Rosa Luxemburg – controversies with Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky

Image: Grisha Besko
Whatsapp
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
Telegram

By RAFAEL DE ALMEIDA PADIAL*

Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered by police officers of the German Social Democratic government on January 15, 1919.

On the occasion of the centenary of Rosa Luxemburg’s assassination, we revisit her polemics with Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky on party theory and its relationship with workers’ councils (soviets). As is often the case, after a quick look at the different positions under debate, the question arises: who was “right” in the face of history?

Contrary to the simplistic arguments sometimes made, it seems to us that none of the three were absolutely and unilaterally right in the main moments of the debate. As we will argue in this text, at first Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky were right against Vladimir Lenin, but later – and formally maintaining the same terms of the debate – the historical reason was reversed. In our view, this occurred because the “organization question” was resolved at the same time as a private party theory (in strict sense of the word, “avant-garde”) and a theory of self-emancipation or common movement of broad layers of the working class.

Vladimir Lenin in 1903 and the developments of his party theory

Within the Marxist movement, it is customary to think of revolutionary party theory and immediately allude to Vladimir Lenin. In fact, it was he who first developed the most consistent party plans of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (RSDLP) at the turn of the 1901th to the 1902th century, which later characterized a specific form of party organization that, for better or worse, had universal validity (application throughout the world). The course of such elaboration goes from his article “Where to Begin?” (XNUMX), through the famous “Letter to a Comrade” (XNUMX), to the no less famous What to do? (1902), through the controversy at the Second Congress of the RSDLP (1903), arriving, last but not least, in One step forward, two steps back (1904).

The conceptually new point brought by Vladimir Lenin was put forward at the Second Congress of the RSDLP, around which the famous controversy with Julius Martov arose. It concerns the problem of the first paragraph of the party statute, which concerns who is or is not a member of the party. At first glance, the question seems trivial and the controversy pointless. Let us recall the formulas proposed.

Vladimir Lenin's formula: “A member of the [Russian Social-Democratic Labour] Party is anyone who accepts the Party's program and supports the Party both financially and through personal participation in one of the Party's organizations.” Julius Martov's formula: “A member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party is anyone who accepts the Party's program, supports the Party financially, and lends regular personal assistance under the leadership of one of its organizations.”[I]

The difference lies in “personal participation” (Vladimir Lenin) or “regular collaboration” (Julius Martov) in a party organization. Personal participation means being part of the organization; “collaboration” does not necessarily mean being part of it. Julius Martov wanted to work with the “not necessarily”; he wanted to extend the membership status to sympathizers; he wanted to artificially create a supposedly dialectical zone, characterized by being “neither inside nor outside” the party.[ii]

Note, therefore, that there was no clear controversy among the majority of members of the congress – with the exception of those from the Jewish League, Waist, and part of the so-called “economists” – regarding the notion of centralism (against federalism), conspiratorial work (against legalism), discipline (unity of action) etc. Practically everyone was formally in favor of these elements, but only the “hardliners” (supporters of Vladimir Lenin) believed that such principles would only be effective if the party were capable of distinguishing, in a clear and direct way, without any gray areas (that is, with well-defined borders), its true militants, the professional revolutionaries, that is, its members effectively active in the class.

The problem is that, by attributing the notion of activity to a sector of the working class, it seemed to deprive the rest of the class of activity, which would then apparently only have the notion of passivity. For Martov and his comrades, henceforth known as Mensheviks (sometimes “soft” or “soft”), attributing the adjective “passive” to someone who, whether they wanted to or not, consciously collaborated with the party, seemed very harsh.[iii]. Martov and his followers believed that such harshness, by alienating the intermediary elements, tended to create a chasm, perhaps unbridgeable, between the revolutionary organization and the class. The result of this “formalism” would be, according to them, sectarianism.

Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky were prominent in their criticism of Vladimir Lenin's party theory, focusing fire on certain possibly simplistic phrases and schemes presented by the Bolshevik leader.[iv]. Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky's defense of the economic element and the active character of the proletarian masses is well known; their criticism of the Kautskyist conception, supported by Vladimir Lenin (against the “economists”), that socialist consciousness would be brought to the working class externally, from outside, by the hand of the party; as well as their criticism of Vladimir Lenin's defense (against Axelrod) of excessively conspiratorial work, inherited, according to them, from the “Jacobinist” petty bourgeoisie (work of professional committee revolutionaries).[v]. Are such criticisms correct? Vladimir Lenin generally defends himself by claiming that his statements were taken out of context and oversimplified.[vi]

If it is true that there was a simplification of what Vladimir Lenin said – and sometimes resentment of an almost personal nature, especially on the part of Leon Trotsky – it is also true that Vladimir Lenin slipped several times (and in the heat of controversy) into schematic and somewhat dichotomous formulas. Vladimir Lenin, like the great majority of socialist leaders of the time, seemed to be a prisoner of certain undialectical conceptions that reigned in the Second International, under the baton of the “orthodox center”, the leadership of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD).

It was within this party, consciously since the Erfurt Congress (1891), that notions such as a “minimum program” (economic and reformist) as opposed to a “maximum program” (political and revolutionary) were developed, as well as the idea (clearly developed by Karl Kautsky at the turn of the century) that socialist consciousness would be brought from outside (by bourgeois or petty-bourgeois intellectuals) to the working class.[vii]. To see theory as external to the class means to see the party (the supposed conscious bearer of this theory) as external to the class. Another dichotomy often presented is that which refers to illegal (party) work as opposed to legal (economic-union) work, as can be seen above all in What to do?.

Who would be right in this debate? It is difficult to answer in advance. It is likely that none of them – Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg or Leon Trotsky – was unilaterally right at that moment, in the face of history. History had yet to be written. However, the beginnings of the answer emerged the following year and initially proved Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky right against Vladimir Lenin. The events of the first Russian Revolution (1905) confirmed the creative activity of the masses, and in their eyes, Vladimir Lenin’s faction often assumed a sectarian role.

It should be emphasized that the element, sometimes deliberately ignored, that the Russian soviets (councils of workers' deputies), as we know them, as they came into being in the Russian Revolution of 1905, especially as they were created from the foundation of the main one (that of St. Petersburg), were a proposition of the Mensheviks, to which the Bolsheviks opposed themselves.

The fact is narrated to us by Leon Trotsky in his important autobiography, in the chapter referring to 1905. In it, dealing with the spontaneous outbreak – unexpected activity of the masses – of the strong general strike of October 1905, the theoretician of permanent revolution tells us:

“The movement was growing steadily, but there was a risk of failure if it was not led by a mass organization. I arrived from Finland with a plan for a non-party electoral organization with one delegate for every thousand workers. The writer Iordansky, who later became the Soviet ambassador to Italy, informed me on the very day of my arrival that the Mensheviks had already put forward the slogan of a revolutionary electoral body with one delegate for every five hundred workers. This was correct. The members of the Bolshevik Central Committee present in Petersburg were resolutely opposed to an electoral organization independent of the parties, fearing that it would compete with Social Democracy. The Bolshevik workers had no such fears. The upper circles of Bolshevism conducted themselves in a sectarian manner towards the Soviet until the arrival of Vladimir Lenin in November. […] Vladimir Lenin's late return from abroad was one of the reasons why the Bolshevik faction failed to assume a leading position in the events of the first revolution.”[viii]

This element is also clarified by O. Anweiler, who does not fail to be ironic: “It is very significant that the model of the Paris Commune – which would provide the basis for the Leninist theory of the State and the Bolshevik system of councils – was originally introduced into Russian Marxism not by the Bolsheviks, but by the Mensheviks.”[ix]. Still according to Anweiler, it was Julius Martov who theorized most about the soviets as a form of “revolutionary self-administration” (and Axelrod, to whom Leon Trotsky dedicated his pamphlet Our Political Tasks, would have been the “most ardent propagandist of this plan”).

