SOURCE: "Marxism Without An Organizing Party: Personal Observations on Rosa Luxemburg's Life," in Soviet Studies, Vol. XVIII, No. 2, October, 1966, pp. 225-51.

[In the following essay, Schlesinger considers the aspects of Luxemburg's writings and activism that pertained to the issue of the military industrial complex.]

My lack of knowledge of the Polish language and of the source material available in it exclude any claim for this article to be accepted as a comprehensive review of Mr. Nettl's recent biography of Rosa Luxemburg. A picture based primarily upon German and Russian experiences, which is the natural one for me and my contemporaries, is necessarily one-sided. Nettl's emphasis on the Polish aspects, and on the corresponding sides in Rosa's personal life, even if he has exaggerated them, forms the major merit of his book. Its shortcomings are those to be expected from a comparatively young author writing with sympathy, but far away from the intellectual world in which the experience described by him originated, and burdened with the psychological and sociological fashions of our days. The occasional factual mistakes, scarcely avoidable in a work of this size, include, however, some which throw doubt upon the success of the author's efforts to familiarize himself with the whole framework of the drama depicted by him. The following lines are intended as a treatment of a great figure in a specific stage in the development of the Marxist movement, reference to Mr. Nettl's book being made where this may help to make my argument clearer.

On 15 January 1919, the mercenaries who served the Ebert government as instruments for repressing an ill-organized revolt which was more propagandist than power-seeking, led a man and a woman out of the Eden Hotel, which served as a provisional barracks and prison, to shoot them 'while attempting to escape'. The two had been the leaders of the Marxist Left and of the anti-war struggle in Germany; the present author is not the only one whom they, and the Russian October revolution, helped to find his way to revolutionary socialism. (The war, in isolation, would have produced only an indignant pacifism.) Two days before their murder Vorwärts, the central organ of the German Social Democrat Party, one of whose editors Rosa Luxemburg had once been, had published verses culminating in the words:

Many hundred corpses in a row,
Proletarians.
Karl, Rosa, Radek and Co.,
Not one of them is there,
Proletarians.

It has become the anti-communist fashion to burden Soviet foreign policies with the responsibility for all mistakes committed in German communist policies—but there is that doggerel, which will stay in my mind till I die, and there are the events of those weeks, which occurred before Soviet foreign policies could exercise any influence other than Radek's advice on the formation of German communism. The verses only reflected what Friedrich Ebert, whose memory is honoured by German Social Democracy to this day, had said at the very start of the November revolution of 1918: 'I have revolution like sin.…' No one thought of dismissing the editors in whose paper such a poem could appear, no one in the government camp had thought of disarming the mercenaries and executing the guilty—they were left to the 'justice' of gowned fellow anti-communists; in the Federal Republic they got the official affirmation that their action was 'an execution in accordance with martial law'.

Rosa Luxemburg had explained Marxism in a way which she regarded, and we accepted, as the orthodox one. For us the rejection by most other Marxists of her theory of accumulation mattered little, for it had helped to make us aware of the inherent inevitability of war so long as its roots, the capitalist mode of production, were preserved. Later, critical consideration of Rosa's work on our part was induced by the obvious contrast between Soviet Russia's triumph and our defeats, which continued even when we had an organized party. (What Rosa had founded at the end of her life was a mere symbol, rent by internal feuds and incapable of comprising more than a minority of those who stood on her platform. A communist mass party originated only in the autumn of 1920.) It was known that Rosa had had disagreements with Lenin on many issues, in particular the organization problem, a wrong solution of which appeared to be the main cause of our defeats. Had the theoretical foundations, so far as they were specifically 'Luxemburgist', been mistaken? From this, and not merely from the Russian interest in controlling potential supports of Trotskyism, followed the 'Bolshevization' of the German party in which the new German leadership of Ruth Fischer and Maslow played a temporary and provocative yet completely unprincipled part.

Even if we leave this episode alone, the need for communism to overcome Rosa Luxemburg's limitations was obvious, and remains obvious, if only because she failed to notice the fact, emphasized by Lenin and even Hilferding, that capitalism had entered a new stage, economically as well as politically. On the other hand, destalinization encourages looking back to those forms of Marxism which preceded the system described by Stalin as 'Leninism'. The re-consideration of one of the outstanding non-Russian contemporaries of Lenin (Labriola was another) offers a suitable opportunity for distinguishing the general traits of early twentieth-century revolutionary Marxism from its specific Russian realization.

In order to formulate this problem we must go back to 1892, when Rosa Luxemburg was 22, yet already one of the leaders of a Polish socialist group which tried to oppose the growth of a nationalist conception of Polish socialism. In his article Socialism in Germany, Engels tried to develop the prospects of German Social Democracy which, two years before, had emerged triumphant from Bismarck's oppression as the strongest German party. Nearly half a century had passed since Engels, together with his great friend whose name the theory was to bear, had started its elaboration, a mere fifteen years since he had still to fight hard stuggles within the still legal German Socialist party for the publication of its systematization in his Anti-Diihring, one year since that very party had adopted a programme, Marxist at least in form, as a symbol of its self-awareness and hope for the future. However, it was only superficially a Marxist party, and Engels was well aware of the basic importance of the periodically recurring disputes on allegedly particular problems. Dr. Nettl suggests that, apart perhaps from the agrarian question and from the South German parliamentarians' desire to vote for budgets introduced by Liberal Land governments, everything was smooth. This impression, however, merely reflects the party bureaucracy's own self-assuring assertions.

