The Revolutionary Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg

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The great revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg has often been misrepresented, when not openly slandered, by bourgeois academics and Stalinists as an opponent of the October Revolution – or as an advocate for a ‘softer’, ‘anti-authoritarian’ Marxism, as opposed to that of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Some contribute to distorting Luxemburg’s legacy through the invention of ‘Luxemburgism’, as a set of ideas opposed to Bolshevism.

In this session, Marie Frederiksen, author of a new biography of Luxemburg, will explain the true content of her political thought, and how it developed as the international class struggle unfolded. A class-conscious revolutionary and staunch defender of Marxist theory to the end, Luxemburg waged a battle against revisionism, opportunism, class-collaboration national chauvinism and pacifism, always on the side of the socialist revolution. Marxists today must reclaim Luxemburg’s revolutionary legacy.

Transcription

Marie: Thank you, Julian. We, the generations of revolutionaries today, stand on the shoulders of giants, it is imperative for us that we learn from their lives and experience and one of those is Rosa Luxemburg. She’s a figure that has been hijacked by the “soft-leftists”, if you can call them that, people who try to use her to justify their own left reformism by putting it in a radical veneer and I think it’s time that we set the record straight and that we, the IMT, reclaim Rosa Luxemburg as the revolutionary that she was. I will focus on two myths that have been created about her.

But first a little bit of background: she was born in 1871 in Russian occupied Poland, she was a Pole not allowed to speak her own language in school, she was a Jew, and she was a woman. She started fighting oppression at a very young age, already in high school she became politically and revolutionarily active and before she turned twenty, she had to flee the country and move to Switzerland. In 1898, she decided to move to Berlin in order to participate in what was probably the strongest labour movement in the world at that time, the German Social Democratic Party, the SPD. The leadership there found her a bit difficult to handle, so they tried to derail her into the woman’s movement of the SPD, but she wasn’t a person that was easily derailed and she threw herself into the most important debates in the movement at that time. When she arrived in Berlin, it was just in time for the central debate between reform and revolution that Eduard Bernstein had raised inside the SPD. Bernstein tried to introduce a revision of Marxism and actually transform the political foundation of the SPD from Marxism into reformism. Rosa Luxemburg threw herself into this, explaining that it wasn’t just a theoretical question; it was a question of the life and death of the SPD. I think that if you read her text ‘Social Reform or Revolution?’ today, you will find it striking that it is in many ways rebutting exactly the same arguments that you can hear on the left wing today and you can take quotes from her and use them directly against a lot of these soft-leftists that you meet today (all over the world, I think). Throughout her life she played a key role in fighting the opportunist-reformist degeneration that happened in German Social Democracy and in the Second International, a fight that ended up in her being a key part in founding the German Communist Party, and also a fight that ended in her being killed for fighting for what she believed in.

She has become somewhat of a left wing icon, but I would say that her legacy has been grossly distorted, this concept of so-called “Luxemburgism” has been invented. They present her as representing some kind of a special trend within Marxism, as her being both opposed to the reformists, but also to the Leninists and to Bolshevism, like some kind of third way, a softer revolutionary way, a more “democratic” way in their view. In reality they try to use her to cover up for her own left reformism in radical clothing. They try to portray her as some kind of champion of working class creativity and spontaneity and as being in opposition to some “ultra-centralist”, “undemocratic” Lenin, who supposedly made a coup in Russia in order to set up a dictatorship in Russia under in own leadership. This is false, and I will try to explain this. But this Luxemburgism (so-called) can seem attractive to young, honest revolutionaries – revolutionaries who seek an alternative to what they have been told is Leninism, but is in actual fact Stalinism. But this idea of a special “Luxemburgism” as an independent trend, in opposition to Leninism and Bolshevism, is false to the core; it is based on myths that are created by taking texts and quotes out of context and also hiding the fact that Luxemburg, on several occasions, changed her mind when events convinced her that her criticisms of Lenin and the Bolsheviks had been wrong. If you make a serious study of the writings and life of Rosa Luxemburg, then you can make no other conclusion than that she was a revolutionary, a communist, and on the same side of the barricades as Lenin and the Bolsheviks – the same side of the barricades that the IMT stands on. There are many myths that have been created, I want to use my talk to try and combat the two myths that I think are most important.