The Bolsheviks, especially in the absence of Vladimir Lenin, fearing that the soviets would replace the party, maintained a somewhat ambiguous position towards them; in some cities they even hindered or delayed the creation of the soviets. Such was the narrow and leftist position of the so-called “committee men”, against whom Vladimir Lenin also fought several times in his life. For him, these men of apparatus, usually intellectuals, merely formally repeated learned formulas, without reflecting deeply and vividly on them.[X]

However, if they acted in this way, it was because the ambiguity was, strictly speaking, in the initial formulations of Vladimir Lenin himself. Despite his defense of the soviets, Lenin did not yet have an absolutely clear understanding of their historical (strategic) significance as organs of power and government of the working class (he saw them only as possible instruments of struggle for the party). Thus, according to an important biographer of Vladimir Lenin, J.-J. Marie, the position of the main Bolshevik leader regarding the soviets remained vacillating during the first revolution.[xi]

It is no exaggeration to say, then, that in 1905 all the elements of Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky's criticisms of Vladimir Lenin were confirmed: the Bolsheviks opposed the working masses (seeking replace the organization created by spontaneous activity of them); the impulse of the masses made social democracy grow (socialist consciousness) and not the other way around; the men of apparatus, due to excessively closed, sectarian and clandestine habits (Jacobin-Blanquists), were unable to relate to the movement; the intellectuals tended to rival the workers[xii]. In addition, the mass movement pressed for joint work between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, in practice carrying out in many committees a reunification of the factions.

In St. Petersburg, the joint work between the main local Bolshevik leader, Leonid Krasin, and Trotsky, chairman of the Soviet (the center of the revolution in the country), was crucial. In November 1905, the Bolshevik Central Committee declared itself in favor of unification with the Mensheviks, and Vladimir Lenin and Bogdanov attended a Menshevik conference in the capital. The Mensheviks, also aiming at unification, approved Vladimir Lenin's formula for the first paragraph of their statutes.

Vladimir Lenin remained one of the greatest supporters of the merger until the next party congress. When the party met in April 1906 (therefore after the crushing of the insurrection) and approved the merger of the groups, the Mensheviks, precisely because of their position in relation to the soviets and Trotsky's prestige, were numerically in the majority (they had 62 delegates against 46 Bolsheviks and elected 7 members of the CC against 3 Bolsheviks).[xiii]. Thus, in the heat of the mass movement in 1905, the controversies of the past seemed just that. Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg were gaining ground to advance important syntheses. What were these syntheses?

The dialectic achieved by Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky from 1905 onwards

The most important element that Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky theorize based on the experience of 1905 is the idea that it would be necessary to deduce an intermediate element between the dichotomous poles previously presented by social democracy. According to them, it would not be possible to work with the concepts of “passive” as opposed to “active”, “economic” as opposed to “political”, “legal” as opposed to “illegal”, without allowing between them something that é (they are) both things at the same time; a crossing between two elements, a negative zone that is neither one thing nor the other, but, even so, necessarily has its own status.

In light of the first Russian revolution, Rosa Luxemburg began to reflect, as early as 1906, on the importance of the so-called “mass strike”. Her most famous text on the subject, in fact, is significantly called Mass strike, party and unions (1906)[xiv] Rosa Luxemburg constantly seeks to deduce an organizational element that is intermediate between the political-party (illegal) and the economic-union (legal): mass strikes and the organizations created by them, responsible for the insurrection itself. The mass strike would not be strictly political – and Rosa Luxemburg gives several examples of the great power of economic struggles, especially for the reduction of the working day – but it would not be strictly economic either, since it would necessarily create organs of insurrection.

Rosa Luxemburg asserts and reaffirms that the movement in 1905 moved not only from the economic to the political, but also from the political to the economic. And she summarizes, regarding the struggle in January 1905 (the “Bloody Sunday”): “Here the economic struggle was in reality not a fragmentation, not a fading of action, but a change of front; the first battle against absolutism soon and naturally transformed into a general settling of accounts with capitalism, and this, in accordance with its nature, takes the form of partial conflicts in favor of wages. It is false to say that the political class action in January was destroyed, because the general strike was divided into economic strikes. It is exactly the opposite (…).”[xv]

For Rosa Luxemburg, after the general strike in January, a new principle emerged: “the very relations between workers and employers undergo transformations”, because “the principle of the capitalist as master in his own house is practically suppressed. We have seen Workers’ Committees spontaneously form in the largest factories, the only bodies that negotiate with the employer (…)”[xvi]. This new principle, it becomes clear, is what will later be called dual power, or dual power – a counterweight to capitalist administrative power within the factory.

