SOURCE: "Rosa Luxemburg's Theory of Revolution," translated by E. B. Ashton, in Social Research, Vol. 40, No. 1, Spring, 1973, pp. 83-109.

[In the following essay, Vollrath compares Luxemburg's theory of political action to ideas of Cicero, Robespierre and the American Federalists, as well as her Marxist contemporaries and successors.]

I

Every political theory contains a theory on the nature of action, whether specifically weighed or tacitly assumed, stated in so many words or lodged in the categorial apparatus. The problem to which every theory of action seeks to give a direct or indirect answer is the problem of the start and of starting—for all action is a beginning, a new beginning of something which previously did not exist. That such a beginning has been made can be established only when that which began is continued; unless the start is carried out, and the beginning is carried on, start and beginning would not come to appear and would not become visible. The structure of action involves (at least) two moments: the start and the continuance, both essentially linked. This dual structure has been noted and registered ever since the Western theory of action, especially of political action, originated in the thinking of Plato and Aristotle. Its classic formula in regard to political theory was stated by Cicero: "For there is nothing in which human faculties come closer to the power of the gods than either founding new states or maintaining those already founded" (neque enim est ulla res in qua propius ad deorum numen virtus accedat humana, quam civitates aut condere novas aut conservare iam conditas). Founding start (condere) and continuing maintenance (conservare) are the two structural moments of human action in general and of political action in particular. To the classic theory of action, above all of political action, this was well known. Political action proper merely shows the structural moments of action pure and unveiled.

Whether political theory to date has been able to do anything with this insight is another question. It indicates the caution with which it should be approached that Cicero, in the line just quoted, is by no means referring to philosophical theory. He expressly stays clear of it, referring instead to men who have done something in politics—in other words, precisely not to the metaphysical theoreticians of practice. Any metaphysically defined theory of action endeavors to make action understandable by the theory's own experiences with itself, i.e., not by the phenomenal fund of action. This is not the place to go into that complex of questionable points. Almost wholly lost sight of in the metaphysical theory of practice is the problem of the start, above all, the fundamental problem of all acting. For when political theory will measure action, not by the phenomenon of action itself, but by its own experiences—and that is what a metaphysically defined theory of politics is doing—there will be no occasion for the problem of start and beginning, and thus of continuance and execution, to be taken any too seriously. Starting is unproblematical to theoretical thought because such thought can posit itself as the start. To the thinker, his thought precedes every beginning and can therefore mediate and posit the beginning at will; there is, and there occurs, no break that would have to be bridged between the thought and the beginning. Needless to say, this is not quite so simple for action, let alone for political action. In real action every start posits a difference from all that has gone before, because every acting start has in itself the element of "not" (not at all, not this way, not as anything like this, etc.) A metaphysically defined theory of practice and politics will vault this chasm by positing itself as the start—that is to say, by understanding itself from the volitive point of view as that in which everything new is anticipated. The immediate consequence is that acting will no longer be understood as acting but as making, or at least as something of the kind. For making, as distinct from acting, the problem of the start has long been solved. The start lies with the maker and with his knowing disposition about the start. All metaphysically defined theory of political action tends to use theory to cover up the problem of the start of action, to make that problem disappear. This means nothing other than that all past theory of political practice has failed to make action an object of its reflections.

II

The premised observations are to serve as a horizon for the following treatment of Rosa Luxemburg's theory of revolution. The duplicity of present political theories—theories of state-authored organizations on the one hand, theories of revolutionary movements on the other—evidently points to the previously stressed dual structure of action with its elements of starting (condere) and continuing (conservare). True, the task of any political theory is nothing but the solution of the problem of action. Because the problematical part of action is its start, however, the theories of revolution attract more attention today, for what are revolutions other than new starts? They claim, at least, to be new starts—whether rightly or wrongly has been another question since de Tocqueville. In any event, a theory of revolution has to face the problem of the start, of starting to act and of starting by acting.

Rosa Luxemburg's theory of revolution holds a special place among all theories of revolutionary movements. A comparison with Karl Marx's theory of revolution—from which Rosa Luxemburg's differs fundamentally—may make this clear. "Revolution," Marx wrote in 1844, in Kritische Randglossen, "the over throw of the existing power and the dissolution of the old conditions in general, is a political act. Yet without revolution socialism cannot be carried out. It needs this political act insofar as it needs destruction and dissolution. But when its organizing activity begins, when its end in itself, its soul, emerges, socialism casts off the political shell." In these early hints lies the core of the orthodox Marxist theory of revolution, basically unchanged until Lenin's work State and Revolution of 1917-18 led to its canonization.

According to this common Marxist conviction, revolution is a means to an end that is altogether different from revolution. Yet any means-end relationship takes its bearings from the model of making things, for in making alone is there an unequivocal possibility of assigning means to ends. That Marx and the orthodox Marxists claimed revolution for a mere means to a wholly different end has to do with a distinct view of the nature of politics. Here this view cannot be completely unfolded; even less can its origins in modem political thought be uncovered. The crucial traits may suffice.

