Rosa Luxemburg, revolution, communism

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By PAUL LE BLANC*

The German revolutionary asserted the need for genuine democracy for genuine socialism, as well as warning against violations of democracy by the Bolshevik regime in the post-Revolution period.

“A century after Rosa Luxemburg’s death, her revolutionary heart still beats loudly,” says biographer Dana Mills.[I] The revolution was inseparable from everything she was and everything she had to say. “In a sense, this conflicts with the thematic structure chosen for theComplete Works [Complete Works]. Volume 5 is the final part of three volumes devoted to the theme of “revolution,” following two initial volumes devoted to the theme of “economy.” Nevertheless, these five volumes form a cohesive whole with the rest of the series.[ii]

This centrality of revolution permeates the quality of Rosa Luxemburg’s thought and expression, ensuring that the Marxism she embodied vibrates with an energy, a critical and creative humor, infused with radically democratic and internationalist sensibilities. These sensibilities animate her economic analyses, which in turn refute the notion that capitalism can be gradually reformed into socialism.

Debates about reform or revolution gained momentum within the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SDP), which was Rosa Luxemburg’s political home for most of her political life. By 1909, it was clear that the official leadership of the SDP favored protracted trade union negotiations combined with a legislative program sustained by electoral victories and carried out through parliamentary maneuvers. But the combined economic, political, and cultural analyses found in Rosa Luxemburg’s writings reaffirm that such reformist moderation is incapable of confronting the relentless and rapacious process of capitalist accumulation, with its militarism, imperialism, and—whenever necessary—authoritarian and murderous violence. This understanding connects closely with Rosa Luxemburg’s revolutionary orientation to the “mass strike,” brilliantly elaborated in volumes 4 and 5.

Whether as a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany or the Communist Party of Germany (which she helped to found shortly before her death), Luxemburg’s revolutionary socialist orientation remained consistent throughout her life. At the same time, it evolved in a complex way. In the remainder of my comments, I would like to focus on Rosa Luxemburg’s relationship to communism—particularly to Vladimir Lenin, early Bolshevism, and the Russian Revolution.[iii]

First, it may be useful to identify five phases in Rosa Luxemburg's relationship with Lenin.

(I) From the 1890s to 1902, Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin appear to have had somewhat similar trajectories – becoming intensely active in the revolutionary wing of the world socialist movement, seeing the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SDP) as an ideal form of organization, considering its leading theoretician, Karl Kautsky, an exceptional mentor, while at the same time seriously engaging with and embracing Marxist theory as a guide to action. Their first meeting, in May 1901, included discussions of possibilities for political collaboration.

(ii) In the wake of the 1903 split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks within the Russian Social Democratic Party (RSDLP), Luxemburg leaned towards the Mensheviks, who portrayed Lenin as an authoritarian hypercentralist. This was the tone of her polemically analytical essay, “Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy,” a widely read review of the pamphletOne step forward, two steps back, which in turn is Lenin's account of the split. Published in Die Neue Zeit, the prestigious theoretical periodical of the PSDA, his review did not receive from Lenin an intolerant denunciation, but a respectful and enlightening response (which Die Neue Zeit chose not to publish).[iv]

(Iii) In the wake of the 1905 Revolution, converging political orientations brought Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg closer together. In her correspondence, Luxemburg describes several discussions with Lenin during this period, commenting: “I like talking to him, he is intelligent and well-mannered, and he has such an ugly face, the kind I like to look at.” It was during this period that she wrote a defense of Lenin in “Blanquism and Social Democracy,” responding to a polemic by the Menshevik leader George Plekhanov.[v]

(Iv) The events of 1911–12 drove them apart. Rosa Luxemburg and her Polish comrades opposed Lenin’s effort to create a Bolshevik-dominated RSDLP at the Prague conference in 1912. Rosa Luxemburg expressed her views quite clearly and forcefully in “Credo” (1911) and “The Collapse of Unity in the RSDLP” (1912), repeating her characterizations of 1904 (in apparent contradiction to those of 1906, and certainly in contradiction to the facts), describing Lenin’s organizational views as a “purely bourgeois conception of a political party, according to which the leader is everything and the masses are nothing.” A variety of scholarly works—including those by Tamás Krausz, Lars Lih, August Nimtz, Ronald Suny, Alan Shandro, and Paul Le Blanc—have shown that this is not true.[vi]