During the first half of the nineties there were various critical developments, in particular in the trade union field to which, when it next became topical, Rosa Luxemburg was to devote so much of her attention. In substance, these developments centred on the question whether the trade unions, which in Germany as distinct from Britain had grown with the party's help, should adapt themselves to existing legislation enough to go on functioning normally but still maintain the spirit that had created them, or aim at ideological as well as organizational independence of the party, perhaps even eventually at the creation of a special trade union party competing with Social Democracy. The second alternative would have imposed a break with the cadres whose socialist convictions had given the unions the strength required to face the initial persecution. This was only one of the adaptations to prosperity within the existing social order, the first germs of which had been noticeable during the last years of the Anti-Socialist law, when repression was losing its strength. A considerable section of the underground workers reacted to these developments with distrust of the parliamentary group which, during the operation of the law, nolens volens, had functioned as Central Committee. Some of them (the 'Wild Men') even revived the anarchist attitudes which during the repression period of the eighties had characterized much of the Central and East European labour movement. At the Erfurt Party Congress which followed the restoration of the legal party organization (and which also adopted the first Marxist programme), the 'Wild Men' were expelled from the party. Engels, who was no lover of anarchists, covered the expulsions with his authority, but his distrust of the German party majority caused him to enforce in 1892, against the German leaders' reluctance to interfere with the cult of Lassalle, the publication of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme of 1875 so as to clarify Marx's and his own opposition to the ideas of Lassalle in which he saw a main source of the tendency of right-wing Social Democracy to adapt itself to the Prusso-German realities. A few years later, immediately before his death, Engels protested against the falsification of his introduction to the new, 1895, edition of Marx's Class Struggle in France and demanded, in a letter to Kautsky, the publication of his full original text. The cancer of the oesophagus which Engels was already suffering at the time saved the German party leaders that embarrassment and enabled them to continue—including in their later struggles against Rosa Luxemburg—with his alleged 'last will' which had turned him, as he complained, into 'a peaceful worshipper of legality quand mime'. In fact he had said, to speak in the terms of his article of 1892, that legality at this moment operated in favour of the working class and that no one, except the ruling classes, had an interest in moving the class struggle from peaceful (industrial and parliamentary) methods to street fighting. Engels' favourite model for the transition mechanism was the triumph of Christianity within the Roman empire: the new social organization, inspired by a new outlook which had grown up within a decaying world, would in due course assume responsibility for its estate. (Engels was realistic enough to mention the part played in the eventual triumph of Christianity by the attitude of the army.)

The international socialist movement may return to this approach when acute revolutionary crises, in the sense defined by Engels himself and later by Lenin, are absent as well as in the event (which Engels could not envisage, since his perspectives for a triumph of Western socialism were 'short') of the process being so protracted that the worldwide transformation assumes the character of a competition between those parts of the world where the new order had made its first steps by revolutionary means, and the rest. For this very reason, it may be important to clarify the three basic implications of Engels' approach, the first two of which were fully appreciated by Rosa Luxemburg.

First of all, the social class called to form the basis of the new social cohesion has to be organized and made conscious of its task. (Nettl writes that the SPD was Rosa's fatherland, but what else could it have been? Surely it was not her fatherland to the exclusion of the Polish and Russian parties, nor … to the detriment of the best nonsocialist achievements of German civilization.) In terms of contemporary sociology—the absence of which in Rosa's days I would not regard as a handicap for her work—this meant the development of a proletarian 'subculture' within West European civilization. Since it has become fashionable to discuss basic problems of socialism in connection with cultural life and in these days, as distinct from those when I was young, we have time for this, I may here formulate the problems arising in this field for Rosa's, and following, generations: the treasures accumulated by the old society had to be assimilated in order to secure their preservation and further development in the new order (Christianity had conspicuously failed in this respect) so as to satisfy the human needs of the emancipated class. Rosa, who conceived revolution as succeeding through a chain of temporary defeats, knew very well that millions of workers would get such satisfaction as they could achieve from the activities of the movement, not from its outcome in the cultural policies of socialist states. Besides, she was too much a Westerner to be satisfied with elementary achievements such as the abolition of illiteracy though she knew very well how many years even Russia—not to speak of the ex-colonial world—would need to satisfy even this elementary requirement. Her, and my, generation of socialist intellectuals who regarded service to the movement as the highest fulfilment of our lives could not and cannot conceive of personal artistic etc. tastes divorced from that standard and obligation. To state that for her it was Goethe, Turgenev, Korolenko, Beethoven, is merely another way of dating her life. People who will be young in the last decades of this century, or in the next, may find something else—provided the artists will succeed in creating something equivalent in a period in which the social incentive for classical art, the preparation of the soil in which lives devoted to the progress of mankind could flourish, may have changed its character. But there is nothing remarkable in the standard as such, as distinct from the encouragement of artistic experiment, which may be left to the young artists. From Rosa's correspondence, incidentally, it is quite clear that she did not regard even the most progressive tendency as a substitute for the spark of genius.

It was not a matter of mere cultural 'superstructure'. As distinct from the young Marx, yet in complete agreement with the mature Marx, who had appreciated trade union struggles as instrumental in the growing consciousness and demands of the masses, Rosa did not believe that mere misery creates class consciousness. Arguing against the widespread conception of a peculiar character of the Russian revolution (of 1905-6) she writes in Massenstreik, Partei und Gewerkschaft:

With paupers one cannot make revolutions of that political maturity and ideological clarity [as she found present in Russia, 1905-6]; from the cultural and intellectual point of view the industrial worker of Petersburg, Moscow or Odessa who stands in the front line of the struggle stands much nearer to the West European type than those who conceive bourgeois parliamentarism and well-ordered trade unionism as the sole and indispensable school of the working class. Even without the external guarantees of the bourgeois legal order the modern development of large-scale industry and fifteen years of social democrat intellectual influences which encouraged and guided the economic struggles have performed a good part of cultural work. The contrast becomes smaller still if, on the other side, the actual standard of life of the German working class is subject to a more thorough analysis.…

Rosa then proceeds to discuss the conditions of the broadest strata of the German working class which did not justify speaking—if I may use present terminology—of such an 'affluent society' as was claimed by the trade union leaders in order to argue that the 'crude' class struggle was over. It is for us not essential to what extent Rosa may have exaggerated in her desire to show that Russia was not an isolated case. My own knowledge of Berlin working-class conditions, fourteen years later, suggests that she was not far off the mark. What matters is the fact that in her concept (and, a fortiori, in that of Engels) there was no contradiction between improvement in the conditions of the working class and the preparation of that class for the eventual fulfilment of its historical task. The contradiction arises in the Revisionist idealization of the standard of living in opposition to Marx's statement, again and again repeated by Rosa Luxemburg, that reform is the by-product of revolution. And here we are meeting the second of the basic problems underlying the approach of Engels, and of the 'classical' type of 'pre-revolutionary' Social Democracy in general.

