  Luxemburg’s analysis of political organisation has received several critiques from contrasting perspectives. On the one hand, it has been pointed out that while Luxemburg was able to navigate carefully the choice between national parliamentary representation and a revolutionary analysis of class conflict that transcended state boundaries, she opposed the Second International’s naïve faith on national social democracy with a no less naïve belief on the democratising effects of a continuously expanding wave of strikes (Eley 1980: 147). On the other hand, her faith in the spontanous power of the masses has often been interpreted as the unavoidable consequence of a certain degree of “determinism” or “fatalism” embedded in her analysis of the limits of capital accumulation and its emphasis on an inherent tendency towards crisis (see for a discussion of this literature Geras 1976 [2015, ch 1]). However, as Norman Geras has pointed out, while some of the phrasing in her texts resembles standard formulations of the Second International to the extent that the collapse of capitalism was perceived as inherently unavoidable, and while this rhetoric could occasionally serve a psychological motivating role, Luxemburg was far from considering the emergence of socialism a matter of fatal destiny (Geras 1976 [2015]). On the contrary, she made it clear that socialism was not going to fall as “manna from heaven” and that while “we can no more skip a period in our historical development than a man can jump over his shadow, it lies within our power to accelerate or to retard it” (Luxemburg 1915 [RLR: 320–321]).  The meaning of Engels’s famous slogan “socialism or barbarism”, on which Luxemburg commented in the Junius Pamphlet was quite the opposite of determinism: the vindication of the conscious agency of the oppressed, the transformation, she argued, of the proletariat from “a powerless victim of history” to “its conscious guide” (Luxemburg 1915 [RLR: 321]).