What's the difference between left communism and council communism?

[Fourth Internationalist]

Also, was Rosa Luxemburg a council communist (I've been reading about her and some sources say she was and others don't)?

[Art Vandelay]

Council Communism is a current within the broader tendency which is known as Left Communism. Rosa is largely considered a Left Communist, however I am unsure if she would fall in the CC current.

[Geiseric]

Rosa wasn't a left com, she was in a social democrat party, and de facto agreed with parliamentarism. She is more of a de centralized leninist/marxist. Mostly she was basically identical to Leibchnacht, i'd assume, since they co founded the future KPD.

[Ostrinski]

Council Communism is a current within the broader tendency which is known as Left Communism. Rosa is largely considered a Left Communist, however I am unsure if she would fall in the CC current.I think she was neither. She wasn't a Leninist either, because neither left communism, council communism, or Leninism were "things" until after she died. You can't really pigeon hole her into any one tendency because she was influential on left communism, council communism (perhaps less so), and Trotskyism all in different ways. You do, however, get partisans of all these tendencies trying to "claim" her as "theirs" (and again, all for different reasons).

But to answer the OP, left communism was a movement that began development at the turn of the second decade of the twentieth century that opposed some and many of the policies, positions, and sanctions adopted by both the Comintern (Third International) as well as by the Bolshevik government in Russia. They developed their own defining positions on issues such as national liberation, trade unions, parliamentarianism and electoralism, and the economic nature of the Soviet Union that would distinguish them from their Leninist counterparts.

The two (main) trends of left communism were the Italian and Dutch-German approaches, the former being more party oriented and the latter being more council oriented organizationally speaking. Many left communists view council communism as the degeneration of Dutch-German left communism because it completely dropped all pretenses of advocacy for a communist party and adopted some other positions that were uncharacteristic of the left communist tradition.