  Rosa Luxemburg established herself as a major intellectual figure in Marxist circles with her intervention in the revisionist controversy, the theoretical and political debate around the principles and aims of social-democracy that divided the Second International at the turn of the 19th century. The debate was sparked by Eduard Bernstein, Friedrich Engels’s close friend, collaborator and literary executor, as well as a senior figure in the German Social Democratic Party. It unfolded first in a series of articles published between 1896 and 1898 in Die Neue Zeit, then subsequently consolidated in a volume entitled The Preconditions of Socialism (1899). As the Prussian government progressively relaxed the Anti-Socialist laws promoted by the then chancellor Otto von Bismarck, and social democratic ranks continued to swell, Bernstein tried to revisit some of the core theoretical and political commitments of Marxism by offering a new analysis of the transformation of capitalism in the fifty years following the publication of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto. He criticised one of the fundamental pillars of Marxian economics: that the historical tendency of the rate of profit to fall under the twin pressure of technological modernisation and an increasingly exploited labour force rendered inevitable the crisis of the system. This, Bernstein argued, required social-democrats to abandon their revolutionary aims in favour of enacting progressive legislation which sought to represent workers through parliamentary struggle. He insisted that this was no subversion of the teachings of the founding fathers, but rather an effort to liberate Marxism from the dialectical straightjacket in which many socialists of the Second International had subsequently placed it.