The first one is that she supposedly had a special theory of spontaneity and was against the building of a revolutionary organisation to lead the working class and that she somehow predicted how the Russian Revolution would end up, in a dictatorship under Stalin, and the practical conclusion from these Luxemburgists is that we shouldn’t build a revolutionary organisation at all. The second myth is that she supposedly was an opponent of the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks, but let’s begin with the question of organisation and spontaneity. We are told that Luxemburg stood for the spontaneity of the masses, and their creativity, as against the Leninist model of a highly centralised, monolithic, revolutionary party. It is especially her work ‘The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions’ that is used to create this myth, but the claim that this text supports this myth both misses the point as to why she wrote this pamphlet and against whom she was polemicising and furthermore, and this is general for all the claims about what Luxemburg stood for, you can only support this myth if you grossly distort the article. You can not in all honesty read this article and claim that Luxemburg dismisses the concept of revolutionary leadership. The article is analysing the First Russian Revolution, in 1905, it’s explaining in great detail how the Russian masses rose spontaneously in mass strikes and also how they set up Soviets. The Soviets are basically worker’s councils, a development of the Strike Committee, it was something that the Russian masses founded as the needs arose, it wasn’t something that had been described by any Marxist theoretician beforehand. Luxemburg described this process and it was these councils that in 1917 became the organs of worker’s power and took power in Russia.

The article was written for a German audience, it wasn’t written for a debate in the Russian Party; it was a contribution to a debate taking place inside the SPD (the German Social Democratic Party), and it is basically a very harsh criticism of the leadership of the SPD and of their behaviour. Around the time of the 1905 Revolution in Russia there was also a strike wave taking place in Germany and a discussion was taking place inside the SPD about the Mass Strike, which at least in Denmark we call the ‘General Strike’, on how and when to use it and with what methods. In contrast to Russia, in Germany there were strong Trade Unions and a strong Social Democratic Party with mass roots in Germany, but the leaders of the German Worker’s Movement treated the strikes with contempt and also said that they were “immature” and that they were “doomed to fail”. In contrast, Rosa Luxemburg, and the revolutionary wing of the SPD, welcomed the strikes and argued for the need of the party to intervene and to gives to the strikes a political leadership and direction. Luxemburg, in her criticism of the leadership of the SPD, used an example saying that the SPD leadership treated the mass movement as a pocket knife – something they can just open and close as the Party found convenient, you call the masses to the street and you send them home. Instead she said, using the example of Russia in 1905, that the masses move without permission from any party, they move when they move, and she argued that when the masses move, it is the role of the party to give the movement direction and leadership, and in these ideas she was in complete agreement with Lenin. So this article, about the Mass Strike, was written for this debate as a criticism of the leadership of the SPD for not understanding how the masses move and not wanting to lead the masses when they moved. It was, in actual fact, a criticism of the reformist actions of the leadership of the SPD that, in some ways, anticipated the later actions, at a time when it wasn’t clear how far the reformism had spread in the top layers of the SPD.