If the socialist aim is to be taken seriously and, even in the short run, the movement can avoid the splitting up of the working class into a number of possibly conflicting interest groups which can be made use of by the powers-that-be, all partial reforms must be seen as links in a prolonged revolutionary process (at this stage we need not speak of tactics). This concept was attacked by Revisionism, which aimed and still aims at the integration of the industrial workers (more precisely, of their individual groups) as sectional interests in the existing society. Bernstein's Evolutionary Socialism, the classical presentation of the outlook in the fight against which Rosa Luxemburg established her authority in Marxist circles, starts quite consistently with a polemic against Dialectics (not just the specific Hegelian terminology). In this he relies on Kant, i.e. he turns socialism from an issue of historical necessity into a demand for moral improvement. The book ends with a chapter on the relationship between the 'final aim' and the actual reform movement, in which the justification of the movement is found in its own existence as distinct from the achievement of a new form of society. The preceding chapters, which deal consistently with armaments and foreign and colonial policies in a spirit of progressive variations within the given framework of national policies, has a motto from Schiller which suggests that Social Democracy 'should dare to appear what it is'. In between stands a series of dissertations of varying relevance and substantiation, starting with the assertion that original Marxism, including the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, bears the marks of Blanquism (in the sense of the later discoverers of relationships between Lenin and Tkachev, or even Nechaev). There follows an assessment of the labour theory of value as not superior to the marginal utility theory (quite natural, if one rejects a priori the conception of history which gives it sense). Then comes a questioning of Marx's theory of the economic cycle on the sole basis of the two cycles preceding the publication of the book: unhappily for the author, and to Rosa Luxemburg's great satisfaction, the next ('orthodox') depression followed in the interval between the publication of Bernstein's original book and that of her critique. (Similar experiences occurred on the eve of the Great Depression of 1929.) At this point Bernstein expresses quite fantastic wishful thinking on a dispersion of capital ownership by an increase in the number of shareholders—this at the very time when monopoly capitalism was fully developing. He then considers the growing importance of cooperatives and, of all things, Liberalism. Rosa had no difficulty in dealing with his arguments on all these aspects, though she displayed no particular originality. She did not even unearth Engels' statements, made at the end of his life, on monopoly capitalism, a problem which Hilferding was to handle ten years later. As regards liberalism she was clear in stating that democracy, which in her opinion is essential for the triumph of the working class, emerges as a by-product of the successes of the socialist working class, and not from the Liberals. (The First Congress of Russian Social Democracy, not quoted by her, had already said all essentials on the Liberals.) The strength of Rosa's reply lies in the demonstration that militarism, war and domestic reaction, far from being distortions of the normal course of capitalist development, are inherent in modern capitalism.

The remarkable fact about the counter-attack against Bernstein's formulation of Revisionism (the trend in itself was much older and continues up to the present day) was the complete indifference of the intellectual leaders of the German party—who seven years before had formulated the Erfurt Programme—and that the initiative of two young party journalists, Parvus and Rosa Luxemburg, who had come from the western parts of the Tsarist empire, was required to put Acheron into motion. Nettl mentions the pressure exercised from outside by Plekhanov on the German party executive. He might have added that Plekhanov acted in full agreement with all the revolutionary Marxists of his country. Immediately after the appearance of the (Russian) Economists' Credo, the authors of which Bernstein eventually referred to as being close to him, the Siberian exiles, headed by Lenin, Martov, Potresov and Dan reacted with a protest, to which Plekhanov referred when his 'Emancipation of Labour' group in Zurüch resumed its publications. Reaction against Revisionism stood at the root of Iskra which eventually was to shape Russian Social Democracy. There were good historial reasons for this: without its assertion of Marxism, Russian Social Democracy would not only have failed eventually to assume power (the future Mensheviks, who opposed that assumption, shared with Lenin in the protest) but would have dissolved itself in bourgeois liberalism, as was explicitly suggested in the Credo and was soon pursued by its authors. In Germany this mechanism would not operate since bourgeois liberalism had already fully developed, had a party (or rather two) and was fully compromised in the eyes of the working class by its capitulation to Bismarck's construction of the Empire, in the course of the protest against which German Social Democracy had originated. In Germany rejection of Revisionism by Social Democracy was required not on grounds of self-preservation, for a truly Revisionist party could still fulfil the functions of a Liberal party proper as it does in present-day West Germany, but in order to avoid splitting up the working class into individual interest-groups which would have led to Social Democracy becoming integrated into the framework of Bismarck's empire. As we have seen, party intellectuals who had grown up in the Russian or Polish framework were the first to object. There is no need for Nettl to base explanations on Rosa's alleged urge for a successful party career: such explanations form one of the most unfounded aspects of his book. (However, I realize that the use of the word 'power' … by him as a sociologist trained to think in terms of machines and 'power' is different from its implications to a Marxist thinking in terms of objective social trends within which the individual has to play his part, within or outside institutional machinery.)

Rosa Luxemburg was in no way suitable for a successful 'career'. Quite apart from her propensity to stick to her views even if these were unpopular at party headquarters there was, for example, her incapacity to keep editorial posts for more than a few months (not all of this due to her status as a woman) and her refusal to work in those very fields of party activities where her sex would have been a definite asset. In her case, and in that of some of our best party workers, this refusal was their specific way of fighting for women's emancipation by demonstrating that they could do other work than that concerned with welfare, family and divorce legislation, the rights of the unmarried mother, etc. They knew well that the days of the Indira Gandhis or even Barbara Castles would not come during their lifetime. In fact, even the government of the Soviet Union has been up to now a very male affair, with a few exceptions at the start due to the large part played by women in the technique of underground work and to that played by the Socialist Women's International in the struggle against the war, which also made for Clara Zetkin's importance in the councils of Comintern.

