Rosa Luxemburg
Directed by	Margarethe von Trotta
Produced by	Eberhard Junkersdorf Regina Ziegler
Written by	Margarethe von Trotta
Starring	Barbara Sukowa
Cinematography	Franz Rath
Editing by	Dagmar Hirtz
Release date(s)	10 April 1986
Running time	123 minutes
Country	Germany
Language	German

Mattick reconsiders the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, particularly her critique of Bolshevism and her economic theory.

It will soon be sixty years since the mercenaries of the German social-democratic leadership murdered Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Although they are mentioned in the same breath, as they both symbolized the radical element within the German political revolution of 1918, Rosa Luxemburg's name carries greater weight because her theoretical work was of greater seminal power. In fact, it can be said that: she was the outstanding personality in the international labor movement after Marx and Engels; and that her work has not lost its political relevance despite the changes the capitalist system and the labor movement have undergone since her death.

Just the same, like everyone else, Rosa Luxemburg was a child of her time and can only be understood in the context of the phase of the social-democratic movement of which she was a part. Whereas Marx's critique of bourgeois society evolved in a period of rapid capitalistic development, Rosa Luxemburg was active in a time of increasing instability for capitalism, wherein the abstractly formulated contradictions of capital production showed themselves in the concrete forms of imperialistic competition and in intensified class struggles. While the actual proletarian critique of political economy, according to Marx, consisted at first in the workers' fight for better working conditions and higher living standards, which would prepare the future struggles for the abolition of capitalism, in Rosa Luxemburg's view this 'final' struggle could no longer be relegated to a distant future but was already present in the extending class struggles. The daily fight for social reforms was inseparably connected with the historical necessity of the proletarian revolution.

Without entering into Rosa Luxemburg's biography,(1) it should be said, that she came from a middle-class background and that she entered the socialist movement at an early age. Like others, she was forced to leave Russian Poland and went to Switzerland to study. Her main interest, as behooved a socialist influenced by Marxism, was political economy. Her early work in this field is now only of historical interest. There was her inaugural-dissertation, The Industrial Development of Poland (1898), which did for Poland, though in a less extensive manner, what Lenin's The Development of Capitalism in Russia, did for Czarist Russia a year later. And there were her popular lectures at the Social-Democratic Party School, posthumously published by Paul Levi (1925) under the title Introduction of National Economy. In the latter work, it should be noted, Rosa Luxemburg declared that the validity of political economy is specific to capitalism, and will cease to exist with the demise of this system. In her dissertation, she came to the conclusion that the development of the Polish economy would proceed in conjunction with that of Russia, would end in complete integration, and therewith would end the nationalist aspirations of the Polish bourgeoisie. But this development would also unify the Russian and Polish proletariat and lead to the eventual destruction of Polish-Russian capitalism. The main contradiction of capitalist production was seen by her as one between the capacity to produce and the limited capacity to consume within the capitalist relations of production. This contradiction leads to recurrent economic crises and the increasing misery of the working class and therewith, in the long run, to social revolution.

It was only with her work on The Accumulation of Capital (1912) that Rosa Luxemburg's economic theories became controversial. Although she claimed that this book grew out of complications arising in the course of her popular lectures on National Economy, namely, her inability to relate the total capitalist reproduction process to the postulated objective limits of capital production, it is clear from the work itself that it was also a reaction to the emasculation of Marxian theory initiated by the "Revisionism' that swept the socialist movement around the turn of the century. Revisionism operated on two levels: the primitive empirical level personified by Eduard Bernstein, (2) who merely compared the actual capitalist development with that deducible from Marxian theory, and the more sophisticated theoretical turnabout of academic marxism, culminating in Tugan-Baranowsky's (3) Marx-interpretation and those of his various disciples.

Only the first volume of Capital was published during Marx's lifetime, and the second and third were prepared by Friedrich Engels from unrevised papers left to his care, although they had been written prior to the publication of the first volume. Whereas the first volume deals with the capitalist process of production, the second concerns itself with the circulation process. The third volume, finally, deals with the capitalist system as a whole in its phenomenal form, as determined by its underlying value relations. Because the reproduction process necessarily controls the production process, Marx thought it useful to display this fact by means of some abstract reproduction diagrams in the second volume of Capital. The diagrams divide total social production into two sections: one producing means of production, the other means of consumption. The transactions between these two departments are imagined to be such as to enable the reproduction of the total social capital to proceed either on the same or on an enlarged scale. But what is a presupposition for the reproduction diagrams, namely, an allocation of the social labor as required for the reproduction process, must in reality first be brought about blindly, through the uncoordinated activities of the many individual capitals in their competitive pursuit of surplus-value.

The reproduction diagrams do not distinguish between values and prices; that is, they treat values as if they were prices. For the purpose they were intended to serve, namely, to draw attention to the need for a certain proportionality between the different spheres of production, the diagrams fulfill their pedagogical function. They do not depict the real world, but are instrumental in aiding in its under- standing. Restricted in this sense, it does not matter whether the interrelations of production and exchange are dressed in value or price terms. because the price form of value, taken up in the third volume of Capital, refers to the actual capitalist production and exchange process, the imaginary equilibrium conditions of Marx's reproduction diagrams do not refer to the real capitalist world. Still, Marx found it quite necessary to view the process of reproduction in its fundamental simplicity, in order to get rid of all obscuring interferences and dispose of the false subterfuges, which assume the semblance of scientific analysis, but which cannot be removed so long as the process of social reproduction is immediately analyzed in its concrete and complicated form.(4)

Actually, according to Marx, the reproduction process under capitalistic conditions pre cludes any kind of equilibrium and implies, instead, "the possibility of crises, since a balance is accidental under the conditions of this production... (5)Tugan-Baranowsky, however, read the reproduction diagrams differently because of their superficial resemblance to bourgeois equilibrium theory, the main tool of bourgeois price theory. He came to the conclusion that as long as the system develops proportionately with respect to its reproduction requirements, it does not have objective limits. Crises are caused by disproportionalities arising between the different spheres of production but can always be overcome through the restoration of that proportionality which assures the accumulation of capital. This was a disturbing idea, as far as Rosa Luxemburg was concerned, and this the more so as she could not deny the equilibrating implications of Marx's reproduction diagrams. If Tugan-Baranowsky interpreted them correctly, then Marx was wrong, because this interpretation denied the inevitable end of capitalism.

The discussion around Marx's abstract reproduction diagrams was particularly vehement in Russia because of earlier differences between the Marxists and the Populists with regard to Russia's future in face of her backwardness and her peculiar socio-economic institutions. Whereas the Populists asserted that for Russia it was already too late to enter into world competition with the established capitalist powers, and that, furthermore, it was quite possible to construct a socialist society on the basis of the not yet dissolved collectivity of peasant production, the Marxists maintained that development on the Western pattern was inescapable and that this development itself would produce the markets it required within Russia and in the world at large. The Marxists emphasized that it is the production of capital, not the satisfaction of consumption, that determines capitalist production. There is, therefore, no reason to assume that a restriction of consumption would retard the accumulation of capital; on the contrary, the less there is consumed, the faster capital would grow.

This "production for the sake of production" made no sense to Rosa Luxemburg -- not because she was unaware of the profit motive of capitalist production, which constantly strives to reduce the workers' share of social production, but because she could not see how the extracted surplus-value could be realized in money form in a market composed only of labor and capital, such as is depicted in the reproduction diagrams. Production has to go through the circulation process. It starts with money, invested in means of production and labor-power, and it ends with a greater amount of money in the hands of the capitalists, to be re-invested in another production cycle. Where would this additional money come from? In Rosa Luxemburg's view, it could not possibly come from the capitalists; for if it did, they would not be recipients of surplus-value but would pay with their own money for its commodity equivalent. Neither could it come from the purchases of the workers, who only receive the value of their labor power, leaving the surplus-value in its commodity form to the capitalists. To make the system workable, there must be a "third market,' apart from the exchange relations of labor and capital, in which the produced surplus-value could be transformed into additional money.

This aspect of the matter Rosa Luxemburg found missing in Marx. She intended to close the gap and therewith substantiate Marx's conviction of capitalism's necessary collapse. Although The Accumulation of Capital approaches the realization problem historically -- starting with classical economy and ending with Tugan-Baranowsky and his many imitators -- so as to show that this problem has always been the Achilles heel of political economy, her own solution of the problem comprises, in essence, no more than a misunderstanding of the relation between money and capital and a misreading of the Marxian text. As she presents matters, however, everything seemingly falls in its proper place: the dialectical nature of the capital-expansion process, as one merging out of the destruction of pre-capitalist economies; the necessary extension of this process to the world at large, as illustrated by the creation of the world market and rampant imperialism in search of markets for the realization of surplus-value; the resulting transformation of the world economy into a system resembling Marx's closed system of the reproduction diagram; and therewith, finally, the inevitable collapse of capitalism for lack of opportunities to realize its surplus-value.

Rosa Luxemburg was carried away by the logic of her own construction to the point of revising Marx more thoroughly than had been done by the Revisionists in their concept of a theoretically possible harmonious capital development, which, for them, turned socialism into a purely ethical problem and into one of social reform by political means. On the other hand, the Marxian reproduction diagrams, if read as a version of Say's Law of the identity of supply and demand, had to be rejected. Like her adversaries, Rosa Luxemburg failed to see that these diagrams have no connection at all with the question of the viability of the capitalist system, but are merely a methodologically determined, intermediary step in the analysis of the laws of motion of the capitalist system as a whole, which derives its dynamic from the production of surplus-value. Although capitalism is indeed afflicted with difficulties in the sphere of circulation and therewith in the realization of surplus-value, it is not here that Marx looked for, or found, the key to the understanding of capitalism's susceptibility to crises and to its inevitable end. Even on the assumption that there exists no problem at all with regard to the realization of surplus-value, capitalism finds its objective limits in those of the production of surplus-value.

According to Marx, capitalism's basic contradiction, from which spring all its other difficulties, is to be found in the value and surplus-value relations of capital production. It is the production of exchange-value in its monetary form, derived from the use-value form of labor-power, which produces, besides its own exchange-value equivalent, a surplus-value for the capitalists. The drive for exchange-value turns into the accumulation of capital, which manifests itself in a growth of capital invented in means of production relatively faster than that invested in labor-power. While this process expands the capitalist system, through the increasing productivity of labor associated with it, it also tends to reduce the rate of profit on capital, as that part of capital invested in labor-power -- which is the only source of surplus-value -- diminishes relative to the total social capital. This long and complicated process cannot be dealt with satisfactorily in this short article, but must at least be mentioned in order to differentiate Marx's theory of accumulation from that Rosa Luxemburg. In Marx's abstract model of capital development, capitalist crises, as well as the inevitable end of the system, find their source in the temporary or, finally, total breakdown in the accumulation process due to a lack of surplus-value or profit.

For Marx, then, the objective limits of capitalism are given by the social production relations as value relations, while for Rosa Luxemburg capitalism cannot exist at all, except through the absorption of its surplus-value by pro-capitalist economies. This implies the absurdity that these backward nations have a surplus in monetary form large enough to accommodate the surplus-value of the capitalistically advanced countries. But as already mentioned, this wrong idea was the unreflected consequence of Rosa Luxemburg's false notion that the whole of the surplus-value, earmarked for accumulation, must yield an equivalent in money form, in order to be realized as capital. Actually, of course, capital takes on the form of money at times and at other times that of commodities of all descriptions - all being expressed in money terms without simultaneously assuming the money form. Only a small and decreasing part of the capitalist wealth has to be in money form; the larger part,, although expressed in terms of money, remains in its commodity form and as such allows for the realization of surplus-value an additional capital.

Rosa Luxemburg's theory was quite generally regarded as an aberration and an unjustified criticism of Marx. Yet her critics were just as far removed from Marx's position as was Rosa Luxemburg herself. Most of theme critics adhered either to a crude underconsumption theory, a theory of disproportionality, or a combination of them. Lenin, for example -- not to speak of the Revisionists -- saw the cause for crises in the disproportionalities due to the anarchic character of capitalist production, and merely added to Tagan-Baranowsky's arguments that of the underconsumption of the workers. But in any case he did not believe that capitalism was bound to collapse because of its immanent contradictions. It was only with the first world war and the revolutionary upheavals in its wake that Rosa Luxemburg's theory found a wider response in the radical section of the socialist movement. Not so much, however, because of her particular analysis of capital accumulation, as because of her insistence upon the objective limits of capitalism. The imperialistic war gave her theory some plausibility and the end of capitalism seemed indeed actually at hand. The collapse of capitalism became the revolutionary ideology of the time and supported the abortive attempts to turn the political upheavals into social revolutions.

Of course, Rosa Luxemburg's theory was no less abstract than that of Marx. Marx's hypothesis of a tendency of the rate of profit to fall could not reveal at what particular point in time it would no longer be possible to compensate for this fall by an increasing exploitation of the relatively diminishing number of workers, which would increase the mass of surplus-value sufficiently to maintain a rate of profit assuring the further expansion of capital. Similarly, Rosa Luxemburg could not say at what time the completion of the capitalization of the world would exclude the realization of its surplus-value. The outward extension of capital was also only a tendency, implying a progressively more devastating imperialist competition for the diminishing territories in which surplus-value could be realized. The fact of imperialism showed the precariousness of the system, which could lead to revolutionary situations long before its objective limits were reached. For all practical purposes, then, both theories assumed the possibility of revolutionary actions, not because of the logical outcome of their abstract models of development, but because these theories pointed unmistakably to the increasing difficulties of the capitalist system, which could in any severe crisis transform the class struggle into a fight for the abolition of capitalism.

Although undoubtedly erroneous, Rosa Luxemburg's theory retained a revolutionary character because, like that of Marx, it led to the conclusion of the historical untenability of capitalism. Although with dubious arguments, she nonetheless restored -- against Revisionism, Reformism, and Opportunism -- the lost Marxian proposition that capitalism is doomed to disappear because of its own unbridgeable contradiction and that this end, though objectively determined, will be brought about by the revolutionary actions of the working class.

The overthrow of capitalism would make all theories of its development redundant. But while the system lasts, the realism of a theory may be judged by its own particular history. Whereas Marx's theory, despite attempts made in this direction, cannot be integrated into the body of bourgeois economic thought, Rosa Luxemburg's theory has found some recognition in bourgeois theory, albeit in a very distorted form. With the rejection by bourgeois economy itself of the conception of the market as an equilibrium mechanism, Rosa Luxemburg's theory found a kind of acceptance as a precursor of Keynesian economics. Her work has been interpreted, by Michael Kalecki (6) and Joan Robinson, (7) for example, as a theory of 'effective demand,' the lack of which presumably explains the recurrent capitalistic difficulties. Rosa Luxemburg imagined that imperialism, militarism, and preparation for war aided in the realization of surplus-value, via the transfer of purchasing power from the population at large to the hands of the state; just as modern Keynesianism attempted to reach full employment by way of deficit-financing and monetary manipulations. However, while it in no doubt possible, for a time, to achieve full employment in this fashion, it is not possible to maintain this state of bliss, as the laws of motion of capital production demand not a different distribution of the surplus-value but its constant increase. The lack of effective demand is only another term for the lack of accumulation, as the demand required for prosperous conditions is brought forth by nothing other than the expansion of capital. At any rate, the actual bankruptcy of Keynesianism makes it unnecessary to kill this theory theoretically. It suffices to say that its absurdity shows itself in the present-day unrelieved growth of both unemployment and inflation.

While Rosa Luxemburg did not fare well with her theory of accumulation, she was more successful in her consistent Internationalism, which was, of course, connected with her concept of accumulation as the global extension of the capitalist mode of production. In her view, imperialist competition was rapidly transforming the world into a capitalist world and thereby developing the unhampered confrontation of labor and capital. Whereas the rise of the bourgeoisie coincided with the formation of the modern nation-state, creating the ideology of nationalism, the maturity and decline of capitalism implied the imperialistic 'internationalism' of the bourgeoisie and therewith also the internationalism of the working classes, if they were to make their class struggles effective. The reformist integration of proletarian aspirations into the capitalist system led to social-imperialism, as the other side of the nationalistic coin. Objectively, there was nothing behind the frantically growing nationalism but the imperialist imperative. To oppose imperialism demanded, then a total rejection of all forms of nationalism, even that of the victims of imperialist aggression. Nationalism and imperialism were inseparable and had to fought with equal fervor.

In view of the at first covert but soon overt social-patriotism of the official labor movement, Rosa Luxemburg's internationalism represented the leftwing of this movement -- but not completely. In a way, it was a generalization of her specific experiences in the Polish socialist movement, which had been split on the question of national self-determination. As we already know from her work on the industrial development in Poland, Rosa Luxemburg expected a full integration of the Russian and Polish capitalism and a consequent unification of their respective socialist organizations, both as a practical and as a principled matter. She could not conceive of nationally oriented socialist movements and even less of a nationally restricted socialism. What was true for Russia and Poland also held for the world at large; national fissions had to be ended in the unity of international socialism.

The Bolshevik section of the Russian Social-Democratic Party did not share Rosa Luxemburg's strict internationalism. For Lenin, the subjugation of nationalities by stronger capitalist countries brought additional cleavages into the basic social frictions, which could, perhaps, be turned against the dominating powers. It is quite beside the point, to consider whether Lenin's advocacy of the self-determination of nations reflected a subjective conviction, or democratic attitude, with regard to special national needs and cultural peculiarities, or was simply a revulsion against all forms of oppression. Lenin was, first of all, a practical politician, even though he could fulfill this role only at a late hour. As a practical politician, he realized that the different nationalities within the Russian empire presented a steady threat to the Czarist regime.