Interestingly, Luxemburg seems to basically agree with Lenin’s assessments of his factional opponents: the Liquidators and the Mensheviks in general, as well as the ultra-left Bolsheviks (Bogdanov and others) and Trotsky. However, she denounces what she calls “Lenin’s sectarian and factionalist policy,” which blocks “the path to organizational unity with the rest of the party” and thus condemns the revolutionary wing of the RSDLP to isolation and impotence. In fact, Lenin’s approach had a quite different outcome. The Bolsheviks became a hegemonic force within the Russian labor movement.[vii]

This contrasts with the more sombre organizational achievements of Rosa Luxemburg and her comrades in Poland and Germany. In Poland, one could even argue that Luxemburg was far more sectarian and factionalist than Lenin. In any case, she would later conclude in her classic critique “On the Russian Revolution” – without completely abandoning her critical views – that “the future everywhere belongs to ‘Bolshevism’.”[viii]

(v) In the period 1914-1919, war and revolution brought Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg closer than ever before – with Rosa Luxemburg and those around her ultimately converging with the early communist movement, of which Lenin was the centerpiece. Even here – as indicated by the materials in volume 5 (above all in her brilliant critique of the Russian Revolution) and by her correspondence – Rosa Luxemburg’s critical mind remains intact. Some elements of her earlier criticism of Lenin seem to have been revised, but others persisted. Among these criticisms one can question her judgments on the national question, the peasant question and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly.[ix].

But what it says about the necessity of genuine democracy for genuine socialism, as well as its blunt warning against the Bolshevik regime’s violations of democracy in the post-1917 Revolution period, remains prescient and essential—and consistent with what Lenin himself had been insisting on from the 1890s until 1917.[X]

It is worth allowing Luxemburg to express this in her own words: “That we have never been idolatrous worshippers of formal democracy means only that we have always distinguished the social core from the political form of bourgeois democracy, we have always revealed the bitter core of social inequality and lack of freedom beneath the sweet shell of formal equality and freedom – not, however, in order to discard this shell; on the contrary, we have done so in order to incite the working class not to be content with this mere shell, but to conquer political power in order to fill it with a new social content. It is the historical task of the proletariat, upon coming to power, to create a socialist democracy in place of bourgeois democracy – not to eliminate democracy altogether. However, socialist democracy is not something that begins only in the Promised Land, once the infrastructure – the socialist economy – has been established; it does not arrive as a ready-made Christmas present to the obedient population who, in the meantime, have loyally supported the handful of socialist dictators. Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the dismantling of class domination and the construction of socialism. It begins at the very moment the socialist party takes power.”[xi]

It is clear, on any serious reading of her polemic, that Rosa Luxemburg is not breaking with Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky or other revolutionary leaders as traitors to the socialist ideal, nor is she rebuking them from afar. This is a critique from within. She sees them as exceptional comrades engaged in the same struggle to which she devoted her life, comrades who—particularly under the pressure of events—have begun to make grave mistakes that she wishes to help correct.

Had Rosa Luxemburg lived for even a few years beyond January 1919, the Communist Party of Germany (which would soon become a well-organized revolutionary force on the German scene) could have counted on her efforts to help tilt German, Russian, and global realities in a different direction—which was her intention, and Lenin’s hope. Understanding (as Rosa Luxemburg and other Marxists did) that backward Russia was too economically underdeveloped to create socialism, Lenin’s Bolsheviks were “betting on the inevitability of world revolution,” as he explained in his August 1918 “Letter to the American Workers.”

The spread of the revolution would be largely inspired by what the Russian revolutionaries were doing, but it would also come to their rescue. Lenin and his comrades anticipated that this would attract majorities of the working class to control industrially advanced countries, which would then join the struggling Soviet Republic. Luxemburg herself explained: “The whole calculation behind the Russian struggle for freedom is based on the tacit assumption that the revolution in Russia must become the signal for the revolutionary uprising of the proletariat in the West: in France, England and Italy, but above all in Germany.” Lenin emphasized: “We are now, so to speak, in a besieged fortress, waiting for the other detachments of the world socialist revolution to come to our rescue.”[xii].