Rosa's views were acceptable to the German party machine only in one point which, however, was of secondary importance to the machine (it is a merit of Nettl's to have emphasized this point), namely her resistance to Polish nationalism and nationlist socialism, as embodied, one should not forget, for example by Pilsudski. This resistance was essential to Rosa from the very start, and formed one of the foundations for her union with Leo Jogiches as well as for her early conflicts with Plekhanov, who in this connection showed no greater capacity for dealing with younger comrades on terms of equality than on other occasions.

Solidarity with the Polish struggle for national independence formed part of the Marxist tradition in general, and in particular in Russia where even the first 'Zemlya i volya', in 1863, had bravely faced isolation from the predominant trends of public opinion in order to express its solidarity with the Polish insurrection. On the other hand, Polish separatism represented a major nuisance for German Social Democracy (the Austrian party kept its Poles happy on a federative basis, while the German party was strictly centralist). From this, notwithstanding Kautsky's insistence on the classical Marxist tradition, originated some interest amongst the German party bureaucracy in Rosa's first activities amongst the Silesian Poles, which promoted her first steps in the German party. But that was all. Her attack against Revisionism made her unpopular with the machine which, like other machines, was not too happy to be pushed forward. With the discussions on the mass-strike (since 1905) begins her differentiation from the party majority. At first hidden, from 1910 explicit, this differentiation turns, with the outbreak of the war, into open and ruthless struggle, to be concluded with the foundation of the German Communist Party and the murder of Rosa.

All this was far in the future when, in answer to Bernstein, she wrote Social Reform or Revolution?, attempting to speak for the party. Those parts of the pamphlet which we have discussed above are, indeed, a mere reflection of views supposedly held by the party as a whole. But at the end of the pamphlet Rosa leaves the well-traced path—and Engels' whole concept of a mature fruit falling into the organized workers' grasp. Indeed, she here begins to develop, at the very start of her German party work, twenty years before her death, the specific 'Luxemburgist' attitude. Quoting Marx's statements from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and arguing against all the current statements about the dangers of assuming power before objective conditions have matured, Rosa argues that, since the organization of the socialist society presupposes the assumption of power by a class hitherto removed from current political education and experience, where all the objective conditions for socialist reconstruction are available the assumption of power cannot come too early: it will open the series of experiences, including defeats, in which the working class will mature. (I may here recall the last lines from her pen, written at the time when the insurrection begun against her advice was defeated and when she could well realize her personal fate. Yet she said of the Revolution: 'I was, I am, and I shall be'.) The first conquest of power by the working class, Rosa writes in 1898, is bound to come too early from the standpoint of retaining it since a transformation so enormous as the transition from capitalism to socialism cannot proceed otherwise than by a number of steps each unsatisfactory in itself. Only in the course of struggle and partial defeat can the working class become capable of solving that herculean task. The opposite approach, i.e. waiting till all the conditions are fulfilled by some automatic development, amounts to waiting in eternity, and leaving the initiative to opponents who will lead mankind into disaster. (Rosa did not know of atom bombs, but she was one of the first who realized the inevitability of one, or more, all-European wars unless the capitalist control of Europe was broken.) Being in essence a German socialist, Rosa could not, like Trotsky, conceive of' permanent revolution' as an appeal, by the workers of an underdeveloped country, to those of more developed ones. To avoid misunderstandings, she did not even use the term.

As distinct from Lenin, and very much dominated as she was by her local Polish background of struggle against any confusion of socialism with nationalism, Rosa Luxemburg based her analysis strictly on the two main classes of capitalist society. For her, as opposed to the trade unionist ideal of securing material benefits for a skilled and well-organized minority of the working class (the achievements of which, generalized, constituted 'socialism', which was the substance of Bernstein's approach), the maturing process of the working class was a chain of revolutionary mass-movements, economic as well as political in character, which would involve the whole, or nearly the whole, of the class hitherto oppressed and denied the political experience required to build a new world. This, as already noted, was the substance of her Massenstreik, Partei und Gewerkschaft. If, in order to draw the lessons from the Russian experience, she may have drawn a picture of the working class at least of Petersburg, Moscow and Odessa slightly nearer to the West than they actually were, it should be added that this lack of precision had enabled her also to foretell, earlier than did anyone else, that 'the future Russia will be the socialist element of fermentation [she did not say more] for the whole of Europe'. On the other hand, her very conviction of a basic identity of Russian and German issues, her conception of the Russian movement as facing tasks not particularly Russian in character, caused her, who knew the bureaucracy of the German labour movement, to use, during the struggle of the Russian Mensheviks (with whom she sided in the organization dispute against the Bolsheviks) expressions such as 'the organization as a process' upon which Lenin, the guardian of the traditions of the revolutionary Narodniki and the enthusiastic student of organization problems, poured deserved scorn.

The socialist party of each country was the element of guidance, not more, since Rosa did not believe that revolutions could be organized in the sense of determining their start and practical course, which had to be left to the dynamics of the revolutionary period. Guidance in the revolutionary period meant giving the struggle such slogans and direction that at every moment the maximum of the potential as well as of the actual power of the working class is realized, that the decisiveness and sharpness of the tactics of Social Democracy never lag behind the actual forces but move ahead of them. (No provision is made for retreat. This, presumably, is left to the dynamics of the counter-revolutionary phases: it was in such a one that Rosa was to die.) But Social Democracy is not just identical with the parliamentary party and its electorate. Rosa—and this she had learned from Lenin's What is to be Done?—was quite explicit on the existence of two different aspects of the political party: that of fighting for social reforms of all kinds—in this respect it was simply another branch of organized labour, equal in rights but not superior to trade unionism; and as the carrier of the long-term interest of the working class in its emancipation. In the latter respect, the trade unions formed only a part of the whole as represented by Social Democracy. Thus, the trade union leaders' claim for a voice equal to that of the party in long-term policy decisions such as calls for revolutionary strikes amounted to a mere indirect way of stating that they could not imagine forms of the class struggle other than that for partial reforms in the framework of the existing society. In all this, however, Rosa lacks one basic element of the Leninist analysis of party, namely his statement in What is to be Done? that the insufficiency of the 'trade unionist class-consciousness' (both trade unionist and reformist parliamentary) derives not only from its short view but also from its failure to be based upon the experiences and relationships of all classes in society.