To be sure, Lenin was also an internationalist and saw the socialist revolution in terms of the world revolution. But this revolution had to begin somewhere and he assumed that it would first break the weakest link in the chain of competing imperialist powers. In the Russian context, supporting the self-determination of nations, up to the point of secession, suggested the winning of "allies" in any attempt to overthrow Czarism. This strategy was supported by the hope that, once free, the different nationalities would elect to remain within the new Russian commonwealth, either out of self-interest, or through the urgings of their own socialist organizations.

Until the Russian Revolution, however, this whole discussion around the national question remained purely academic. Even after the revolution, the granting of self-determination to the various nationalities within Russia was not very meaningful, for most of the territories involved were occupied by foreign powers. Still, the Bolshevik regime continued to press for self-determination in order to weaken other imperialist nations, particularly England, in an attempt to foster colonial revolutions against Western capitalism, which threatened to destroy the Bolshevik state.

The Russian Revolution found Rosa Luxemburg in a German prison, where she remained until the overthrow of the German monarchy. But she was able to follow the progress of the Russian Revolution. Though delighted by the Bolshevik seizure of power, she could not accept Lenin's policies towards the peasants and with respect to the national minorities. In both cases she worried needlessly. Although her prediction that the granting of self-determination to the various nationalities within Russia would merely surround the new state with a cordon of reactionary counter-revolutionary countries, turned out to be correct, this was so only for the short run. Rosa Luxemburg failed to see that it was the principle of self-determination which dictated Bolshevik policy with regard to the Russian nationalities, than the force of circumstances over which the Bolsheviks had no control. At the first opportunity they began whittling away at the self-determination of nations, to end by incorporating all the new independent nations in a restored Russian empire, and, in addition, by forging for themselves spheres of interest in extra-Russian territories.

On the strength of her own theory of nationalism and imperialism, Rosa Luxemburg should have realized that Lenin's theory could not be actualized, in a world of competing imperialist powers and would, most probably, not need to be put into practice should capitalist be brought down by an international revolution. The disintegration of the Russian empire was not due to or aided by the principle of self-determination, but was effected through the loss of the war; as it was the winning of another war, which led to the recovery of previously lost territory and to a revival of Russian imperialism. Capitalism is an expansive system and therefore necessarily imperialistic. It is the capitalistic way of overcoming national limitations to capital production and its centralization -- of gaining, or securing, privileged or dominating positions within the world economy. It in thus also a defense against this general trend; but in all cases, it is the inescapable result of capital accumulation.

As Rosa Luxemburg pointed out, the contradictory capitalist 'integration' of the world economy cannot alter the domination of weaker by stronger nations through the latter's control of the world market. This situation makes real national independence illusory. what political independence can accomplish, at best, is no more than the subjugation of the workers under native instead of international control. Of course, proletarian internationalism cannot prevent, nor has it reason to prevent, movements for national self-determination within the colonial and imperialistic context. These movements are part of capitalist society just an imperialism is. But to 'utilize' these movements for socialism can only mean to try to deprive them of their nationalist character through a consistent internationalism on the part of the socialist movement. Although oppressed people have the sympathy of the socialists, it does not relate to their emergent nationalism but to their particular plight as twice-oppressed people, suffering from both native and foreign exploitation. The socialist task in the ending of capitalism, which includes the support of anti-imperialist forces; not, however, to create new capitalistic nation-states, but to make their emergence more difficult, or impossible, through proletarian revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries.

The Bolshevik regime declared itself socialistic and by that token was to end all discrimination of national minorities. Under such conditions, national self-determination was, in Rosa Luxemburg's eyes, not only senseless but an invitation to revive, via the ideology of nationalism, the conditions for a capitalist restoration. In her view, Lenin and Trotsky mistakenly sacrificed the principle of internationalism for momentary tactical advantage. While perhaps unavoidable, it should not be elevated into a socialist virtue. Rosa Luxemburg was right, of course, in not questioning the Bolshevik's subjective sincerity as regards the establishment of socialism in Russia and the furthering of the world revolution. She herself thought it possible, by way of a westward extension of the revolution, to defy the objective unripeness of Russia for a socialist transformation. She blamed the West European socialists, and in particular the Germans, for the difficulties the Bolsheviks encountered, which forced them into concessions, compromises, and opportunist actions. And she assumed that the internationalization of the revolution would do away with Lenin's nationalistic demands and resurrect the principle of internationalism in the revolutionary movement.

As the world revolution did not materialize, the nation-state remained the field of operation for economic development as well as for the class struggle. The "internationalism" of the Third International, under Russian dominance, served strictly Russian state interests, covered up by the idea that the defense of the first socialist state was a prerequisite for international socialism. Like national self-determination, this type of "internationalism" was designed to weaken the adversaries of the new Russian state. After 1920, however, the Bolsheviks no longer expected a resumption of the world-revolutionary process, and settled down for the consolidation of their own regime. Their 'internationalism' expressed now their own nationalism, just as the economic internationalism of the bourgeoisie serves no other end than the enrichment of nationally-organized capital entities.

The result of the second world war and its aftermath ended the colonialism of the European powers and led to the formation of numerous 'independent' nations; while, at the same time, two great power blocs emerged, dominated by the victorious nations Russia and the United States. Within each bloc there was no real national independence but rather the subordination of the nominally self-determined countries to the imperialistic requirements of the leading powers. This subordination was enforced by both economic and political means and by the general necessity to adapt the economies and therewith the political life of the satellite nations to the realities of the capitalist world market.

For the former colonies this implied a new form of subjugation and dependence, which found its expression in the term neo-colonialism; for the reborn, capitalistically more-advanced nations it implied the direct control of their political structure through the proven methods of military occupation and puppet governments. This situation led, of course, to new "liberation movements" not only in the capitalist but also in the so-called socialist camp, providing the proof that there is no such thing as national self-determination, either in the market-controlled or the state-controlled economies.

That nationalism is really a vehicle upholding the ruling class was soon made evident in all liberated nations, as it provided political parvenus with an instrument for their own emergence as new ruling classes, in collaboration with the ruling classes of the dominating countries. Whether these now ruling classes adhere to the 'free world' or to the authoritarian part of the world, in either case the national form, on which their rule in based, precludes any stop towards a socialist society. Wherever possible, their nationalism implies a fervent, even if miniature, imperialism, which sets 'socialist nations' against other nations, including other 'socialist nations.' Thus we have the sorry spectacle of a threatening war between the great 'socialist countries' Russia and China, and, on a smaller scale, the open warfare between 'Marxist' Ethiopia and "Marxist' Somalia for the control of Ogaden.

With some variations, this story can be prolonged almost endlessly, characterizing the present state of world politics, in which small nations act as proxies for the great imperialist powers, or fight on their own behalf, only to fall victim to one or another power bloc. All this substantiates Rosa Luxemburg's contention that all forms of nationalism are detrimental to socialism and that only a consistent internationalism can aid the emancipation of the working class. This unwavering internationalism is one of her greatest contributions to revolutionary theory and practice and sets her far apart from both the social-imperialism of Social Democracy and the Bolshevik opportunist concept of world revolution as advocated by its. great 'statesman' Lenin.

Like Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg looked upon the October Revolution as a proletarian revolution which, however, depended fully upon international events. At the time this view was shared by all revolutionaries whether Marxist or not. After all, as she said, by seizing power the Bolsheviks had "for the first time proclaimed the final aim of socialism as the direct program of practical policies" (8) They had solved the "famous problem of winning a majority of the people, by revolutionary tactics that led to a majority, instead of waiting for the latter to evolve a revolutionary tactic." (9) In her view, Lenin's party had grasped the true interests of the urban masses by demanding all power for the Soviets in order to secure the revolution. Still, the agrarian question was the axis of the revolution and here the Bolsheviks showed themselves as opportunistic in their policies as with regard to the national minorities.

In pre-revolutionary Russia the Bolsheviks had shared with Rosa Luxemburg the Marxist position that the land must be nationalized as a prerequisite for the organization of large-scale agricultural production in conformity with the socialization of industry. In order to gain the support of the peasants, Lenin abandoned the Marxist agricultural program in favor of that of the Social-Revolutionaries -- the heirs of the old Populist movement. Although Rosa Luxemburg recognized this turnabout as an 'excellent tactic,' for her it had nothing to do with the quest for socialism. Property rights must be turned over to the nation, or the state, for only then is it possible to organize agricultural production on a socialistic base. The Bolshevik slogan "immediate seizure and distribution of the land by the peasants" was not a socialist measure, but one which, by creating a new form of private property, cut off the way to such measures. "The Leninist agrarian reform," she wrote, "has created a now and powerful layer of popular enemies of socialism in the countryside, enemies whose resistance will be much more dangerous and stubborn than that of the noble large landowners." (10)

This proved to be a fact, hampering both the restoration of the Russian economy and the socialization of industry. But, as in the case of national self-determination, here too the situation was determined not by the Bolsheviks' policy but by circumstances beyond their control. The Bolsheviks were prisoners of the peasant movement; they could not hold power except with its passive support, and they could not proceed towards socialism because of the peasants. Moreover, their sly opportunism did not initiate the peasants' seizure of the land, but merely ratified an accomplished fact, independent of their own attitude. While other parties hesitated to legalize the expropriation of land, the Bolsheviks favored it, in order to win the support of the peasants and thus to consolidate the power they had won by a coup d'etat in the urban centers. They hoped to maintain this support by a policy of low taxation, while the peasants required a government which would prevent a return of the landlords by way of counter-revolution.

As far as the peasants were concerned, the revolution involved the extension of property rights and was, in this sense, a bourgeois revolution. It could only lead to a market-economy and the enhanced capitalization of Russia. For the industrial workers, as for Lenin and Luxemburg, it was a proletarian revolution even at this early stage of capitalist development. But as the industrial working class formed only a minuscule part of the population, it seemed clear that sooner or later the bourgeois element within the revolution would gain the upper hand. Bolshevik state-power could only be hold by arbitrating between these contrary interests but success in this endeavor would negate both the socialist and the bourgeois aspirations within the revolution.

This was a situation not foreseen by the Marxist movement and not predictable in terms of Marxian theory, which held that the proletarian revolution presupposes a high capitalistic development in which the working class finds itself in the majority and thus able to determine the course of events. While Lenin was not interested in a bourgeois revolution, except as a preliminary to a socialist revolution, he was a bourgeois in that he was convinced that it was possible to change society by purely political means, that is, by the will of a political party. This idealistic reversal of Marxism, with consciousness determining the material development instead of being produced by it, implied in practice no more than a copying of the Czarist regime itself, in which the autocracy had ruled over the whole of society. In fact, Lenin insisted that if the Czar could govern Russia with the aid of a bureaucracy of a few hundred thousand men, the Bolsheviks should be able to do likewise and better with a Party exceeding this number. In any case, once in power the Bolsheviks had no choice but to try to maintain it in order to defend their sheer existence. In the course of time there emerged a state apparatus which took upon itself the authoritarian control not only of the population but also of economic development, by turning private property into state property without changing the social relations of production -- that is, by maintaining the capital-labor relations that allow for the exploitation of the working class. This new type of capitalism -- properly called state-capitalism -- persists to the present day in the ideological dress of 'socialism."

In 1918, Rosa Luxemburg could not envision this development, as it lay outside of all Marxist assumptions. For her, the Bolsheviks were making various mistakes, which might endanger their socialist goal. And if these mistakes were unavoidable within the context of the isolated Russian Revolution, they should not be generalized into a revolutionary tactic for times to come and for all nations to follow. However helplessly, she opposed the Russian reality with Marxian principles, so as at least to save the Marxian theory. Bat it was all in vain, for it turned out that private-party capitalism is not necessarily followed by a socialist regime, but could be transformed into a state-controlled capitalism, wherein the old bourgeoisie was replaced by a new ruling class, whose power is based on its collective control of the state and the means of production. She knew as little as Lenin how to go about building a socialist society, but while the latter proceeded pragmatically from the experiences of wartime state-controls of capitalist nations and envisioned socialism as the state-monopoly over all economic activity, Rosa Luxemburg persisted in proclaiming that such a state of affairs could not emancipate the working class. She could not imagine that the emerging Bolshevik society represented a historically new social formation, but saw in it no more than a false application of socialist principles. And thus she feared a possible restoration of capitalism by way of the agrarian reforms of Bolshevism.

As it turned out, the agrarian question agitated the Bolshevik state unceasingly, finally leading to the compulsory collectivization of the peasantry as an in-between solution between private-property relations on the land and the nationalization of agriculture. This was no real repudiation of Lenin's peasant policies, which had been based on necessity, not on conviction. Except on paper, Lenin simply did not dare to nationalize the land, and Stalin did not dare more than the forced collectivizations of the peasants, in order to increase their production and exploitation, without depriving them of all private initiative. Even so, this was a frightful undertaking which almost destroyed, the Bolshevik regime. If Rosa Luxemburg was right against Lenin with respect to the peasant question, her arguments were nonetheless beside the point, for it was just a question of time, and of the strength of the state apparatus before the peasants would lose their newly-won relative independence and fall once more under the control of an authoritarian regime.

It should have been evident from Lenin's concept of the party and its role in the revolutionary process that, once in power, this party could only function in a dictatorial way. Quite apart from the specific Russian conditions, the idea of the party as the consciousness of the socialist revolution clearly relegated all decision-making power into the hands of the Bolshevik state apparatus. This general assumption found an even sharper accentuation in the Russian Revolution, divided, as it was, in its bourgeois and proletarian aspirations. If the proletariat was not able, according to Lenin, to develop more than a trade-union consciousness (that is, to fight for its interests within the capitalist system) it would certainly be even more unable to realize socialism, which presupposes an ideological break with all its previous experience. Echoing Karl Kautsky, Lenin was convinced that socialist consciousness had to be brought to the proletariat from the outside, through the knowledge of the educated middle class. The party was the organization of the socialist intelligentsia, representing revolutionary consciousness for the proletariat, even though it might also include a sprinkling of intelligent workers in its ranks. It was necessary that these specialists in revolutionary politics become the masters of the socialist state, if only to prevent the defeat of the working class through its own ignorance. And as the party was to lead the proletariat, so the leadership of the party was to lead its members by way of a semi-militaristic centralization.

It was this arrogant attitude of Lenin, pressed upon HIS party, which made Rosa Luxemburg quite wary about the possible outcome of the Bolsheviks' seizure of power. Already in 1904 she had attacked the Bolshevik party concept for both its artificial separation of a revolutionary vanguard from the mass of the workers and for its ultra-centralization in general, as well as in party affairs in particular. "Nothing will more surely enslave a young labor movement to an intellectual elite hungry for power," she wrote, than this bureaucratic strait-jacket, which will immobilize the movement and turn it into an automaton manipulated Central Committee. (11) By denying the revolutionary character of Lenin's party concept, Rosa Luxemburg prefigured the actual course of Bolshevik rule down to the present day. To be sure, her indictment of Lenin's organizational ideas was based on their confrontation with the organizational structure of the Social Democratic Party, which, though highly centralized, aspired to a broad mass basis for its evolutionary work. This party did not think in terms of seizing power, but was satisfied with its electoral successes and the spreading of the socialist ideology as a basis for its: growth. In any case, Rosa Luxemburg not believe that any type of party could bring about a socialist revolution. The party could only be an aid to revolution, which remained the privilege and required the activities of the whole working class. She did not see the socialist party as an independent organizer of the proletariat, but as part of it, with no functions or interests differing from those of the working class.

With this conviction, Rosa Luxemburg was only true to herself and to Marxism when she raised her voice against the dictatorial policies of the Bolshevik party. Although this party reached its dominating position via the demagogic demand for the sole rule of the Soviets, it had no intention of delegating any power to the Soviets, except, perhaps, where they were composed of Bolsheviks. It is true that the Bolsheviks in Petrograd and a few other cities held a majority of the Soviets, but this situation might change again and return the party to the minority position it had held during the first months after the February Revolution. The Bolsheviks did not look upon the soviets as organs of an emerging socialist society, but saw in them no more than a vehicle for the formation of a Bolshevik government. Already in 1905, which saw-the first rise of the Soviets, Lenin recognized their revolutionary potential, which, however, gave him only one more reason to strengthen his own party and prepare it for the reins of government. To Lenin, the latent revolutionary power of the Soviet form of organization did not change its spontaneous nature, which implied the danger of the dissipation of this power in fruitless activities. Although a part of social reality, spontaneous movements could, in Lenin's view, at best support but never supplant a goal-directed party. In October 1917, the question for the Bolsheviks was not one of choosing between Soviet- and party-rule, but between the latter and the Constituent Assembly. As there was no chance of winning a majority in the Assembly and thus gaining the it was necessary to dispense with realize the party dictatorship in the proletariat.

