SOURCE: An introduction to Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, edited by Mary-Alice Waters, Pathfinder Press, Inc., 1970, pp. 1-32.

[Waters is a Philippine-born American author and editor who specializes in feminist-socialist issues. In the following essay, she argues that Luxemburg's criticism of more famous Marxists does not make her anti-communist, as some of her detractors believe.]

ROSA LUXEMBURG'S PLACE IN HISTORY

Rosa Luxemburg was destined to be one of the most controversial figures in the history of the international socialist movement, and her rightful place of honor among the great revolutionary Marxists has often been denied her. Her detractors have come from every side, and have used virtually every means of slander and distortion to discredit her, to picture her as the opposite of the revolutionary she was.

The ruling class, of course—whether American, German, Japanese, Mexican, or any other stripe—has had no interest in telling the truth about Rosa Luxemburg. They are more than willing to see her revolutionary heritage smeared and buried. But Luxemburg's detractors have come from sources within the traditional left-wing movement as well.

The first major category of her defamers are those who have tried to turn her into an opponent of the Russian Revolution, to make her a proponent of some special school of "democratic" socialism as opposed to the "tyrannical, dictatorial" socialism of Lenin. Perhaps the most widely read modern writer in this category is Bertram D. Wolfe, the virulently anti-Leninist editor of those works by Rosa Luxemburg in which she voiced differences with the Bolsheviks. Also belonging to this category are the various branches of left-wing social democracy (the right wing of social democracy long ago gave up any pretense of being "Red Rosa's" heir).

The left-wing social democrats—unlike Rosa Luxemburg, who understood the basic social and economic transformation that took place in the Soviet Union after the October insurrection—consider the Soviet Union and other degenerated or deformed workers' states to be a form of capitalist state. They thus condemn those countries and find in them nothing that is fundamentally superior to the Western imperialist nations. In their search for some impeccable revolutionary authority to whose reputation they can hitch this un-Marxist analysis, they came up with Rosa Luxemburg, and have since tried to lay claim to her heritage on the fraudulent grounds that she also opposed the Russian Revolution. We will return to her analysis of the Russian Revolution later on, but one need only read her words of praise for the Bolsheviks to see clearly that she was anything but an opponent of the Russian Revolution.

The second major political tendency which has spared no effort in its attempt to slander and distort Rosa Luxemburg's views is Stalinism. During the early years of the Russian Revolution, when Lenin and Trotsky both played central roles in the leadership of the Bolshevik Party and the Third International, Rosa Luxemburg was held in high esteem. She was recognized as a genuine revolutionary—one who made errors to be sure, but, more importantly, a revolutionary woman of action, a fighter whose errors never carried her outside the revolutionary camp.

The fate of her posthumous image was tied to that of the Russian Revolution, however, and as the revolution itself degenerated, and Stalin rose to dominance as the leader of a powerful bureaucracy, she came under attack along with other genuine revolutionaries.

One of the themes that runs throughout Rosa Luxemburg's writings on the Russian Revolution is that without the aid of revolution in Western Europe, especially Germany, the revolutionary regime which had come to power in Russia could not hope to survive. This view was shared by Lenin, Trotsky, and many others. History proved them all correct—but in its own way, in a manner unforeseen by any of the generation of Marxists who helped to make the first socialist revolution. The Soviet regime managed to survive the civil war and invasion of hostile armies. Through incredible sacrifice and effort it managed to maintain its foundation of a nationalized economy and to industrialize the country. With a planned economy free from the built-in anarchy of capitalist production, it was unaffected by the great economic crisis of the 1930s and made tremendous material progress while the capitalist countries stagnated and decayed.

But, while the basic foundations of the Russian Revolution were never destroyed, and while they made possible the economic growth that transformed Russia from the most backward agricultural country in Europe into the second most highly industrialized country in the world, the revolution did not survive its isolation and initial poverty unscathed. The brutal material conditions in which it was doomed to struggle, unrelieved by the help which would have come from a victorious workers' revolution elsewhere, created the basis for, and nourished the growth of, a huge bureaucratic caste which represented the interests of the middle-class layers of Soviet society. These layers were at first made up of the rich and middle peasantry. Subsequently, Stalin's bureaucratic caste became more and more based on the economically privileged officials, managers, and administrators.

In its rise to power, the wing of the party led by Stalin had to destroy the Leninist, proletarian wing, led by Trotsky. Stalin had to eliminate every last vestige of revolutionary policies and perspectives to be able to carry out his basically nationalist, rather than internationalist, program and his counterrevolutionary, rather than revolutionary, projections. His ruthlessness was total. He was willing and able to use every form of struggle from lies and frame-up to torture, concentration camps, and murder. And while destroying everything Lenin stood for, while eliminating physically the party Lenin had built and wiping out all vestiges of democratic functioning both inside the party and throughout society, Stalin claimed to be wearing Lenin's mantle!

The process taking place within the Soviet Union was reflected in every Communist Party around the world, and in each it meant the destruction of revolutionary tradition.

Along with Trotsky and others who fought uncompromisingly for revolutionary policies nationally and internationally, against the interests of the privileged layers of Soviet society, Rosa Luxemburg became an early target of Stalin and his henchmen. The fact that she was a prime target is, in its own way, a tribute to the revolutionary influence of her heritage.

In 1923, Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow, leaders of the German Communist Party (KPD), launched an attack against Rosa Luxemburg's "right-wing deviations." Her influence was labeled the "syphilis bacillus" of the German Communist movement, her "errors" were "examined" and found to be almost identical to Trotsky's, and thus she was portrayed as the main source of all the defects of German Communism. It was discovered that her theoretical errors in The Accumulation of Capital were the source of a full-blown theory of "spontaneity" and all her organizational mistakes flowed from her economic miscalculations.

After the 1925 Congress of the Third International, Communist Parties took a swing to the right. Fischer and Maslow were soon expelled, and Rosa Luxemburg was attacked, no longer for "right-wing deviations" but as an ultraleftist.