The extension of this local dual power throughout 1905, according to Rosa Luxemburg, culminated in the creation of councils (soviets) at the end of the year, as a dual power at the regional level (beyond the factory), capable of directing all workers' committees: “In October, the revolutionary experiment of establishing an 8-hour working day took place in St. Petersburg. The Council of Workers' Deputies [Soviet] decided to create an 8-hour working day by revolutionary means. Thus, on a certain date, all the workers of St. Petersburg declared to their employers that they refused to work more than 8 hours a day and would leave their workplaces at the set time.”[xvii]

The mass strike, as it appeared in Russia in 1905, Rosa Luxemburg also said, would be a phenomenon “so mobile that it reflects in itself all the phases of the political and economic struggle, all the stages and all the moments of the revolution”.[xviii] Rosa Luxemburg could not have been clearer in presenting the problem: “we are surprised by the fact that the economic element and the political element are indissolubly linked. Once again, reality departs from the theoretical scheme (…)”[xx]; “cause and effect follow one another, alternate incessantly”, economics and politics are “far from mutually excluding each other as the pretentious scheme claims”[xx].

Leon Trotsky, likewise, in his Balance and Perspectives (1906), he revisited points regarding a coincidence between economic and political elements. However, the richest of his reflections in this period seems to concern the soviets as organs not only of proletarian struggle, but properly as democratic institutions of the workers' government (class dictatorship). In his conception, there is an “intermediate” element (economic and political at the same time); it is an organizational form of its own, but not only that: it is also the embryonic form of the future workers' government.

In another important text, also from 1906 – “The Council of Workers’ Deputies and the Revolution”, published in New Time –, Leon Trotsky presented the matter even more clearly: “The council organized the masses, led political strikes and demonstrations, armed the workers… But other revolutionary organizations had done so before it, did so at the same time, and continued to do so after its dissolution. The difference was that [the Council] was, or at least aspired to be, an organ of power. Although the proletariat, as well as the reactionary press, called the council a ‘workers’ government’, in fact the council represented the embryo of a revolutionary government.”[xxx]

The intermediate (semi-legal) element as the dialectical negative

To be fair with the history of this controversy, it is necessary to state that we exaggerate when we say that before 1905 revolutionaries did not think of “intermediate elements” between the dichotomous poles. In fact, the theme was common in German social democracy and was more than present in the first controversies that divided the RSDLP in 1903. In the midst of these, for example, when defending his formula, Vladimir Lenin – as if protecting himself from accusations – stated that it contained a series of “lose organizations [loose organizations]”[xxiii]. It is no coincidence that he used the German term: it is a reference to the experience of the SPD, which based its activities on a series of loose and “broader” cultural and trade union organizations and associations, which served as a link between the party and the “masses” and, thus, also as a gateway to militancy.

Likewise, in One step forward, two steps back (1904), Vladimir Lenin developed up to five categories of organizations, from those composed of professional revolutionaries, to the broad unorganized elements of the class, which submitted to the leadership of the party.[xxiii]. This is the understanding that the party would reach the masses through concentric circles. The party would be the “illegal” pole (which would carry the historical awareness of the need for socialism), which would create intermediary, “semi-legal” organizations, which would organize more “advanced” consciousnesses, until it thus encompassed the broad working mass, organized in its legal organizations, of spontaneous and economic struggle (the unions).

The conception was widespread in social democracy and also appeared in the work of Leon Trotsky prior to the experience of the soviets, as in Our Political Tasks (1904): “It is clear that our party will always represent, from the center to the periphery, a whole series of concentric circles that increase in number but decrease in level of consciousness. The most conscious and therefore most revolutionary elements will always be 'in the minority' in our party.”[xxv]

In fact, this conception of Leon Trotsky (until 1904) and Vladimir Lenin, who then saw party construction somewhat as “onion layers” built by the party up to the masses – as “collaterals”, “levels”, “tendencies” or “trade unions” of the party – is not exactly dialectical. It is, as we have said, a form of party construction characteristic of German social democracy and, curiously, something that comes close to the position of Julius Martov in his polemic with Vladimir Lenin.