Although Rosa Luxemburg held that in one fashion or another the whole mass of people must take part in the construction of socialism, she did not recognize the soviets as typifying the organizational form which would make this possible. Impressed as she was in 1905 by the great mass-strikes taking place in Russia, she paid little attention to their soviet form of organization. In her eyes, the soviets were merely strike committees in the absence of other more permanent labor organizations. Even after the 1917 Revolution she felt that "the practical realization of socialism and an economic, social and juridical system is something which lies completely hidden in the mists of the future." (12) Only the general direction in which to move was known, not the detailed concrete steps that had to be taken to consolidate and develop the new society. Socialism could not be derived from ready-made plans and realized by governmental decree. There must be the widest participation on the part of the workers, that is, a real democracy, and it was precisely this democracy which alone could be designated as the dictatorship of the proletariat. A party-dictatorship was for her no more than "a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense,, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins." (13)

All this is undoubtedly true, on the general level, but the bourgeois character of Bolshevik rule reflected -- ideologically as well as practically -- the objectively non-socialistic nature of this particular revolution, which simply could not proceed from the quasi-feudal conditions of Czarism to a socialist society. It was a sort of 'bourgeois revolution' without the bourgeoisie, as it was a proletarian revolution without a sufficiently large proletariat: a revolution in which the historical functions of the bourgeoisie were taken up by an apparently anti-bourgeois party by means of its assumption of political power. Under these conditions, the revolutionary content of Western marxism was not applicable, not even in a modified form. This may explain the vacuity of Rosa Luxemburg's arguments against the Bolsheviks, her complaints about their disrespect for the Constituent Assembly and their terroristic acts against all opposition whether from the right or the left. Her own suggestions as how to go about with the building of socialism, however correct and praiseworthy, would not fit in with a Constituent Assembly, which is itself a bourgeois institution. Her tolerance towards all points of view and their wishes to express themselves in order to influence the course of events, cannot be realized under civil-war conditions. The construction of socialism cannot be left to a leisurely trial-and-error method by which the future may be discerned in the 'mists' of the present, but is dictated by current necessities that call for definite actions.

Rosa Luxemburg's lack of realism with regard to Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution may be traced to ambiguities of her own. On the one hand she was a social democrat and on the other a revolutionary, at a time when both positions had fallen apart. She looked upon Russia with social-democratic eyes and upon Social Democracy with revolutionary eyes; what she desired was a revolutionary-Social Democracy. Already in her famous debate with Eduard Bernstein, (14) she refused to choose between reform and revolution but endeavored to combine both activities in dialectical fashion in one and the same policy. In her view, it was possible to wage the class struggle in both the parliament and in the streets, not only through the party and the trade-unions but with the unorganized as well. The legal foothold gained within bourgeois democracy was to be secured by the direct actions of the masses in their everyday wage struggles. It was the masses' actions, however, which were most important, as they increased the masses' awareness of their class position and thereby their revolutionary consciousness. The direct struggle of the workers against the capitalists was the real 'school of socialism.' In the spreading of mass-strikes, in which the workers acted as a class, she saw the necessary precondition for the coming revolution, which would topple the bourgeoisie and install governments supported and controlled by the mature class -- conscious proletariat."

Until the outbreak of the first world war, Rosa Luxemburg did not fully comprehend the true nature of Social Democracy. There was a right wing, a center, and a left wing, Liebknecht and Luxemburg representing the latter. There was an ideological struggle between these tendencies, tolerated by the party bureaucracy because it remained purely ideological. The practice of the party was reformist and opportunistic, untouched by the left-wing rhetoric, if not indirectly aided by it. But there was the illusion that the party could be changed and restored to the revolutionary character of its origins. Suggestions to split the party were rejected by Rosa Luxemburg, who feared to lose contact with the bulk of the socialist workers. Her confidence in these workers was not affected by her lack of confidence in their leaders. She was thus more than surprised that the social-chauvinism displayed in 1914 united leaders and led against the party's left. Even so, she was not ready to leave the party until its split in 1917 on the issue of war aims, which led to the formation of the Independent Socialist Party (USPD), in which the Spartacus League, composed of a circle of people around Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Mehring, and Jogiches, formed a small faction. In so far as this faction engaged in independent activities, these were a matter of propaganda against the war and the class-collaborationist policies of the old party. Only near the end of 1918 did Rosa Luxemburg recognize the need for a new revolutionary party and a new International.

The German Revolution of 1918 was not the product of any left-wing organization, though members of all organizations played various parts in it. It was a strictly political upheaval to end the war and to remove the monarchy held responsible for it. It occurred as a consequence of the German military defeat and was not seriously opposed by the bourgeoisie and the military, for it allowed them to place the onus of the defeat upon the socialist movement. This revolution brought Social Democracy into the government, which then proceeded to ally itself with the military, in order to crush any attempt to turn the political into a social revolution. Still under the away of tradition and the old reformist ideology, the majority of the spontaneously-arising workers' and soldiers' councils supported the social-democratic government and declared their readiness to abdicate in favor of a National Assembly within the frame of bourgeois democracy. This revolution, it has been aptly said, "was a Social Democratic revolution, suppressed by the Social Democratic leaders: a process hardly paralleled in the history of the world." (16) There was also a revolutionary minority, to be sure, advocating and fighting for the formation of a social system of workers' councils as a permanent institution; but this was soon systematically subdued by the military forces arrayed against it. To organize this revolutionary minority for sustained actions, the Spartacus League, in collaboration with other revolutionary groups, transformed itself into the Communist Party of Germany. Its program was written by Rosa Luxemburg.

Already at its founding congress, it became clear that the new party was internally split. Even at this late hour Rosa Luxemburg was not able to break totally with social-democratic traditions. Although she declared that the time for a minimum program short of socialism had passed, she still adhered to the politics of the double perspective, that in, to the view that the uncertainty of an early proletarian revolution demanded the consideration of policies defined within the given, social institutions and organizations. In practice this meant participation in the National Assembly and in trade unions. However, the majority of the congress voted in favor of anti-parliamentarism and for a struggle against the trade unions. Although reluctantly, Rosa Luxemburg bowed to this decision and wrote and acted in its spirit. As she was murdered only two weeks later, it is not possible to say whether or not she would have stuck to this position. In any cage, encouraged by Lenin, via his eminary Radek, her disciples soon split the new party and merged its parliamentary section with a part of the Independent Socialists to form a "truly Bolshevik Party;" this time, however, as a mass-organization in the social-democratic sense, competing with the old Social Democratic Party for the allegiance of the workers, in order to forge an instrument for the defense of Bolshevik Russia.

But all this is history. The failed revolutions in Central Europe, and the state-capitalistic development in Russia, overcame the political crisis of capitalism that followed the first world war. Its economic difficulties were not so overcome, and led-to a now world-wide crisis and the second world war. Because the ruling classes -- old and now -- remembered the revolutionary repercussions in the wake of the first world war, they defeated their possible recurrence in advance by the direct means of military occupation. The enormous destruction of capital and its further centralization by way of war, an well as the raising of the productivity of labor, allowed for a great upswing of capital production after the second war. This implied an almost total eclipse of revolutionary aspirations, save those of a strictly nationalist and state-capitalist character.

This effect was strengthened by the development of the 'mixed economy,' nationally as well as internationally, wherein governments influenced economic activities. Like all things of the past, Marxism became an academic discipline -- an indication of its decline as a theory of social change. Social Democracy ceased to see itself as a working class organization, but rather as a people's party, ready to fulfill governmental functions for capitalist society. Communist organizations took over the classic role of Social Democracy -- and also its readiness to form, or to partake in, governments upholding the capitalist system. The labor movement-divided into Bolshevism and Social Democracy, which had been Rosa Luxemburg's concern -- ceased to exist.

Still, capitalism remains susceptible to crises and collapse. In view of present methods of destruction, it may destroy itself in another conflagration. But it may also be overcome by way of class struggles leading to its socialist transformation. The alternative enunciated by Rosa Luxemburg -- socialism or barbarism -- retains its validity. The current state of the labor movement, which lacks any revolutionary inclinations, makes it clear that a socialist future depends more on spontaneous actions of the working class as a whole, than on ideological anticipations of such a future which may find expression in newly-arising revolutionary organizations. In this situation, there is not much to be learned from previous experiences, except the negative lesson that neither Social Democracy nor Bolshevism had any bearing on the problems of the proletarian revolution. By opposing both, however, inconsistently, Rosa Luxemburg opened up another road towards the socialist revolution. Despite some false notions, with respect to theory and some illusions regarding socialist practice, her revolutionary impulse yielded the essential elements required for a socialist revolution: an unwavering internationalism and the principle of the self-determination of the working class within its organizations and within society. By taking seriously the dictum that the emancipation of the proletariat can only be its, own work, she bridged the revolutionary past with the revolutionary future. Her ideas thus remain as alive as the idea of revolution itself, while all her adversaries in the old labor movement have become part and parcel of the decaying capitalist society.

Paul Mattick

From Root and Branch #6, 1978

FOOTNOTES

1. For biographical information, see John P. Nettl, "Rosa Luxemburg", 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1966).

2. Eduard Bernstein, "Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismas und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie", translated as "Evolutionary Socialism" (1899; NY: Schocken, 1961)

3. Mikhail I. Tugan-Baranowsky, "Die Theoretischen Grundlagen des Marxismus" [The Theoretical Foundations of Marxism] (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1905).

4. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 2, "The Process of Circulation of Capital" (1885; Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1926), p. 532.

5. ibid., p. 578.

6. Michael Kalecki, 'The Problem of Effective Demand with Tagan-Baranowsky and Rosa Luxemburg.'

7. Joan Robinson, Introduction to Rosa Luxemburg, "The Accumulation of Capital" (1913; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951).

8. Luxemburg, "The Russian Revolution" (1922), in "The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism?" (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), p. 39.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Luxemburg, "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy" (1904), Ibid., p. 102.

12. Luxemburg, "The Russian Revolution," Ibid.# p. 69.

13. Ibid., p. 72

14. Luxemburg, "Social Reform or Revolution" (1899; NY: Pathfinder, 1973).

15. Luxemburg, "The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions" (1906; NY: Harper and Row, 1971).

16. Sebastian Haffner, "Failure of a Revolution" (NY: Library Press, 1972), p. 12.

Rosa Luxemburg: revolutionary hero

Saturday, January 17, 2009 - 11:00

By Barry Healy

Rosa Luxemburg, one of the great figures of the socialist movement, was callously murdered in Berlin on January 15, 1919.

By cruelly smashing her brains out with a rifle butt, the German social democrats who ordered her killing silenced one of the socialist movement's most articulate voices and one of the most passionate defenders of the right of workers to revolt.

Born in 1871 in the provincial Polish town of Zamosc, she joined the underground revolutionary movement at age 16.

Within two years the police chased her into exile in Switzerland. It is said that she managed to talk a reactionary priest into helping her escape by pretending that her Jewish parents were preventing her from marrying a Catholic.

In Switzerland she studied economics and natural sciences and honed her theoretical skills in the intense debates raging in emigre Marxist circles.

When she joined the German Social Democratic party (SPD) in 1898 she debated with Eduard Bernstein, an established SPD leader who denied Marxism was a revolutionary doctrine.

Her incisive articles on the subject were published together in a famous pamphlet - widely known today as Reform or Revolution.

In 1903 she debated with Lenin, differing with him on the Marxist attitude to the right of nations to self-determination.

In 1904 her political work was briefly interrupted when she was jailed for "insulting the Kaiser".

She fully supported the 1905 Russian revolution and wrote numerous articles in its defence publications for her Polish comrades. Marrying action with her words she clandestinely entered Poland (then still part of the Russian Imperial empire) and worked underground until she was captured in 1906. Luckily, her German nationality allowed her to be released after only four months imprisonment.

Generalising from the 1905 Russian experience she concluded: "The mass strike is the first natural spontaneous form of every great revolutionary proletarian action." Her commitment to the revolutionary spirit of workers in action was her distinguishing feature.

She attempted to theoretically underpin her attitude to imperialist plunder by analysing the international development of capitalism in a major work on economics titled The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to the Economic Explanation of Imperialism. Her analysis, though flawed, showed that she was grappling with exactly the same question that Lenin was able to master in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.

Six months before the outbreak of World War I, Luxemburg was arrested again for inciting soldiers to mutiny. She had told the troops that if they were ordered to "murder our French or other foreign brothers" they should answer "no, under no circumstances".

Her courtroom speech, in which she turned the tables on her prosecutors, was later published as Militarism, War and the Working Class, is an anti-imperialist classic.

She received a year long sentence, but was not immediately locked up. She simply left the courtroom and repeated her revolutionary anti-war statements at a mass meeting!

When WWI broke out the entire SPD leadership capitulated to the war fever. Her famous 1915 Junius Pamphlet — a denunciation of the war written from her prison cell — still stands as a monument to the civilising call of socialism in the face of imperialist war.

She devastatingly wrote: "Bourgeois society faces a dilemma; either a transition to Socialism, or a return to barbarism ... we face the choice: either the victory of imperialism and the decline of all culture, as in ancient Rome — annihilation, devastation, degeneration, a yawning graveyard; or the victory of Socialism — the victory of the international working class consciously assaulting imperialism and its method: war. This is the dilemma of world history, either — or; the die will be cast by the class-conscious proletariat."

The October 1917 Bolshevik revolution inspired Luxemburg immensely, even though, true to form, she still maintained a certain intellectual distance from the Bolsheviks.

Freed from prison by rebellious German workers in November 1918, Luxemburg threw herself into the work of building the revolutionary movement. Unfortunately, her right wing SPD ex-comrades were ruthlessly suppressing all dissent, organising bands of armed thugs to attack the workers movement.

Hours before her murder Rosa Luxemburg wrote: "The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built."

1918: The revolution criticises its errors, Part 1

Submitted by WorldRevolution on May 5, 2008 - 20:07.

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Faced with all the conflicting arguments about the Russian revolution, it is difficult to steer an even course between the predominant view - that the revolution was a total disaster for humanity and inexorably led to the horrors of Stalinism - and the less fashionable but equally uncritical portrayals of Lenin and the Bolsheviks as superheroes who never made any errors. For our part, we follow the method of Rosa Luxemburg in her pamphlet The Russian Revolution: total solidarity with the October insurrection as the first step in the world revolution, but without the slightest hesitation to criticise the mistakes that were made by the Bolsheviks almost immediately after they came to power. What follows is the first section of an article originally published in International Review 99 in 1999, 4th quarter. This section focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of Luxemburg's pamphlet.

Rosa Luxemburg and the Russian revolution

Marxism is first and foremost a critical method, since it is the product of a class which can only emancipate itself through the ruthless criticism of all existing conditions. A revolutionary organisation that fails to criticise its errors, to learn from its mistakes, inevitably exposes itself to the conservative and reactionary influences of the dominant ideology. And this is all the more true at a time of revolution, which by its very nature has to break new ground, enter an unknown landscape with little more than a compass of general principles to find its way. The revolutionary party is all the more necessary after the victorious insurrection, because it has the strongest grasp of this compass, which is based on the historical experience of the class and the scientific approach of marxism. But if it renounces the critical nature of this approach, it will both lose sight of these historical lessons and be unable to draw the new ones that derive from the groundbreaking events of the revolutionary process. As we shall see, one of the consequences of the Bolshevik party identifying itself with the Soviet state was that it increasingly lost this capacity to criticise itself and the general course of the revolution. But as long as it remained a proletarian party it continuously generated minorities who did continue to carry out this task. The heroic combat of these Bolshevik minorities will be the main focus of the next few articles. But we will begin by examining the contribution of a revolutionary who was not in the Bolshevik party: Rosa Luxemburg, who, in 1918, in the most trying of conditions, wrote her essay The Russian Revolution, which provides us with the best possible method for approaching the errors of the revolution: the sharpest criticism based on unflinching solidarity in the face of the assaults of the ruling class.

The Russian Revolution was written in prison, just prior to the outbreak of the revolution in Germany. At this stage, with the imperialist war still raging, it was extraordinarily difficult to obtain any accurate information about what was happening in Russia - not only because of the material obstacles to communication resulting from the war (not to mention Luxemburg's imprisonment), but above all because from the very start the bourgeoisie did everything it could to hide the truth of the Russian revolution behind a smokescreen of slander and bloodthirsty fabulation. The essay was not published in Luxemburg's lifetime; Paul Levi, on behalf of the Spartacus League, had already visited Rosa in prison to persuade her that, given all the vicious campaigns against the Russian revolution, publishing articles criticising the Bolsheviks would add grist to these campaigns. Luxemburg agreed with him, and so sent the essay to Levi with a note saying "I am writing this only for you and if I can convince you, then the effort isn't wasted" (Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Pathfinder Press, p 366). The text was not published until 1922 - and by then Levi's motives for doing so were far from revolutionary (for Levi's growing break with communism, see the article on the March Action in Germany in International Review no.93).

Nevertheless, the method of criticism contained in The Russian Revolution is entirely in the right spirit. From the very start, Luxemburg staunchly defends the October revolution against the Kautskyite/ Menshevik theory that because Russia was such a backward country, it should have stopped short at the "democratic" stage, showing that only the Bolsheviks were able to uncover the real alternative: bourgeois counter-revolution or proletarian dictatorship. And she simultaneously refutes the social democratic argument that formal majorities have to be obtained before revolutionary policies can be applied. Against this deadening parliamentary logic she praises the revolutionary audacity of the Bolshevik vanguard: "As bred-in-the bone disciples of parliamentary cretinism, these German Social-Democrats have sought to apply to revolutions the homemade wisdom of the parliamentary nursery: in order to carry out anything you must first have a majority. The same, they say, applies to revolution: first let's become a ‘majority'. The true dialectic of revolution, however, stands this wisdom of parliamentary moles on its head: not through a majority to revolutionary tactics, but through revolutionary tactics to a majority - that is the way the road runs.