During the ultraleft Third Period, 1928-35, when the Communist Party in Germany paved the way for Hitler's rise to power by refusing to work with the SPD to combat fascism, Rosa Luxemburg, along with the rest of the prewar left wing, was accused of differing "only formally from the social-fascist theoreticians." ("Social-fascist" was the Communist Party's designation for social democrats.)

In 1931 Stalin himself entered the debate, rewriting history the way he wanted it read, in an article entitled "Questions Concerning the History of Bolshevism." Here he decreed, contrary to historical fact as well as everything he had previously written, that Rosa Luxemburg was personally responsible for that greatest of all sins, the theory of permanent revolution, and that Trotsky had only picked it up from her. He also decreed, despite the historical record, that Rosa Luxemburg had begun the attack on Kautsky and the German SPD center in 1910 only after she had been persuaded to do so by Lenin, who saw the degeneration of the SPD much more clearly than she.

Trotsky came to Rosa Luxemburg's defense, setting the historical record straight, in the article "Hands Off Rosa Luxemburg," which is printed as an appendix to [Rosa Luxemburg Speaks]. But the article by Stalin set the Communist Party line on Rosa Luxemburg for several decades. Since she was never declared an "unperson" and eliminated from the history books altogether, as were so many of her contemporaries, her image has been partially restored with the passage of time. Her anniversaries are commemorated today in Eastern Germany and Poland, but a thoroughly honest evaluation of her role and her ideas has never been and will never be made by the Stalinists. In 1922 Lenin upbraided the German party for its slowness in publishing her collected works; this task has yet to accomplished in either Poland or Germany, almost fifty years later!

The reason is not hard to divine. Rosa Luxemburg's revolutionary spirit breathes through every page she ever wrote. Her internationalism, her call to action, her high standard of truth and honesty, her devotion to the interests of the working class, her concern for freedom and the fullest possible growth of the human spirit: such things are hardly in tune with the thinking of the bureaucratic caste that dominates economic, political, social and artistic life in Eastern Europe! They prefer to ignore her revolutionary politics and leave her in the shadows of hallowed martyrdom.

Historically, Rosa Luxemburg's political record unquestionably places her in the revolutionary camp. On every important political question during her lifetime, she stood foursquare on the side of opposition to the capitalist system and all its evils. She fought tenaciously against every attempt to turn the labor movement away from the fight to abolish capitalism, against every unscientific, utopian, phony scheme to reform the system. She was fond of repeating that the greatness of Marxism was that it placed the socialist movement on a scientific basis, proving from the very laws of capitalism itself the necessity for socialism as the next form of economic organization, if man was to progress and not descend to the depths of barbarism. She remained true to that comprehension of revolutionary Marxism throughout her life.

In the debate with Bernstein and his followers over the possibility of reforming capitalism into socialism, she led the theoretical fight against his revision of Marxism.

When the Frenchman Millerand became the first socialist to enter a bourgeois cabinet, she exposed the illogic of his action and demonstrated why he would have to betray his own socialist principles.

In the fight with the German trade-union leaders she explained the material reasons for their conservatism and their rejection of a revolutionary perspective. She warned against the dangers that pure-and-simple trade unionism posed to the party.

In the debate over the value of using elections as a means of struggle against the capitalist system, she refused to concede to those forces within the SPD that wanted to subordinate everything to parliamentary politicking, and she demanded that the SPD continue to organize the masses in other forms of struggle as well.

In the debates over the character of the 1905 and the 1917 Revolutions in Russia, she stood wholeheartedly with the Bolsheviks and against the Mensheviks, asserting that the working class must lead the struggle, fighting for its own interests. She had nothing but contempt for the Menshevik temporizing and compromising with the liberal, capitalist parties.

She fully understood that in political struggle, program is decisive in the long run. She battled always for programmatic clarity and worked to develop the kind of program that would help advance the class struggle step by step towards socialist revolution.

Living during the first tremendous growth of modern militarism, she was among the first to recognize the importance of military spending as an economic safety valve for capitalism. Faced with the growing realization of the destructive capacities of the imperialist rulers, she neither dismissed the dangers as irrelevant nor surrendered to them in advance.

At the crucial hour of the First World War, one of the fundamental historical dividing lines between revolutionary and non-revolutionary, she and Karl Liebknecht led the small handful of members of the SPD who refused to support the war plans of their own imperialist government.

Years before Lenin or any of the other European revolutionary leaders, she discerned the weaknesses of Kautsky and the German SPD "center," correctly branding them as men without revolutionary principles whose open capitulation to the right wing of the party was doubtless only a matter of time.

While her most enduring contributions are reflected in her writings, she was far from being an armchair revolutionary. She was always in the thick of any action she could find.

Finally, she stood solidly behind the October Revolution, declaring her unconditional support for the direction taken by the Bolsheviks, and proclaiming that the future belonged to bolshevism.

Such a record was matched by only a very few prewar social democrats anywhere in Europe. And Rosa Luxemburg's errors were made within this framework of a totally revolutionary perspective and a genuine search for the swiftest and surest path to a socialist future.

THE NATIONAL QUESTION

Rosa Luxemburg's major errors were centered around three questions: the right of nations to self-determination; the nature of the party and its relationship to the revolutionary masses; and certain Bolshevik policies following the October Revolution. Her theoretical errors in economics, developed in The Accumulation of Capital, are also important in the history of Marxism, but as her economic writings are essentially outside the scope of this book, they will be referred to only in passing.

From the beginning of her political life to the very end, Rosa Luxemburg emphatically rejected the basic Marxist position on the revolutionary significance of the struggle of oppressed national minorities and nations for self-determination. Her first writings on this question were published in 1893, and her last were set down only a few months before her death, in her pamphlet on the Russian Revolution. It can be said with certainty that this is one question on which she did not change her mind before she was murdered.

