SOURCE: "Freedom and Revolution: Rosa Luxemburg," in Revisionism: Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas, edited by Leopold Labedz, Frederick A. Praeger, 1962, pp. 55-66.

[Carsten is a German-born historian. In the following essay, he discusses Luxemburg's pamphlets in relation to the ideals of the German Social-Democratic party.]

Among the rather unimaginative and pedestrian leaders of the German Social-Democratic Party of the early twentieth century—who were occupied with the task of achieving better living conditions for the workers and passing high-sounding resolutions against the evils of bourgeois society (which did not oblige anybody to take any action)—one was entirely different: a fiery woman of Jewish-Polish origin, small and slender, slightly lame from a childhood disease, an orator who could sway the masses, a professional revolutionary who seemed to belong to the Russian world from which she came rather than to modern Germany. Rosa Luxemburg was born on March 5, 1871, in the small Polish town of Zamosc near Lublin into a fairly prosperous Jewish middle-class family. Her span of life coincided almost exactly with that of the German Empire which Bismarck had founded at Versailles a few weeks before her birth; its collapse in November 1918 she outlived only by some weeks. Her family sympathized with the aspirations of the Polish national movement, and at the age of sixteen Rosa Luxemburg joined an underground revolutionary socialist group called Proletariat and participated in its clandestine activities among the workers of Warsaw. In 1889, when threatened with arrest and imprisonment, she was smuggled out of Poland by her comrades and went to Zurüch, the centre of the Russian and Polish political émigrés. There she studied at the university and took part in the intense political and intellectual life of her fellow Socialists, in the heated discussion where the battles of the coming Russian revolution were fought out in advance.

Her political activities remained intimately connected with Poland. She was a co-founder of the Social-Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania in 1894 and a chief contributor to its paper published in Paris. She was opposed to the slogan of independence for Poland, which was advocated by another Polish Socialist party, the PPS; instead she advocated the overthrow of the Tsarist autocracy in alliance with the Russian working class as the primary task of the Polish revolutionary movement. She aimed at the establishment of a Russian democratic republic within which Poland would merely enjoy cultural autonomy. To Poland she returned during the revolution of 1905 to participate in the revolutionary struggle. There her party had become a mass party which issued papers and leaflets in several languages, organized trade unions and strikes, and co-operated closely with the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party. After a few months of great political activity, however, Rosa Luxemburg and her lifelong friend Leo Jogiches were arrested. She was kept in prison for four months, but was then released on account of her German nationality (she had contracted a pro forma marriage with a German comrade so as not to be hampered in her political work) and expelled from Poland, never to return.

It was in Germany that she made her home at the end of the nineteenth century; there she worked together with Karl Kautsky, the editor of the theoretical weekly of the German Social-Democrats, Die Neue Zeit, and the propounder and popularizer of Marxist theories. In the columns of this paper and at German Party congresses she crossed swords with Eduard Bernstein who had just published his articles on 'Problems of Socialism', emphasizing the evolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism and 'revising' orthodox Marxism in a Fabian sense. In the columns of Die Neue Zeit Rosa Luxemburg soon crossed swords with another redoubtable figure of the international socialist movement, V. I. Lenin, on the question of the organization of Russian Social-Democracy and the powers of the central committee of the Party, which showed that she was well aware of the dangers threatening the revolutionary movement from within. There too she commented vigorously on the Russian revolution of 1905 and discovered in it a new weapon of primary importance, the political mass strike, which she attempted to transfer to Germany. Her close association with Kautsky came to an end after some years during which she learned to distrust his Marxist jargon and to doubt the readiness of the Social-Democratic leaders to accompany their revolutionary words by similar deeds.

During the years preceding the outbreak of the First World War Rosa Luxemburg became the acknowledged theoretical leader of a left wing within the German Social-Democratic Party, whose adherents claimed that they were the only true heirs of Marx's revolutionary ardour. She also published her most important theoretical work, The Accumulation of Capital, in which she tried to demonstrate that capitalism could expand only so long as it had at its disposal non-capitalist, colonial markets: with their progressive absorption and their conversion to capitalism through the division of the world among the imperialist powers the system was bound to reach its 'final phase':

Imperialism is simultaneously a historical method of prolonging the existence of capitalism and the most certain means of putting an end to its existence in the shortest possible time. This does not imply that the final goal must be reached inevitably and mechanically. Yet already the tendency towards this final limit of capitalist development expresses itself in forms which will make the last phase of capitalism a period of catastrophes.