To Marx, as to orthodox Marxism, the political realm and all action in it are secondary and derivative in kind. They constitute the alienated form of a true realm and of true doings: of the realm of production by work. Only what is done in this realm is productive, while political action is nothing but an expression of the rule of the unproductive capitalist class. Of the innumerable utterances in which Marx and Engels sought to confirm this thesis we need to cite only one (by Engels, at Marx's grave): "The main purpose of this organization [state] has always been the use of armed force to assure the working majority's economic suppression by the exclusively propertied minority."

It has to be made clear that this appraisal of the political realm and the actions occurring in it is by no means a peculiarity of Marxian and Marxist thinking. Rather, it is the consequence of action being reduced to producing and thus productive work, and we therefore find it also among theoreticians who certainly cannot be suspected of Marxism, such as Adam Smith.

But these are not the only views about action which Marx and Marxism share with a considerable number of bourgeois theoreticians. The concurrence extends to the basic assumptions about the relationship of action and politics, assumptions that are part of the modem concept of the state. According to those, the modem sovereign state monopolizes the realm of politics, and what characterizes it is its simultaneous monopolization of force. Equating politics with the state and identifying this realm with force—this is a legacy which Marx and orthodox Marxism received from the Founding Fathers of the modern state concept—from Thomas Hobbes, for example. These identifications are easy for a way of thinking in which the central category, work, remains characterized by moments of making.

These identifications, so very plausible to modem thought, have considerable consequences for Marx's theory of revolution. They enable us to make that theory completely intelligible. For once the realm of the state and of politics is determined—as a secondary, derivative, and alienated one—by the element of force, revolution can only mean the forcible (i.e., political) seizure of power (i.e., of the realm of politics and the state), in order to use this power so that, by changes in the production context, the realm of the state will ultimately disappear and politics as well as force will vanish with it. If this is the situation, both revolution and the disappearance of the realm of politics and the state can be planned and "made" according to this revolutionary theory. Lenin's political theory, from What is to be Done? to State and Revolution, clearly amounts to such a theory of revolutionary planning.

III

It is precisely against this Leninist revolutionary theory with its metaphysical implications that Rosa Luxemburg's theory is directed. She opposes, first, the seemingly so plausible identification of revolution and force: "But revolution is something other, and something more, than bloodshed." The entire question which dominates her political thinking can be understood as a search for this "other" thing, this "more" that distinguishes revolution from pure use of force. In any case, her questioning of the identification of revolution and force lends the total political realm a dimension other than that which determined the classic concept of modem age politics; for in that concept—no matter whether in its bourgeois or its Marxist form—politics is essentially characterized by the element of force. Rosa Luxemburg expressly rejects the theory worked out by Lenin, with its possibility of scheduling the revolution "for a certain calendar day, by way of a central committee decision"—which would mean tuming it into a "mere combat technique that might be 'decided upon' or possibly 'forbidden' at will, with the best of science and conscience."

The gist of Rosa Luxemburg's controversy with Lenin's theory of a new type of party—a theory she charges with being a conspiratorial one of the "Jacobin-Blanquist type"—concerns the nature of revolutionary action itself. To Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin's party theory was based upon a wrong view of that action. She characterizes this view as follows: Revolutionary activity issues from an ultracentralistically organized collective will which, in accordance with a plan worked out in advance, in every detail, turns the broad masses of the people into its disciplined tools, to which the strength of the center is mechanically transferable. Such a view of revolutionary action clearly takes its bearings from the model of "making," with the real activity placed entirely into the will of the planning and organizing center, to which the revolutionary act has ceased to be anything but a mere "coup." To Rosa Luxemburg, in other words, Lenin's theory of revolution is alarmingly identical with the "bourgeois" view that sees the essence of revolution in the "battle of the barricades, the open clash with the armed forces of the state," in short, in violent action to take over the power of the state. Rosa Luxemburg has no doubts about the reason behind this Leninist theory of revolution and of action. In fact, Lenin is holding on to the modern identifications of politics and force, of state and force, of political action and force, and in his theory of revolution this appears when his revolutionary tool, the proletariat organized by the central will, is asked for the necessary factory-type discipline—which Rosa Luxemburg proves to him can only be produced "by the barracks, also by a modem bureaucracy, in short … by the total mechanism of the centralized bourgeois state."

Lenin's concept of politics too is accordingly determined by the modern concept of the state, an essential part of which is the element of force. But since this element makes political action appear as the plannable and makeable fabrication of a "central power which alone thinks, creates, and decides for all," the Leninist theory seems to Rosa Luxemburg to miss the essence of political and revolutionary action.