This is the creation of artificial organizational forms in which party members and non-members are admitted with equal status. It is not the creation of living intermediary organisms, the result of a spontaneous movement of broad layers of the working class. These loose formulas have nothing to do with the organizational forms created by the action of the Russian masses in 1905, forms that were both economic and political, forms of self-emancipation, which led the working class as a whole. It was against this false intermediary that Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky rose up after 1905 in search of a dialectic (albeit an initial one).

In artificial forms, of lose organizations, which serve as a mask for the party or its instruments of “co-optation”, both the vitality of the masses and the potential of the party are diluted, as the former become passive and the latter, in order to act, dependent on unstable elements. Strictly speaking, this is a contradictory position with the formula thought up by Vladimir Lenin himself in 1903 – but he, without another dialectical conception to put in its place, had to rely on this to try to overcome the gap between the party and the masses.

In short: in the social-democratic conception of lose organizations It is the party that goes (actively), as a one-way street, to the (passive) masses, and builds the “intermediate” organizational forms supposedly necessary to encompass them. In the conception that Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky sought to develop after 1905, it is the reciprocal action of the party and the masses that builds an intermediate (semi-legal) organizational level, which is strictly neither one thing nor the other (neither an illegal party nor legal unions); an intermediate organizational level that expresses itself as factory committees and, later, councils.

Herein lies, therefore, the whole difficulty. When observing the sequence of three levels: “economic”, “non-economic-nor-political”, “political”; or, again: “legal”, “semi-legal”, “illegal”; or again “minimum”, “intermediate”, “maximum”; when observing this sequence, one can assume that the movement is linear; one can assume that the “consciousness” of the “masses”, stimulated by the party, would start from the “economic” level (trade union struggle, of a legal nature), would establish itself at the “non-economic-nor-political” level (collateral, trade union central, etc.) and would finally reach the “political” level (the party, the consciousness of the illegality of the capitalist system and, therefore, of the need to overthrow it).

However, what should govern the dialectical movement of ascent between levels is not a positive teleology but rather a negative process. It is not a question of the party raising the “masses” by means of a “ladder” (1 to 2 to 3), but rather of achieving a joint synthesis with the activity of the “masses” (1 ⇄ 3 | 2). The intermediate element is not a “step” below the “political” and above the “economic”. In the organizational theory and experience of 1905, the intermediate element is a synthesis, in the dialectical sense of repeal (suppression), an overcoming that denies the previous terms, preserving them within itself. Thus, the intermediary is beyond (above) the opposition between economic and political, and, for this very reason, it is also the superior form of government of the working class, the form that represents the future socialist government, for the overcoming of capitalism. The factory committees and the councils are, at the same time, an overcoming of the unions and parties created by the working class under capitalism; they are the organs of administration and government of the future socialist economy and society. At the limit, they even indicate the possibility (after a long period of transition) of the disappearance of the parties and unions.

The Return of Vladimir Lenin

Being rigorous with the logic of this dialectic, we realize that from what has been pointed out above, theoretically, it follows that a party is needed to help create the superior organizational element. Furthermore, it is understood that the more well-defined, organized and agile it is, the better, because the more powerful the dialectic between its action and the spontaneous action of the working masses will be. This is what both Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky would later realize – somewhat tragically. Despite being correct in their initial polemic, both would come to the conclusion that Vladimir Lenin's formula regarding the strict theory of the party was correct.[xxiv]

It was Vladimir Lenin, therefore, who returned to the forefront of history in 1917. The fact that he had dedicated his life to the creation of a party of professional revolutionaries, of action, better defined in relation to the class as a whole, gave him great advantages over the others, especially when he became an adherent of the theory of councils as governing bodies of the working and oppressed masses. It was then that his organizational conception, previously only formally correct, became dialectically correct. “All power to the soviets” then became the slogan associated with the Bolsheviks in 1917, particularly since the April Theses.[xxv]

In fact, no one in the period submitted to such a serious and detailed analysis the role of the Soviets as organs of self-government as Vladimir Lenin himself in The State and the Revolution (written between August and September 1917). Vladimir Lenin's great advantage was that his practical antithesis to the mass movement was much more powerful than that of Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, who barely had their own factions. Vladimir Lenin was able to strike much more deeply into the spontaneous movement because he always maintained a well-organized communist faction. This, among other things, made the dialectic created by history in 1917, thanks to the joint activity (synthesis) of the masses and the Bolshevik Party, powerful enough to seize and secure power.