With the above observations we have given an explanation of Rosa Luxemburg's failure fully to come to terms with Lenin at any stage of her development. This was not implied in any struggle of hers for abstract 'democracy': in his presentation, Nettl rightly takes issue with the misuse of her attitude for present anti-communist purposes. I may add that, once Rosa had sided with the Mensheviks in the Russian organizational issue, she was bound to use the 'democratic' argument as everyone, including people who apply methods so undemocratic as her companion Jogiches in the Polish disputes from 1911, does in such circumstances. The question was simply why she sided that way. Rosa's attitude to the Russian party might rather be derived from her negative attitude to Polish self-determination. Lenin was quite prepared to regard errors in this respect, if committed by Poles, i.e. by members of the oppressed nation, as purely tactical. There was, however, a real fear that, in the event of close collaboration, 'the Russians would soon discover that the SDKPiL [Social Democrat Party of Poland and Lithuania] was in fact like a South American army—all generals and few soldiers'. But all this was subsidiary. Once Rosa saw both the Mensheviks (the Petrograd Soviet, dominated even by the left-wing Mensheviks Trotsky and Parvus as it was) and the Moscow Bolsheviks in action, and had had an opportunity to discuss the actual issues of the revolution with the Bolshevik leaders, her choice would be clear. This, moreover, contradicts the myth that she glorified mass strikes at the expense of armed insurrection, though she would not ascribe to the latter such a central importance as is natural for supporters of 'organizing the revolution'.

Then followed the collaboration with Lenin in the very superficially re-united Russian party, in the struggle for the anti-war platform in the International and (after an interruption due to her and Jogiches' not very democratic manoeuvres in their domestic party split) a loose though never close collaboration during the War, when Rosa, as we shall see later, adopted an attitude similar to that of the 'Left-wing Communists' in Lenin's own party. There is nothing astonishing in this if we keep in mind that within the general framework of revolutionary Marxism, which would assert itself in burning issues of war and revolution, Lenin's specific attitude in the organization issue derived from his concrete analysis of the national and agrarian problems, which forms his world historical merit but which Rosa, enamoured as she was with the classical 'model' of 'pure' capitalism (and with the domestic struggle against the Polish Social Patriots), simply refused to appreciate. Perhaps she chose Germany as her main field of activity precisely because it was closer to the model.

The institutional framework of party life appears, indeed, irrelevant once it is taken for grated that some inherent mechanism of capitalist society will, by its own dynamics, bring about the conditions in which class consciousness and, eventually, the solution of the historical tasks of the working class are generated through a process of mass 'spontaneity'. When Rosa believes that the political level of Social Democracy allows for the expulsion of Bernstein, she suggests it so that he may occupy his true position as a lower-middle-class liberal. When she sees that this is impossible in view of the strength of Bernstein's actual (as distinct from formal) support, she withdraws the suggestion and eliminates the corresponding paragraphs from Social Reform or Revolution? What else could she do? By now she had arrived at the conclusion: 'Let us stay at our principle that no one is expelled from our ranks because of theoretical convictions'. This goes of course a good deal further than the view that, since the expulsion of right-wingers is clearly impossible, the party's internal balance should not be disturbed by the expulsion of anarchistic elements, which is a question of tactics. It is clear that for a person capable of making these two statements, at an interval of seven years, it is not just the tactical situation of the intra-party struggle but the concept of party itself which has changed. Now it was no longer the community of socialists inspired by Marxist principles but the place where one could work for those principles, the 'protecting roof over our heads' as Fritz Heckert, the representative of her group, Spartakus, frankly enough stated at the foundation congress of the new Independent Socialist Party at Easter 1917. But some ten years before, the feeling that the party bureaucracy, if given a free hand, would purge the party of all dissenters was already widespread. From the fear of such developments arose, as Nettl has noticed (though he incorrectly transfers it to the realm of mere 'morality') an occasional united front of right-wing and left-wing Social Democrats. In view of the tendency of the party's executive committee to denounce even such informal Left groupings as Sonderbiinde, and of the enormous power of the trade unions, which would have backed an expulsion of the Left and even urged it, there can be no doubt that Frolich's retrospective suggestion that the Left might have organized itself in a group, with some journal as the initial centre (as the Right wing had done with the Sozialistische Monatshefte), represented, indeed, the maximum of the possible. It should be added that the main purpose of such a journal would have been clarification within the group itself since even Mehring opposed Rosa in the all-important issue of strengthening the mass movement on the Prussian constitutional question. The journal was established, as late as December 1913, in the very elementary form of a Presse-Korrespondenz, to be used by sympathetic editors of party papers (there were not many of them) but containing also a lot of articles which Rosa and Marchlewski, the editors, could not expect to be reprinted, and which thus must have been regarded as destined for their sympathizers' information. It still proved useful in the first stage of the war, and formed the basis of the later Spartakus-Briefe. As happens in such cases, it had originated from a breakdown of Rosa's earlier tactics, which were to place her articles in widely read Socialist dailies edited by her real or presumed friends.