IV

Rosa Luxemburg's point of departure for all reflections upon revolution is the insight that "there is no separating its economic and its political element." This entwinement suffices to set her political thinking apart from that of Marx and of orthodox Marxists, to whom politics is and remains an estranged derivative of economics. But Rosa Luxemburg's central thesis holds: "Between the two there is complete interaction"—and perhaps it is so in the "mass strike" which is the revolutionary action pure and simple.

Since it is the fundament of Rosa Luxemburg's political thought, this interaction of the economic and political moments calls for closer scrutiny. To understand it, we have to start out from her basic assumption that "the formal side of democracy" differs from its other side, its "real substance." The assumption of such a difference between form and substance is what makes Rosa Luxemburg a socialist thinker—one who holds the conditions of capitalism responsible for formal democracy's failure to be substantially fulfilled. In her writings, therefore, the difference appears in the well-known socialist formulas, principally in that of the class struggle. But Rosa Luxemburg's own crucial idea is her political interpretation of the difference in line with her basic assumption of economic-political interaction. The proletariat, due to its economic situation, is incapable of acting politically to determine its own fate, and it is kept in this state of incapacity, against its will, by the political-economic power of capitalism.

What the difference means politically can be demonstrated with the aid of Kant's definition of the political realm. The formal constitution of this realm as a union of free men takes three moments, according to Kant: "I. Freedom of each member of society as a human being; 2. equality of each member with every other member as a subject of the state; 3. independence of each member of the community as a citizen." United, these three moments make out the concept, i.e., the form of a state in a political condition, and they must be the criteria for determining whether or not we have to do with that sort of structure. The formality of this concept of politics is the ground of its universality, which entitles each human being as such to claim to belong to the realm of freedom (first moment) and to the realm of law (second moment).

Even more essential to our consideration is the third moment, independence. In that, Kant comprehends man's active self-determination as a citizen, i.e., his claim to be actively engaged in the political realm or, in other words, his claim to political action. Here Kant adds a qualification. Not everyone has such a right of political action; only he who is "his own master (suiiuris)"—that is to say, only he who "has some sort of property." In a footnote to this definition Kant distinguishes two kinds of activity and two corresponding types of actors. The distinction goes back to the ancient European division of all the things men do into "acting" proper (the Greek prattein, the Latin agere) and "making" (the Greek poiein, the Latin facere). Kant's resumption of this old distinction—whose ontological interpretation has been demonstrated chiefly by Aristotle in Nicomachian Ethics—has two characteristics: first, the distinction is made to bear fruit in a political respect only, and second, the traditional order of rank, in which acting is accorded primacy over making, seems to have been reversed by Kant. For as he expounds the distinction, an active part in the existence of the state can be claimed only by one who knows how to produce a work (opus) that he can dispose of by conveying title to another—in other words, only the maker, whom Kant calls an artifex. He alone is a self-determining member of the state (citoyen). Not entitled to active participation in political existence, on the other hand, is he whose activities do not produce any work that he might dispose of, and who therefore owns nothing but the use of his faculties, which he might grant to another. His sole exclusive property is the activity of living, and in Kantian usage a man engaged in this activity alone is called operarius. The term that has since come to prevail as designating such a man is "proletarian." In the horizon of the Kantian distinction, such a man cannot begin to act because he is always already engaged in the pure activity of living—an activity in which there is no such thing as a true start, a new beginning.

The reason why the proletarian operarii are excluded from political activity is evident from the following. It does not lie in a mythical power of the property that springs as a work from the producing activity; it lies in its political function. The man whose producing activity can "make" him the owner of a disposable thing is therefore not forced to exhaust himself in the pure use of his faculties, in the sheer activity of "making his living." He is free from the pure activity of keeping himself alive, free for an existence as a political actor. If it did seem initially as though the Kantian distinction of artifex and operarius implied a revaluation of the primacy of acting over making, an interpretation of the political function of the property produced in making shows that Kant actually preserves that primacy. The making of works that can be turned into property outranks the pure activity of living—but it does not have that supremacy for itself, only with respect to political activity. Freedom of self-determining political action rests upon freedom from the pure activity of living.

What Kant failed to consider in analyzing the formal moments of the concept of politics is the rise in the 19th century of an immense class of operarii, i.e., of men for whom active participation in political action was impossible although their active work produced things that were precisely not their property.

This is the problem envisioned by Rosa Luxemburg when she distinguishes the real substance of democracy from its formal side, when she wants the political and economic realms viewed as interacting. Her basic political question is this: How, in a state of formal democracy, can all men—including those barred from acting by the conditions of capitalism—be enabled to participate in political action? This question is to be posed under any system that recognizes the formality of democracy without realizing it substantially, i.e., in action. It is thus to be posed also in the bureaucratic regimes that are formally democratically structured without having a democratic substance. The explosive power of Rosa Luxemburg's ideas for these systems is evident.