While the Bolsheviks were trying to resist, the young and fragile Soviet Republic was being invaded by foreign armies, strangled by an economic blockade, suffering an increasingly complex and brutal civil war (financed by foreign powers), and being targeted by assassinations and attempted assassinations, among other problems. In response to this – not to “create socialism” but simply to survive – they consolidated a one-party dictatorship, establishing a secret police force known as the Cheka, which unleashed the Red Terror.[xiii].

The head of the Cheka was a recent recruit of the Bolsheviks, who under the party name “Jozef” had for many years been one of Luxemburg’s comrades in the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, Felix Dzerzhinsky. Writing to another Polish comrade living in Soviet Russia, she remarked: “It is clear that under such conditions, i.e., being caught in the pincers of the imperialist powers on all sides, neither socialism nor the dictatorship of the proletariat can become a reality, but at most a caricature of both.”

By dictatorship of the proletariat, she meant the classical Marxist conception of political rule by the working class. She continued: “I fear that Józef has been carried away [by the idea] that economic and political holes can be plugged by energetically tracking down ‘conspiracies’ and killing ‘conspirators.’” Referring to sweeping threats to “massacre the bourgeoisie” as “idiocy of the highest order,” she concluded that this “only discredits socialism and nothing more.”[xiv].

In fact, Rosa Luxemburg's text About the Russian Revolution It is not simply a polemic against a “wrong” idea of ​​socialism that Lenin supposedly had, but it identifies dangers inherent in the revolutionary struggle itself.

After Rosa Luxemburg's death, the tension over her outlook persisted among her closest comrades in Germany and Poland, and in the wake of the fiasco of the March Action of 1921, they decided to follow either the example of Paul Levi (who broke with the communist movement) or Clara Zetkin (who remained within it). Mathilde Jacob was a close comrade of Luxemburg who followed Levi, and it would be interesting to learn more about others who took this path.[xv].

However, a significant number of Rosa Luxemburg's followers did not follow Levi – including Heinrich Brandler, Paul Frölich, Fritz Heckert, Sophie Liebknecht, Julian Marchlewski, Ernst Meyer, Wilhelm Pieck, August Thalheimer, Adolf Warski and Clara Zetkin.

The supporters of Rosa Luxemburg who eventually left the communist movement after Paul Levi’s departure seem to have rejected Stalinism rather than Leninism. While Fritz Heckert, Wilhelm Pieck, and Sophie Liebknecht remained in the Communist Party of Germany and accommodated itself to its Stalinization, three central figures—Heinrich Brandler, August Thalheimer, and Paul Frölich—were expelled from the Communist Party of Germany in 1929 for resisting its Stalinization. Another, Ernst Meyer, actively resisted Stalinization but died in 1930.

Clara Zetkin remained in the party as a notorious and bitter internal critic of Stalinist developments until her death in 1933.[xvi]. Among the Polish comrades, Julian Marchlewski (who died in 1925) remained a pillar of the Polish Communist Party, as did Adolf Warski (who was arrested and executed during the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s) – and the Polish Communist Party was dissolved in 1938 as politically unreliable, by decision of the Communist International under Stalin.[xvii]

This triumph of Stalinism resulted in the shipwreck of the world communist movement. Activists seeking to rebuild this movement and help humanity avoid barbarism through the revolutionary creation of socialism find in Rosa Luxemburg a powerful resource – in the five volumes of her Complete Works already published and in the other volumes to come.

*Paul LeBlanc is a professor of history at La Roche College in Pittsburgh. Author of, among other books, The Living Flame: The Revolutionary Passion of Rosa Luxemburg (Haymarket Books). [https://amzn.to/3DWhuKs]

Translation: Rafael A. Padial.

As January 15 approaches – the day in 1919 when Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were assassinated by police officers of the German social democratic government – ​​we publish texts that recover the legacy of these important revolutionaries.

Notes


[I] Dana Mills, Rosa Luxemburg. London: Reaktion Books, 2020, p. 7.