Conclusion

It is from the dialectical resolution of the positions of Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky that, in our view, arises the adjustment between form and content in the party theory necessary for the working class in its process of emancipation. It is necessary for the working class to act to create, from its legal bodies, new organisms for its common struggle (properly, organs of power, even if embryonic); but it is also necessary – as a precondition or presupposition – the existence of a party with strict selection of members, capable of acting effectively among the working masses.

The process must therefore be at the same time communal and autonomous on the one hand, and particular and directive on the other. From this relationship arises the dialectical theory of the organizational levels of the revolutionary process. Therefore, party theory also shows itself, in the final analysis, as a theory of a revolutionary program – insofar as it contains the steps or the general movement of broad sectors of the workers towards the seizure of economic and political power.[xxviii]

*Rafael de Almeida Padial holds a PhD in Philosophy from Unicamp. Author of On Marx's Passage to Communism (Mall). [https://amzn.to/3PDCzMe]

References


ANWEILER, O., Les Soviets en Russia, 1905 – 1921, Paris: Gallimard, 1972;

PROCEEDINGS OF THE SECOND CONGRESS OF THE RSDLP (1903), São Paulo: Editora Marxista, 2014 (vol. 1) and 2015 (vol. 2);

BENOIT, AHR, “Theory (dialectics) of the party or negation of the negation Vladimir Leninist”, in October Magazine, New York: Shaman, 1998;

BROSSAT, A., The political thought of young Trotsky. Mexico DF: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1976;

BROUÉ, P. The Bolshevik Party, New York: Routledge, 2014;

VLADIMIR LENIN, W., What to do?, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986;

__________.One step forward, two steps back, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986;

ROSA LUXEMBOURG, R. Mass strike, party, unions. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979;

__________. “Blanquism and Social Democracy”, available digitally at , accessed in May 1906;

MARIE, J.-J. Vladimir Lenin. Madrid: POSI, 2008;

TROTSKY, Our Political Tasks, available digitally at , accessed on May 1904, 14;

__________. 1905, suivi de Bilan et Perspectives, Paris: Edition de Minuit, 1969;

__________. My life, São Paulo: Sundermann, 2017.

Notes


[I] PROCEEDINGS OF THE SECOND CONGRESS OF THE RSDLP (1903), São Paulo: Editora Marxista, 2014, vol. 1. For Vladimir Lenin’s formula, cf. p. 253. For Martov’s, cf. p. 32.

[ii] See, in the aforementioned PROCEEDINGS (vol. II), the XXII and XXIII sessions of the Congress.

[iii] “Menshevik,” or “member of the minority,” is the opposite of Bolshevik, “member of the majority.” It is always worth remembering that, ironically, Martov’s formula was victorious against Vladimir Lenin’s by 28 votes to 23 (that is, the Mensheviks were, in this regard, the majority). However, during the congress, with the departure of the members of the Waist and economists (who voted for Martov's formula), Vladimir Lenin's group became the majority and thus won most of the central bodies. Hence the adjectives so frequently cited.

[iv]         For Leon Trotsky's criticisms of Vladimir Lenin, see his Report of the Siberian Delegation (1904) e Our Political Tasks (1904). For Rosa Luxemburg's criticism of Vladimir Lenin, see Centralism and democracy (1904). The last two are direct responses to One step forward…

[v] For the question of consciousness brought externally to the class, see What to do?, item “II. The spontaneity of the masses and social-democratic consciousness”. For Vladimir Lenin’s response to Axelrod on the question of Jacobinism or Blanquism (Babeuvism), see One step forward, two steps back, item “r) The new Iskra. Opportunism in organizational matters”. It is worth mentioning that Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky also present the idea that the necessary result of ultra-centralism and the separation from the masses would be not only the replacement (“substitutism”) of the party in relation to the class (a dictatorship about the proletariat), but also the dictatorship of the Central Committee over the party and a dictatorship of the top leader over the Central Committee. There are many who, in a simplistic and anachronistic way, have used such passages to argue that the germ of Stalinism was already contained in Vladimir Lenin's initial positions.