She maintained in conclusion that

the more capital, through militarism, in the world at large as well as at home, liquidates the non-capitalist strata and depresses the living conditions of all working people, the more does the daily history of capital accumulation in the world become a continuous chain of political and social catastrophes and convulsions which, together with the periodic economic catastrophes in the form of crises, will make the continuation of capital accumulation impossible … even before capitalism has reached the natural, self-created barriers of its economic development.

In Rosa Luxemburg's opinion capitalism was doomed and its final crisis was inevitable: a point on which she differed from Lenin, whose Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, written a few years later, contained certain analogies with her analysis of imperialism but avoided any definite pronouncement on the "inevitability" of capitalist collapse.

It is not, however, on economic theories such as these that Rosa Luxemburg's fame as a socialist writer rests. This is, above all, due to her uncompromising stand against war and militarism. In February 1914 she was arrested and sentenced to twelve months imprisonment on a charge of inciting soldiers to mutiny because she had declared publicly: 'if they expect us to murder our French or other foreign brothers, then let us tell them: "No, under no circumstances!" ' At the outbreak of war in August 1914 the German Social-Democratic Party—like most other socialist parties—decided to support the fatherland and to grant the war credits demanded by the government; this decision was opposed only by a small minority in the party caucus and by not a single deputy at the decisive vote in the Reichstag on August 4th. Rosa Luxemburg from the outside hotly attacked this policy and never forgave the party's leaders for their betrayal of the ideals to which they had once subscribed:

With August 4, 1914, official German Social-Democracy and with it the International have miserably collapsed. Everything that we have preached to the people for fifty years, that we have proclaimed as our most sacred principles, that we have propounded innumerable times in speechds, pamphlets, newspapers, and leaflets, has suddenly become empty talk. The party of the international proletarian class struggle has suddenly been transformed as by an evil spell into a national liberal party; our strong organizations, of which we have been so proud, have proved to be totally powerless; and instead of the esteemed and feared deadly enemies of bourgeois society we are now the rightly despised tools of our mortal enemies, the imperialist bourgeoisie, without a will of our own. In other countries more or less the same breakdown of socialism has occurred, and the proud old cry: 'Working men of all countries, unite!' has been changed on the battlefields into: 'Working men of all countries, slit each other's throats!'

Never in world history has a political party become bankrupt so miserably, never has a proud ideal been betrayed so shamefully.

She explained why German Social-Democracy was able to change its policy so quickly and successfully, without encountering any major opposition inside the party:

It was precisely the powerful organization, the much-lauded discipline of German Social-Democracy, which proved their worth in that the whole organism of four millions allowed itself to be turned round within twenty-four hours at the behest of a handful of parliamentarians and let itself be joined to a structure, the storming of which had been its lifelong aim… Marx, Engels, and Lassalle, Liebknecht, Bebel, and Singer educated the German working class so that Hindenburg can lead it. The better the education, the organization, the famous discipline, the building-up of trade unions and party press is in Germany than it is in France, the more effective is the war effort of German Social-Democracy in comparison with that of the French.

Soon Rosa Luxemburg and her circle of friends, intellectuals like herself, began to organize opposition to the war and to issue clandestine anti-war leaflets, signed with the pen-name of Spartacus: hence their group came to be known as Spartakusbund (Spartacus League). Thus they remained faithful to the resolution that had been voted for the first time by the Congress of the Socialist International at Stuttgart in 1907 at the suggestion of Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and Martov:

If the outbreak of war threatens, the workers and their parliamentary deputies in the countries in question are obliged to do everything to prevent the outbreak of war by suitable means.… If war should nevertheless break out, they are obliged to work for its speedy termination and to strive with all their might to use the economic and political crisis created by the war for the mobilization of the people and thus to hasten the overthrow of capitalist class rule.

Their underground activities soon landed most of the leaders of the Spartacus League in prison. Rosa Luxemburg was arrested in February 1915 and, with the exception of only a few months, spent the remaining years of the war in various German prisons—until she was freed by the revolution of November 1918. In prison she wrote her most eloquent denunciation of the war, in which she clearly established the responsibility of the German Imperial government because the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia had been issued with its consent, because it had assured Austria in advance of German support in case of war, and because it had given Austria 'an entirely free hand in its action against Serbia'. The Crisis of Social-Democracy, written under the pen-name of Junius, bitterly condemned the war and even more bitterly condemned the policy of the German Social-Democrats:

This world war is a relapse into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the destruction of civilization—sporadically during a modern war, and finally if the period of world wars which has now started should continue without hindrance to the last sequence. We are today faced with the choice, exactly as Frederick Engels predicted forty years ago: either the triumph of imperialism and decline of all civilization, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, one vast cemetery; or the victory of socialism, that is the conscious fight of the international working class against imperialism and its method: war.…

Yes, the Social-Democrats are obliged to defend their country during a great historical crisis; and this constitutes a grave guilt on the part of the Social-Democratic Reichstag fraction, that it declared solemnly on August 4, 1914: 'We do not desert the fatherland in the hour of danger'; but it denied its own words at the same moment, for it has forsaken the fatherland in the hour of its greatest peril. The first duty towards the fatherland in that hour was to show it the real background of this imperialist war; to tear away the tissue of patriotic and diplomatic lies which surrounded this attack on the fatherland; to proclaim loudly and clearly that for the German people victory or defeat in this war is equally disastrous; to resist with all force the muzzling of the fatherland by the state of siege … finally, to oppose the imperialist war aims of the preservation of Austria and Turkey—that is of reaction in Europe and in Germany—by the old truly national programme of the patriots and democrats of 1848, the programme of Marx, Engels, and Lassalle: by the slogan of the united, great German republic. That is the banner that should have been raised, a banner that would have been truly national, truly liberal and in conformity with the best traditions of Germany, as well as of the international class policy of the working class.

Rosa Luxemburg's voice became the symbol of opposition to the war, but it remained a cry in the wilderness. Although many Germans became war-weary on account of mounting casualties and increasing hunger, the Spartacus League never mustered more than a few hundred members, and the non-revolutionary, pacifist Independent Social-Democratic Party became the mass opposition party in the later years of the war. Although the Spartacists joined this party, its leaders were men far removed from Rosa Luxemburg's revolutionary idealism, men like her old enemies Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky. Even after the revolution of 1918 it was the Independent Social-Democratic Party which became the mass party of the radicalized section of the German working class; while the newly founded German Communist Party, the successor of the Spartacus League, remained a small sect.

It was in prison, too, that news reached Rosa Luxemburg first of the February and then of the October revolution in Russia; her revolutionary ideals seemed at last to have reached the realm of reality, if not in Germany then at least in Russia. And it was in prison too that she wrote what must remain the most important testimony to her independence of spirit, a trenchant criticism of Lenin's policy after the October revolution. As early as 1904, at the same time and for the same reasons as George Plekhanov, she had criticized Lenin for his advocacy of

a ruthless centralism, the chief principles of which are on the one hand the sharp distinction and separation of the organized groups of the avowed and active revolutionaries from the surrounding, if unorganized, yet revolutionary active circles, and on the other hand the strict discipline and the direct, decisive intervention of the central authority in all activities of the local party groups. It is sufficient to remark that according to this conception the central committee is authorized to organize all local committees of the party, therefore also empowered to decide upon the personal composition of each Russian local organization, from Geneva and Liege to Tomsk and Irkutsk, to impose upon them its own local rules, to dissolve them altogether by decree and to create them anew, and thus finally to influence indirectly even the composition of the highest party organ, the party congress. Thus the central committee appears as the real active nucleus of the party and all other organizations merely as its executive tools.

Against Lenin's formula that the revolutionary Social-Democrat was nothing but 'a Jacobin who was inseparably linked with the organization of the class-conscious proletariat', Rosa Luxemburg emphasized that it was in a conspiratorial organization of the type created by Blanqui that tactics and activity were worked out in advance, according to a fixed plan, that its active members were but the executive organs of a higher will which was formed outside their sphere of action, and blindly subordinated to a central authority which possessed absolute powers. In her opinion, the conditions of Social-Democratic action were entirely different,

not based on blind obedience, nor on the mechanical subordination of the party militants to a central authority; and it is equally out of the question to erect an absolute partition between the nucleus of the class-conscious proletariat which is already organized in firm party cadres, and the surrounding sections which are already engaged in the class struggle and are being drawn into the process of class education.

According to her, Lenin's ideas amounted to

a mechanical transfer of the organizational principles of the Blanquist movement of conspirators into the Social-Democratic movement of the masses of the workers.

Social-Democracy was not 'linked,' with the organization of the class-conscious workers, but was the proper movement of the working class, so that Social-Democratic centralism had to be of an entirely different quality from that of Blanqui. Local organizations had to have sufficient elbow-room so that they could deploy their initiative and make use of the existing opportunities to further the struggle; while the ultra-centralism advocated by Lenin was designed to control, channel, and regiment the activity of the party.