[ii] Veja https://www.toledotranslationfund.org/complete_works_rosa_luxemburg. Volumes published through 2024 include: Peter Hudis, ed., The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume I: Economic Writings 1. London: Verso, 2013; Peter Hudis and Paul Le Blanc, eds., The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume II: Economic Writings 2. London: Verso, 2015; Axel Fair-Schulz, Peter Hudis, and William Pelz, eds., The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume III: Political Writings 1, On Revolution 1897-1905. London: Verso, 2019; Peter Hudis and Sandra Rein, eds., The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume IV: Political Writings 2, On Revolution 1906-1909. London: Verso, 2022; Helen C. Scott and Paul Le Blanc, eds., The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume V: Political Writings 3, On Revolution 1910-1919. London: Verse, 2024.

[iii] This relationship has been the focal point of controversy over the years. The striking contrast between a benign and admirable Rosa Luxemburg and a malignant and despicable Lenin is the influential interpretation presented in a long and widely read introductory essay by Bertram D. Wolfe in The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism? Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1961, reprinted in their collection Strange Communists I Have Known. New York: Stein and Say, 1965.

It is worth noting that in his years as a revolutionary Marxist, before he evolved into a Cold War anti-communist, Wolfe's approach was similar to that found in Paul Frölich's splendid biography, first published in 1940 and still in print – Rosa Luxemburg. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010 – which portrays Luxemburg and Lenin as comrades who had significant differences on important issues but whose basic political orientations were compatible.

Coming closest to Frölich's approach is J.P. Nettl's masterful two-volume biography, Rosa Luxemburg. London: Oxford University Press, 1966. Hannah Arendt, reviewing Nettl's work and also drawing on her own extensive knowledge, developed a similar interpretation in “A Heroine of Revolution”, New York Review of Books, October 6, 1966, reprinted as “Rosa Luxemburg, 1871-1919”, in her collection But in the Dark Times. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1968.

Frölich's thesis about a compatibility between Luxemburg and Lenin is further accentuated in influential essays produced by Norman Geras, The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg. London: Verso, 1983), and by Michael Löwy, Rosa Luxemburg: The Incendiary Spark, ed. by Paul Le Blanc. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023. A similar approach can be seen in the work of one of India's most important Marxist scholars, Sobhanlal Datta Gupta, who edited the volume Readings in Revolution and Organization: Rosa Luxemburg and Her Critics. Calcutta: Pearl Publishers, 1994, and produced a valuable collection of essays, Rosa Luxemburg. Bakhrahat: Serbian, 2015.

Occupying a midpoint on the spectrum between compatibility and incompatibility is Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson's substantial introduction to their volume The Rosa Luxemburg Reader. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004, following in the interpretative footsteps of Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

Among some of the most serious German scholars who deal with Luxemburg, there is an inclination to come at least partly close to Wolfe's interpretation. See, for example, the valuable essays of Ottokar Luban, available in English at . This is also evident in an important study co-authored by Michael Brie and Jörn Schutrümpf, Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary Marxist at the Limits of Marxism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021 – although in separate articles published later, Schutrümpf leans even more strongly towards Wolfe’s interpretation (see “Rosa Luxemburg versus the Leninists”), while Brie comes closer to Frölich’s interpretation (see “Seven Reasons Not to Leave Lenin to Our Enemies”). Both can be found on the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation website , and .

Also leaning strongly toward Frölich's interpretation are Helen C. Scott and Paul Le Blanc's introduction to Volume V of The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, cited above in note #2, as well as its introduction in Helen C. Scott and Paul Le Blanc, eds., Socialism or Barbarism: Selected Writings of Rosa Luxemburg. London: Pluto Press, 2010. See also essays in Paul Le Blanc, The Living Flame: The Revolutionary Passion of Rosa Luxemburg (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019). This is also the case with Dana Mills’ biography of Luxemburg, cited in note 1 above, and with essays by Ankica Čakardić, Like a Clap of Thunder: Three Essays on Rosa Luxemburg. Berlin: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2020 .

[iv] VI Lenin, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back – Reply by N. Lenin to Rosa Luxemburg”, Collected Works, Volume 7. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1961, pp. 472-83.

[v] Luxemburg Letters, p. 290; Rosa Luxemburg, “Blanquism and Social Democracy” (June 1906), Marxist Internet Archive, .

[vi] Rosa Luxemburg, “Credo: on the State of Russian Social Democracy,” in Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, eds., The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), pp. 266–280; Rosa Luxemburg, “The Breakdown of Unity in the RSDLP,” contained in Rosa Luxemburg versus the Leninists (Rosa Luxemburg Foundation) .