[vi] In the 1907 preface to the collection Twelve years (in which are republished, among others, What to do? e One step forward…), Vladimir Lenin draws attention to the fact that Plekhanov, after 1904, began to claim that he differed from Vladimir Lenin himself on the issue of “consciousness” brought from the outside. Vladimir Lenin clarifies that, when publishing What to do?, Plekhanov (and the entire body of the Iskra) had not raised any questions on the matter. The reason for this, according to Vladimir Lenin, was that everyone was clearly aware that the argument had the sole purpose of combating the economists, and did not intend to present a problem of philosophical principle. The same applies, according to Vladimir Lenin, to the accusation that he began to receive, after 1904, of “despising” the economic and trade union movement (and, by extension, the character of the active of the masses) in the name of the “political” (the party).

[vii] Cf. Kautsky’s article, “An Element Imported from Outside” (in Die Neue Zeit, 1901).

[viii] TROTSKY, L., My life, São Paulo: Sundermann, 2017, pp. 218-19. The emphasis is ours. Note that in his book 1905 (published in 1909), which analyzed the events of the first revolution, Leon Trotsky states that the electoral/representative model of delegation had its precedent in the “Shidlovsky Commission”. (See chapter “Formation of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies”). This was a commission formed by the Tsar in January 1905 in response to the general strike that took place in St. Petersburg. Its name refers to the senator – Shidlovsky – who was responsible for this commission before the Tsar. The purpose of this commission, at least formally, was to study the causes of the discontent of the workers in the factories of St. Petersburg and the means to remedy them. The commission was formed by representatives of the government and the bourgeoisie, as well as by workers. The workers would be elected from nine professional categories in the capital, in the proportion of one delegate for every 100 workers. Giving credit to Oskar Anweiler, it is worth noting that even before the formation of this commission, the two wings of Russian social democracy – the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks – were divided. Although both defended participating in the election, their tactics were different. The Bolsheviks saw it as just a diversionary maneuver by the government and thought of a way to weaken or boycott it. The Mensheviks wanted to transform it into a platform to broaden its reach among the working class. The Bolsheviks’ position was the majority; a series of demands were presented to the senator while ultimatum, which were subsequently denied by the representatives of power. The workers' representatives then boycotted the commission and issued a manifesto to the population. The life of this commission therefore did not exceed two weeks. On this subject, see ANWEILER, O., Les Soviets en Russia, 1905 – 1921, Paris: Gallimard, 1972, p. 41 et ss;and p.65 (for the proportion of the delegation).

[ix] ANWEILER, O., op. quoted, p. 84.

[X] On the delay or non-creation of Soviets in predominantly Bolshevik regions, see ANWEILER, O., op. quoted, p. 97 and BROUÉ, P. The Bolshevik Party, São Paulo: Sundermann, 2014, p. 74. The main representative of the leftism of the “committee men” was then A. Bogdanov, an important leader of the faction. Another characteristic representative of this narrow committee spirit was the later famous Stalin. See MARIE, J.-J. Vladimir Lenin. Madrid: POSI, 2008, p. 85; ANWEILER. THE. op. quoted, p. 93.

[xi] Vladimir Lenin's defenses of the Soviets while still abroad are quite cautious. Vladimir Lenin always leaves it up to the local leadership to decide whether or not to publish his pro-Soviets texts (which does not happen under Bogdanov's direction). Cf. MARIE, J.-J., Vladimir Lenin, op. cit, P. 87 et ss;cf. ANWEILER. O. op. quoted, p. 99.

[xii] Alain Brossat, ultimately a defender of Vladimir Lenin's theory, also recognizes that the theories of Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky were confirmed in 1905. See BROSSAT, A., The political thought of young Trotsky. Mexico DF: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1976, p. 47 and p. 64.

