  Luxemburg’s analysis on questions of strategy and political organisation was shaped by her reflections on the development of capitalism, her emphasis on the global character of that development and her conviction that any discussion of the issue of political organisation had to be historically informed and sensitive to the internal dynamic of the political movements of different countries. While historical materialism provided the methodological foundation, Luxemburg’s more specific interventions on the questions of the day (reform vs. revolution, economic vs. political struggle, spontaneous vs. centralised forms of political organisation) were shaped by her analysis of two very different experiences of working class organisation. In Western Europe, the demands of workers were increasingly driven (and constrained) by representation in the institutions of liberal parliamentary democracy, their demands presented in the language of civic rights, their appeals taking the form of a call to collective democratic responsibilty. In Eastern Europe, where the struggle for worker’s rights took place mostly underground, political debate was constantly threatened by censorship, and mass actions were organised in secret and at great risk to activists’ lives. The debate was therefore very different. Luxemburg’s essay on the The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Union, synthesises the lessons learned from the Russian revolution of 1905 and reflects on them to better understand working class organisation as a whole.