Only a party which knows how to lead, that is, to advance things, wins support in stormy times. The determination with which, at the decisive moment, Lenin and his comrades offered the only solution which could advance things (‘all power in the hands of the proletariat and peasantry') transformed them overnight from a persecuted, slandered, outlawed minority whose leaders had to hide like Marat in cellars, into the absolute master of the situation" (ibid, p 374-5).

And, like the Bolsheviks, Luxemburg was perfectly well aware that this bold policy of insurrection in Russia could only have any meaning as a first step towards the world proletarian revolution. This is the whole significance of the famous concluding words of her text: "theirs is the immortal historical service of having marched at the head of the international proletariat with the conquest of political power and the practical placing of the problems of the realisation of socialism, and of having advanced mightily the settlement of the score between capital and labour in the entire world. In Russia the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to ‘Bolshevism'" (ibid, p395).

And this solution was, in Luxemburg's mind, entirely concrete: it demanded that the German proletariat above all must fulfil its responsibility and come to the aid of the proletarian bastion in Russia by making the revolution itself. This process was under way even as she wrote, although her assessment, in this very essay, of the relative political immaturity of the German working class was also an insight into the tragic fate of this attempt.

Luxemburg was therefore well placed to develop the necessary criticisms of what she saw as the principal errors of the Bolsheviks: she judged them not from the detached heights of an "observer", but as a revolutionary comrade who recognised that these errors were first and foremost the product of the immense difficulties that isolation imposed on the Soviet power in Russia. Indeed, it is precisely these difficulties that required the real friends of the Russian revolution to approach it not with "uncritical apologetics" or a "revolutionary hurrah spirit", but with "penetrating and thoughtful criticism": "Dealing as we are with the very first experiment in proletarian dictatorship in world history (and one taking place at that under the harshest conceivable conditions, in the midst of the worldwide conflagration and chaos of the imperialist mass slaughter, caught in the coils of the most reactionary military power in Europe, and accompanied by the most complete failure on the part of the international working class), it would be a crazy idea to think that every last thing done or left undone in an experiment with the dictatorship of the proletariat under such abnormal conditions represented the very pinnacle of perfection" (ibid p 368-9).

Luxemburg's criticisms of the Bolsheviks were focussed on three main areas:

1. the land question

2. the national question

3. democracy and dictatorship.

1. The Bolsheviks had won peasant support for the October revolution by inviting them to seize the land from the big landowners. Luxemburg recognised that this was "an excellent tactical move" But she went on: "Unfortunately it had two sides to it; and the reverse side consisted in the fact that the direct seizure of the land by the peasants has in general nothing at all in common with socialist economy...Not only is it not a socialist measure, it even cuts off the way to such measures; it piles up insurmountable obstacles to the socialist transformation of agrarian relations" (ibid, pp375-376). Luxemburg points out that a socialist economic policy can only start from the collectivisation of large landed property. Fully cognisant of the difficulties facing the Bolsheviks, she does not criticise them for failing to implement this straight away. But she does say that by actively encouraging the peasants to divide the land up into innumerable small plots, the Bolsheviks were piling up problems for later on, creating a new stratum of small property owners who would be naturally hostile to any attempt to socialise the economy. This was certainly confirmed by experience: though prepared to support the Bolsheviks against the old Czarist regime, the "independent" peasants later became an increasingly conservative weight on the proletarian power. Luxemburg was also very accurate in her warning that the division of the land would favour the richer peasants at the expense of the poorer. But it has also to be said that in itself the collectivisation of the land would be no guarantee of the march towards socialism, any more than the collectivisation of industry; only the success of the revolution on a world scale could have secured that - just as it could have overcome the difficulties posed by the parcellisation of the land in Russia.

2. Luxemburg's most trenchant criticisms concern the question of "national self-determination". While recognising that the Bolsheviks' defence of the slogan of "the right of peoples to self-determination" was based on a legitimate concern to oppose all forms of national oppression and to win to the revolutionary cause the masses of those parts of the Czarist empire which had been under the yoke of Great Russian chauvinism, Luxemburg showed what this "right" meant in practise: the "new" national units which had opted for separation from the Russian Soviet republic systematically allied themselves with imperialism against the proletarian power: "While Lenin and his comrades clearly expected that, as champions of national freedom, even to the extent of ‘separation', they would turn Finland, the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic countries, the Caucasus etc into so many faithful allies of the Russian revolution, we have witnessed the opposite spectacle. One after another, these ‘nations' used the newly granted freedom to ally themselves with German imperialism against the Russian revolution as its mortal enemy, and, under German protection, to carry the banner of counter-revolution into Russia itself" (p 380). And she goes on to explain why it could not be otherwise, since in a capitalist class society, there is no such thing as the "nation" separate from the interests of the bourgeoisie, which would far rather subject itself to the domination of imperialism than make common cause with the revolutionary working class: "To be sure, in all these cases, it was really not the ‘people' who engaged in these reactionary policies, but only the bourgeois and petty bourgeois classes, who - in sharpest opposition to their own proletarian masses - perverted the ‘national right of self-determination' into an instrument of their counter-revolutionary class policies. But - and here we come to the very heart of the question - it is in this that the utopian, petty bourgeois character of this nationalistic slogan resides: that in the midst of the crude realities of class society and when class antagonisms are sharpened to the uttermost, it is simply converted into a means of bourgeois class rule. The Bolsheviks were to be taught to their own great hurt, and that of the revolution, that under the rule of capitalism there is no self-determination of peoples, that in a class society each class of the nation strives to ‘determine itself' in a different fashion, and that, for the bourgeois classes, the standpoint of national freedom is fully subordinated to that of class rule. The Finnish bourgeoisie like the Ukrainian bourgeoisie, were unanimous in preferring the violent rule of Germany to national freedom, if the latter should be bound up with Bolshevism" (ibid).

Furthermore, the Bolsheviks' confusion on this point (although it must be remembered that there was a minority in the Bolshevik party - in particular Piatakov - who fully agreed with Luxemburg's point of view on this question) was having a negative effect internationally since ‘national self-determination' was also the rallying cry of Woodrow Wilson and of all the big imperialist sharks who were seeking to use it to dislodge their imperialist rivals from the regions that they themselves coveted. And the whole history of the twentieth century has confirmed how easily the "rights of nations" has become no more than a cloak for the imperialist desires of the great powers and of their lesser emulators.

Luxemburg did not dismiss the problem of national sensitivities; she insisted that there could be no question of a proletarian regime ‘integrating' outlying countries through military force alone. But it was equally true that any concession made to the nationalist illusions of the masses in those regions could only tie them more closely to their exploiters. The proletariat, once it has assumed power in any region, can only win those masses to its cause through "the most compact union of revolutionary forces", through a "genuine international class policy" aimed at splitting the workers from their own bourgeoisie.

3. On "democracy and dictatorship" there are profoundly contradictory elements in Luxemburg's position. On the one hand there is no doubt that she falls into a real confusion between democracy in general and workers' democracy in particular - the democratic forms used in the framework and in the interest of the proletarian dictatorship. This is shown by her resolute defence of the Constituent Assembly, which the Soviet power dissolved in 1918, in perfect consistency with the fact that the very appearance of the latter had made the old bourgeois democratic forms entirely obsolete. And yet somehow Luxemburg sees this act as a threat to the life of the revolution. In a similar vein she is reluctant to accept that, in order to exclude the ruling class from political life, "suffrage" in a Soviet regime should be based primarily on the workplace collective rather than on the individual citizen's domicile (albeit her concern was also to ensure that the unemployed would not be excluded by this criterion, which was certainly not its intention). These inter-classist, democratic prejudices are in striking contrast to her argument that "national self-determination" can never express anything else than the "self-determination" of the bourgeoisie. The argument is identical as regards parliamentary institutions, which do not, whatever the appearance, express the interests of the "people" but of the capitalist ruling class. Luxemburg's views in this text are also totally at odds with the programme of the Spartacus League formulated soon after, since this document demands the dissolution of all municipal and national parliamentary type bodies and their replacement by councils of workers' and soldiers' delegates: we can only presume that Luxemburg's position on the Constituent Assembly - which also became the rallying cry of the counter-revolution in Germany - had evolved very rapidly in the heat of the revolutionary process.

But this does not mean that there is no validity to any of Luxemburg's criticisms of the Bolsheviks' approach to the question of workers' democracy. She was fully aware that in the extremely difficult situation facing the beleaguered Soviet power, there was a real danger that the political life of the working class would be subordinated to the necessity to bar the road to the counter-revolution. Given this situation, Luxemburg was right to be sensitive to any signs that the norms of workers' democracy were being violated. Her defence of the necessity for the widest possible debate within the proletarian camp, and against the forcible suppression of any proletarian political tendencies, was justified in light of the fact that the Bolsheviks, having assumed state power, were drifting towards a party monopoly that was to damage themselves as much as the life of the proletariat in general, particularly with the introduction of the Red Terror. Luxemburg did not at all oppose the notion of the proletarian dictatorship. But as she insisted "this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination, in energetic, resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society, without which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished. But this dictatorship must be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class - that is, must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses; it must be under their direct influence, subjected to the control of complete public activity; it must arise out of the growing political training of the mass of the people ( ibid, p 394).

Luxemburg was particularly prescient in warning of the danger of the political life of the Soviets being emptied out more and more as power became concentrated in the hands of the party: over the next three years, under the pressures of the civil war, this was to become one of the central dramas of the revolution. But whether Luxemburg was right or wrong in her specific criticisms, what inspires us above all is her approach to the problem, an approach that should have served as a guide to all subsequent analyses of the revolution and its demise: intransigent defence of its proletarian character, and thus criticism of its weaknesses and its eventual failure as a problem of the proletariat and for the proletariat. Unfortunately, all too often the name of Luxemburg has been used to pour scorn on the very memory of October - not only by those councilist currents who have claimed descent from the German left but who have lost sight of the real traditions of the working class; but also, and perhaps more importantly, by those bourgeois forces who in the name of "democratic socialism" use Luxemburg as a hammer against Lenin and Bolshevism. This has been the speciality of those who descend politically from the very forces who murdered Luxemburg in 1919 to save the skin of the bourgeoisie - the social democrats, particularly their left wing factions. For our part, we have every intention, in analysing the mistakes of the Bolsheviks and the degeneration of the Russian revolution, of remaining faithful to the real content of her method. CDW.

The second part of this article can be found here.

Rosa Luxemburg

Biographical Information

"Rosa Luxemburg: A Socialist With a Human Face"

by Beverly G. Merrick

To recognize Rosa Luxemburg is a conscientious act, for she triumphed over many odds to found a practical theory that combined the Marxist dialectic with historical pragmatism. Although she became a martyr for her contributions to radical thought, more than 40 years before the sixties movement of the New Left, Luxemburg, is -- as Robert Bland suggests -- the ideological founder of that movement. Bland further writes:

For although student leaders and publicists do not yet document their tactics and rhetoric with citations from her pamphlets, there are curious parallels to her insights into situations that, with the availability now of her works, may become apparent and relevant to the contestateurs the future. . . . Despite the current notion that revolution begins at the bottom of the masses, or that theory and organization come out of action, the current dispersed adherents of praxis still need a theorist of her audacity -- one who knew that no one "makes" a revolution..

Luxemburg, according to Stephen Bronner, is the founder of an "emancipatory heritage" that allows theorists to view socialism in a favorable light. Bronner writes that the socialism, of the linage of Marx-Lenin-Stalin "conjures up a socialism of grey, a socialism of dictatorship and concrete, of repression, truly "strains against the shackles of both capitalistic and 'social' oppression.". Rosa Luxemburg advocated socialism with a human face. The purpose of this research is to explore the contributions of Rosa Luxemburg to socialist thought, by presenting her personal life and theory of historical progressivism in the context of strategies. Her personal tactics were to get to the center of the action, to be a fighter, and to never be afraid to tackle those who had gained stature in a field, whether it be on the political scene or in philosophical discussion. She discovered truth by applying historical examples to the revolutionary struggle. This type of political approach has proved her to be a visionary. Most of all, she is an example of how far belief in one's self and one's own vision can be acted out for the betterment of humanity. As a hero, not heroine, Luxemburg resisted the separatism between men and women conveyed by such nuances in the language. Luxemburg considered herself a person, not a gender type. How Luxemburg arrived at the state of supreme self-confidence is a study in heroism. She was a subject of the Russian state, a member of a subject people, a member of the outcast Jewish race, and a cripple. Yet, as Mary-Alice Waters writes, Rose Luxemburg

dedicated her immense energies, capabilities, and intellectual powers to the goal of world social revolution. She understood that the stakes were high, that the fate of humanity was at stake and, as a woman of action, she gave herself completely to the great historic battle..

Her life spanned the five decades that opened the first dress rehearsal for the socialist revolution and closed as a new era was launched -- 1871 to 1919. Luxemburg was born on March 1, 1871, in Zanosc, a small town in southeastern Russian Poland in the year of the Paris commune.. She was the youngest of five children. Her parents were Jews who de-emphasized their Jewishness.. Although little is known about her mother, it is known that she was well-read. Luxemburg wrote to Sophie Leibknect, in Letters From Prison, that her mother considered Schiller and the Bible supreme sources of wisdom, being "firmly convinced that King Solomon understood the language of birds.". Rosa said that in the pride of her 14 years and in her training in natural science, she used to smile at her "mother's simplicity.". Her father, educated in Germany, owned a timber business. He has generally been described as cosmopolitan in thought and actions. The Polish and German languages were spoken in the home. Luxemburg also learned Russian. Rosa said she learned from her father liberal ideas, an active interest in world affairs, an ongoing pleasure in Western literature. He had emancipated himself from the strictness of the ghetto and from the Jewish orthodoxy at an early age.. The family moved to Warsaw, where at the age of 5 Rosa developed a serious hip ailment. Bedridden for a year, she taught herself to read. Luxemburg never fully recovered from the disease. She walked with a slight limp the rest of her life.. Biographer and friend Paul Frolich writes:

Physically she was not cut out for the role of heroine. She was slight of build and her body was badly proportioned; her legs were too short for her torso, and owing to her early hip trouble her walk was ungainly. Her features were sharp and pronouncedly Jewish. It was a face indicating energy and determination, and it repelled one and fascinated the other..

Her education was remarkable in several respects. At the age of 13, she entered the second girls school, graduating in 1887 with an excellent academic record from an institution reserved "first and foremost" for the children and Russian administrators.. Mary-Alice Waters said school authorities denied Luxemburg a gold medal she had earned for academic achievement because of her "rebellious attitude." Apparently, Luxemburg had already become active in the underground revolutionary movement.. Two years later, with arrest eminent, Luxemburg was smuggled out of Poland into Germany. A Catholic priest helped her after she told him she had to leave Poland because she wanted to be baptized to marry her lover.. Luxemburg went to Zurich. She attended the University of Zurich, one of the few institutions of the time that admitted men and women on an equal basis. Her studies covered a wide range of the humanities, social science and history. Earning a doctorate in political science, she was considered an oddity by prospective landlords, who had never before seen a woman with a doctor's degree.. Frolich writes that along with her studies, Luxemburg took part in the Zurich working-class movement. She became active in the intellectual life of political emigrants from Poland and Russia.. Frolich said that free thought prevailed amongst them in an angst of strict and almost ascetic morality.. The subjects of discussion had one theme -- revolution, whether it be philosophy, Darwinism, the emancipation of women, Marx, Tolstoy, Russian agrarian communism, capitalistic development, Nihilist terrorism, Bakunin, Blanqy, methods of revolutionary struggle, demoralization of the Western bourgeoisie, Bismark's fall, German social democracy, the emancipation of Poland, Emile Zola.. Luxemburg positioned herself in the thick of political battles, invariably advocating Marxism. She became one of the central leaders of Polish social democracy, and remained so until her murder. She also entered into an intimate personal, intellectual and political relationship with Leo Jogiches, which lasted for 15 years.. Her friend Clara Zetkin once said of Jogiches:

He was one of those rare men who can tolerate a great personality in the woman by his side, working with him in loyal and happy comradeship, without feeling her growth and development as a limitation on his own personality..

Luxemburg refused to assume the stereotypical roles women usually fill in a political organization. Waters said she had virtually no interest in the details of party functioning, financing, underground work, nor the complications of getting underground literature published. Jogiches dealt with such matters. Luxemburg chose rather to be always the orator and writer. In her public life, she was continually in the spotlight.. One of her earliest battles, as a founding member of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), was to be seated as a delegate at the Third Congress International of 1893. She met stiff opposition when she demanded the right to delegate status. Frolich writes that as a trenchant fighter, Luxermburg took the floor at the convention showing no trace of self-consciousness "at being seated in the presence of the illustrious heads of the international socialist movement.". He added, "On the contrary, the unknown woman defended her [particular] cause by launching a vigorous attack on its opponents.". By the next congress in 1986, her demand to be seated went unchallenged.. A year laster, Luxemburg completed her studies. She decided to make her living as a journalist while working for Germany's large and influential socialist party. She reportedly married Gustav Lubeck to achieve citizenship status, so that German authorities could not prevent her political activity. Five years later, when she gained German citizenship, she parted company with Lubeck outside the registry office.. At the Paris Congress of the International, a new attempt was made to exclude her from the proceedings of socialist discussion. This time the attempt was "pitiful" in view of her wide support.. Her opponents apparently did not argue against her ideas but her character. Apparently, the "abuse" had no visible effect on Luxemburg:

In political argument she could be extraordinarily trenchant, and her irony was biting, but she remained objective always." The mud thrown at her was so ineffective that she never bothered to answer it or defend herself in her writings..