A large part of her writings on national struggles were published in Polish, and unfortunately few have been translated into other languages. Her most important article, for example, "The Question of Nationality and Autonomy," written in 1908, against which Lenin polemicized in his basic work, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, has apparently never been published in any language except the original Polish. However, the Junius Pamphlet and the section of The Russian Revolution which is devoted to the national struggle contain the essence of her position.…

Briefly, without enumerating all the supporting arguments and examples, her position can be summed up as follows: The elimination of all forms of oppression, including the subjugation of one nation by another, was an incontestable goal of socialism. Without the elimination of all forms of oppression one could not even begin to talk of socialism. However, Rosa Luxemburg held that it was incorrect for revolutionary socialists to assert the unconditional right of all nations to self-determination. The demand for self-determination was unrealizable under imperialism. It would always be perverted by one or another of the major capitalist powers. Under socialism it would become largely irrelevant, as socialism would eliminate all national boundaries, at least in an economic sense, and the secondary problems of language and culture could be solved without great difficulty.

In a strategic sense, she thought that advocacy of the right of nations to self-determination was extremely dangerous to the international working class since it reinforced nationalist movements which must inevitably come under the domination of their own bourgeoisie. In her opinion, supporting separatist aspirations served only to divide the international working class, not to unite it in common struggle against the ruling classes of all nations. Advocacy of the right of nations to self-determination, which she described as "nothing but hollow, petty bourgeois phraseology and humbug," only corrupts class consciousness and confuses the class struggle. As she says in The Russian Revolution, the "utopian, petty bourgeois character of this nationalist slogan" [right to national self-determination] resides in the fact "that in the midst of the crude realities of class society and when class antagonisms are sharpened to the uttermost, it is simply converted into a means of bourgeois class rule."

Lenin and the other defenders of the Marxist position answered her clearly and sharply.

It is not sufficient, they maintained, to say simply that socialists are opposed to all forms of exploitation and oppression. Every capitalist politician in the world would make the exact same assertion. As Rosa Luxemburg herself pointed out so forcefully, the entire First World War was supposedly fought under the banner of assuring self-determination for all nations. Socialists must put their words into action in order to prove to the oppressed and exploited national minorities that their slogans are not hollow and meaningless as are those of the ruling classes.

Theoretically it is incorrect to say that self-determination can never be achieved under capitalism. The example of Norway winning independence from Sweden in 1905, with the support of the Swedish workers, is a case in point.

A socialist government, Lenin asserted, can win the allegiance of oppressed minorities only if it is willing and able to prove its unconditional support of their right to form a separate state if they so choose. Any other policy would amount to the forcible retention of diverse nationalities within one state, to a national oppression which would in essence be no different from the national oppression practiced by imperialism. The free association of different nationalities in a single political unit can only be obtained by first guaranteeing each the right to withdraw from that union. Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin charged, tried to avoid the question of political self-determination by shifting the argument to the grounds of economic interdependence.

Paradoxically, while socialists must fight for the unconditional right of self-determination, including the right of separation, the only party that can lead such a fight and assure the victory of the socialist revolution is a democratic centralist party, such as the Bolsheviks built, that includes within its ranks and leadership the most conscious sectors of the working class, peasantry, and intellectuals of all the nationalities within the boundaries of the existing capitalist state. As Trotsky explained in the History of the Russian Revolution, "A revolutionary organization is not the prototype of the future state, but merely the instrument for its creation.… Thus a centralized organization can guarantee the success of revolutionary struggle—even where the task is to destroy the centralized oppression of nationalities."

At the same time, Lenin pointed out, unconditional support for the right of self-determination does not mean that the socialists of the oppressed nation are obliged to fight for separation. Nor does it imply support to the national bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation, except—as Lenin explains in The Right of Nations to Self-Determination—insofar as the "bourgeois nationalism of any oppressed nation has a general democratic content that is directed against oppression, and it is this content that we unconditionally support." But only the working class and its allies can lead the struggle to completion, and the oppressed masses must never rely on their own bourgeoisie which, given its ties to the ruling class of the oppressor nation and to international capital, cannot carry the struggle to its conclusion.

Lenin explained numerous times that his disagreement with Rosa Luxemburg and the Polish social democrats was not over their opposition to demanding independence for Poland, but over their attempt to deny the obligation of socialists to support the right of self-determination, and particularly their attempt to deny the absolute necessity for the revolutionary socialist party of an oppressor nation to guarantee that right unconditionally. Lenin points out at the end of The Right of Nations to Self-Determination that the Polish social democrats had been led "by their struggle against the Polish bourgeoisie, which deceives the people with its nationalist slogans, to the incorrect denial of self-determination."

Finally, he argued that the right of self-determination is one of the basic democratic rights raised by the bourgeois revolution, and socialists are obligated to fight for democratic rights. "In the same way as there can be no victorious socialism that does not practice full democracy, so the proletariat cannot prepare for its victory over the bourgeoisie without an all-around, consistent, and revolutionary struggle for democracy."

Rosa Luxemburg's argument that a demand for self-determination is impractical under capitalism ignores the fact that "not only the right of nations to self-determination, but all the fundamental demands of political democracy are only partially 'practicable' under imperialism, and then in a distorted way of exception."

"There is not one of these demands which could not serve and has not served, under certain circumstances, as an instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie for deceiving the workers." But that in no way relieves socialists of the obligation to struggle for democratic rights, to expose the deceptions of the bourgeoisie, and to prove to the masses that only the socialist revolution can lead to the full realization of the basic democratic rights proclaimed by the bourgeoisie.

Rosa Luxemburg sincerely believed that the Bolshevik policy on national self-determination was disastrous and could only lead to the destruction of the revolution. But she could not have been more wrong.

The February 1917 Revolution which established a liberal republic in Russia brought about a great historical awakening of the oppressed nations within the czarist empire, but the formal equality they received from the revolution served only to emphasize to them the degree of their real oppression. And it was the refusal of the liberal bourgeois government, from February to October, to grant the right of self-determination that cemented the opposition of the oppressed nationalities to the Menshevik government in Petrograd and sealed its doom.

Only by guaranteeing self-determination, up to and including the right of separation did the Bolshevik Party win the indestructible confidence of the small and oppressed nationalities of czarist Russia. This confidence ultimately proved decisive in the battle against the counterrevolution and led, not to the disintegration of the revolutionary forces, as Rosa Luxemburg feared, but to their victory within the oppressed nations as well as among the Great Russians themselves.