It wasn’t a criticism of the Bolsheviks, with whom she was in agreement regarding the 1905 Revolution. In December 1905 she had gone to Poland to participate in the revolution, at that time, although it wasn’t obvious at the time, the revolution was already at an ebb and she was arrested in March 1906. A few months later, she was released and went to Finland, in Finland many of the Bolshevik leaders were also present and she had long discussions with many of them, including Lenin, and it became clear in these discussions that on the fundamental questions they agreed. She participated in the congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1907 and this was a congress in which all of the tendencies of the Russian Social Democratic Party participated: the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks, and also the Polish Party which, for historical reasons, hadn’t been part of the Russian Social Democratic Party before. So you had people like Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Plekhanov discussing the experience of the first Russian Revolution and seeing what lessons were to be drawn. The Revolution had drawn the different trends close, but now again the differences came to the fore, the differences between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks and so on. This became clear in the discussions during the congress, Rosa Luxemburg held a long speech on behalf of the Polish Party and the main part of the speech, she used to heavily criticise the Mensheviks, their conduct, and their line during the Revolution. She criticised them for giving up the independent struggle of the working class and criticised them for putting their trust in the bourgeoisie and the liberal parties and for subordinating the working class to the bourgeoisie. She was fully on the side of the Bolsheviks and praised them for their independent class policy and she agreed with them that the next step would have been for the masses in the Revolution of 1905 to go forward for an armed uprising of the workers in Russia.

While she criticised the Mensheviks in their basic position, she had one concrete critical remark about the Bolsheviks and that was that she thought that they had put too much emphasis on organising the technical side of the armed uprising. She said that the masses themselves would take care of this question and solve it during the revolution. I think this reveals also what I think is her weak side and something that runs through her entire life, that her approach to organisation is a bit abstract; she has this idea that problems of organisation will be solved basically when they arise. This is a consequence of her being in the SPD which was very organised and where she could see the bureaucratism putting a break on the movement of the masses and the workers, but I believe this was a mistake of hers. But I think that if you look at these debates, and also at what she writes, that when she criticised the Bolsheviks, she didn’t reject political leadership – just as Lenin didn’t reject the spontaneity of mass struggle. They agreed that the masses move when they move, not by the order of any party, but when they move it is necessary that there is revolutionary leadership to this movement. Their difference was on how much emphasis revolutionaries should put on the practical side of organising the masses taking power and you can see this with the practical consequences – Lenin built the Bolsheviks and Luxemburg didn’t build a party in time that could lead the masses and I think history has shown Luxemburg to be wrong in relation to Lenin on this question.

Connected to this question of organisation, these so-called “Luxemburgists” reject the building of a revolutionary party at all, in continuation of them claiming that she was against organisation they present this as her somehow anticipating the development of bureaucratic dictatorship under Stalin and also they claim that the Stalinist dictatorship followed naturally from Lenin’s ideas on organisation, implying that you shouldn’t build a revolutionary organisation because it will always end up in a Stalinist bureaucratic dictatorship. They present the myth that Luxemburg was for some kind of genuine worker’s democracy, in opposition to the dictatorial methods of Leninism. This idea is wrong on many levels, the bureaucratic-Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution did not flow from the Leninist view of organisation of the Bolsheviks; the Stalinist degeneration was a consequence of the objective conditions in Russia in 1917 and the years after, it was the consequence of the Revolution taking place in a backward country and the fact that the Revolution remained isolated. None of the leaders of the Russian Revolution at that time imagined that the Russian Revolution could lead to socialism in Russia alone, their idea was to hold on until the workers of the more developed capitalist countries, especially Germany, came to their help. If you look at history and what actually happened in Russia, you can see the bureaucratic regime was not a continuation of the organisational methods of the Bolsheviks or the Russian Revolution. If you look at history, you can see that the Stalinist regime was not a continuation of the organisational methods used by the Bolsheviks or the Leninist methods of organisation and it wasn’t a consequence of the Russian Revolution, how it took place, or the worker’s state set up under the leadership of Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks. The two regimes were separated by a river of blood, the Stalinist regime practically wiped out the old Bolshevik party. If you take, as I think many of you will have seen, pictures of the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks during the 1917 revolution and you look at what happened to these people, you will see that most of them will have disappeared or been killed when we come to 1940.