Luxemburg did not think highly of the methods and the doctrines of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). While they learned to

respect her exceptionable abilities, they generally considered her, to put it most bluntly, a cantankerous foreign youngster who, on top of everything else, was a woman. One of their first proposals to her was that she turn her attentions toward the SPD's organization for women, where they thought she properly belonged, and where they hoped she would be sidetracked and eliminated from the mainstream of the part's political life..

Waters further writes that Luxemburg promptly turned them down. She looked for another area in which to be active: "While she understood the importance of organizing women to take part in the revolutionary struggle, . . . she steadfastly refused to be forced into any traditional women's role within the party.". Luxemburg encouraged the women around her to follow her example. According to researcher Dick Howard, Luxemburg continually tried "to persuade her women friends to take an independent role in politics, and to free themselves from the domination of their husbands.". In a letter from prison, she urged Sophie Liebknecht to keep up her reading: "[Y]ou must go on with your mental training, and it will be quite easy for you since your mind is still fresh and pliable.". In a speech given on May 12, 1912, at the Second Social Democratic Women's Rally, Luxemburg said that women's suffrage is a worthy goal, but added:

[T]he mass movement to bring it about is not a job for women and men of the proletariat. Germany's present lack of rights is only one link in the chain of reaction that shackles people's lives. . . . Monarchy and women's lack of rights have become the most important tools of the ruling capitalist class..

Luxemburg's friend Clara Zutkin became the leader of the SPD's women's movement.. Even though Luxemburg rarely wrote about the struggle for women's liberation, she considered herself, according to Waters,

a revolutionary leader of men and women, and she dismissed the insults directed against her because she was woman as simple part of the overhead of political battle. She understood that women can achieve their full liberation only with the triumph of the social revolution nd elimination of their economic bondage to the family institution, and she devoted all her energies to bring about that revolution..

Luxemburg viewed women as part of the exploited of the population, which included the working class, national minorities and peasants.. She once wrote with biting irony about the role women are required to play, according to the traditional viewpoints. In What Is Economics?, she said:

In the winter there is spinning to be done -- women's work, while the men make whatever the household needs with axe, saw and hammer. For all I care you can call it "agriculture" or Handicraft." In any case, we have to do a little of everything since we need all kinds of things around the house and for the fields. How do we "organize" the work? Another silly question! The men, naturally, do those chores which call for the strength of men; the women take care of the house, the cows and the chicken coop' the children help wherever they can. You don't mean that I should send a woman to cut the wood and that I should milk the cows myself? (The good man does not know -- let us add on our part -- that in many primitive tribes, Brazilian Indians, for instance, it is precisely the women who collect the wood, dig for roots and gather fruits in the forest, while with the cattle-raising tribes of Africa and Asia it is the men who not only take care of the cattle, but also milk them. Even today, in Dalmatia, one can still see the woman carrying heavy loads on her back, while the robust man rides alongside on a donkey, puffing a pipe.).

She said the division of labor in the respective cultures seem just as natural to them as it seems to the peasant that the husband should cut the wood and the wife should milk the cows.. Frolich said her political acumen was instinctive rather than acquired. She was able to speak affectively to mass of people. Her meetings were always triumphs.. Even so, Luxemburg wrote several years after the fact about what she called "the strange reception" her oratorical prowess had been given in the German socio-democratic camp. She complained to a correspondent of pettiness. Frolich said the founders of the movement were angered that Luxemburg,

. . . a woman, had dared to interfere in politics, an almost exclusively male affair. Not only that, but she had not contented herself with modestly asking the opinions of "practical politicians," who were years her senior, but had put forth her own ideas, and what was worse, supported them with such brilliant arguments that the graybeards were forced to capitulate, and they bore her a grudge for it..

Luxemburg was able to cut to the heart of an argument because she believed facts have their own logic, and individuals fail to know how to use that logic effectively. She would lay bare the "logic of facts" rather than develop a moral system of political logic.. If was not liked, she was at least gained respect in some quarters. Max Beer, who traced the history of the movement in "Fifty Years of International Socialism," said about Luxemburg, who he called the Jewess:

Her wide learning, intellectual and artistic culture, her eloquence and sparkling wit, made her one of the great figures of the Socialist International. She won the admiration of men [persons] of action, like James and Lenin, and of artists such as Hugo Wolf.. Her method of dialect was strongly influenced by Marx. She regarded history as a process. In the process class-forces struggled for their own interests as they evolved out of a given economic situation.. For Luxemburg,

Marxism was not a theoretical system solving all questions at once and for all, but a method of examining the process of economic change at each new stage of its development, with all its effects on the interests, ideas, aims and political activities of each group in society.. Her ability to use the system of logic was, according to Frolich, "a weapon enabling her to maintain intellectual mastery of the social process as a whole.". Other scholars have studied her method of inquiry as a continuing process. Robert Looker writes that Luxemburg was convinced that "nothing is more contrary to the historical-dialectical method of Marxist thought than absolute, general application.". The Marxist dialectic was for Luxemburg, a model to communicate in-depth historical insight gained from careful analysis of situations in her own times. Above all, Luxemburg was a woman of thought and will. Frolich said her heart was disciplined by her head: "all her political decisions first passed the test of reason and justified themselves in theory before they developed into action.". She had the strength to withstand 20 long years of battling within the German Socialist Party, fighting often single handedly against the party's reformist drift. Waters said Luxemburg held on to her "profoundly revolutionary perspective in the fact of heavy pressure to retreat and find a comfortable niche in the party apparatus.". Because she founded her theories of fact on historical evidence, her process often proved her to be on target when applied to similar situations. Frolich writes:

She displayed almost a visionary ability to grasp as a whole the great historical process, in which technique, the organization of product and distribution, historical tradition, scientific achievement, jurisdicial conceptions and laws, and scores of other factors interacting to facilitate or retard the cyclopean battle of the classes, but of which, in the long run, economic factors are the determining force shaping the organization of society.. Luxemburg never was prepared to view only the surface phenomena of a problem. She investigated below the surface, seeking the motives behind a particular act. Her contemporaries often thought her speculations were far afield of the problem, but history unfolding bore out her predictions.. Even as she looked at a current development, she looked into the future at the repercussions caused by chosen courses of action. Frolich said Luxemburg invariably had the next stage of the movement in mind. She understood that revolution had a secondary character: for the bourgeoisie, considerations meant more civil liberties,. the republic and parliamentary democracy; for the working class, the change had a proletarian character.. During a time of international political upheaval, during World War I,Luxemburg wrote

The task of Social Democracy and its leaders it not to let themselves be dragged along in the wake of events, but deliberately to forge ahead of them, to foresee the trend of events, to shorten development by conscious action, and to accelerate its progress..

It is difficult to know where to place Luxemburg into the context of intellectual thought because she was always controversial, always playing the devil's advocate in arguments by finding the weaker points. She was called at times an opponent of the Russian Revolution. At other times, she was praised. For instance, at the Petrograd Soviet meeting of January 18, 1919, she was called "one of the first Marxists to evaluate the Russian Revolution correctly as a whole.". After all, she was often a battling dissenter of the agenda of the German Social Democrats. Others say her classical analysis of imperialism, The Accumulation of Capital, and other works have gained popular recognition in the United States. It is interesting to note as well that she founded the Polish and Lithuanian Social Democratic Part (SDPIL), the Gruppe Internationale, the Spartakusbund, and the German Community Party. She first gained renown by taking on Bernstein and Kautsky. Later she challenged Lenin and the Bolshevik machine. Apparently, she had great self-confidence in her own methods and application of the theories aggravated political enmities.. Luxeumburg also questioned political dogma. She accepted no generally applicable formula to solve all national problems. She challenged accepted tradition, even if it were political postulates of Marx and Engels, even while all other Marxist of the time were buying the whole of dogma hook, line and sinker.. During the 1890s. she opposed Russian expansionism because she saw not further need to foreign powers "to act as mid-wives for the Russian revolution.". Luxemburg agreed with Lenin that the founding of the new society must be brought about by revolutionaries. She agreed that the advanced guard of the class struggle must be centrally organized with a disciplined majority carrying out policies. However, the two parted company in visualizing how the government, once in place, would operate.. Luxemburg regarded the continued existence of an all-powerful Central Committee as a danger to the development of the struggle itself.. She maintained that social tactics could become hidebound and mechanical unless controlled by the total membership of the party. She wanted the masses to be encouraged to widely criticize the process.. Her predictions were borne out when the Stalinist regime made bolshevist policy "a virtue of necessity." This resulted in a bureaucracy that divided the leaders from the masses.. Luxemburg argued convincingly that the ruling party would become an elitist party cadre even though such questions of nationality lay with the masses. Theorist Horace P. Davis writes:

Since Lenin advocated self-determination only up to a point, those who wished for self-determination beyond that point -- those who were not interested in social revolution [except to combat it] -- would of course charge Lenin with hypocrisy; and this was done, both at the time [of the Russian Revolution] and later. Luxemburg's position was not any more palatable to the conservatives, but she did escape the charge of hypocrisy..

Davis says the difference between Lenin and Luxemburg were in a portion due to a difference in the "set of facts" with which they were operating. However, her statement of the case against the theory of self-determination is as relevant today as when it was written in 1908.. Norman Geras also recognizes Luxemburg's call for the scope of democratic gains and liberties within the dictatorship of the proletariat. Geras writes:

Luxemburg's view on the issue is clear. The proletarian dictatorship is a more direct and more extensive form of democracy than anything that has existed hitherto and must involve comprehensive democratic procedures and freedoms: elections, freedom of the press, freedom of opinion -- for the one who thinks differently, not only for the members of the party -- freedom of assembly, etc., in the absence of which a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. . . . [A]n elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously..

Geras maintains that Luxemburg called described a socio-political system based on a plurality of tendencies and of parties within the dictatorship of the proletariat.. He also suggests that Luxemburg protested against what she regarded as "a failure of the leadership in the Bolshevik camp to weigh fully the dangers involved in restricting democratic rights and liberties.. Further, that she was not protesting from a liberal stance or from an anarchy against the dictatorship of the proletariat. Nor did she appeal to universal freedom, nor to interclass democracy against coercion of any kind, nor the plea of a pacifist " to the effect that the masses must join the battle with an enemy armed to the teeth, shielded only by the strength of their ideals.". The critic says Luxemburg was warning the party intellectuals against the temptation to rigidify their principles to the point of finding they are necessities. She said the principles could become a kind of model of necessity.. Lenin heard her cautionary words, but did not agree. However, after her death, in 1922, he upbraided the German party for being slow to publish her work.. A decade later, Stalin, as the new leader of the Soviet Union, attempted to discredit her writings. Waters writes that Stalin tried to rewrite history when he decreed that Luxemburg was "personally responsible for that greatest of all sins, the theory of permanent revolution.". Trotsky got into the debate, coming to her defense. In articles titled "Hands Off Rosa Luxemburg" and published in the August 6 and 13, 1932, issues of The Militant, Trotsky writes:

If one were to take the disagreements between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg in their entirety, then the historical correctness is unconditionally [biases] on Lenin's side. But this does not exclude the fact that in certain questions, and during definite periods Rosa Luxemburg was correct against Lenin [sic]..

Trotsky further maintains that Stalin did not hesitate to vilify her and to lie about her motives and theories.. Efforts to eradicate Luxemburg's name from the social movement were ultimately unsuccessful because she was never declared "an unperson" . Waters said Luxemburg was not eliminated from history books altogether; therefore, her image has been partially restored with the passage of time.. It should be pointed out that Luxemburg never aligned herself unreservedly with the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks. More so, she stood for unity within the Russian Social Democratic Party (RSDRP).. Even so, she was not afraid to criticize those in powerful leadership positions. Reform or Revolution was Luxemburg's first major political work. The book is comprised of a series of articles written while she was still in her twenties. The articles were published in Neue Zeit, from 1897 to 1898.. In the work, she attacks the theory of Edward Bernstein, who is in the leadership of the German Socialist Party, for calling on socialists to join forces with the liberal bourgeoisie on the basis of a capitalistic program.. In 1905, in a pamphlet titled Socialism and the Church, Luxemburg indicted the church, under the pen name of Josef Chmua, as a reactionary institution. The essay maintains that the church was one of "the most wealthy and vicious exploiters of the poor.". On March 4, 1906, Luxemburg was arrested in Poland and charged with serious crimes against the state. She was released in July of that year. After her release, she went to Finland, where she wrote The Mass Strike: the Political Party and the Trade Union. She had predicted the mass strike, which occurred in Russia in 1905, when the working classes led a revolution and general strike and used other economic leverages.. The reason for her arrest is probably because of her innumerable speech in Germany about the revolt in Russia. Frolich writes:

[E]verywhere she was regarded as the living representative of the revolution, and her meetings turned into a tour of triumph. Under irresistible pressure from the enthusiastic masses, who would brook no refusal, she was allowed to speak even on trade-union platforms, which up to then had been closed to her..

Around that time, Luxemburg authored a pamphlet about the mass strikes outlines the 1905-1906 revolution in Russia, which attacks "the institutionalized conservatism of the social democratic trade-union bureaucracy in Germany.". It is pertinent to show several arguments she used concerning the mass strike in that they represent tactics Luxemburg proposed in her Marxist theory of historical progressivism. Luxemburg writes:

As the Russian Revolution shows it to us, the mass strike is such a changeable phenomenon that it reflects in itself all phases of the political and economic struggle, all states and moments of revolution. Its applicability, its effectiveness, and the moments of its origin change continually. It suddenly opens new, broad perspectives of revolution just where it seems to have come to a narrow pass; and it disappoints where one though he [she] could reckon on it with full certitude..

Further, she maintained:

Political and economic strikes, mass strikes and partial strikes, demonstrative strikes and fighting strikes, general strikes of individual cities, peaceful wage struggles and street massacres, barricade fighting -- all these run through one another, next to each other, cross one another, flow in and over one another; it is an eternal moving changing sea of appearances..

Luxemburg said the law of movement of these phenomena is clear. "

It does not lie in the mass strike itself," she explained, "not in its technical peculiarities, but in the political and social relation of the forces of the revolution. The mass strike is merely a form of revolutionary struggle.". Luxemburg suggests that the mass strike is not artificially made, not decided out of the blue, not propagated: rather the strike is an historical phenomenon, which at "a certain moment follows with historical necessity from the social relations.". She said it is impossible to propagate a strike in the same way it is impossible to propagate a revolution' The terms "mass strike" and "revolution" are only "concepts which signify an external form of the class struggle, and which have a sense and a content only in connection with determined political associations.". It stands to reason, therefore, that revolutionaries are not inciters of civil strife, only the conduits of it. In simple terms, no one can cause something to happen unless the conditions are ripe for something to happen. During World War I, Luxemburg wrote under another pseudonym, that of Junius, an earlier champion of liberty against absolute abuses. Frolich said the Junius pamphlet, published in April 1916, openly and powerfully reveals Luxemburg's deep indignation about the conflict. With "bitter and ice-cold sarcasm,". she describes

a world in which the mass slaughter of human beings has degenerated into a monotonous daily task, in which business flourished on mass ruin, and in which the mad hunt for war profits was praised as an expression of the same patriotism which led others to lay down their lives on the battlefield..

Despite daily reports of German victories, Luxemburg prophesied the collapse of Austria, Turkey and Tsarist Russia, and the rivalry between Japan on one side and Great Britain, the United States and China on the other.. The Junius pamphlet could just as well be a pamphlet for our time. During Luxemburg's second and longest imprisonment, from July 1916 to November 1918, she was prevented from participating in any political activity, including political writing. Therefore, her correspondence to friends became her sole emotional and intellectual outlet.. Her letters from prison, according to Waters, reveal a side of her personality finding little overt expression in her political writings. Luxemburg's correspondence demonstrates that she had a deep love for life in all forms.. Max Beer agrees that Luxemburg's imprisonment revealed her humanist tendencies. True, she was a theoretician who was willing and able to challenge the theories of Lenin.. She was also a person who gave a passionate part of her mind to contemplating "the ways of birds and beats and poets.". During the two years in prison, Luxemburg drew her strength, not from dwelling on the struggle itself, but finding in herself a place in the universal order of things: "the clouds she could see above the prison wall, the weeds which grew in the crannies of the prison paving stones, the birds she could watch and hear from behind the bars, and the poems men [persons] had written to express their joy in these things.". She wrote to Sophie Liebknecht in May of 1917:

Sometimes . . . it seems to me that I am not really a human being at all, but like a bird or beast in human form. I feel so much more at home even in a scrap of garden like the one here, and still more in the meadows when the grass is humming with bees than -- at one of our party congresses..

She also fought through bouts of depression, saying she suffered in silence. Later in May she again wrote to Liebknecht

If at this moment the very job of my soul had stood embodied before me, I should have been unable to utter a word of greeting, and could only have gazed at the vision in dumb despair. In fact I rarely have much inclination to talk. Weeks pass without my hearing the sound of my own voice..