At bottom, the cardinal question of Rosa Luxemburg's political thought is how democracy—understood as the self-determining activity of all—can be realized, not only in line with the concept, but by the activity of all. The question arises whenever all men are not capable of and admitted to this activity, when there is democracy only according to the formal concept, but not in what all men really do and are permitted to do. It is worth noting that in this view the problem of the realization of democracy emerges everywhere and in all political systems.

V

What Rosa Luxemburg calls revolution is an activity of those whom the sheer facts of proletarian life—in other words, economic reasons—keep from participating actively in the determination of their fate. It is the activity in which they set out to win this participation. Such a view of the nature of revolution excludes the assumption that revolution is a means to quite another end. And it is equally out of the question, then, to see the essence of revolution in violence or in a pure shift of power according to plans laid by a centralized collective will.

Instead, Rosa Luxemburg's concept—which characterizes revolution as the conquest of a share in self-determining action—corresponds completely to the modem non-Marxist concept. The classic formula for it was found by Maximilien Robespierre. In his speech "On the principles of revolutionary government," delivered before the Convention on 5 Nivôse An II (12-25-1793), Robespierre defined the essence of revolution as follows:

Le but du gouvernement constitutionel est de conserver la Republique; celui du gouvernement re'volutionaire de la fonder.… Le gouvernement revolutionaire a besoin d'une activitie extraordinaire.… II est soumis à des regles moins uniformes et moins rigoureuses, parce que les circonstances ou il se trouve sont orageuses et mobiles, et surtout parce qu 'il est forcé à déployer sans cesse des ressources nouvelles et rapides, pour les dangers nouveaux et pressants. Le gouvernement constitutionel s'occupe principalement de la liberté civile; et le gouvernement ré'volutionaire, de la liberté publique.

Revolution is here defined with the aid of the two terms used by Cicero to define political action: fonder, to found (the Latin condere), and conserver, to maintain (the Latin conservare). The political condition to be brought about by the founding action is what Robespierre calls Republique. In the political language of the eighteenth century, in the Federalist Papers as well as in Kant's writings, "Republic" is the word for the realm of the free and public action of all men. In another speech, "On the principles of political morality," of 17 Pluviose An II (2-5-1794), in which he celebrates the secular character of revolution, Robespierre identifies that realm with democracy, thereby establishing a revolutionary tradition for the present use of this term.

Le… gouvernement dé'mocratique ou ré'publicain: ces deux mots sont synonymes, malgre les abus de langage vulgaire.… La démocratie est un état où lepeuple souverain, guidé par des lois qui sont son ouvrage, fait par lui-même tout ce qu'il peut bien faire, et par des délégués tout ce qu'il ne peut faire lui-même.

The mission and the goal of revolution is to found the democratic republic as the realm of free action by all men (fonder la republique); but a republic once founded can do no more than maintain this realm of freedom (conserver la republique). Liberation to freedom, and being liberated in freedom—this is the nature of political action in its dual form of actively founding and actively maintaining freedom. But Robespierre—wrongly, in my judgment—equates the two moments of political action with a distinction equally essential to the realm of that action. Constrained by the modern concept of the state, he identifies the moment of fonder with liberte politique, and the moment of conserver with (an apolitical) liberte civile, thus ignoring the eminently political character which the second moment has also. What this means is that with respect to the second moment he defines freedom only formally, not substantially.

In our context it is important that Robespierre's description of revolutionary action characterizes this as an "extraordinary activity." Revolutionary action is extraordinary because it is the prototype of political action as opposed to all ordinary doings—which are mere behavior. It is therefore rare, because it requires the courageous resolution to start something new. The rules it follows are less uniform and strict than those which govern pure behavior. Unlike, indeed in contrast to, mere behavior—which is subject to norms of behavioral biology, depth psychology, sociology, or economics, is uniform and accordingly fixed and confined—politically revolutionary action is free from these norms and restrictions, is diverse and unlimited. The circumstances it creates and in which it moves are precisely not fixed, confined, and restricted as are the ones of behavior; they are determined by action and counteraction alone. In these circumstances—in the world of acting and speaking human beings, the world that constitutes itself by human action and speech—the individual actor can incessantly, and sometimes with astonishing rapidity, find new fonts of his action in the action of those who join him in counteracting the ever-present danger of a suppression of this free action that has only one goal: to keep restoring its own possibility as free action. This is the condere and the fonder, the founding and establishing of freedom.

As a matter of fact, revolutionary action and political action are identical. Just as revolutionary action with the characteristics we have shown must be regarded as political action pure and simple, so is political action in itself revolutionary. But if revolutionary action is identical with political action, the consequence for all those concerned with free, public, common, and thus political action can only be to exert every effort to make revolutionary action last, because it is political action. Then the point of revolutionary activity—which is political action—can only be to act in freedom, time and again; or, put another way, to act so that free action will be possible time and again. This is the other moment of free action, the moment of conservare and of conserver.