Scholarly works that challenge Luxemburg's polemical characterization of Lenin and Bolshevism include: Tamás Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, An Intellectual Biography (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015); Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered. “What Is To Be Done?” in Context (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008); August H. Nimtz, The Ballot, the Streets, or Both? From Marx and Engels to Lenin and the October Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019); Alan Shandro, Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony: Political Practice and Theory in the Class Struggle (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015); Ronald G. Suny, Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution (London: Verso, 2017) and Stalin: Passage to Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).

My own research is reflected in Paul Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015) and Paul Le Blanc, Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 2023).

[vii] Leopold H. Haimson, “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917,” Slavic Review vol. 23, no. 4 (1964): 619-642, and vol. 24, no. 1 (1965): 1-22.; Paul LeBlanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, pp. 217-31; Paul Le Blanc, Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution, pp. 62-5.

[viii] Eric Blanc, “The Rosa Luxemburg Myth: A Critique of Luxemburg's Politics in Poland (1893-1919)”, Historical Materialism, 25:4, pp. 3-36; Rosa Luxemburg, “On the Russian Revolution”, Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 5. London: Verso, 2024, p. 246.

[ix] On the national question, see V. I. Lenin, “The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” Collected Works, Volume 21. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974, pp. 407-14. On the peasant question, see: Teodor Shanin (ed.), Peasant Societies: Selected Readings. Harmondsworth/UK: Penguin Books, 1971; Teodor Shanin, The Roots of Otherness: Russia's Turn of the Century, 2 volumes. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985; Paul LeBlanc, October Song: Bolshevik Triumph, Communist Tragedy, 1917-1924. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017, pp. 255-92. On the Constituent Assembly, see Le Blanc, October Song, pp. 124-29.

[X] See Paul Le Blanc, “Socialism and Revolutionary Democracy: Lenin's Legacy for Our Time of Catastrophe,” Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, February 5, 2024 and Paul Le Blanc, “Lenin's Socialism: Labels and Realities,” Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, March 13, 2024, .

[xi] Luxemburg, “On the Russian Revolution”, Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, volume 5, p. 244.

[xii] Luxemburg, “Historical Responsibility”, in The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, volume 5, p. 169; VI Lenin, “Letter to American Workers”, Collected Works, Volume 28. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965, p. 75.

[xiii] George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police. Oxford/UK: Clarendon Press, 1986; James Ryan, Lenin's Terror: The Ideological Origins of Early Soviet State Violence. London: Routledge, 2014; Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions. Princeton/NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000; LeBlanc, October Song, pp. 219-54.

[xiv] Robert Blobaum, Feliks Dzierzynski and the SDKPiL: A Study in the Origins of Polish Communism. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1984; Luxemburg, “Letter to Julian Marchlewski, September 30, 1918”, in The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Georg Adler, Peter Hudis and Annelies Laschitza. London: Verso, 2011, pp. 474–5

[xv] David Fernbach, ed., In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings of Paul Levi. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2011; Mathilde Jacob, Rosa Luxemburg, An Intimate Portrait. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2000; Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg's Views on the Russian Revolution. New York: Red Star Publishers, 2017.

[xvi] On the perspectives of the Communist Party of Germany (Opposition), see August Thalheimer, “Rosa Luxemburg or Lenin” in Marxist Internet Archive, , and Robert J. Alexander, “The Brandler-Thalheimer Group in Germany,” in their study The Right Opposition: The Lovestoneites and the International Communist Opposition of the 1930's. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981, pp. 135–55; see also Isaac Deutscher, “Record of a Discussion with Heinrich Brandler,” New Left Review, I/105, Sept./Oct. 1977, . Information about Ernst Meyer's ideas and struggles can be found in the reminiscences of his widow – Rosa Leviné-Meyer, Inside German Communism: Memoirs on Party Life in the Weimar Republic. London: Pluto Press, 1977. On Zetkin's anti-Stalinism, see: Mike Jones and Ben Lewis, eds., Clara Zetkin: Letters and Writings. London: Merlin Press, 2015, pp. 7, 115-34, 142-61.

[xvii] Isaac Deutscher, “The Tragedy of the Polish Communist Party” [interview with KS Karol, 1958], in Marxist Internet Archive, ; MK Dziewanowski, The Communist Party of Poland, An Outline History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976, pp. 75-154.


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