One of the first pieces she wrote after her release on November 8, 1918, was "Against Capital Punishment," published in Rote Fahne. In the article she condemns the inhumanity of what she calls capitalistic "justice" and outlines the humanitarian goals of the social revolution and the treatment of prisoners.. The last two months of her life were, according to Waters, days and nights of almost uninterrupted mental and physical exertion.". From November 9 to mid-January, there Luxemburg was involved in demonstration after demonstration, with hundreds of thousands of workers pouring into the street. They protested every governmental move made against their organizations and supporters. Mass meetings were held daily.. Luxemburg's final speech was given at the founding convention of the German Communist Party. On January 15, 1919, Rosa, Wilhelm Pieck and Karl Liebknecht [Sophie's husband] were arrested in Berlin by a cadre of solders. The three were murdered shortly thereafter. Reportedly, Luxemburg's skull was first smashed by two blows from the butt of a carbine. Then she was shot in the head. He corpse apparently was flung into a canal, where it was recovered the following May.. Leo Jogiches, her confidante, spent the next few days suggesting she must have been murdered, until he was arrested. On March 10, he was dragged out of prison and murdered.. Waters suggests that the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht marked the end of the first phase of the Russian Revolution. She said it was a tremendous blow to the revolution.. Ironically, although Luxemburg was not a liberal pacifist, she criticize the use of violence against those who opposed Bolshevism, even though she was in substantial agreement with their analysis of the need for a revolution. Luxemburg, in fact, had written a work called Peace Utopia in 1911, which decried the use of force or violence -- the destruction of life. Her position as theorist was basically a moral argument, with a human reluctance to see life destroyed, even if the violence against the oppressed is in no way comparable to the violence of the oppressor.. When Rosa Luxemburg spoke of changing the order of society, she spoke not of violence, but of class struggle. She spoke not of war, but revolution within, through strikes and other forms of civil disobedience. Juxtaposed to her tactics are those of Lenin, who firmly insisted that civil war defined the nature of the revolution, an all or nothing approach to resolve differences. It is ironic, that the peace she wanted could be obtained only by the seizure of power, and no one willingly relinquishes power.. She could not stand to see any living entity suffer. This is the context in which she justified force for the oppressed to free themselves. While in prison, Luxemburg at written to Sophie Leibknecht:

While the lorry was being unloaded, the beasts, which were utterly exhausted, stood perfectly still. The one that was bleeding had an expression on its black face and its soft black eyes like that of a weeping child -- one that has been severely thrashed and doers not know why. nor how to escape from the torment of ill-treatment. I stood in front of the team; the beast looked at me; the tears dwelled up in my eyes. The suffering of the dearly beloved brother could hardly have moved me more profoundly than I was moved by my impotence in the face of this mute agony..

She said she saw the strange and terrible prison guards rain blows upon blow on the buffalo. Blood was running from its gaping wounds. She said, "Poor wretch, I am as powerless, as dumb, as yourself, I am longing.". A few days later, on May 12, she came to some kind of terms with the incident, writing, "I cannot shed tears over all the thrashed buffaloes in the world. . . . "Logic does not help in the matter, and it makes me ill to see suffering.". Juxtaposed against the violence of the scene and her similar brutal murder, is Luxemburg's words about hopes for a revival of life. The letter was written to Sophie Liechknecht toward the end of that May: I had such an experience yesterday. I must tell you what happened. In that bathroom, before dinner, I found a great peacock butterfly on the window. It must have been shut up for two of three days, for it had almost worn itself out fluttering against the hard windowpane, so that there was now nothing more than a slight movement of the wings to show it was still alive. Directly I noticed it, I dressed myself, trembling with impatience, climbed to the window and took it cautiously in my hand. It had now ceased to move, and I thought it must be dead. But I took it to my own room and put it on the outside window sill, to see if it would revive. There was again a gentle fluttering for a little, but after that the insect did not move. I laid a few flowers in front of its antennae, so that it might have something to eat. At that moment the black-cap sang in front of the window so lustily that the echoes rang. Involuntarily, I spoke out loud to the butterfly, saying, "Just listen how merrily the bird is singing; you must take heart, too, and come to life again!" I could not help laughing at myself for speaking life this to a half-dead butterfly, and I thought: "You are wasting your breath!" But I wasn't, for in about half an hour the little creature really revived; after moving about for a while, it was able to flutter slowly away. I was so delighted at this rescue..

The paradox of the passage: to save a butterfly. She who would save life was destroyed by those she would have saved. When Luxemburg's letters, with such passages, were published after her death, they brought about a revulsion of public feeling. Frolich writes:

Many men and women, not socialist, have since openly confessed their deep regret that the news of her murder filled them with satisfaction, and they have bitterly reproached themselves for having had any share, even indirectly, in the creation of the savage atmosphere which made the murders possible.. Luxemburg had been targeted for death because of the mass hysteria caused by the revolutionary ideas proposed in a mass strike. Others in the socialist organization of Spartakusband were also targeted because big business and government feared the loss of their stranglehold on the worker. Her mass rallies became the center of political discussion for the masses. She became a martyr for her cause because her tactics of historical progressivism tempered by humanism were apparently effective strategies for the political atmosphere of the post-war period. Luxemburg was far from being an armchair revolutionary. She as always in the thick of the action. She paid the price of carrying out her beliefs. Someone once wrote that Luxemburg had remarked in one of her letters from prison: "You know that I really do hope to die at my post, in a street-fight or in prison. But my innermost personality belongs more to my tom-tits than to my comrades.".

Rosa Luxemburg

Polish-born Marxist theorist and revolutionary whose activities during the 1918 German Revolution led to her murder by the state during the counter-revolution.

"Like a candle burning at both ends": Rosa Luxemburg and the critique of political economy - Riccardo Bellofiore

Paper showing how Luxemburg's economic theory and political perspective are much richer than the economic determinism and spontaneism they are usually associated with.

Abstract

Order Prevails in Berlin - Rosa Luxemburg

Troops loyal to the Kaiser battle workers on the streets of Hamburg

Written just after the defeat of German Revolution and hours before she and other leaders of the struggle would be arrested and killed by the Friekorps. It details the ebb and flow of recent class struggles and is the last known work of Rosa Luxemburg.

"Order prevails in Warsaw!" declared Minister Sebastiani to the Paris Chamber of Deputies in 1831, when after having stormed the suburb of Praga, Paskevich’s marauding troops invaded the Polish capital to begin their butchery of the rebels.

A Call to the Workers of the World - Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg's call to the international working class to support the 1918 German Revolution by taking up arms against their own ruling classes. Originally published in Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag), November 25, 1918

PROLETARIANS! Men and Women of Labor! Comrades!

The Beginning - Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg's essay at the outbreak of the 1918 German Revolution.

The revolution has begun. What is called for now is not jubilation at was has been accomplished, not triumph over the beaten foe, but the strictest self-criticism and iron concentration of energy in order to continue the work we have begun. For our accomplishments are small and the foe has not been beaten.

The Nationalities Question in the Russian Revolution (Rosa Luxemburg, 1918)

Luxemburg reveals the counter-revolutionary nature and consequences of the Bolsheviks' nationalist policy of the "right of self-determination of peoples"

Originally published as Chapter II of the pamphlet The Russian Revolution, which was constituted out of notes prepared by Rosa Luxemburg in prison in 1918, and published posthumously.

Rosa Luxemburg in Retrospect - Paul Mattick

Mattick reconsiders the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, particularly her critique of Bolshevism and her economic theory.

Luxemburg versus Lenin - Paul Mattick

A comparison of Leninist vanguardism with Luxemburg's more subtle conceptions of working class organisation.

Organisational Questions of the Russian Revolution - Rosa Luxemburg

This text is a translation of two articles entitled 'Organisational Questions of Russian Social Democracy', written by Rosa Luxemburg in 1904.

The translation was made by the United Workers' Party in America and first published in Britain in Pamphlet form in 1935 by the Anti- Parliamentary Communist Federation.

It was later republished by the Independent Labour Party in the 1960s and went under the title of "Leninism or Marxism?"

Opportunism and the Art of the Possible

Rosa argues in 1898 against "opportunism" in her Party.

Rosa Luxemburg Internet Archive

Opportunism and the art of the possible

Written: September 1898
Source: Sachsische Arbeiter zeitung, September 30, 1898
Transcription/Markup: Dario Romeo and Brian Basgen

Leninism or Marxism - Rosa Luxemburg

Leninism or Marxism was published as an article in 1904 under the title "Organisational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy" in Iskra and Neue Zeit, and later reprinted in pamphlet form titled Marxism vs. Leninism in 1935 by the Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation.

Rosa Luxemburg's critique of Lenin's concept of revolutionary organisation, show the disagreements within the Marxist movements in Europe in the years preceding 1917; her comparisons with Blanquism and chillingly accurate predictions of the consequences of such organisation in a successful revolution are incredibly important to an understanding of the differing interpretations of Marx at that tim

Rosa Luxemburg, "The War and the Workers"-- The Junius Pamphlet (1916)

[The voting of war credits in August 1914 was a shattering moment in the life of individual socialists and of the socialist movement in Europe. Those who had worked for and wholly believed in the ability of organized labor to stand against war now saw the major social democratic parties of Germany, France, and England rush to the defense of their fatherlands. Worker solidarity had proved an impotent myth. Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) had for years warned against the stultifying effects of the overly bureaucratized German Social Democratic Party and the anti-revolutionary tendencies of the trade unions that played such a large role in the party's policy decisions. The abdication of 1914 had proved her right but had also dashed the revolutionary yearnings of a lifetime. While she was able to construct new hope from the revolutionary opportunities presented by the war, Luxemburg could not shake the knowledge that, whatever the outcome, the European working class would pay the greatest price in blood and suffering. Thrice handicapped--a woman, a Pole, and a Jew--Luxemburg was the most eloquent voice of the left wing of German Social Democracy, the defender of Marxist purity against all comers, and a constant advocate of radical action. She spent much of the war in jail, where she wrote and then smuggled out the pamphlet excerpted below. Published under the name "Junius," perhaps a reference to Lucius Junius Brutus, a legendary republican hero of ancient Rome, the pamphlet became the guiding statement for the International Group, which became the Spartacus League and ultimately the Communist Party of Germany (January 1, 1919). Luxemburg was instrumental in these developments and, along with Karl Liebknecht (1871-1919), led the Spartacists until their murder by right-wing vigilantes on January 15, 1919. Source: Günter Radczun (ed.), "Die Krise der Sozialdemokratie (Junius-Broschüre)," in Rosa Luxemburg, Politische Schriften (Leipzig, 1970), pp. 229-43, 357-72. Translated by Richard S. Levy.]

TEXT

Chapter 1

The scene has changed fundamentally. The six weeks' march to Paris has grown into a world drama.[1] Mass slaughter has become the tiresome and monotonous business of the day and the end is no closer. Bourgeois statecraft is held fast in its own vise. The spirits summoned up can no longer be exorcised.

Gone is the euphoria. Gone the patriotic noise in the streets, the chase after the gold-colored automobile, one false telegram after another, the wells poisoned by cholera, the Russian students heaving bombs over every railway bridge in Berlin, the French airplanes over Nuremberg, the spy hunting public running amok in the streets, the swaying crowds in the coffee shops with ear-deafening patriotic songs surging ever higher, whole city neighborhoods transformed into mobs ready to denounce, to mistreat women, to shout hurrah and to induce delirium in themselves by means of wild rumors. Gone, too, is the atmosphere of ritual murder, the Kishinev air where the crossing guard is the only remaining representative of human dignity. [2]

The spectacle is over. German scholars, those "stumbling lemurs," have been whistled off the stage long ago. The trains full of reservists are no longer accompanied by virgins fainting from pure jubilation. They no longer greet the people from the windows of the train with joyous smiles. Carrying their packs, they quietly trot along the streets where the public goes about its daily business with aggrieved visages.

In the prosaic atmosphere of pale day there sounds a different chorus--the hoarse cries of the vulture and the hyenas of the battlefield. Ten thousand tarpaulins guaranteed up to regulations! A hundred thousand kilos of bacon, cocoa powder, coffee-substitute --c.o.d, immediate delivery! Hand grenades, lathes, cartridge pouches, marriage bureaus for widows of the fallen, leather belts, jobbers for war orders--serious offers only! The cannon fodder loaded onto trains in August and September is moldering in the killing fields of Belgium, the Vosges, and Masurian Lakes where the profits are springing up like weeds. It's a question of getting the harvest into the barn quickly. Across the ocean stretch thousands of greedy hands to snatch it up.

Business thrives in the ruins. Cities become piles of ruins; villages become cemeteries; countries, deserts; populations are beggared; churches, horse stalls. International law, treaties and alliances, the most sacred words and the highest authority have been torn in shreds. Every sovereign "by the grace of God" is called a rogue and lying scoundrel by his cousin on the other side. Every diplomat is a cunning rascal to his colleagues in the other party. Every government sees every other as dooming its own people and worthy only of universal contempt. There are food riots in Venice, in Lisbon, Moscow, Singapore. There is plague in Russia, and misery and despair everywhere.

Violated, dishonored, wading in blood, dripping filth--there stands bourgeois society. This is it [in reality]. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretense to culture, philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law--but the ravening beast, the witches' sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity. Thus it reveals itself in its true, its naked form.

In the midst of this witches' sabbath a catastrophe of world-historical proportions has happened: International Social Democracy has capitulated. To deceive ourselves about it, to cover it up, would be the most foolish, the most fatal thing the proletariat could do. Marx says: "...the democrat (that is, the petty bourgeois revolutionary) [comes] out of the most shameful defeats as unmarked as he naively went into them; he comes away with the newly gained conviction that he must be victorious, not that he or his party ought to give up the old principles, but that conditions ought to accommodate him." [3] The modern proletariat comes out of historical tests differently. Its tasks and its errors are both gigantic: no prescription, no schema valid for every case, no infallible leader to show it the path to follow. Historical experience is its only school mistress. Its thorny way to self-emancipation is paved not only with immeasurable suffering but also with countless errors. The aim of its journey--its emancipation depends on this--is whether the proletariat can learn from its own errors. Self-criticism, remorseless, cruel, and going to the core of things is the life's breath and light of the proletarian movement. The fall of the socialist proletariat in the present world war is unprecedented. It is a misfortune for humanity. But socialism will be lost only if the international proletariat fails to measure the depth of this fall, if it refuses to learn from it.

The last forty-five year period in the development of the modern labor movement now stands in doubt. What we are experiencing in this critique is a closing of accounts for what will soon be half a century of work at our posts. The grave of the Paris Commune ended the first phase of the European labor movement as well as the First International. [4] Since then there began a new phase. In place of spontaneous revolutions, risings, and barricades, after which the proletariat each time fell back into passivity, there began the systematic daily struggle, the exploitation of bourgeois parliamentarianism, mass organizations, the marriage of the economic with the political struggle, and that of socialist ideals with stubborn defense of immediate daily interests. For the first time the polestar of strict scientific teachings lit the way for the proletariat and for its emancipation. Instead of sects, schools, utopias, and isolated experiments in various countries, there arose a uniform, international theoretical basis which bound countries together like the strands of a rope. Marxist knowledge gave the working class of the entire world a compass by which it can make sense of the welter of daily events and by which it can always plot the right course to take to the fixed and final goal.

She who bore, championed, and protected this new method was German Social Democracy. The [Franco-Prussian] War and the defeat of the Paris Commune had shifted the center of gravity for the European workers' movement to Germany. As France was the classic site of the first phase of proletarian class struggle and Paris the beating, bleeding heart of the European laboring classes of those times, so the German workers became the vanguard of the second phase. By means of countless sacrifices and tireless attention to detail, they have built the strongest organization, the one most worthy of emulation; they created the biggest press, called the most effective means of education and enlightenment into being, gathered the most powerful masses of voters and attained the greatest number of parliamentary mandates. German Social Democracy was considered the purest embodiment of Marxist socialism. She had and laid claim to a special place in the Second International--its instructress and leader. [5]

In his famous 1895 foreword to Marx's The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850, Friedrich Engels wrote:

No matter what happens in other countries, German Social Democracy has a special position and therefore a special task, at least for the time being. The two million voters it sends to the ballot box, and the young men and women who, although non-voters, stand behind them, constitute the most numerous and compact mass, the "decisive force" of the proletarian army.

German Social Democracy, as the Vienna Arbeiterzeitung wrote on August 5, 1914, was "the jewel of class-conscious proletarian organizations." In her footsteps trod the increasingly enthusiastic Social Democrats of France, Italy, and Belgium, the labor movements of Holland, Scandinavia, Switzerland, and the United States. The Slavic countries, the Russians, the Social Democrats of the Balkans looked upon [German Social Democracy] with limitless, nearly uncritical, admiration. In the Second International the German "decisive force" played the determining role. At the [international] congresses, in the meetings of the international socialist bureaus, all awaited the opinion of the Germans. Especially in the questions of the struggle against militarism and war, German Social Democracy always took the lead. "For us Germans that is unacceptable" regularly sufficed to decide the orientation of the Second International, which blindly bestowed its confidence upon the admired leadership of the mighty German Social Democracy: the pride of every socialist and the terror of the ruling classes everywhere.

And what did we in Germany experience when the great historical test came? The most precipitous fall, the most violent collapse. Nowhere has the organization of the proletariat been yoked so completely to the service of imperialism. Nowhere is the state of siege borne so docilely. [6] Nowhere is the press so hobbled, public opinion so stifled, the economic and political class struggle of the working class so totally surrendered as in Germany.