VI

In Rosa Luxemburg's theory of revolution we reencounter the two moments stressed by our preceding analysis of revolutionary activity. The revolutionary act of conquering a share in active self-determination, the moment of condere and fonder, appears—in line with its socialist rudiment—in the phenomenon of the mass strike. The mass strike is that act, that sequence of attitudes, whereby those hitherto not participating in free self-determination conquer that participation (the metexein or koinonein arxus, as the political realm is defined by Aristotle). Rosa Luxemburg never tires of pointing out that the mass strike is never a one-time operation; it always covers an entire period. Revolutions are not made like things, at one stroke, but over a period of time in which the revolutionary activity must never cease, lest the action vanish in a result that lies outside the action.

The treatise Massenstreik, Partei und Gewerkschaften of 1906 is devoted to an analysis of the phenomenon of the mass strike. It seeks to circumscribe the consequences of the Russian revolution of 1905-06 for revolutionary action, i.e., it starts out from real action, not from general theories on revolutionary practice. To Rosa Luxemburg, the mass strike is "the way of motion of the proletarian mass, the phenomenal form of the proletarian struggle in a revolution." For an understanding of her concept of revolution it is important to clarify the real meaning of the term "mass." It has by no means the negative aspect it has assumed in current usage. Quite unlike Lenin—to whose mind the masses are nothing but the remnants of the nonproletarian classes, degraded into means of seizing power after their class structure has been smashed—Rosa Luxemburg uses the term in the original sense of the Roman populus, i.e., the political and legal community of men. The state of such a political-legal community of acting individuals has not even been achieved yet by the proletariat, in which Rosa Luxemburg self-evidently sees the overwhelming majority of all men who have become, and have been rendered, incapable of free action by the conditions of capitalism. Rather, it is precisely the mass strike, the revolutionary activity, that lead the proletariat to become a mass.

Before it can carry out any direct political action as a mass, however, the proletariat must gather itself into a mass, and to this end it must first of all walk out of plants and workshops, out of foundries and shafts; it must overcome the fragmentation and pulverization to which it is condemned under the daily yoke of capital. The mass strike is thus the first, natural, impulsive form of any great revolutionary operation by the proletariat, and the more predominantly industrial the form of the social economy, the more preeminent the proletarian role in the revolution, the more highly developed the antithesis between labor and capital, the more powerful and decisive are the mass strikes bound to become. In the revolution of today, the previous main form of bourgeois revolution—the battle of the barricades, the open clash with the armed forces of the state—is only an extreme point, only a moment in the entire process of the proletarian mass struggle.

To Rosa Luxemburg, mass strike and revolution are "inseparable."

The community of free men is established by acting in freedom, by the very moment we characterized as condere and fonder. Hence Rosa Luxemburg's basic thesis: "The revolution produces the mass strike." Revolution means to become active; it is the start of free action on the part of those who were not freely active before, because the conditions of capitalism excluded them from activity. And in accordance with those conditions this onset of activity occurs in an interaction of economic and political moments, i.e., as a mass strike.

The economic struggle is the guideline from one political node to the other; the political struggle is the periodic fertilization of the soil for the economic struggle. Cause and effect change places here all the time, and so the economic and political moments, far from being neatly parted or even mutually exclusive, as the pedantic schema would have it, are in the mass strike period merely two intertwined sides of the proletarian class struggle in Russia. And their unity is the mass strike. When pilpulistic theoreticians try to get at the 'pure political mass strike' by submitting the mass strike to artificial logical dissection, the outcome of this dissection as of any other will simply be the death of the phenomenon, not a knowledge of its living essence.

The characteristics of revolutionary activity which Rosa Luxemburg expounds correspond exactly to the ones attributed to it by Robespierre.

The mass strike … is so protean a phenomenon that all the phases of political and economic struggle, all the stages and moments of the revolution are reflected in it. Its applicability, its effectiveness, the moments of its origin—all are constantly changing. It suddenly opens broad new revolutionary vistas where the revolution seemed already at a dead end, and it fails where you believe you can count on it with assurance. Now it is flooding the empire like a tidal wave, now splitting up into a giant web of rivulets, now welling from the subsoil like a new spring, now draining entirely into the ground. Political and economic strikes, mass strikes and partial strikes, demonstration strikes and combat strikes, general strikes in single industries and general strikes in single cities, quiet wage struggles and street fights on the barricades—all this runs athwart and alongside each other, crisscrossing and intertwining; it is a perpetually mobile, changing sea of phenomena. And the law that governs the motion of these phenomena becomes clear: it does not lie in the mass strike itself, not in its technical peculiarities, but in the political and social relation of forces in the revolution. The mass strike is merely the form of the revolutionary struggle, and every shift in the relation of the striking forces, in the evolution of parties and the division of classes, in the position of the counter-revolution—all this will instantly influence the strike action in a thousand invisible, scarcely controllable ways. Yet the strike action itself hardly ever ceases. It changes only its forms, its extent, its effect. It is the living heartbeat of the revolution and at the same time its most powerful driving wheel.