She totally underestimated the tremendous force of nationalism which began to awaken in Eastern Europe only in the early twentieth century. She did not comprehend that these movements were destined to explode with full force only after the Russian Revolution, not because the Bolsheviks encouraged them but because of the internal dynamic of the struggle generated by the awakening of the oppressed masses.

One of Rosa Luxemburg's most frequently quoted statements from "The Russian Revolution" is her description of Ukrainian nationalism as "a mere whim, a folly of a few dozen petty bourgeois intellectuals without the slightest roots in the economic, political or psychological relationships of the country." Trotsky took her up on this in the chapter on "The Problem of Nationalities" in his History of the Russian Revolution.

When Rosa Luxemburg, in her posthumous polemic against the program of the October Revolution, asserted that Ukrainian nationalism, having been formerly a mere amusement of the commonplace petty bourgeois intelligentsia, had been artificially raised up by the yeast of the Bolshevik formula of self-determination, she fell, notwithstanding her luminous mind, into a very serious historic error. The Ukrainian peasantry had not made national demands in the past for the reason that the Ukrainian peasantry had not in general risen to the height of political being. The chief service of the February Revolution—perhaps its only service, but one amply sufficient—lay exactly in this, that it gave the oppressed classes and nations of Russia at last an opportunity to speak out. This political awakening of the peasantry could not have taken place otherwise, however, than through their own native language—with all the consequences ensuing in regard to schools, courts, self-administration. To oppose this would have been to try to drive the peasants back into nonexistence.

Not a few historians have tried to show that Rosa Luxemburg's position on self-determination and opposition to nationalist movements was actually put into practice in later years by Stalin, with his vicious persecution of the oppressed nations and all the attendant horrors. But, his actions were as much a perversion of Rosa Luxemburg's program as of Lenin's. As an article by the editor in the March 1935 New International asked: "Can one imagine Rosa in the company of those who strangled the Chinese Revolution by attributing to Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese bourgeoisie the leading revolutionary role in 'liberating the nation from the yoke of foreign imperialism'? Can one imagine Rosa in the company of those who hailed the 1926 coup d'etat of Marshal Pilsudski as the 'great national democrat' who was establishing the 'democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry' in Poland? Can one imagine Rosa in the company of those who for years glorified and canonized every nationalist demagogue who was gracious enough to send a visiting card to the Kremlin… ?" [A few years later another question could have been posed: Can one imagine Rosa in the company of those who murdered virtually the entire Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party?]

And the article concludes, "How contemptible are those who dismiss a Rosa Luxemburg with smug disdain as a 'Menshevik,' when they themselves proved unable to rise to the height of her boots!"

Rosa Luxemburg was wrong on the national question, but her opposition to guaranteeing the right of self-determination was not born out of hostility to revolutionary mass action that leads toward struggle to abolish capitalism. Rather she failed to comprehend the complex and contradictory aspects of the revolutionary dynamic of struggles by oppressed nationalities in the age of imperialism.

THE NATURE OF THE REVOLUTIONARY PARTY

Rosa Luxemburg's mistakes concerning the problem of building a revolutionary party, and the parallel problem of the relationship between that party and the working masses, were just as fundamental as her errors on the national question. Within the context of the German revolution they were probably more costly.

Her differences with the Bolsheviks concerning organizational concepts are not as easy to codify as those concerning national self-determination. She never spelled out clearly and completely, in any one place, her thinking on the type of organization needed, although most of the elements of her basic position are clearly discernible in her 1904 article, "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy." Following the 1905 Revolution her ideas were further clarified.

The fact is that, despite her dispute with Lenin on the nature of the revolutionary party, she was not deeply concerned with organizational problems, and therein lies one of the clearest indications of the nature of her errors. While she understood that in political struggle, program is ultimately decisive, she did not understand, as did Lenin, that program and tactical positions are always refracted through organizational concepts.

Perhaps one of the most revealing examples of her tendency to dismiss the organizational problems of leadership is the fact that for years she refused to attend the conventions of the SDKPiL or to be elected to its Central Committee. Yet she remained one of the party's principal political leaders and its main public voice. The problem was not her location either, since the Central Committee of the SDKPiL had its headquarters in Berlin. Thus she remained a leader in effect, yet not directly accountable to any specific leading body of which she was a member.

Her attitudes on organizational matters were heavily influenced by her experiences with the SPD. She very early recognized the tremendous conservative weight of the SPD leadership, and pointed, even in her 1904 essay, to their inability to so much as consider any strategy other than continuation of the "grand old tactic" of parliamentary concerns and nothing but parliamentary concerns.

Another aspect of the SPD which greatly influenced her thinking was simply the size and scope of the organization itself, which held within its orbit any and every individual who even vaguely thought in socialist terms.

To mount an effective opposition to a leadership as strongly entrenched and secure as the SPD hierarchy was not an easy matter. It required great tactical flexibility as well as political clarity, and it was a job that Rosa Luxemburg never really tackled. Year after year she maintained a blistering political opposition, but, until the war began, she never tried to draw around her, organize, and lead a group within the SPD.

The clarity of her basic political understanding of the SPD leadership was well expressed in a letter she sent to her close friend Clara Zetkin around the beginning of 1907. This same letter illustrates equally well her inability or unwillingness to give her political comprehension an organizational form. The possibility of trying to be more than a one- or two-woman opposition doesn't seem ever to have received serious thought:

Since my return from Russia I feel rather isolated … I feel the pettiness and the hesitancy of our party regime more clearly and more painfully than ever before. However, I can't get so excited about the situation as you do, because I see with depressing clarity that neither things nor people can be changed—until the whole situation has changed, and even then we shall just have to reckon with inevitable resistance if we want to lead the masses on. I have come to that conclusion after mature reflection. The plain truth is that August [Bebel], and still more so the others, have completely pledged themselves to parliament and parliamentarianism, and whenever anything happens which transcends the limits of parliamentary action they are hopeless—no, worse than hopeless, because they then do their utmost to force the movement back into parliamentary channels, and they will furiously defame as 'an enemy of the people' anyone who dares to venture beyond their own limits. I feel that those of the masses who are organized in the party are tired of parliamentarianism, and would welcome a new line in party tactics, but the party leaders and still more the upper stratum of opportunist editors, deputies, and trade-union leaders are like an incubus. We must protest vigorously against this general stagnation, but it is quite clear that in doing so we shall find ourselves against the opportunists as well as the party leaders and August. As long as it was a question of defending themselves against Bernstein and his friends, August & Co. were glad of our assistance, because they were shaking in their shoes. But when it is a question of launching an offensive against opportunism then August and the rest are with Ede [Bernstein], Vollmar, and David against us. That's how I see matters, but the chief thing is to keep your chin up and not get too excited about it. Our job will take years.