But German Social Democracy was not merely the strongest vanguard troop, it was the thinking head of the International. For this reason, we must begin the analysis, the self-examination process, with its fall. It has the duty to begin the salvation of international socialism, that means unsparing criticism of itself. None of the other parties, none of the other classes of bourgeois society, may look clearly and openly into the mirror of their own errors, their own weaknesses, for the mirror reflects their historical limitations and the historical doom that awaits them. The working class can boldly look truth straight in the face, even the bitterest self-renunciation, for its weaknesses are only confusion. The strict law of history gives back its power, stands guarantee for its final victory.

Unsparing self-criticism is not merely an essential for its existence but the working class' supreme duty. On our ship we have the most valuable treasures of mankind, and the proletariat is their ordained guardian! And while bourgeois society, shamed and dishonored by the bloody orgy, rushes headlong toward its doom, the international proletariat must and will gather up the golden treasure that, in a moment of weakness and confusion in the chaos of the world war, it has allowed to sink to the ground.

One thing is certain. The world war is a turning point. It is foolish and mad to imagine that we need only survive the war, like a rabbit waiting out the storm under a bush, in order to fall happily back into the old routine once it is over. The world war has altered the conditions of our struggle and, most of all, it has changed us. Not that the basic law of capitalist development, the life-and-death war between capital and labor, will experience any amelioration. But now, in the midst of the war, the masks are falling and the old familiar visages smirk at us. The tempo of development has received a mighty jolt from the eruption of the volcano of imperialism. The violence of the conflicts in the bosom of society, the enormousness of the tasks that tower up before the socialist proletariat--these make everything that has transpired in the history of the workers' movement seem a pleasant idyll.

Historically, this war was ordained to thrust forward the cause of the proletariat....It was ordained to drive the German proletariat to the pinnacle of the nation and thereby begin to organize the international and universal conflict between capital and labor for political power within the state.

And did we envision a different role for the working class in the world war? Let us recall how we, only a short while ago, were accustomed to describe the future:

Then comes the catastrophe. Then the great mobilization will take place in Europe; 16-18 million men, the flower of the various nations, armed with the best tools of death, will enter the field as enemies. But, I am convinced, that behind the great mobilization there stands the great havoc. It will not come through our agency, but rather yours. You are driving things to the limit. You are leading us to catastrophe. You will reap what you have sown. The Götterdämmerung of the bourgeois world approaches. Believe it! It is approaching! [All italics are Luxemburg's.]

Thus spoke our leader, [August] Bebel, during the Reichstag debate on the Morocco Crisis. [7]

Imperialism or Socialism?, the official party pamphlet distributed in hundreds of thousands of copies a few years ago, closes with these words:

Thus the struggle against imperialism develops ever more into the decisive struggle between capital and labor. War crises, rising prices, capitalism vs. peace, welfare for all, socialism! Thus is the question stated. History is moving toward great decisions. The proletariat must work unceasingly at its world-historical task, strengthen its organization, the clarity of its understanding. Then come what may, be it that [proletarian] power spares mankind the terrible cruelty of a world war, or be it that the capitalist world sinks into history in the same way as it was born, in blood and violence. [In either case] the historical hour will find the working class prepared--and preparation is everything. [All italics are Luxemburg's.]

The official Handbook for Social-Democratic Voters (1911), for the last Reichstag election, says on p. 42 concerning the expected world war:

Do our rulers and ruling classes expect the peoples to permit this awful thing? Will not a cry of horror, of scorn, of outrage not seize the peoples and cause them to put an end to this murder? Will they not ask: For whom? what's it all for? Are we mentally disturbed to be treated this way, to allow ourselves to be so treated? He who is calmly convinced of the probability of a great European war can come to no other conclusion than the following: The next European war will be such a desperate gamble as the world has never seen. In all probability it will be the last war.

With speeches and words such as these, our current Reichstag deputies acquired their 110 mandates.

In the summer of 1911, when the Panther made its lunge to Agadir [8] and the noisy agitation of the German imperialists put war in the immediate offing, an international meeting in London accepted the following resolution (August 4, 1911):

The delegates of the German, Spanish, English, Dutch, and French workers' organizations declare themselves to be ready to oppose any declaration of war with all the means at their disposal. Every represented nation undertakes the obligation, according to the resolutions of national and international congresses, to act against all criminal machinations of the ruling classes.

When, in November 1912, the congress of the International met in the minster at Basel and when the long procession of worker representatives entered the cathedral, everyone present felt a presentiment of the greatness of the coming destiny and a heroic resolve.

The cool, skeptical Victor Adler spoke:

Comrades, the most important thing is that we are here at the common source of our strength, that we can draw from this strength so that each can do in his own country what he can, according to the forms and means that we have, to oppose the crime of war with all the power we possess. And if it can be stopped, if it is really stopped, then we must see to it that it becomes a cornerstone for the end [of bourgeois society]. This is the moving spirit for the whole International. And if murder and arson and pestilence are unleashed throughout civilized Europe--we can only think of this with horror, outrage and indignation churning in our breasts. And we ask ourselves: are we men, are the proletarians of today still sheep that they can be led dumbly to slaughter?....

And [Jean] Jaures concluded the reading of the International Bureau's manifesto against the war with these words:

The International represents all the moral force of the world! And if the tragic hour strikes and we must give ourselves up to it, the consciousness of this will support and strengthen us. We do not merely say "no" but from the depth of our hearts we declare ourselves ready to sacrifice everything.

It was reminiscent of the Oath of Ruetli. [9] The world directed its gaze to the church at Basel where the bell sounded solemnly for the future great battle between the army of labor and the power of capital....

Even a week before the outbreak of war, on July 26, 1914, German party newspapers wrote:

We are not marionettes. We combat with all our energy a system that makes men into will-less tools of blind circumstance, this capitalism that seeks to transform a Europe thirsting for peace into a steaming slaughterhouse. If destruction has its way, if the united will to peace of the German, the international proletariat, which will make itself known in powerful demonstrations in the coming days, if the world war cannot be fended off, then at least this should be the last war, it should become the Götterdämmerung of capitalism. (Frankfurter Volksstimme)

Then on July 30, 1914, the central organ of German Social Democracy stated:

The socialist proletariat rejects any responsibility for the events being brought about by a blinded, a maddened ruling class. Let it be known that a new life shall bloom from the ruins. All responsibility falls to the wielders of power today! It is "to be or not to be!" "World-history is the world-court!"

And then came the unheard of, the unprecedented, the 4th of August 1914.

Did it have to come? An event of this scope is certainly no game of chance. It must have deep and wide-reaching objective causes. These causes can, however, also lie in the errors of the leader of the proletariat, the Social Democrats, in the waning of our fighting spirit, our courage, and loyalty to our convictions. Scientific socialism has taught us to comprehend the objective laws of historical development. Men do not make history according to their own free will. But they make history nonetheless. Proletarian action is dependent upon the degree of maturity in social development. However, social development is not independent of the proletariat but is equally its driving force and cause, its effect and consequence. [Proletarian] action participates in history. And while we can as little skip a stage of historical development as escape our shadow, we can certainly accelerate or retard history.

Socialism is the first popular movement in world history that has set itself the goal of bringing human consciousness, and thereby free will, into play in the social actions of mankind. For this reason, Friedrich Engels designated the final victory of the socialist proletariat a leap of humanity from the animal world into the realm of freedom. This "leap" is also an iron law of history bound to the thousands of seeds of a prior torment-filled and all-too-slow development. But this can never be realized until the development of complex material conditions strikes the incendiary spark of conscious will in the great masses. The victory of socialism will not descend from heaven. It can only be won by a long chain of violent tests of strength between the old and the new powers. The international proletariat under the leadership of the Social Democrats will thereby learn to try to take its history into its own hands; instead of remaining a will-less football, it will take the tiller of social life and become the pilot to the goal of its own history.

Friedrich Engels once said: "Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism." What does "regression into barbarism" mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization. At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences. Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration--a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war. This is a dilemma of world history, an either/or; the scales are wavering before the decision of the class-conscious proletariat. The future of civilization and humanity depends on whether or not the proletariat resolves manfully to throw its revolutionary broadsword into the scales. In this war imperialism has won. Its bloody sword of genocide has brutally tilted the scale toward the abyss of misery. The only compensation for all the misery and all the shame would be if we learn from the war how the proletariat can seize mastery of its own destiny and escape the role of the lackey to the ruling classes.

Dearly bought is the modern working class' understanding of its historical vocation. Its emancipation as a class is sown with fearful sacrifices, a veritable path to Golgotha. The June days, the sacrifice of the Commune, the martyrs of the Russian Revolution--a dance of bloody shadows without number. [10] All fell on the field of honor. They are, as Marx wrote about the heroes of the Commune, eternally "enshrined in the great heart of the working class." Now, millions of proletarians of all tongues fall upon the field of dishonor, of fratricide, lacerating themselves while the song of the slave is on their lips. This, too, we are not spared. We are like the Jews that Moses led through the desert. But we are not lost, and we will be victorious if we have not unlearned how to learn. And if the present leaders of the proletariat, the Social Democrats, do not understand how to learn, then they will go under "to make room for people capable of dealing with a new world."

Chapter 8

In spite of the military dictatorship and censorship of the press, in spite of the abdication of the Social Democrats, in spite of the fratricidal war, the class struggle rises with elemental force from out of the Burgfrieden; [11] and the international solidarity of labor from out of the bloody mists of the battlefield. Not in the weak and artificial attempts to galvanize the old International, not in pledges renewed here and there to stand together again after the war. No! Now in and from the war the fact emerges with a wholly new power and energy that the proletarians of all lands have one and the same interests. The war itself dispels the illusion it has created.

Victory or defeat? Thus sounds the slogan of the ruling militarism in all the warring countries, and, like an echo, the Social Democratic leaders have taken it up. Supposedly, victory or defeat on the battlefield should be for the proletarians of Germany, France, England, or Russia exactly the same as for the ruling classes of these countries. As soon as the cannons thunder, every proletarian should be interested in the victory of his own country and, therefore, in the defeat of the other countries. Let us see what such a victory can bring to the proletariat.

According to official version, adopted uncritically by the Social Democratic leaders, German victory holds the prospect of unlimited economic growth, while defeat means economic ruin. This conception rests upon the pattern of the war of 1870. However, the flourishing capitalism following that war was not the consequence of the war but of the political unification, even though this came in the crippled form of Bismarck's German Empire. Economic growth proceeded out of unification despite the war and the many reactionary obstacles that came in its wake. What the victorious war contributed to all this was the entrenchment of the military monarchy in Germany and the rule of the Prussian Junkers; the defeat of France helped liquidate the [Second] Empire and establish the [Third] Republic.

But today matters are quite different in the belligerent states. Today war does not function as a dynamic method of procuring for rising young capitalism the preconditions of its "national" development. War has this character only in the isolated and fragmentary case of Serbia. Reduced to its historically objective essence, today's world war is entirely a competitive struggle amongst fully mature capitalisms for world domination, for the exploitation of the remaining zones of the world not yet capitalistic. That is why this war is totally different in character and effects. The high degree of economic development in the capitalist world is expressed in the extraordinarily advanced technology, that is, in the destructive power of the weaponry which approaches the same level in all the warring nations. The international organization of the murder industry is reflected now in the military balance, the scales of which always right themselves after partial decisions and momentary changes; a general decision is always and again pushed into the future. The indecisiveness of military results leads to ever new reserves from the population masses of warring and hitherto neutral nations being sent into fire. The war finds abundant material to feed imperialist appetites and contradictions, creates its own supplies of these, and spreads like wildfire. But the mightier the masses and the more numerous the nations dragged into the war on all sides, the more drawn out its existence will be.

Considered all together, and before any decision regarding military victory or defeat has been taken, the effect of the war will be unlike any phenomenon of earlier wars in the modern age: the economic ruin of all belligerents and to an increasing degree that of the formally neutral as well. Every additional month of the war affirms and extends this result and postpones the expected fruits of military success for decades. In the last analysis, neither victory nor defeat can change any of this. On the contrary, it makes a purely military decision extremely unlikely and leads one to conclude the greater probability that the war will end finally with the most general and mutual exhaustion.

In these circumstances a victorious Germany would win but a Pyrrhic victory, even should its imperialistic warmongers succeed in the total defeat of all its enemies through mass murder and thus realize its audacious dream. [Germany's] trophies would be: a few beggared and depopulated territories to annex. Under its own roof would be a leering ruin. And once the stage scenery of war loan financing and the Potemkin villages [12] of war contracts and unshakable national prosperity are pushed aside it will be immediately seen [as the ruin it is]. It must be clear even to the most superficial observer that the most victorious state can not expect any reparations that would even come close to healing the wounds inflicted by this war. A replacement for this and a complement of "victory" would be the perhaps even greater economic ruin of the conquered side: France and England, the very countries most closely connected economically to Germany and upon whose welfare she is most dependent for her own recovery. After a "victorious" war the German people would have to pay back the war credits granted by the patriotic parliament, that is, in reality have to bear an immense burden of taxation while enduring a strengthened military reaction--the only lasting, tangible fruit of "victory."

If we seek to imagine the worst results of a [military] defeat, then, aside from the imperialist annexations, they present feature for feature essentially the same consequences as would have issued from victory. The consequences of waging war are today so deeply embedded and far-reaching in nature that the military outcome has only minimal effects upon it.

Nevertheless, let us accept for the moment, that the victorious state would understand how to throw off the burden of great ruin from itself onto its defeated opponent and to hamstring its economic development with all sorts of obstacles. Can the trade union struggles of the German working class go forward after the war if the union action of the French, English, Belgian, and Italian workers is thwarted by economic regression? Until 1870 the workers' movement operated independently in each country; sometimes key decisions were taken in individual cities. It was in Paris on whose cobblestones the battles of the proletariat were joined and decided. The labor movement of today, [because of] its more arduous daily economic struggle, bases its mass organization on cooperation [with worker movements] in all capitalist countries. If the principle is valid that the workers' cause can flourish only on the basis of a healthy, powerfully pulsating economic life, then it is valid not only for Germany but also for France, England, Belgium, Russia, Italy. And if the workers' movement stagnates in all the capitalist countries of Europe, if there exist low wages, weak unions, and slight resistance to exploitation, then it will be impossible for the trade union movement to thrive in Germany. From this standpoint and in the last analysis, it is exactly the same loss for the situation of the proletariat if German capitalism enriches itself at the cost of the French or the English at the cost of the German.

Let us turn, however, to the political results of the war. Here differentiation ought to be easier than in the economic area. Historically, the sympathies and partisanship of the socialists have been on the side fighting for historical progress and against reaction. Which side in the present war represents progress and which reaction? Clearly, this question cannot be answered on the basis of the superficial labels of the warring states, such as "democracy" or "absolutism." Rather, [the question should be judged] on the actual objective tendencies they represent in world politics. Before we can judge what benefits a German victory would bring to the German proletariat, we must see what the effects [of such a victory] would have upon the overall shape of European political relationships.

The definitive victory of Germany would result in the immediate annexation of Belgium, as well as additional strips of territory in east and west, wherever feasible, and a part of the French colonies. The Habsburg monarchy would be preserved and enriched with new regions. Finally, Turkey, retaining a fictional "integrity," would become a German protectorate which would mean the simultaneous transformation of the Middle East into de facto German provinces, whatever the form. The actual military and economic hegemony of Germany in Europe would logically follow these results.

These results of a decisive German military victory will come about, not because they correspond to the wishes of imperialist agitators in this war, but because they are the wholly inevitable consequences emanating from Germany's position in the world and from the original conflicts with England, France, and Russia that have grown tremendously beyond their initial dimensions during the course of the war. It will suffice to put these results into context by understanding that under no circumstances will it be possible to maintain any sort of balance of power in the world.

The war means ruin for all the belligerents, although more so for the defeated. On the day after the concluding of peace, preparations for a new world war will be begun under the leadership of England in order to throw off the yoke of Prusso-German militarism burdening Europe and the Near East. A German victory would be only a prelude to a soon-to-follow second world war; and this would be the signal for a new, feverish arms race as well as the unleashing of the blackest reaction in all countries, but first and foremost in Germany itself.

On the other hand, an Anglo-French victory would most probably lead to the loss of at least some German colonies, as well as Alsace-Lorraine. Quite certain would be the bankruptcy of German imperialism on the world stage. But that also means the partition of Austria-Hungary and the total liquidation of Turkey. The fall of such arch-reactionary creatures as these two states is wholly in keeping with the demands of progressive development. [But] the fall of the Habsburg monarchy as well as Turkey, in the concrete situation of world politics, can have no other effect than to put their peoples in pawn to Russia, England, France, and Italy. Add to this grandiose redrawing of the world map power shifts in the Balkans and the Mediterranean and a further one in Asia. The liquidation of Persia and a new dismemberment of China will inevitably follow.

In the wake [of these changes] the English-Russian, as well as the English-Japanese, conflict will move into the foreground of world politics. And directly upon the liquidation of this world war, these [conflicts] may lead to a new world war, perhaps over Constantinople, and would certainly make it likely. Thus, from this side, too, [an Anglo-French] victory would lead to a new feverish armaments race among all the states--with defeated Germany obviously in the forefront. An era of unalloyed militarism and reaction would dominate all Europe with a new world war as its ultimate goal.

Thus proletarian policy is locked in a dilemma when trying to decide on which side it ought to intervene, which side represents progress and democracy in this war. In these circumstances, and from the perspective of international politics as a whole, victory or defeat, in political as well as economic terms, comes down to a hopeless choice between two kinds of beatings for the European working classes. Therefore, it is nothing but fatal madness when the French socialists imagine that the military defeat of Germany will strike a blow at the head of militarism and imperialism and thereby pave the way for peaceful democracy in the world. Imperialism and its servant, militarism, will calculate their profits from every victory and every defeat in this war--except in one case: if the international proletariat intervenes in a revolutionary way and puts an end to such calculations.

