Spartakus

Spartakus is a study of the German revolt of the winter of 1918 to 1919 that sits where history meets philosophy in twentieth-century Italian thought. Its text is by the historian and critic Furio Jesi.

On December 29, 1918, the Spartakus League, a Marxist revolutionary movement, rose up in Germany to demand an end to bourgeois class rule. Large demonstrations followed, and in January more than 500,000 Berliners took to the streets. Police and anticommunist paramilitary troops crushed the uprising. Several of the League's leaders were killed and the revolt was put down.

Jesi reconstructs the events of that violent winter in detail and uses them to rethink a basic political distinction: revolt or revolution. He draws on a deep store of literary sources, including Brecht, Eliade, Dostoyevsky and Mann, to develop a sharp phenomenology of revolt. In it, revolution has a purposeful historical time, while revolt is marked by a suspension of time.

This edition also includes an essay on the politics of time and revolution by Rosa Luxemburg, a founding leader of the Spartakus League.