facilitate the mass strike. Rather, she saw many different dynamics working together in a social revolution.

  In her work Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organization, Luxemburg explained that political organization would develop naturally from within, as workers learned by participating in strikes for better wages and later for political ends. Revolution would teach itself to the participating masses. She believed that leaders should be nothing more than the conscious embodiment of the feelings and ambitions of the masses, and that mass strikes would bring about a new form of socialism. The events of 1905 had shown Luxemburg that a general strike could not be decreed by an executive decision, nor could it reliably be incited by grass roots groups, but that it was a natural phenomenon of the proletarian consciousness. It was an inevitable result of social realities, particularly the hardship of working people forced, in order to survive, to carry out onerous, underpaid work in the new industrial workplaces of Central Europe and Russia.

Lech Walesa founded Solidarity in Poland in 1980. The independent trade union used mass strikes to improve the lives of workers, and these strikes were the catalyst for political change.

Luxemburg believed that the pressure of proletarian discontent against the military might and financial control of the state would explode in unsuccessful and successful strikes, culminating in a spontaneous mass strike. This would bring about the workers’ objectives and transform the party leadership while advancing the revolution against capitalism. During these developments, workers would advance intellectually, guaranteeing their further progress. Vladimir Lenin objected that this “revolutionary sponteneity” took away the benefits of the inherent discipline and forward-planning of a revolution led by enlightened commanders. He assigned the leadership role to his Bolshevik party. Luxemburg saw this as conducive to dictatorship and ultimately to “the brutalization of public life.” The horrors of Lenin’s Red Terror and Stalin’s murderous trajectory were to prove her right.