This war's most important lesson for the policy of the proletariat is the unassailable fact that it cannot parrot the slogan Victory or Defeat, not in Germany or in France, not in England or in Russia. Only from the standpoint of imperialism does this slogan have any real content. For every Great Power it is identical to the question of gain or loss of political standing, of annexations, colonies, and military predominance. From the standpoint of class for the European proletariat as a whole the victory and defeat of any of the warring camps is equally disastrous.

It is war as such, no matter how it ends militarily, that signifies the greatest defeat for Europe's proletariat. It is only the overcoming of war and the speediest possible enforcement of peace by the international militancy of the proletariat that can bring victory to the workers' cause. And in reality this victory alone can simultaneously rescue Belgium as well as democracy in Europe.

The class-conscious proletariat cannot identify with any of the military camps in this war. Does it follow that proletarian policy ought to demand maintenance of the status quo, that we have no other action program beyond the wish that everything should be as it was before the war? But existing conditions have never been our ideal; they have never expressed the self-determination of peoples. Furthermore, the earlier conditions are no longer to be saved; they no longer exist, even if historic state borders continue to exist. Even before its results have been formally established, the war has already brought about immense confusion in power relationships, the reciprocal estimate of forces, of alliances, and conflicts. It has sharply revised the relations between states and of classes within society. So many old illusions and potencies have been destroyed, so many new forces and problems have been created that a return to the old Europe as it existed before August 4, 1914 is out of the question. [It is] as out of the question as a return to pre-revolutionary conditions even after a defeated revolution.

Proletarian policy knows no retreat; it can only struggle forward. It must always go beyond the existing and the newly created. In this sense alone, it is legitimate for the proletariat to confront both camps of imperialists in the world war with a policy of its own.

But this policy can not consist of social democratic parties holding international conferences where they individually or collectively compete to discover ingenious recipes with which bourgeois diplomats ought to make the peace and ensure the further peaceful development of democracy. All demands for complete or partial "disarmament," for the dismantling of secret diplomacy, for the partition of all multinational great states into small national one, and so forth are part and parcel utopian as long as capitalist class domination holds the reins. [Capitalism] cannot, under its current imperialist course, dispense with present-day militarism, secret diplomacy, or the centralized multinational state. In fact, it would be more pertinent for the realization of these postulates to make just one simple "demand": abolition of the capitalist class state.

It is not through utopian advice and schemes to tame, ameliorate, or reform imperialism within the framework of the bourgeois state that proletarian policy can reconquer its leading place. The actual problem that the world war has posed to the socialist parties, upon the solution of which the destiny of the workers' movement depends, is this: the capacity of the proletarian masses for action in the battle against imperialism. The proletariat does not lack for postulates, prognoses, slogans; it lacks deeds, the capacity for effective resistance to imperialism at the decisive moment, to intervene against it during [not after] the war and to convert the old slogan "war against war" into practice. Here is the crux of the matter, the Gordian knot of proletarian politics and its long term future.

Imperialism and all its political brutality, the chain of incessant social catastrophes that it has let loose, is undoubtedly an historical necessity for the ruling classes of the contemporary capitalist world. Nothing would be more fatal for the proletariat than to delude itself into believing that it were possible after this war to rescue the idyllic and peaceful continuation of capitalism. However, the conclusion to be drawn by proletarian policy from the historical necessity of imperialism is that surrender to imperialism will mean living forever in its victorious shadow and eating from its leftovers.

The historical dialectic moves forward by contradiction, and establishes in the world the antithesis of every necessity. Bourgeois class domination is undoubtedly an historical necessity, but, so too, the rising of the working class against it. Capital is an historical necessity, but, so too, its grave digger, the socialist proletariat. Imperialist world domination is an historical necessity, but, so too, its destruction by the proletarian international. Step for step there are two historical necessities in conflict with one another. Ours, the necessity of socialism, has the greater stamina. Our necessity enters into its full rights the moment that the other--bourgeois class domination--ceases to be the bearer of historical progress, when it becomes an obstacle, a danger to the further development of society. The capitalist world order, as revealed by the world war, has today reached this point.

The expansionist imperialism of capitalism, the expression of its highest stage of development and its last phase of existence, produces the [following] economic tendencies: it transforms the entire world into the capitalist mode of production; all outmoded, pre-capitalist forms of production and society are swept away; it converts all the world's riches and means of production into capital, the working masses of all zones into wage slaves. In Africa and Asia, from the northernmost shores to the tip of South America and the South Seas, the remnant of ancient primitive communist associations, feudal systems of domination, patriarchal peasant economies, traditional forms of craftsmanship are annihilated, crushed by capital; whole peoples are destroyed and ancient cultures flattened. All are supplanted by profit mongering in its most modern form.

This brutal victory parade of capital through the world, its way prepared by every means of violence, robbery, and infamy, has its light side. It creates the preconditions for its own final destruction. It put into place the capitalist system of world domination, the indispensable precondition for the socialist world revolution. This alone constitutes the cultural, progressive side of its reputed "great work of civilization" in the primitive lands. For bourgeois-liberal economists and politicians, railroads, Swedish matches, sewer systems, and department stores are "progress" and "civilization." In themselves these works grafted onto primitive conditions are neither civilization nor progress, for they are bought with the rapid economic and cultural ruin of peoples who must experience simultaneously the full misery and horror of two eras: the traditional natural economic system and the most modern and rapacious capitalist system of exploitation. Thus, the capitalist victory parade and all its works bear the stamp of progress in the historical sense only because they create the material preconditions for the abolition of capitalist domination and class society in general. And in this sense imperialism ultimately works for us.

The world war is a turning point. For the first time, the ravening beasts set loose upon all quarters of the globe by capitalist Europe have broken into Europe itself. A cry of horror went through the world when Belgium, that precious jewel of European civilization, and when the most august cultural monuments of northern France fell into shards under the impact of the blind forces of destruction. This same "civilized world" looked on passively as the same imperialism ordained the cruel destruction of ten thousand Herero tribesmen and filled the sands of the Kalahari with the mad shrieks and death rattles of men dying of thirst; [13] [the "civilized world" looked on] as forty thousand men on the Putumayo River [Columbia] were tortured to death within ten years by a band of European captains of industry, while the rest of the people were made into cripples; as in China where an age-old culture was put to the torch by European mercenaries, practiced in all forms of cruelty, annihilation, and anarchy; as Persia was strangled, powerless to resist the tightening noose of foreign domination; as in Tripoli where fire and sword bowed the Arabs beneath the yoke of capitalism, destroyed their culture and habitations. Only today has this "civilized world" become aware that the bite of the imperialist beast brings death, that its very breath is infamy. Only now has [the civilized world] recognized this, after the beast's ripping talons have clawed its own mother's lap, the bourgeois civilization of Europe itself. And even this knowledge is grappled with in the distorted form of bourgeois hypocrisy. Every people recognizes the infamy only in the national uniform of the enemy. "German barbarians!"--as though every people that marches out to do organized murder were not transformed instantly into a barbarian horde. "Cossack atrocities!"--as though war itself were not the atrocity of atrocities, as though the praising of human slaughter as heroism in a socialist youth paper were not the purest example of intellectual cossack-dom!

None the less, the imperialist bestiality raging in Europe's fields has one effect about which the "civilized world" is not horrified and for which it has no breaking heart: that is the mass destruction of the European proletariat. Never before on this scale has a war exterminated whole strata of the population; not for a century have all the great and ancient cultural nations of Europe been attacked. Millions of human lives have been destroyed in the Vosges, the Ardennes, in Belgium, Poland, in the Carpathians, on the Save. Millions have been crippled. But of these millions, nine out of ten are working people from the city and the countryside.

It is our strength, our hope, that is mown down day after day like grass under the sickle. The best, most intelligent, most educated forces of international socialism, the bearers of the holiest traditions and the boldest heroes of the modern workers' movement, the vanguard of the entire world proletariat, the workers of England, France, Belgium, Germany, Russia--these are the ones now being hamstrung and led to the slaughter. These workers of the leading capitalist countries of Europe are exactly the ones who have the historical mission of carrying out the socialist transformation. Only from out of Europe, only from out of the oldest capitalist countries will the signal be given when the hour is ripe for the liberating social revolution. Only the English, French, Belgian, German, Russian, Italian workers together can lead the army of the exploited and enslaved of the five continents. When the time comes, only they can settle accounts with capitalism's work of global destruction, with its centuries of crime committed against primitive peoples.

But to push ahead to the victory of socialism we need a strong, activist, educated proletariat, and masses whose power lies in intellectual culture as well as numbers. These masses are being decimated by the world war. The flower of our mature and youthful strength, hundreds of thousands of whom were socialistically schooled in England, France, Belgium, Germany, and Russia, the product of decades of educational and agitational training, and other hundreds of thousands who could be won for socialism tomorrow, fall and molder on the miserable battlefields. The fruits of decades of sacrifice and the efforts of generations are destroyed in a few weeks. The key troops of the international proletariat are torn up by the roots.

The blood-letting of the June days [1848] paralyzed the French workers' movement for a decade and a half. Then the blood-letting of the Commune massacres again retarded it for more than a decade. What is now occurring is an unprecedented mass slaughter that is reducing the adult working population of all the leading civilized countries to women, old people, and cripples. This blood-letting threatens to bleed the European workers' movement to death. Another such world war and the outlook for socialism will be buried beneath the rubble heaped up by imperialist barbarism. This is more [significant] than the ruthless destruction of Liege and the Rheims cathedral. This is an assault, not on the bourgeois culture of the past, but on the socialist culture of the future, a lethal blow against that force which carries the future of humanity within itself and which alone can bear the precious treasures of the past into a better society. Here capitalism lays bear its death's head; here it betrays the fact that its historical rationale is used up; its continued domination is no longer reconcilable to the progress of humanity.

The world war today is demonstrably not only murder on a grand scale; it is also suicide of the working classes of Europe. The soldiers of socialism, the proletarians of England, France, Germany, Russia, and Belgium have for months been killing one another at the behest of capital. They are driving the cold steel of murder into each other's hearts. Locked in the embrace of death, they tumble into a common grave.

"Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles! Long live democracy! Long live the Tsar and Slav-dom! Ten thousand tarpaulins guaranteed up to regulations! A hundred thousand kilos of bacon, coffee-substitute for immediate delivery!"...Dividends are rising, and the proletarians are falling. And with every one there sinks into the grave a fighter of the future, a soldier of the revolution, mankind's savior from the yoke of capitalism.

The madness will cease and the bloody demons of hell will vanish only when workers in Germany and France, England and Russia finally awake from their stupor, extend to each other a brotherly hand, and drown out the bestial chorus of imperialist war-mongers and the shrill cry of capitalist hyenas with labor's old and mighty battle cry: Proletarians of all lands, unite!

END OF TEXT

FOR FURTHER READING

James Joll, The Second International, 1889-1914 (2nd rev. ed, London, 1974)

J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg. Abridged ed. (London, 1967)

W. L. Guttsman, The German Social Democratic Party, 1875-1933 (London, 1981)

NOTES

[1] Six weeks was the time allotted for victory on the Western Front by the Schlieffen Plan. The general staff was forced to scrap the plan in October 1914, as the war of movement swiftly evolved into grinding trench warfare. Jump back to text.

[2] For three days in April 1903, Kishinev, the provincial capital of Bessarabia in the Russian Empire, was the scene of an anti-Jewish riot. According to an official report, more than fifty Jews were killed and over five hundred injured; hundreds of homes and shops were plundered and vandalized. Local authorities supported antisemitic organizations and deliberately maximized the carnage by holding back on the use of force to reestablish order. Luxemburg here uses the reference to the Kishinev pogrom and to "ritual murder"--the medieval belief that Jews used the blood of Christians, usually children, for ritual purposes--as the nadir of civilization. Jump back to text.

[3] Quoting Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Jump back to text.

[4] At the close of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, besieged Paris revolted against the regular French government (sitting in Bordeaux). For ten weeks representatives of the working class, organized as the Commune, ruled "the capital of Europe" with an efficiency and fairness that surprised and disturbed the propertied classes all over Europe. Recouping its forces, the elected French government retook Paris in street-by-street fighting marked by wanton atrocities and destruction of property on both sides. The First International, founded by Karl Marx in 1864, was falsely accused of fomenting the Commune. Its true purpose was to unite working class parties in pursuit of the revolutionary goals first outlined in the Communist Manifesto (1848). But doctrinal divisions and factionalism paralyzed the organization which met for the last time in Philadelphia in 1874. Jump back to text.

[5] The successor to the First International, the Second took form in 1889 and recruited most of the Social Democratic parties of Europe from its central offices in Brussels. World War I destroyed the viability of the organization, although it continued to function as the voice of moderate socialists as opposed to the more radical communist parties arrayed in Lenin's Third International or Comintern (1919-43). Jump back to text.

[6] With mobilization at the outbreak of the war, the role of the civilian sector in Germany shrank continually. The country was divided into defense sectors and commanding generals within these took over all the functions of government; they could suspend civil rights, arrest individuals under the guise of protective custody, and exercize considerable powers of censorship. Thus they were able to stifle dissent and particularly to restrict news of the military failures. Jump back to text.

[7] August Bebel (1840-1913), a rarity in the leadership of the European socialist movement, an authentic worker, singlehandedly organized the Marxist branch of the German labor movement in the 1860s and then guided it until his death. The Second Morocco Crisis of 1911 aroused fears of imminent European war. The crisis resolution entailed Germany's recognition of a French protectorate in exchange for a large, relatively worthless strip of French Equatorial Africa. While Britain strongly supported its French ally, Germany had had to back down when its own allies showed clear unwillingness to go to war on behalf of overseas interests. Nationalists at home regarded the outcome as a humiliation, further proof that the kaiser's government was incapable of directing the drive for world power. Leftists saw the crisis as ominous proof of the intentions of militarists and imperialists. Jump back to text.

[8] Sending the German gunboat, Panther, to Agadir, a port in Morocco, was the kaiser's way of announcing his intention of protecting German interests. The symbolic attempt to preempt French designs on erecting a protectorate over Morocco was seen as a provocation and helped the conflict in interest escalate into a full-blown crisis. Jump back to text.

[9] According to legend, Wilhelm Tell and representatives of three Swiss cantons met at Ruetli in 1307 to pledge resistance against Austrian tyranny, the traditional foundation of Swiss freedom. Jump back to text.

[10] In June 1848, four months after the revolutionary overthrow of the Orleanist monarchy in France, the conservative bourgeoisie regained control of Paris amid street-fighting and great bloodshed. The defeat of the Parisian communards in June 1871 by regular French forces was accompanied by mass executions and later deportations. The Russian revolution referred to by Luxemburg took place in 1905. Briefly, working class soviets (councils) controlled St. Petersburg and Moscow, but tsarist forces were able to quell the revolutionaries and reestablish a somewhat modified autocracy. Jump back to text.

[11] The Burgfrieden, literally the "peace of the castle" imposed upon all those seeking shelter in a fortified spot during the Middle Ages, signified the political truce agreed upon by the political parties represented in the Reichstag at the outbreak of the war. After voting the credits that made the war financially possible, members of the Reichstag suspended further elections for the duration of hostilities and declared a cessation of "politics." Essentially, the civilian sector abdicated its responsibility to participate in policy making, leaving all major decisions in the hands of the kaiser's government and then in those of the general staff of the armed forces. This behavior contrasted sharply with that of the western democracies where, all through the war, it was "politics as usual." Only toward the end of the war, did the Reichstag reconquer some of the lost ground of 1914. Jump back to text.

[12] Count Gregory Alexandrovich Potemkin (1724-91) was said to have deceived Catherine the Great of Russia with cardboard facades of new villages he was supposed to have constructed. Jump back to text.

[13] The Herero tribesmen rebelled against German control of their homeland in Southwest Africa, 1903-07. During the brutal wars of pacification, German troops forced men, women, and children into the Kalahari desert where many perished. The extraction of rubber from along the Putumayo River was accompanied by horrifying exploitation of native laborers. Jump back to text.

Rosa Luxemburg

From Dikipedia, ze freer encyclopedias

Contents

Life

Poland

Germany

Before World War I

During the War

German Revolution of 1918-19 and death

Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organisation

Criticism of the October Revolution

Last words: belief in the revolution

Quotations

Memorials

Rosa-Luxemburg-Memorial

Works

Film

See also

References

Further reading

External links

Rosa Luxemburg (disambiguation)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rosa Luxemburg (film)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cast

References

External links

Rosa Luxemburg Foundation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

See also

External links

'If You Do Not Follow the Order You Will Be Shot'

New facts about the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg

Epitaphs For Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg

Epitaph 1919

Epitaph for Karl Liebknecht

Epitaph for Rosa Luxemburg

Tony Cliff

Rosa Luxemburg

(1959)

This article is part of the series collected by the Socialist Party, the CWI in Ireland, on aspects of Labour History.

Trotsky: The Political Profiles of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg

1919 Revolution in Germany

Rosa Luxemburg in Retrospect - Paul Mattick

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Rosa Luxemburg and the Russian revolution

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NOTES

Epitaphs For Karl Liebknecht and
Rosa Luxemburg