And precisely these characteristics make it impossible for revolutionary activity to be comprehended technically, as by Lenin—as something made according to plan and resolved upon by a central will. It is the element of fonder, of the start of action in freedom, that makes out the essence of revolution as conceived by Rosa Luxemburg. It is to this she gave the name which ever since Kant has marked all action in freedom: the name of spontaneity.

Kant identifies spontaneity with freedom, since "freedom is …a faculty to start a condition, and thus a series of the consequences of that condition." He calls this faculty of free action spontaneity, for what begins by itself (sponte sua) has the character of spontaneity. The element of starting to establish freedom in and by action is the essential characteristic Rosa Luxemburg underscores in revolution. And it is this characteristic that makes it impossible to take revolution for the plannable product of a collective will: "The element of spontaneity plays so preeminent a role in mass strikes … because revolutions will not be tutored." i.e., because revolution is a course of action, not a production process to be computerized. What Rosa Luxemburg means by the element of spontaneity—an element that has always been and will continue to be viewed with distrust by all the orthodox—is the moment of starting to act, the condere and fonder that is the essence of all action.

VII

In her socialist theory of revolution, Rosa Luxemburg has not only expounded the first moment of revolutionary action, the condere and fonder, she also preserved the second moment, the conservare and conserver, in its political sense, a sense lost by Robespierre. In her second great controversy with Lenin, in the treatise The Russian Revolution of 1918, Rosa Luxemburg—for all her continuing admiration of the Russian Bolsheviki for having started and advanced the revolution of 1917—sharply condemned the abolition of democracy by Lenin and Trotsky. This part of the treatise may be cited as her attempt to present her principles of the second moment of revolutionary action. What applies to the first moment must also apply to the second. Thus Rosa Luxemburg on the connection of both: Just as free exposure to the rays of the sun is the most effective, cleansing, and healing remedy against infections and germs of disease, so the only healing and cleansing sun is the revolution itself and its renovating principle, the intellectual life it evokes, the activity and self-responsibility of the masses—in other words, the most widespread political freedom as its form.

Just as the realm of a community of free men can be founded only if they will unite for spontaneous action in freedom, it can be maintained only if all of them will spontaneously act in freedom. The freedom of action is the sole determining principle of both moments. One things with which Rosa Luxemburg reproaches Trotsky (and Lenin) is to have seen the two moments precisely not as belonging together:

Thanks to the open and immediate struggle for the power of government, the working masses accumulate a great deal of political experience in short order and develop swiftly from step to step. Here Trotsky refutes himself and his own friends in the party. Precisely because this is true, their suppression of public life has stopped up the font of political experience and the rise in development. Or else one would have to assume that experience and development were possible until the Bolsheviki seized power, had then reached their degree, and became superfluous thereafter.

In essence, this rebuke shows Rosa Luxemburg's complete acceptance of the fact that Trotsky and Lenin realized the first moment of revolution (whether she was right or wrong in this is quite another question that could be clarified only by analyzing Trotsky's and, above all, Lenin's relation to the Soviets). To her they were revolutionaries who made a new start. About this moment she can say explicitly: "And in this sense the future belongs everywhere to 'Bolshevism.' " But the second moment of revolutionary activity, the maintenance of the newly established freedom, is perishing under them, due to their wrong course of action, and that presumably because their views of action came entirely from a theory tied to modem political philosophy, a theory that never gets down to action itself. In this context she expressly questions Lenin's basic thesis—taken from Marx, but implied from the outset in the modern state concept—that the state and the politics identified with the state are nothing but instrumentalities of oppression and class rule. That her eminent understanding of the nature of action makes such a thesis absolutely unacceptable to Rosa Luxemburg is a matter of course.

The realm of the freedom of all, founded by the spontaneous action of all and maintained by the active spontaneity of all—this is what she calls "socialist democracy." It has none of the pure formality attached to bourgeois democracy. Because her socialist democracy is simply active participation by the masses in political life, it is not something to be introduced only after a socialist transformation of the economic structure—a gift, as it were, from a "handful of socialist dictators." This would mean the abolition of democracy. "The historic task of the proletariat, when it comes to power, is to replace bourgeois democracy with a socialist democracy, not to abolish all democracy." It is Rosa Luxemburg's view that in a formal, bourgeois democracy the masses of the people remain excluded from active participation in political action because the conditions of capitalism prevent them from engaging in anything but the satisfaction of their vital needs, i.e., in pure survival. To her mind, therefore, formal democracy and capitalism are identical:

We always distinguish the social core from the political form of bourgeois democracy; we always uncovered the bitter core of social inequality and unfreedom under the sweet shell of formal equality and freedom—not in order to reject these, but to spur the working class not to be content with the shell and rather to seize political power so as to fill the shell with a new social content.