[xiii] See MARIE, J.-J., Vladimir Lenin, op. cit., pp. 89-91. The merger, as we know, did not go very far. Important differences of opinion were expressed at the congress, such as those regarding expropriations, on behalf of which Vladimir Lenin, Krasin and Bogdanov maintained a secret “special economic group”. In addition, there was an important division regarding whether or not to participate in the Duma (pre-parliament). The Bolsheviks – with the sole exception of Vladimir Lenin – were against participation, while the Mensheviks were in favor. But the most important thing is that part of the Mensheviks, led by Plekhanov, soon began to theorize about the necessary period of reflux and reaction that would result from the defeat, which, in order to minimize damage, would justify a policy adapted to the liberal-bourgeois opposition to the monarchy. During the years of reaction, a significant part of the Mensheviks, rejecting the methods of armed insurrection, began a resolute path towards liberal democracy (against which the Bolsheviks had fought and won). Rosa Luxemburg then began to distance herself from the Mensheviks and to draw closer to Vladimir Lenin. In June 1906, she defended Vladimir Lenin against Plekhanov, who once again accused him of “Blanquism” (See her text “Blanquism and Social Democracy”, available digitally at https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/06/blanquism.html. Already at the May-June 1907 congress of the RSDLP, the difference between its two factions was visible. Leon Trotsky comments on the shameful, skeptical, uncommitted, contemptuous trait of the Mensheviks, of all broad perspectives and of themselves, while the Bolsheviks were characterized by their ties, their faith in the future, their audacity, their “party patriotism” and their military character. See MARIE, J.-J., Vladimir Lenin, on. cit., P. 94.

[xiv] Interestingly, Rosa Luxemburg begins her book relatively in favor of the Bakuninists during their controversy with Engels regarding the “general strike.” This is perhaps the first of many criticisms by Rosa Luxemburg of Engels. The revolutionary increasingly saw in certain positions of the later Engels (in the 1890s) the root of some of the dichotomous and simplistic positions of German social democracy. For example, take Rosa Luxemburg’s speech on program and political situation at the Founding Congress of the German Communist Party (KPD) on December 31, 1918, in which she returns to criticize the dichotomous program of Erfurt and turns relatively against Engels. This is where the German communist tradition of criticism of Engels comes from, which later gained greater philosophical expression.

[xv] ROSA LUXEMBOURG, R. Mass strike, party, unions. New York: Routledge, 1979, pp. 30-31.

[xvi] Same, same, P. 35.

[xvii] Same, same, P. 39.

[xviii] Same, same, P. 42.

[xx] Same, same, P. 45.

[xx] Same, same, P. 46.

[xxx] TROTSKY, L. “El consejo de los deputados obreros y la revolucion”, in BROSSAT, A. op. quoted, p. 261.

[xxiii] PROCEEDINGS OF THE SECOND CONGRESS OF THE RSDLP (1903), São Paulo: Editora Marxista, 2015 vol. II. XXII Session, p. 88.

[xxiii] VLADIMIR LENIN, One step forward, two steps back. São Paulo: Alpha-Omega, 1986, p. 261.

[xxv] TROTSKY, L., Our political tasks (1904), available digitally at , accessed on May 1904, 14.

[xxiv] On Rosa Luxemburg’s part, the theme of strong leadership became almost an obsession in her later writings, especially as the impotence of the German revolutionaries in the face of the German revolution of 1918/19 became apparent. “Spontaneity” in such a revolution was nowhere near enough to cope with the situation, and the setback of the process resulted in the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg herself (along with Karl Liebknecht) by the social democracy. It is enough to read the author’s short articles shortly before her assassination, on the need for leaders. Trotsky, for his part, even fell into “ultra-centralism” (between 1919 and 1921), against which Vladimir Lenin protested. After the defeat of the revolutions in Germany, China and Spain, Trotsky began to pay more attention to the question of the party, concluding that it was a prerequisite (condition) for the working masses to take and maintain power. The theme was also recurrent in his texts for the founding of the Fourth International.

[xxv] Even though, to make it effective, Vladimir Lenin had to fight against the apparatus men of his own party, starting with Kamenev and Stalin, who in February 1917 defended entry into the provisional government together with the Mensheviks and wrote in the official party newspaper, Truth, by merging with the Mensheviks. Vladimir Lenin was then accused of “Trotskyism”, for becoming an open supporter of the formula of “permanent revolution” and for associating himself with the idea of ​​soviets as a system of government.

[xxviii] This article was presented in 2018, at the meeting of the National Association of Postgraduate Studies in Philosophy (ANPOF), in Vitória-ES.


the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE

See all articles by

10 MOST READ IN THE LAST 7 DAYS

See all articles by

SEARCH

Search

TOPICS

NEW PUBLICATIONS