Wishful thinking in this respect may have been prompted by Rosa's earlier successes during the campaign for mass strikes to enforce democracy in Germany, which began again on the immediate eve of the war. In general, and not only in Petersburg where this was obvious, the war began at a time when a strong radicalization of the labour movement was noticeable. Rosa's position as a member of the International Socialist Bureau and the great authority she enjoyed in it certainly prompted her overestimation of her influence. Her position was in fact strengthened by her intermediate situation between the Germans and the Bolsheviks, the fantastically difficult special problem of the Poles, and her consistent internationalism. She had experienced Kautsky's sudden turn a few months after he wrote, in 1909, the Wegzur Macht, to his (if one may use a later communist term) 'struggle on two fronts' against herself and the Revisionists—in fact more against her group, while the Revisionists got away with very formal condemnations. Afterwards she had lost many wavering supporters during the years when it became clear that she was not speaking for the party majority. Such experiences were bound to make it clear to her that she and her closest group of friends had to prepare for playing an independent part within the party of the German working class. I can assure Dr. Nettl that the factory workers in her Niederbarnim constituency—young when they attended her classes, experienced shop-stewards when fifteen years later they worked with me—were not kept uninformed on basic issues, nor—as he appears to think, on the basis of some correspondence—were they mainly regarded as means of getting mandates to party congresses.

Within hours of learning of the decision of the parliamentary party on 4 August 1914, Rosa did what every intelligent and energetic Marxist is bound to do in similar circumstances, i.e. convened a factional meeting to organize the necessary counter-action. She has proved herself not only a brave (das moralische versteht sich von selbst) but also a careful (see her efforts to prevent a premature sacrifice by Liebknecht), intelligent and consistent leader of the anti-war group. That (as Stalin would have said) she concentrated her fire on those who had betrayed German socialism was not, as Nettl considers, a matter of pent-up resentment but an application of the principle, formulated in those days by Karl Liebknecht, that 'the enemy stand in one's own country'. Should a German socialist eager to fight the imperialists have joined hands with them to denounce mainly the French and British Social Patriots? Nuances, such as whether one should formulate this attitude in Rosa's terms, or in Lenin's terms of 'defeat of one's own bourgeoisie' while he wrote, to avoid misunderstandings, articles on 'The National Pride of the Great Russians' appear ridiculous in the historical perspective. I am not willing to argue with my two great teachers on such points, after half a century has passed. So far as the Social Patriot right wing was concerned, it was not a matter of arguing against erring comrades but of the class struggle in its most immediate forms. That poem of 1919 and Ebert's observation, with which we have opened this article, forms a mere continuation of earlier statements dating especially from the replacement in October 1905 of the right-wing editors of Vorwärts by Rosa Luxemburg and other left wingers. This series of statements carried, at various periods, an intermixture of chauvinistic, anti-feminist and anti-semitic overtones, denunciation of her policies as harmful to the trade union cause and all kinds of attacks against her personal honour.

Her attitude to the Marxist 'centre' logically followed from the resolution of the Stuttgart Congress of the International which she had moved seven years before. If it was correct that in the event of war socialists should use the political and economic crisis created by it as an opportunity to promote the fall of the capitalist regime, no person who took this decision seriously could take anything other than a fighting attitude to a group of which an outstanding leader, Karl Kautsky—once Rosa's supporter in the movement for political mass-strikes—now proclaimed the slogan: 'class-struggle in peace, struggle for peace [in alliance with the liberal pacifists] in wartime'. The sharpness of Rosa's critique of the 'Marxist Centre' in no way prevented her from keeping to the principle that 'the worst working-class party is better than none', which she had formulated in 1908, and that

one can 'leave' sects or conventicles when these no longer suit and one can always found new sects or conventicles; it is nothing but childish fantasy to talk of liberating the whole mass of proletarians from their bitter and terrible fate by simply 'leaving' and in this way setting them a brave example,

as she wrote from prison in early 1917. On such grounds, she opposed even the separation of the Centrist minority of the SPD from the majority party, enforced though it was by the latter's leaders (who had good reasons, for even in my days there were quite a few regions, mainly in Saxony, where most of the 'majority socialist' workers and party activists were far to the left of many of the former 'Independents'). Eventually, those very principles would cause Spartakus to participate as an independent faction in the formation of the Independent Socialist Party; as late as 11 November 1918 Rosa's advice would be to remain in that party as long as possible. There was no ground for any different behaviour, unless one took the Leninist position that the party had to organize the revolution, a position taken by none of the competing left-wing factions in Germany. Even if someone had taken that position, it would have been nonsense to establish an independent party unless one had the potential required at least to try it. Lenin had this potential, if only in nucleo, when, in Prague in 1912, he rallied a majority of the operating socialist party committees during the start of a revolutionary wave, an obvious aim of which (the establishment of the democratic republic in Russia) was on the cards but in no way assured unless the Russian working class had a party not bound to collaboration with, and waiting for, the liberal bourgeoisie.

There follows the Russian revolution. However much use has been made of Rosa's writings of those days to show her allegedly inherent opposition to Bolshevik policies (Nettl … is quite sensible on this point), nothing emerges beyond the obvious facts. These were, firstly, that Rosa was a German and hence, according to the principle that 'the enemy stands in one's own country', viewed a separate peace of Soviet Russia with Germany, which was bound at least temporarily to alleviate the latter's position, with eyes different from those of the Bolsheviks (whose obligations to their own revolution she fully recognized). Secondly, she had in general, as we have seen, a tendency to be pessimistic on the prospects of first revolutionary triumphs to be consolidated, and hence to put greater demands on the orthodoxy of practical policies which, in her opinion, would produce lessons for the future rather than consolidated states. This was in principle the position of the Soviet 'left-wing Communists' of the Brest Litovsk period, i.e. that held for a short while by a majority of the Russian party. Finally, Rosa put greater demands than the Bolsheviks could satisfy on the preservation of some kind of proletarian democracy. However, her critique of the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly was only short-lived. At the end she pursued in Germany the same policy, with the difference only that the Bolsheviks were backed by the sympathy of the overwhelming majority of the industrial workers and soldiers while Rosa, in her very last programmatic declaration, had to admit that, in Germany, both kinds of support were conspicuously absent. As regards the terror Rosa, arguing with Radek, now the Russian party representative, is sorry that their old comrade Dzerzhinsky has taken up the job of organizing Cheka, even be it necessary. Leo Jogiches, supporting in the argument their old opponent Radek, says to Rosa: 'If the need arises, you can do it too'. This is the crux of the matter: the Russian revolution has ceased to be a dream, it has become hard reality. If Rosa had survived and become responsible for a real revolution building a new order she, too, would have learned to do hard things. But could she have survived so long?