Important as the influence of the SPD was, however, it is not by itself a sufficient explanation for her organizational attitudes. Not only different objective circumstances but also different organizational concepts set her apart from Lenin.

Before discussing what her organizational theories were, however, it is worth mentioning what they were not. Rosa Luxemburg has often been credited—by those who think they agree with her as well as those who disagree—with holding a full-blown theory of "spontaneity," or even with advocacy of something akin to an anarchist position. Nothing could be a greater oversimplification and distortion of her ideas.

As mentioned earlier, the Stalinists at one time even pretended to trace her organizational errors to her theoretical mistakes in The Accumulation of Capital. In this, her principal economic work, Rosa Luxemburg tries to demonstrate that capitalism, considered as a closed or completed system without precapitalist or noncapitalist markets to cannibalize, could not continue to expand. Her argument is basically incorrect on the theoretical level in that she leaves out of consideration the central factors of competition among different capitals and the unevenness of the rate of development between different countries, different sectors of the economy and different enterprises—factors which constitute the driving force behind the expansion of capitalist markets. However, the Stalinists accused her of propagating a crude theory of the "automatic" and "mechanical" end of capitalism, to occur as soon as the world's noncapitalist markets were exhausted or absorbed into capitalist relations. And from this they made a leap into the organizational question, claiming that it followed that she could not have believed that organizing the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism was an urgent need since the automatic "breakdown" of capitalism was assured. Her own words, throughout the pages of this book, speak eloquently enough in her own defense against such crude distortions.

What was her basic conception?

She disagreed with Lenin that the party should be an organization of professional revolutionaries with deep roots in and ties to the working class, an organization holding the perspective of winning the leadership of the masses during a period of revolutionary upsurge.

On the contrary, in her view the revolutionary party should come much closer to encompassing the organized working class in its entirety.

This comes out in her 1904 essay in which she polemicizes against Lenin's definition of a revolutionary social democrat.

In One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, an analytical balance sheet of the Russian party's 1903 Congress at which there had been a split into "hard" and "soft," that is, Bolshevik and Menshevik factions, over the organizational question, Lenin had taken up the "dreadful word" Jacobin (name of the left faction in the French Revolution), which had been flung at the Bolsheviks. He wrote: "A Jacobin who maintains an inseparable bond with the organization of the proletariat, a proletariat conscious of its class interests, is a revolutionary social democrat."

In objection, Luxemburg wrote: "… Lenin defines his 'revolutionary social democrat' as a 'Jacobin joined to the organization of the proletariat, which has become conscious of its class interests.'

"The fact is that the social democracy is not joined to the organizations of the proletariat. It is itself the proletariat.… Social democratic centralism .… can only be the concentrated will of the individuals and groups representative of the most class-conscious, militant, advanced sections of the working class.…"

In other words, she did not downplay the role of the party in providing political leadership, but tended to confine the party to the role of agitator and propagandist and to deny its central role as a day-to-day organizer of the class struggle, providing leadership for the masses in an organizational and technical sense as well. She did not understand the Leninist concept of a combat party—a party which recognizes that capitalism must be defeated in struggle and understands that the working masses must be led by an organization capable of standing up under the pressure of a combat; a party that is deeply rooted in the mass movement and consciously works to mobilize the combativity of the masses and help give their struggles anticapitalist direction; a party that, regardless of its size or stage of development, bases its conduct on the firm intent to become a mass working-class party capable of leading the way to victory, a party that prepares over a period of years for the role it must play in the decisive struggles; a party that understands the vital, indispensable need for conscious organization and leadership.

Instead, Rosa Luxemburg placed great emphasis on the role of the masses themselves in action, on the steps they could take without conscious organizational leadership, on the things which she believed their combativity alone could accomplish. She assigned to them the task of overwhelming and sweeping away the conservative, backward working-class leaders, and creating new revolutionary organizations in place of the old. She called on them to perform the task for which she herself was not willing to pave the way, except in the most general political sense.

In her mass strike pamphlet, for instance, she eloquently pictures the process: "From the whirlwind and the storm, out of the fire and flow of the mass strike and the street fighting, rise again, like Venus from the foam, fresh, young, powerful, buoyant trade unions." And later she warns the trade unionists that if they attempt to stand in the way of real social struggles, "the trade-union leaders, like the party leaders in the analogous case, will simply be swept aside by the rush of events, and the economic and the political struggles of the masses will be fought out without them."

As against the Bolsheviks' concept that it was necessary to organize revolution, she came closer to the Menshevik slogan of 1905—unleash the revolution.

It was Trotsky who put her general concept in an extremely succinct form—and pointed to her central error—in a speech on "Problems of Civil War," in July 1924. Discussing the problems surrounding the timing of an insurrection, he said:

It must be recognized that the question of the timing of the insurrection acts in many cases like a kind of litmus paper for testing the revolutionary consciousness of very many Western comrades, who have still not rid themselves of their fatalistic and passive manner of dealing with the principal problems of revolution. Rosa Luxemburg remains the most eloquent and talented example. Psychologically, this is fully understandable. She was formed, so to speak, in the struggle against the bureaucratic apparatus of the German social democracy and trade unions. Untiringly, she showed that this apparatus was stifling the initiative of the masses and she saw no alternative but that an irresistible uprising of the masses would sweep away all the barriers and defenses built by the social democratic bureaucracy. The revolutionary general strike, overflowing all the dikes of bourgeois society, became for Rosa Luxemburg synonymous with the proletarian revolution.