The critique of Trotsky and Lenin contains an analysis of the second moment of revolutionary activity, and the analysis is presented under the Marxist formula of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Initially, that idiom—canonized and fetishized by Marx's letter to J. Weydemeyer of March 5, 1852—denotes nothing but the takeover and use of power by the proletarians (presented as the majority) as against the capitalists and their minions (declared to be the minority) for the purpose of establishing the realm of freedom. Marx and Engels (and Lenin) used the concept of the proletarian dictatorship to characterize the interim between the proletariat's conquest of political power and the definitive abolition of the realm of politics and of the state as a stage that is still political, i.e., based on force. More crucial to Rosa Luxemburg, however, is another moment, one also to be found in Marx and Engels. They say in the Communist Manifesto: "The proletarian movement is the independent movement of the vast majority in the interest of the vast majority." We are by no means about to analyze the sociological accuracy of that thesis, which Rosa Luxemburg accepts, of course, though with modifications. What concerns us, rather, is its political meaning.

The political relevance of the cliche of the majority dates back to the Abbe Sieyes, although it is unquestionably older (it comes from the medieval election law for such clearly defined electoral bodies as a college of monks, for example). In Sieyes treatise Qu 'est-ce que le Tiers Etat? the bourgeoisie's pursuit of political power is led to victory by the compelling argument that the bourgeois far exceed the nobles and clerics in number, and that the nation is accordingly present in the representatives of the bourgeoisie. The principle is stated as follows: "II est constant que, dans la representation nationale ordinaire et extraordinaire, Pinfluence ne peut etre qu 'un raison du nombre des totes qui ont droit d sefaire representer." By the way, the man who brought the platitude into the context of socialist thinking was none other than Gracchus Babeuf, who rebuked the Thermidorians for ruling in the name of a million Frenchmen against the twenty-four million plebeians of France.

The political meaning of the commonplace can be interpreted in two ways. The first interpretation—undoubtedly the one of Sieyes, of Babeuf, and also of Marx, starts out from the will, i.e., it is fundamentally Rousseauist even though Rousseau rejects the idea of a majority will (volonté de tous). The absolute unfeasibility, noted by Rousseau himself, of really basing the political existence of a state on the pure volonté générale led the Abbe Sieyes and all his successors to replace this volonte with that of the majority. And since that time it has always been the will of the majority—if only of a future majority—that was retroactively drawn upon to justify political and social action.

But the substitution of majority will for the volonté générale as the ultimate ground of political or social legitimacy could happen only because this retroactive justification corresponds to a political experience in which a principle quite different from the will is posited for political action. That principle is opinion. And if we base political action on opinion, this means from the outset that we are referring to the number of those who share, or can share, an opinion—i.e., to a possible majority opinion. It is startling to see how close Rosa Luxemburg comes here to the ideas of authors of the Federalist Papers of 1787, ideas she does not seem to have known at all. The reason for the correspondence is that like Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, Rosa Luxemburg does not start out from a political theory but from the experiences that can be gathered in action.

Nothing but experience can make corrections and can open new ways. Nothing but the uncurbed effervescence of life hits upon a thousand new forms and improvisations, illuminates creative powers, corrects all mistakes on its own. The public life of states with restricted freedom is so scant, so miserable, so schematical, so barren precisely because by the exclusion of democracy it locks itself off from the living sources of all intellectual wealth and progress.

The point of revolutionary activity is the constitution of the realm of freedom, which can be maintained only by continuing activity in freedom. For this reason, and since she by no means shares Lenin's and Trotsky's view of the derivative character of the realm of state and politics, Rosa Luxemburg clings stubbornly to the idea of "representatives of the people, chosen by the people in general elections," in other words, to representative democracy as the political constitution of those who act in freedom. The formula she found for this—"A backbone of Soviets as well as a constituent assembly and the universal franchise"—does not make her seem far removed from one of the American Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, who tirelessly calls for the institution of Soviet-type councils or "wards."

To Rosa Luxemburg, a representative democracy, one resting on the relationship of "electors and elected," remains the "most important democratic guarantee of a healthy public life and of political activity on the part of the working masses." In this context she makes an impressive presentation of Lenin's and Trotsky's continued adherence to the modern state concept which she considers obsolete, with its identifications of the political realm with violence and domination. She regards the Soviets as conceived to facilitate and to preserve the participation of all men in political freedom. They are to protect the representative body from the danger of detachment from those whose opinions it has to represent, so that "the living fluid of the popular mood will constantly water the representative bodies, permeate them, guide them." Political life remains alive only in the constant practice of public freedom. "The only way to a rebirth is the school of public life itself, the broadest, most unlimited democracy and public opinion." And as a matter of course, this means all those institutions in which alone opinions can make themselves publicly heard, so as to become politically effective. "On the other hand it is an obvious, undeniable fact that rule by broad masses of the people is quite unthinkable without a free and uninhibited press, without a life of unhampered association and assembly."

