  Authors who study Luxemburg’s stance on national self-determination believe that her hostility to it stems from aversion to nationalism. Her argument however was more sophisticated (see Brie and Schütrumpf 2021). Luxemburg was enthusiastic about the unique contribution of national culture through art or literary products to the understanding of the historical and social specificities of different nations, as her commentaries on the work of Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz make clear (see for a discussion Scott 2021). However, her appreciation of such distinctive linguistic and cultural contributions was always distinguished from the issue of nation-state sovereignty – a positiion which put her at odds with mainstream progressive movements in Congress Poland. While the charge of being a “national nihilist” may be exaggerated, it is fair to say that Luxemburg’s prominence in the Polish socialist movement, imprinted on the SDKP a sectarian tendency which many historians have subsequently criticised for undermining the Polish workers’ movement with its distinctive nationalist commitments (Blanc 2017). Luxemburg always maintained that if the political and economic power of the Polish proletariat were so weighty as to make national self-determination a viable alternative, then surely the workers would also have enough power to rebel against capital beyond national boundaries. Given the empirical circumstances of Poland, Luxemburg believed that national self-determination was a dangerous distraction from the imperative to work with the labour movement to fight the Russian empire and turn it into a socialist state. Without socialist governments in Germany, Austria, and Russia, she argued, independence would deepen the exploitation of Polish workers. The demand for national self-determination ran the risk of playing in the hands of liberal ruling elites, distracting Polish workers and turning them from an entity dominated by Russian capital to one dominated by Polish capital. This attitude towards nationalism is also central to understand her stance against the war, leading to her definitive break with German social democracy whom she accused of joining forces with nationalist conservatives to support the war against Russia. As she explained in the 1915 Junius Pamphlet: “So long as capitalist states exist, i.e., so long as imperialistic world policies determine and regulate the inner and outer life of a nation, there can be no ‘national self-determination’ either in war or in peace” (Luxemburg 1915 [RLR: 325]).