However, whatever its power and mass character, the general strike does not settle the problem of power; it only poses it. To seize power, it is necessary, while relying on the general strike, to organize an insurrection. The whole of Rosa Luxemburg's evolution, of course, was going in that direction. But when she was snatched from the struggle, she had not yet spoken her last word, nor even the penultimate one.

Rosa Luxemburg's correct evaluation of the nature of the SPD leadership and her consequent opposition to it led her to question the centralism of a revolutionary organization as well as the centralism of a reformist one—to be skeptical of conscious organizational leadership in general.

It would be a mistake however to accuse her of rejecting any kind of centralized organization. She was concerned primarily with the degree of centralization, and the nature of the leadership function of the party. As Trotsky put it in the article "Luxemburg and the Fourth International," … "The most that can be said is that in her historical-philosophical evaluation of the labor movement, the preparatory selection of the vanguard, in comparison with the mass actions that were to be expected, fell too short with Rosa; whereas Lenin—without consoling himself with the miracles of future actions—took the advanced workers and constantly and tirelessly welded them together into firm nuclei, illegally or legally, in the mass organizations or underground, by means of a sharply defined program."

The Bolsheviks answered Rosa Luxemburg, in word and deed, over the years. They pointed out that under capitalism the working class as a whole is not in a position to raise itself to the level of consciousness necessary to successfully confront the bourgeoisie in all fields, to destroy bourgeois authority. If it were, capitalism would have perished long ago.

The determination, ruthlessness, and unity of the ruling class demand that the working class create a party that is serious and professional in its concepts, that is disciplined and welded together by common political agreement on the tasks to be performed, that is trained and capable of leading the masses to victory. Such a party cannot be created spontaneously, out of the struggle itself. It is a weapon that must be fashioned before the battle begins.

Lenin labeled Rosa Luxemburg's organizational concepts her "not-to-be-taken-seriously nonsense of organization and tactics as a process." By that he did not, of course, mean that an organization was created in isolation from objective circumstances, or that tactics did not evolve or change, and were not adapted to living reality. To Rosa Luxemburg's view that the historic process itself would create the organizations and tactics of struggle, Lenin counterposed a diametrically opposite relationship between historical developments and the party. As he saw it, the organization and the tactics are created not by the process but by those people who achieve an understanding of the process by means of Marxist theory and who make themselves part of the process through the elaboration of a plan based upon their understanding.

Walter Held, a leader of the German section of the Fourth International prior to the Second World War, once explained the concept by an analogy from natural science: "The power latent in a waterfall may be transformed into electricity. But not every person without more ado is capable of accomplishing this feat. Scientific education and training are indispensable. On the other hand, the scientifically trained engineers are naturally constrained to draft their plans according to the given natural conditions. What can be said, however, of a man, who, because of this, jeers at engineering science and praises instead the 'elementary force of water which produces electricity'? We should be entirely justified in laughing him out of court. Nor is it otherwise with the social process. It was for this and no other reason that Lenin used to jest about the conception of 'organization as process' which was counterposed to his conception."

The differing organizational theories of Lenin and Luxemburg underwent the acid test in the post-World War I revolutionary upsurge. The party Lenin had built was able to lead the masses to power. In Germany, the absence of a similar cohesive, trained, educated and disciplined party and leadership proved fatal to the German revolution and to many of the courageous revolutionaries themselves.

In retrospect the differences now seem obvious; the mistakes of Luxemburg seem underscored by history. But at the time, the issue was certainly not so clear. History itself was uttering the final word on the nature of the revolutionary party, indicating what was necessary to assure victory. And even Lenin did not think he was doing anything so unique. Prior to 1914 he viewed his efforts as being directed toward the creation of a "Bebel-Kautsky" wing in the Russian social democracy. He did not come to understand the political character of that "Bebel-Kautsky" wing of the SPD until several years after Rosa Luxemburg turned her political fire against those vacillating middle-of-the-roaders.

In the years following the Russian Revolution, however—after the lessons of the Russian and German revolutions were drawn and the questions concerning organizational concepts decided by history—many currents within the working-class movement still continue to reject the fundamental concepts of the Bolshevik Party and look to Rosa Luxemburg as the champion of a revolutionary alternative to Leninism. These basically social democratic currents—which also came to equate Leninism with Stalinism rather than recognizing them as irreconcilable opposites—have been fond of pointing out that Trotsky, too, held views similar to Luxemburg's in the years prior to 1917. Trotsky, fortunately, was alive to defend himself.

In 1904 Trotsky wrote a pamphlet, "Our Political Tasks," in which he made a statement that has been quoted by many opponents of Leninism, including Bertram D. Wolfe and Boris Souvarine. Trotsky asserted: "Lenin's methods lead to this: the party organization [the caucus] at first substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organization; and finally a single 'dictator' substitutes himself for the Central Committee.…"

In response to all the admiring anti-Leninists who approvingly quoted Trotsky's prognosis and saw his exile by Stalin as confirmation of the warnings he and Rosa Luxemburg had voiced in 1904, Trotsky replied: "All subsequent experience demonstrated to me that Lenin was correct in this question as against Rosa Luxemburg and me. Marceau Pivert counterposes to the 'Trotskyism' of 1939, the 'Trotskyism' of 1904. But after all since that time three revolutions have taken place in Russia alone. Have we really learned nothing during these thirty-five years?"

No one knows what Rosa Luxemburg might have said in the same situation, but she, too, was capable of learning from the course of history.

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

The most serious of Rosa Luxemburg's criticisms of the policies of the Bolsheviks, as expressed in her draft article on the Russian Revolution, have already been dealt with—her longstanding differences on the national question, and her organizational disagreements, which are implicit in the draft. But she raises several other questions that are worth discussing. It would take a book to deal adquately with all of them, and it is in Trotsky's three-volume History of the Russian Revolution, in fact, that one finds the most complete answers. But the intention here is simply to indicate the direction in which the reader must search for solutions to the very complex problems of the first socialist revolution in history.