At bottom, this is exactly what Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America describes as "political associations." What is to unfold in the Soviets and in their link with the representative body is that political life "of the broadest publicity, with the most active, unimpeded participation of the masses of the people, in unrestricted democracy," which is "the source of political experiences" as well as "the vital element, the air" from and in which the political existence established by revolutionary action will be preserved and enhanced. Once founded, the freedom of all to act publicly is to be continued and preserved as all act publicly in freedom. Both the foundation and the continuing preservation of the freedom to act are basically identical, going back to one principle: to freedom, to the self-determining action of all. The revolution, conceived as the process of all men coming to be active to establish the freedom of all, is continued and realized as all are active in freedom.

Also part of this context is the famed and controversial formula: "Not to revolutionary tactics by way of a majority, but to a majority by way of revolutionary tactics." The point of this formula is to suggest that an opinion that will be politically relevant must be the product of revolutionary action. This opinion is generated by those who start to act and are joined by others in continuing and finishing what has started. Action, starting and continued, forms the opinion that can become the opinion of a majority; but one cannot wait for the formation from somewhere of a majority of opinions to start action. Rosa Luxemburg is no adherent of a merely formal democracy of majorities because such a democracy does not rest on an opinion produced by revolutionary action, i.e., will not lead all men to act freely at all.

In the Federalist Papers, James Madison stated the relation of power and opinion explicitly: "If it be true that all government rests on opinion, it is no less true that the strength of opinion in each individual, and its practical influence on his conduct, depend much on the number which he supposes to have entertained the same opinion." This still leaves open whether a majority opinion leads to the preservation of freedom or to its destruction. The whole political theory of the authors of the Federalist Papers serves to maintain a diversity of opinion, because this alone can keep the will of a majority from evolving into an elective despotism. What matters is not to destroy the freedom of minority opinion, because the minority must be preserved for a reconstruction of the political realm by uniting those who can share the same opinion. That is to say: the minority—and in the extreme case this is the individual human being—should be so protected from the threat of rule by the majority will that it remains capable of coalescing in a new majority opinion. In this sense the freedom of opinion, without which there can be no action, takes over the condere and the conservare of the freedom of political action.

To the authors of the Federalist Papers, the only form of government that might be up to the task is representative democracy, to which they—like Kant—give the name "Republic." The point of departure in basing political action on opinion is the fundamental political fact of human plurality, i.e., the fact that the world is not inhabited by man but by men, and that they must try by their actions to make a human world of it. The weakness of basing political action on the will, on the other hand, is that there the plurality of men proves an absolute obstacle to the will—because every will always seeks its realization only in unity with itself, in the "one will" of Thomas Hobbes or in the volonte generale of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. A view based on the will as the principle of political action—not as a moment in it, as by Aristotle—will therefore always posit the will of the majority as the only legitimate will. It must try to annihilate the minority's will, whereas the majority of opinion must seek to preserve the other, deviating opinion of the minority. From there alone is a new start of action possible at any time, once the political realm is no longer preserved in action.

The real reason why Rosa Luxemburg holds on to the people's representatives chosen in general elections and to their link with the Soviets is the basic principle she views as governing the entire political and social realm: the freedom of opinion, which she also calls "popular mood." "Freedom is always the dissenter's freedom only. Not because of a fanaticism of 'justice,' but because all the instructive, salutary, and purifying qualities of political freedom hang on this essential side of it, and because their effect fails when freedom becomes a 'privilege.' " The political freedom which the revolution is to found, which is established in the activity for which the masses gather, can be maintained only by this freedom to hold another opinion. Its result is the maintenance of freedom of action, "the active, unhampered, energetic political life of the broad masses of the people."

Nothing makes this clearer than the negation of the established and preserved free public action of all.

If all this falls by the wayside, what really remains … ? With the suppression of political life throughout the country, life in the Soviets too is bound to wane. Without general elections, unhampered freedom of press and assembly, a free struggle of opinions—without all that, life in every public institution withers and becomes a sham life in which the bureaucracy remains the only active element. Public life becomes gradually dormant as a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless idealism direct and govern; beneath them, the real guidance comes from a dozen eminent brains, and from time to time an elite of labor is summoned to meetings, to applaud the speeches of the leaders and to give unanimous consent to the resolutions submitted—what it all comes down to is cliquism.

If the freedom won in the action of all is not maintained by the free action of all, the established freedom perishes. It is as if its foundation had never occurred. Without the conservare and conserver, the condere and fonder has no consequences and becomes null and void. It is as if it had not happened at all.