Thus Rosa Luxemburg realized at a very early stage the dangers inherent in the Bolshevik type of organization; but this did not prevent her from co-operating with Lenin during later years and from welcoming the Russian revolution as 'the most tremendous fact of the world war.' Her criticisms of Lenin's policy after the October revolution were above all directed against his agrarian policy and against the anti-democratic, dictatorial tendencies inherent in Bolshevism. Lenin, at the time of the October revolution, had taken over the agrarian programme of a non-Marxist party, the Social Revolutionaries, which sanctioned the division of the expropriated estates of the nobility among the peasants and created a strong class of peasant proprietors. Rosa Luxemburg predicted that this policy would

create for socialism a new and powerful class of enemies in the countryside, whose opposition will be much more dangerous and tenacious than that of the noble landlords had ever been

and that

an enormously enlarged and strong mass of peasant proprietors will defend their newly acquired property tooth and nail against all socialist attacks. Now the question of a future socialization of agriculture, and of production in Russia in general, has become an issue and an object of a struggle between the urban workers and the peasants.

How right she was the years of Stalin's forced collectivization were to show; but she did not consider whether, in the conditions of 1917, Lenin, if he wanted to seize and to retain power, had any alternative but to sanction occupation of the land by the peasants, which was proceeding spontaneously and independently of his orders or wishes. On this point she was more orthodox than Lenin.

Far more weighty was Rosa Luxemburg's criticism of the antidemocratic policy of Lenin and Trotsky, of their suppression of free political life, of their establishment of a dictatorship not of the masses, but over the masses. She declared quite unequivocally that

It is an obvious and indisputable fact that without a free and uncensored press, without the untrammelled activity of associations and meetings, the rule of the broad masses of the people is unthinkable.

And she prophesied correctly that

with the suppression of political life in the whole country the vitality of the Soviets too is bound to deteriorate progressively. Without general elections, without complete freedom of the press and of meetings, without freedom of discussion, life in every public institution becomes a sham in which bureaucracy alone remains active. Nothing can escape the working of this law. Public life gradually disappears; a few dozen extremely energetic and highly idealistic party leaders direct and govern; among them in reality a dozen outstanding leaders rule, and the elite of the working class is summoned to a meeting from time to time to applaud the speeches of the leaders and to adopt unanimously resolutions put to them; au fond this is the rule of a clique—a dictatorship it is true, but not the dictatorship of the proletariat, but of handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense.

Rosa Luxemburg had not become an adherent of 'bourgeois democracy', nor was she against dictatorship. She stood on the platform on which Marx had stood in 1848; dictatorship of the broad masses of the people was to her the same as revolutionary democracy, a dictatorship against the small minority of capitalists and landlords, but not against the people:

Dictatorship, certainly! But dictatorship means the way in which democracy is used, not its abolition; it means energetic, resolute interference with the acquired rights and economic conditions of bourgeois society, without which there can be no question of a socialist revolution. But this dictatorship must be the work of the class, and not of a small, leading minority in the name of the class; i.e. it must originate from the continuous active participation of the masses, must be directly influenced by them, must be subordinate to the control of the whole people, and must be borne by the increasing political education of the masses.

These masses must participate actively in the political life and in the shaping of the new order, 'otherwise socialism will be decreed and imposed from above by a dozen intellectuals.'

The masses, however, cannot acquire political education and experience without political freedom: it is here that Rosa Luxemburg realized the deep gulf which separated her libertarian socialism from totalitarian socialism:

Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party—however numerous they may be—that is not freedom. Freedom is always freedom for the man who thinks differently.

It is proof of her political genius that she could write these words a few months after the inauguration of the Bolshevik dictatorship. The essay was not published in her lifetime, however, but only some years after her death by her pupil Paul Levi (who succeeded her in the leadership of the German Communist Party) after he had broken with Moscow.

The German revolution of November 1918 freed Rosa Luxemburg from prison. She spent the remaining few weeks of her life in feverish activity, exhorting the masses to revolutionary action, pouring scorn over the moderate Social-Democratic leaders who suddenly found themselves in power, writing numerous articles for the communist paper, Die Rote Fahne, which she edited together with Karl Liebknecht. In contrast with the majority of communists, she considered it necessary to participate in the elections to the German National Assembly which were to take place in January 1919; but she did so for reasons entirely at variance with those of the large mass of German socialists, who put their faith in the introduction of parliamentary democracy, and not in the continuation of violent revolution. She wanted to use parliament as a revolutionary platform, as a means of furthering the cause of revolution:

Now we stand in the midst of the revolution, and the National Assembly is a counterrevolutionary fortress which has been erected against the revolutionary proletariat. It is thus essential to besiege and to reduce this fortress. To mobilize the masses against the National Assembly and to summon them to battle, for this the elections and the platform of the National Assembly must be used.