At the time of that conversation, against Rosa's and Radek's advice, the decision had been taken to leave the Independent Socialists and to establish an independent Communist Party. The programme, drafted by Rosa, concludes with the declaration that Spartakus would never assume power except when called by the workers to do so. But when the revolution started, Spartakus had not more than fifty organized members in Berlin. The decision to establish a party of its own was taken because at a meeting of the Berlin activists of the Independent Socialist Party Rosa had got less than a third of the votes on her motion to convene an extraordinary party congress. Spartakus did not get a single delegate to the national congress of the German Soviets. Its independent caucus within the Berlin Soviet was established a month after Liebknecht's and Rosa's deaths. But in March 1919, at the National Congress of the Independent Socialists, a motion in favour of participating in parliamentary elections only as a means to promote propaganda for the Soviet system (i.e. the very platform which Rosa had defended at the foundation congress of 'her' party yet been outvoted by the radical antiparliamentarians) was lost by only one vote. In December 1919 the next congress of the Independents unanimously adopted a resolution in favour of establishing a Soviet government. A motion immediately to join Comintern, which had been established in March of that year, polled 114 votes against 169 in favour of a motion to enter into negotiations with Moscow. When these negotiations had produced Lenin's Twenty-One Conditions, the Leipzig Congress of the Independent Socialists in October 1920 (Zinoviev arguing against Martov) accepted the conditions, which implied expulsion of the right-wing Independents, by 256 to 156 votes. Less than half of the members existing on paper carried out the decision: still, only 50,000 of the 300,000 members of the new communist party had come from Spartakus. Its heroism during the first crises of the revolution and the blood of its founders, who were now regarded as the martyrs of the German socialist movement, had not even been capable of producing the mainstream of German communism. Rosa had been right in opposing the foundation of the party. She was wrong when she gave way to revolutionary enthusiasm, both on that occasion and a few weeks later when the Berlin Independents started an abortive insurrection from which she could not dissociate herself—nor even, though it was disapproved by her central committee, prevent the participation of some of its leaders, because her theory prohibited her from opposing 'mass-initiative', even that of a majority which was only local in a hopeless situation. What further happened to her has been said in the opening of this article.

She would always have been ready to fertilize with her blood the soil for a truly revolutionary party of the German proletariat. In the moral sense she has done so. But she was a theoretician, and her theoretical legacy proved to be a handicap for the development of her party. That she and Karl Liebknecht, the heroes of the anti-war struggle, could be outvoted at the foundation congress in two issues so decisive as the participation in parliamentary elections and in the existing trade unions, was bad enough. That the doomed insurrection could be started against her will was worse. But worst of all was the fact that her theory did not even enable her party to correct mistakes without immediately falling into the opposite extreme. Seven months after her death, under the leadership of her pupil Levi—the same who, when eventually leaving the party, used Rosa's critique of the Bolshevik revolution as an instrument to dissociate his group from it—the party expelled (against Radek's advice) the radical wing, i.e. a near majority of the existing members, including the most important industrial regions. When in the following spring in Germany a situation arose which was analogous to that of the Russian Kornilov coup which had opened to the Bolsheviks the way to power, the Central Committee led by Levi declared, now in a pseudo-orthodox vein, that the working class was not interested in the armed dispute between two factions of the ruling class. In that instance there were no Russians who could be regarded as responsible, as in an analogous case eleven years later. After 1920, there was time to attempt the correction; after 1932, though the correction was attempted, none.

Since I am here concerned with the history not of organizations but of ideologies, I may ask the question to what extent Rosa Luxemburg's failure in every sense other than the moral one was due to weaknesses of theory. Undoubtedly she was to a large extent the heiress of Marx and, with a few exceptions (such as the Accumulation theory) wished it to be so. But though the unquestionable Marxist successes have not been achieved without accommodations, it can hardly be said that Lenin's development of emphasis on Party represents a larger deformation of original Marxism than the opposite one, its virtual negation by Rosa Luxemburg.

The differences in economic theory were almost irrelevant for initial successes or failures. In the period of reconstruction and, a fortiori in the post-Keynesian period in the West, it was important to have a theory of imperialism based on full recognition of the phenomenon of monopoly capitalism. But at a time when everything depended on every militant's conviction that the horrors of the First World War were no accident, no consequence of mere faulty politics capable of correction within the framework of capitalist society, the details of theories of imperialism did not matter.

Rosa Luxemburg's negative attitude to national problems has undoubtedly done harm to the communist movement of her home country, Poland, where the political task consisted precisely in finding a combination of the urge for national liberation with the need to prevent a deflection of this urge into chauvinistic if not (in the case of Pilsudski) fascist channels. But this does not hold true of her adopted fatherland, Germany, where the sharpest opposition to aggressive chauvinism was the right one.

One is led to the opinion that her basic weakness lies precisely where also lies her great historic strength: in her function as a transmission belt between the Eastern and the Western developments of Marxism. Her capacity to promote critically creative groups ('peer groups', to use the not very helpful term of modem sociology which Nettl repeatedly employs, perhaps without knowing how current the phenomenon was in those days, and thus how little the term explains) combined, in her mind and in her activities, her personal roots in a powerful revolutionary movement which evokes the strongest moral forces in men (yet also, because of the very restricted scene on which its preparation can proceed, makes for all the unavoidable narrowness of groupings) with her operations in a mass party exposed to stagnation and bureaucratization yet also requiring a remedy against those very shortcomings. In the East, Rosa Luxemburg has been a not very successful organizer and a fairly average theoretician; her failure has been obvious because it contrasted so strongly with Lenin's triumph (though it should not be forgotten that there was only one Lenin in the Russian movement; Rosa was not inferior to Trotsky or Bukharin). In the West, she was the greatest Marxist theoretician since Engels' death—outside Italy, which with Labriola and Gramsci had quite a remarkable succession independent of the Russian tradition. Her weaknesses may be explained in terms of a failure of Marxism, as developed in her days, to satisfy the needs of a fully developed Western industrial country.