The circumstances surrounding the writing and posthumous publication of Rosa Luxemburg's article on the Russian Revolution are explained in the introductory note to that selection, but some additional comments are in order.

Incarcerated as she was in the Breslau prison, her isolation and extremely limited access to accurate information about what was going on in Russia were important factors. Even outside the jails, the truth was hard to come by. People living in the United States today, for example, can draw a parallel with the difficulties of obtaining anything resembling truthful information on happenings in Vietnam, particularly concerning the areas governed by the Provisional Revolutionary Government.

In Germany following the October Revolution in 1917, the ministry of the interior eschewed any pretense of freedom of the press and ordered "all that explains or praises the proceedings of the revolutionaries in Russia must be suppressed." Anything that the German military thought would discredit the revolutionary government of Russia received wide publicity, while anything that might win sympathy was censored.

Once out of prison, with access to better information, Rosa Luxemburg retained some of her criticisms, and changed her mind about others. And on many questions it is unclear whether she altered her opinion or not, as she never mentioned them again, at least publicly. The tremendous problems facing the revolutionary leadership in Germany between November 1918 and January 1919 became her overriding concern.

What is most striking in her draft article is that she is not really suggesting alternative policies as much as she is describing what would have been the optimum course—if conditions had been different; if the proletarian revolution had occurred almost simultaneously across Europe; if the German, French, and English workers had be able to come to the aid of their Russian comrades. Under such circumstances there would have been no need for the sharp restrictions on democratic freedom. There would have been no strong counterrevolutionary forces backed by all the major capitalist powers.

The leaders of the Russian Revolution recognized this also. Lenin and Trotsky never ceased to point out the isolation of the revolution, the tardiness—and eventually the indefinite postponement—of the German revolution. Such historical facts determined much of the course of the Russian Revolution.

During 1918 Rosa Luxemburg stressed over and over again the decisive importance of the German revolution if the Bolshevik regime was to survive:

Everything that happens in Russia is comprehensible and represents an inevitable chain of causes and effects, the starting point and end term of which are: the failure of the German proletariat and the occupation of Russia by German imperialism. It would be demanding something superhuman from Lenin and his comrades if we should expect of them that under such circumstances they should conjure forth the finest democracy, the most exemplary dictatorship of the proletariat and a flourishing socialist economy. By their determined revolutionary stand, their exemplary strength in action, and their unbreakable loyalty to international socialism, they have contributed whatever could possibly be contributed under such devilishly hard conditions.… The Bolsheviks have shown that they are capable of everything that a genuine revolutionary party can contribute within the limits of the historical possibilities. They are not supposed to perform miracles. For a model and faultless proletarian revolution in an isolated land, exhausted by world war, strangled by imperialism, betrayed by the international proletariat, would be a miracle.

One could hardly ask for a clearer statement of support for the Russian Revolution or greater comprehension of its difficulties. It is within that framework that she voices her criticisms.

At another time, towards the end of November 1918, after she was released from prison, she wrote to her longtime comrade in the leadership of the SDKPiL, Adolf Warsawski, also known as A. Warski, who was at that time in Warsaw:

If our party [SDKPiL] is full of enthusiasm for bolshevism and at the same time opposed the Bolshevik peace of Brest-Litovsk, and also opposes their propagation of national self-determination as a solution, then it is no more than enthusiasm coupled with the spirit of criticism—what more can people want from us?

I shared all your reservations and doubts, but have dropped them in the most important questions, and in others I never went as far as you. Terrorism is evidence of grave internal weakness, but it is directed against internal enemies, who … get support and encouragement from foreign capitalists outside Russia. Once the European revolution comes, the Russian counterrevolutionaries lose not only this support, but—what is more important—they must lose all courage. Bolshevik terror is above all the expression of the weakness of the European proletariat. Naturally the agrarian circumstances there have created the sorest, most dangerous problem of the Russian Revolution. But here too the saying is valid—even the greatest revolution can only achieve that which has become ripe [through the development of] social circumstances. This sore too can only be healed through the European revolution. And this is coming!

Among Rosa Luxemburg's disagreements with Bolshevik policies it is those criticisms directed against the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the distribution of land to the peasants, and the use of revolutionary violence which are most important.

She opposed the decision of the Bolsheviks to sign a separate peace treaty with the German government in early 1918 because she believed it meant surrendering large parts of revolutionary Russia to counterrevolution, to German imperialism. She feared it would only postpone the end of the war, and might possibly lead to the victory of the German armies.

Although her fears proved unfounded, she was certainly not alone in holding the position she did. It was shared by close to a majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee as well. Only after it became clear that the German army intended and had the ability to take even larger sections of Russia by continued military advances, did Lenin convince a majority of the Central Committee that the treaty of Brest-Litovsk must be signed, despite the harsh terms. The cost of continued refusal to sign a separate treaty with the Central powers, Lenin feared, would be the conclusion of a separate peace between Germany and its imperialist enemies, followed by a coalition of all the capitalist powers against revolutionary Russia.

Such fears were eventually to materialize, despite the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, but in the meantime the war-weary Russian masses were able to gain a respite, the revolutionary government was able to begin to consolidate itself, the revolutionary process in the German-occupied territories deepened and the foundations of the Red Army were laid—in short the Brest-Litovsk treaty notwithstanding the fears of all who opposed it, was the only way out for the Bolshevik government and made possible the eventual victory of the revolution. It was not choice, but iron necessity that compelled the Bolsheviks to sign the treaty.

While in prison, Rosa Luxemburg was extremely critical of the Bolshevik dissolution of the Constituent Assembly elected just after the victory of the October Revolution. But she changed her position after being released from jail. During the revolutionary upsurge of November and December 1918 in Germany, the Spartacus League rapidly came to realize that the call for a Constituent Assembly was the rallying cry of the SPD and others who opposed the revolution. To the call for a Constituent Assembly, Spartacus counterposed the demand for the transfer of power to the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils. Thus, compelled by the logic of their own struggle against the counterrevolution, Spartacus developed a position similar to that of the Bolsheviks, and Rosa Luxemburg soon realized the question was not quite so simple as it had seemed from Breslau.