It is necessary to participate in the elections, not in order to pass laws together with the bourgeoisie and its mercenaries, but to chase the bourgeoisie and its partisans out of the temple, to storm the fortress of the counter-revolution and above it to hoist victoriously the flag of the proletarian revolution. To do this a majority in the National Assembly would be required? That only those believe who render homage to parliamentary cretinism, who want to decide upon revolution and socialism through parliamentary majorities. It is not the parliamentary majority inside which decides the fate of the National Assembly itself, but the working masses outside in the factories and in the streets.…

The elections and the platform of this counterrevolutionary parliament must become a means to educate, rally and mobilize the revolutionary masses, a step in the struggle for the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship.

Although the masses of the German workers proved more than reluctant to follow the communist lead, Rosa Luxemburg never lost her faith in them. The day before she was murdered by counter-revolutionary thugs, on January 15, 1919, she wrote in her last article, which contained an appraisal of the attempted seizure of power by the extreme left in Berlin, the so-called Spartacist rising:

The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which will be built the final victory of the revolution. The masses have stood the test; they have made out of this 'defeat' one link in the chain of historical defeats which constitute the pride and the power of international socialism. And this is why out of this 'defeat' victory will be born … Tomorrow already the revolution will arise again in shining armour and will frighten you with her trumpet-call: I was, I am, I shall be!

The course of the German revolution was to show how unjustified her faith in the masses and her revolutionary optimism had been, and when the masses in Germany moved they moved in a direction totally different from that which she had so confidently predicted.

A few weeks before Rosa Luxemburg was murdered, the German Communist Party was founded in Berlin. In its programme, published in December 1918, Rosa Luxemburg once more gave expression to the ideas which had inspired her criticism of Lenin's policy after the October revolution, to her clear refutation of the rule of a minority over the working class and of all putschist tactics (which so tragically came to a head in the Spartacist rising of January 1919):

The proletarian revolution requires no terror to achieve its aims, it hates and despises murder.… It is no desperate attempt of a minority to fashion the world according to its own ideals, but the action of the many millions of the people, which is called upon to fulfil its historical mission and to transform historical necessity into reality … The Spartacus League is not a party which wants to seize power over the working class or through the working class.…

The Spartacus League will never seize power unless it be through the clear, positive wish of the large majority of the working masses in Germany, never otherwise than on the basis of their conscious approval of the views, aims and political methods of the Spartacus League.… Its victory stands not at the beginning, but at the end of the revolution: it is identical with the victory of the many millions of socialist workers.

It was a tragedy, not only for itself, that the new party did not heed this advice of its founder; throughout its history it remained devoted to putschist tactics, and when it finally came to power it did so as a clique ruling over the workers and maintained in power by the bayonets of a foreign army.

In the new party programme Rosa Luxemburg also emphasized what in her opinion constituted the essential features of socialism:

The essence of a socialist society consists in this, that the great working mass ceases to be a regimented mass, but lives and directs the whole political and economic life in conscious and free self-determination.…

The proletarian masses must learn to become, instead of mere machines employed by the capitalists in the process of production, the thinking, free, and active directors of this process. They must acquire the sense of responsibility of active members of the community which is the sole owner of all social wealth. They must develop zeal without the employer's whip, highest productivity without capitalist drivers, discipline without a yoke, and order without regimentation. Highest idealism in the interest of the community, strictest self-discipline, a true civic spirit of the masses, these constitute the moral basis of a socialist society.

It is in ideas such as these, in her searching criticism of the conceptions of Lenin, in her emphasis on the moral and democratic basis of socialism that the lasting value of Rosa Luxemburg's thought can be found. Her theory of the inevitable collapse of capitalism, her blind faith in the masses and in revolution as such, her vast optimism as to the future of socialism have been disproved by events which she did not live to see. Yet enough remains to make her one of the outstanding exponents of modern socialist thought. It is no accident that she has been classified as a heretic in Eastern Europe and that the only recent edition of her writings omits all that is truly important among them. For Rosa Luxemburg, socialism and freedom were inseparable: those who have abolished freedom have no use for her ideas.