At this point I wish to return to my observation above that Engels' approach of 1892 has three basic implications. We have hitherto discussed how Rosa Luxemburg handled the first two of these—the need for the new class to be organized and to be made conscious of its task, and the need for it to mature in experience and organization to the demands of that task. There is a third one, which exceeds the framework of Rosa Luxemburg's days, and those of my own youth, when the approach of war, war itself, and in between the wars the Great Depression, appeared to answer the question on our behalf. Indeed, we would then have regarded any application to present-day capitalism of Marx's saying that no social system collapses before it has exhausted all its potential productive capacity as an abandonment of the essentials of Marxism—which it is not, since the correctness of the Marxist analysis does not depend upon whether the great transformation takes place in the nineteenth, twentieth or twenty-first centuries, whether there are intermediate stages, etc. By now we have had two decades without major depressions, with an evident raising of the productive resources in both parts of the world, and the hope that the threat of world war may recede. What then?

Rosa Luxemburg has made two contributions to a future tackling of this problem. First, during the years when things appeared to proceed so slowly and the obstacles presented by the German party bureaucracy so overwhelmingly strong, she, living in Germany and realizing the close associations of all aspects of German society with militarism, tried to subsume all of them 'from the poisoning of an old-age pensioner to the pretensions of Prussian officers, from unemployment to taxation' under the general heading of 'imperialism', avoiding both the specific emphasis on the militarist phenomenon that was characteristic of Liebknecht and also a specific economic definition of imperialism, since she had none. Whether this was really such an asset as Nettl asserts is an open question. Certainly it was better than over-specialization, or emphasis on the mere fact of monopoly; both approaches would logically lead to a struggle against purely individual aspects of existing society and thus deprive socialism of its function as an alternative to capitalist society (this once taken for granted, the issue of 'reform vs. revolution' is an issue of tactics, applicable in definite times and places). Rosa felt that the problem must somehow be tackled. This is the background of her suggestion, made in 1910 and rejected even by Mehring because of the traditional Marxist aversion to emphasis on 'superstructural' aspects, to raise the issue of the monarchy—not quite an irrelevant issue, one would think, in pre-1914 Germany. This line was continued during the war when, in the Junius pamphlet, she combined the assertion that no national wars were possible any more (an assertion rejected by Lenin) with the raising of a political, i.e. republican, programme for Germany—as if, to quote Lenin's criticism, the Greater German Republic, if existing, would not also have conducted an imperialist war. Of course, it would—but the question was whether, in the process of bringing it into being in the struggle against a monarchy fully identified with the Army, the latter, and thereby the backbone of the powers-that-be, might have been broken. It is another question whether this could have been achieved with her theory about organization which amounted, in effect, to her rejection of organization. In substance, this is the issue of 'transition slogans in non-revolutionary situations' about which in the late twenties we had so many disputes with our right-wingers, most of them direct pupils of Rosa Luxemburg. It still remains to me more than problematical whether, say, the demand for a transformation of the Reichswehr into a People's Militia, in days where it would have simply amounted to broadening the entrance to the military career, would have amounted to a policy different in substance from that pursued, at present, by West German Social Democracy which supports the so-called national demands of the existing government because it is allegedly unpatriotic to do otherwise.

Secondly, there stands her theory of Accumulation, that is to say her assertion that the part of the surplus value destined for investment cannot be realized by sales to either of the main classes of capitalist society but only outside its framework, to the remaining pre-capitalist classes in the capitalist centres and, in particular, in the colonial countries which, in the process, become capitalist themselves. With the approaching conclusion of the process, and even earlier with a serious reduction of scope for expansion, the viability of capitalism comes to an end and it will fall, presumably in a chain of major depressions with revolutionary consequences. With this theory, which played in her intellectual corpus the same role as that of monopoly capitalism for Hilferding and Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg remained amongst Marxist theorists in a minority of one. Her reply to the almost unanimous criticism, including by such unquestionable left wingers as Lenin, under the heading 'What the Epigones have made of the Marxist Theory', albeit from prison, is not one of her best writings. Nevertheless, at a time when stability of the value of money was a basic assumption of all Marxist models, she had a case, and she was one of the few Marxist theorists who seriously approached the problems of the underdeveloped countries. True, she did so with an erroneous concept and from the wrong end, so to speak, as potential yet insufficient markets for the industrialized countries rather than in relation to economic and political processes in the colonial countries themselves. (But may not her approach again be relevant? Will, for example, the effect of the Vietnam war upon South-East Asia be necessarily more important, on the world scale, than that upon the West itself?) However great the temporary impact of Rosa's theory upon the CPG then in formation, it was bound to remain transitory: not because the Russians insisted on Leninist orthodoxy but because it was impossible with its help to handle the problems of real underdeveloped countries when they arose, starting with China. The theory has retained a certain influence amongst those noncommunist intellectuals who searched for a theory of automatic breakdown of capitalism, the very thing which Rosa rejected in favour of a conception of a series of conflicts and catastrophes, the solution of which by working-class action would demand a maximum of consciousness.

In the last chapter of The Accumulation of Capital Rosa Luxemburg describes militarism, at least so far as it is financed by taxes levied from the non-proletarian strata of the population, as an additional field for the realization of the surplus value to be accumulated: only at this point do the activities of the state as a potential regulator of the economic cycle come in. But let us not forget that the book was written in 1912 and that phenomena such as the 'war-industrial complex' are still with us. If her analysis was mistaken then it shows, in any case, points relevant even for our days. Not of all economists and sociologists can this be said after more than half a century.