  The focus of the discussion were political and economic strikes as methods in the struggle against capitalism. Such strikes, confined to particular sectors of production or to particular towns, should not be understood in isolation from each other, Luxemburg argued. The mass strike, she suggests, should not be seen as “a crafty method discovered by subtle reasoning for the purpose of making the proletarian struggle more effective but, the method of motion of the proletarian mass, the phenomenal form of the proletarian struggle in the revolution” (Luxemburg 1905 [RLR: 192]). While a strike may begin as a series of demands for, say, reduced working hours or improved pay, those demands for a fairer distribution are inseparable from the question of workers’ access to political power. As Luxemburg puts it, “the economic struggle is the transmitter from one political centre to another; the political struggle is the periodic fertilization of the soil for the economic struggle” (Luxemburg 1905 [RLR: 195]). This interdependence between economic and political struggle also meant that the question of mass strike could not be separated from that of revolution, observed not from the point of view of public order as “street disturbances”, “rioting” and “bloodshed” but as a “thoroughgoing internal reversal of existing class relations” (Luxemburg 1905 [RLR: 195–196]). And yet precisely because the mass strike should not be understood as an isolated measure to be called at will but was inextricably linked to the fate of revolution, the decision to bring it about could not come even from “the highest committee of the strongest Social Democratic party” (Luxemburg 1905 [RLR: 197]). Of course, Luxemburg conceded that initiative, direction, mass education and party discipline had a crucial role to play in revolutionary organisation. But she was convinced that “revolutions do not allow anyone to play schoolmaster with them” because, as she argued, “in every individual act of the struggle so very many important economic, political and social, general and local, material and psychical, factors react upon one another in such a way that no single act can be arranged and resolved as if it were a mathematical problem” (Luxemburg 1905 [RLR: 198]).