In her prison essay, however, her basic error on the question of democratic practices in the revolution was to ignore the role of the Soviets, which were probably the most democratic institutions of modern times.

The Constituent Assembly was not dissolved because its majority disagreed with the Bolsheviks. If the Bolsheviks and Left Social Revolutionaries had been in the majority they would have dissolved themselves and delegated their authority to the Soviets—which held power anyway. The Constituent Assembly was disbanded because it was totally unrepresentative—as Trotsky explains in the section quoted by Rosa Luxemburg—and far from being simply another organ of workers' democracy subject to pressure from the masses, it would have rapidly become an organizing center of the counterrvolution. Once dissolved, there was no need for a new Constituent Assembly, as the Soviets had assumed the functional role of such a body.

All these things Rosa Luxemburg came to realize very rapidly through her own direct experiences in the German revolution.

Rosa Luxemburg carefully places her criticisms of the Bolsheviks' agrarian policies within the framework of the historical tasks to be accomplished and the tremendous difficulty of assuring the victory of a socialist revolution in one of the most backward capitalist countries.

In the Western European countries the destruction of feudal land relationships had been largely accomplished by the bourgeois revolutions of the nineteenth century; Russia, however, was a country where the vast majority of the peasantry owned no land. For the peasantry the February Revolution meant the opening of the struggle against the landlords, the awakening of political consciousness. At first cautious in its demands, seeking only rent reductions and similar ameliorations of intolerable conditions, the peasant movement rapidly gained in depth, scope, and political intensity. Soon estate after estate was looted, burned, and the land divided up—months before the October Revolution triumphed.

While division of the great estates was the formal program of the Social Revolutionaries, the mass radical peasant party, the SRs opposed the land seizures by the peasants because such actions jeopardized the support of the landed bourgeoisie for the coalition government to which the SRs belonged.

During the summer and fall of 1917, as the Menshevik-SR government began sending troops against the peasants to protect the landlords, the peasantry turned more and more toward the Bolsheviks who promised to support the land seizures.

In other words, the confiscation of the great estates and their division among the peasants was not a policy merely implemented by the Bolsheviks, but a fact already accomplished in large measure before the Bolsheviks came to power. To have opposed the division of the great estates would have meant a war against the peasantry and the defeat of the revolution—just as a similar policy by the Mensheviks had assured the downfall of the bourgeois government.

Rosa Luxemburg recognized this when she stated, "Surely the solution of the problem by the direct, immediate seizure and distribution of the land by the peasants was the shortest, simplest, most clear-cut formula to achieve two diverse things: to break down large landownership, and immediately to bind the peasants to the revolutionary government. As a political measure to fortify the proletarian socialist government, it was an excellent tactical move."

She was right, of course, in pointing to the dangers this could ultimately entail for the revolution, if the process could not be reversed, and if a significant layer of rich peasants became more and more powerful. She recognized the absolute necessity of solving the agrarian problem, which had never been accomplished by a bourgeois revolution in the czarist empire; but she did not clearly see how this task combined with the tasks of the proletarian revolution. She favored the nationalization of the large estates, but proposed they be retained intact and operated as large-scale agricultural units. While theoretically correct, such a course would have meant leaping far ahead of the historical possibilities.

The Bolsheviks were able to win the allegiance of the peasantry only by adopting the agrarian policy they did, and only with the peasants as allies was the revolution able to defeat the combined counterrevolutionary forces.

Rosa Luxemburg's final major criticism of Bolshevik policy was directed at the use of violence against the counterrevolution. Her position was basically a moral one, a humanitarian reluctance to use force or violence, to see any life destroyed. But it would be a mistake to put her in the same category as liberal pacifists who hypocritically oppose any kind of violence.

She agreed wholeheartedly that the violence of the oppressed is in no way comparable to the violence of the oppressor. One is justified and the other is not. There was no confusion in her mind concerning the source of the greatest violence and destruction mankind had every known. She wrote in Rote Fahne, November 24, 1918:

[Those] who sent 1.5 million German men and youths to the slaughter without blinking an eyelid, [those] who supported with all the means at their disposal for four years the greatest bloodletting which humanity has ever experienced—they now scream hoarsely about 'terror,' about the alleged 'monstrosities' threatened by the dictatorship of the proletariat. But these gentlemen should look at their own history.

She understood full well that no revolution could consolidate itself without violently putting down the old ruling forces—that no revolution in history had ever succeeded without violence and probably never would. But she fervently wished it could be otherwise, and regretted that the revolutionary forces in the Soviet Union were so weak that they had to resort to violence against the counterrevolution.

At the same time she realized that the revolution's weakness was entirely a function of its international isolation. She realized that a successful German revolution would make violence less necessary in Russia, and that with each additional successful revolution, the forces of counterrevolution would be weaker, and less violence would have to be used against them.

Once again, her criticisms of the Bolsheviks came down to new exhortations to the German workers to come to the aid of their Russian comrades. When she wrote, "There is no doubt either … that Lenin and Trotsky … have taken many a decisive step only with the greatest inner hesitation and with most violent inner opposition," she was probably referring more than anything else to the use of violence, and reflecting very clearly her own inner revulsion against it, even though she understood it was absolutely necessary. She realized that if counterrevolutionaries were to triumph, the violence they would use would be infinitely more ruthless and barbaric than the revolutionary violence of the class that had history on its side.

Rosa Luxemburg ends her article on the Russian Revolution in the same vein as she begins it: with unequivocal support for the Bolsheviks, proclaiming that the future of the world is in the hands of bolshevism.

Only the most obtuse and hypocritical could take her words and twist them to make her appear an anticommunist. Her own phrases speak more strongly in her own defense than anything which could be added:

Whatever a party could offer of courage, revolutionary farsightedness and consistency in a historic hour, Lenin, Trotsky and the other comrades have given in good measure. All the revolutionary honor and capacity which Western social democracy lacked was represented by the Bolsheviks. Their October uprising was not only the actual salvation of the Russian Revolution; it was also the salvation of the honor of international socialism.