The “Luxemburgists” falsify what Lenin and the Bolsheviks really stood for in order to facilitate this myth. They portray the Bolshevik Party as some kind of monolith, without any free debate and under a highly centralised regime under Lenin and his dictatorship, but the truth is that the Bolshevik party of the fullest freedom of internal debate. If you read about the congresses you can see that different opinions were being freely discussed and often in a very tense atmosphere, with no words minced. What is it that these soft-leftists, these “Luxemburgists”, really have against the Bolshevik Party? It is that it wasn’t a debating club, it wasn’t a place where ideas could freely be discussed, just for the sake of discussion or for individual expression. The Bolshevik Party was a fighting revolutionary organisation, where debated were taken in order to prepare the workers for taking power – it was a fighting organisation. Internally, it was organised on the lines of democratic centralism, with full democratic debates, but once an internal debate had taken place on a question, a vote would be held, the majority policy would become the policy of the party and the party members had to follow the line and carry out the decisions. Just like it takes place at a factory or a workplace, where the workers discuss whether to strike or not: you have a debate, you take a vote, and then you decide whether everybody strikes or not. These “Luxemburgists”, in order to try and pit Luxemburg against Lenin and claim that Luxemburg thought he was an undemocratic ultra-centrist, use a special article; it’s an article from 1904 called ‘Organisational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy’. I think it has been renamed to something like ‘Marxism vs. Leninism’ by someone, probably in the ‘70s. [‘Marxism vs. Leninism’ was the first title to which the article was renamed, although it is more commonly known under a different renaming as ‘Leninism or Marxism?’, with the former dating all the way back to 1935 and being due to the Scottish Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation – transcriber] This says everything as that was not the original title which Luxemburg gave that article and shows how they try and distort it. Here she denounced Lenin and the Bolsheviks and their ultra-centralism and she even accused them of Blanquism. Blanquism is the idea of organising a Social Revolution by a small conspiracy of revolutionary leaders, basically a coup. Like Lenin, Luxemburg was of the way with words that when she meant something, she said it very harshly, but also like Lenin, she wasn’t afraid of admitting later if she had been wrong in her harsh words.

In 1903, in the split between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, she initially sided with the Mensheviks, she knew a lot of the Menshevik leaders personally and believed their side of the story of what happened in the 1903 conference. The reality is that Luxemburg didn’t understand what Lenin was driving for in 1904 when she wrote the article, I think the truth is that very few, if any, really did at the time. But if you look at the article, the “Luxemburgists” actually take her argument and turn it on its head, in the article she doesn’t say that the kind of Party that Lenin is building will establish a bureaucratic dictatorship after the revolution. It is not, as the “Luxemburgists” say, a warning against the Stalinist degeneration. What she says is that the Party that Lenin is striving to build is in danger of degenerating, before the Revolution, into a sect and therefore risks not being capable of carrying out a revolution. So she is not against a revolutionary organisation or revolutionary leadership, she is debating what kind is the best to ensure the victory of the revolution and the victory of the workers. And furthermore she changed her mind, and this is never mentioned by the “Luxemburgists” – they just pick and choose what they want to use by her. In articles and in the congress in 1907 of the Russian Party, she said that experience of 1905 had shown her to be wrong. She said that her warnings about Blanquism being inherent in Bolshevism in 1904 belonged to the “distant past” and from 1905 and after, she sided with the Bolsheviks on all fundamental questions against the Mensheviks. Later, in 1918, together with Karl Liebknecht, she set out to form the German Communist Party as part of the Communist International, i.e. building a Revolutionary Party. So to say that she is diametrically opposed to Lenin on this question is sheer dishonesty, there is no fundamental difference between Lenin and Luxemburg in their understanding of the masses and the need for organisation – they were just in different roles and different situations. The masses move when they are ready, as Alan explained in the World Perspectives discussion, the outbreak of struggles, mass strikes, or revolutions are, in most examples, spontaneous in nature. But they also agreed on the need for revolutionaries to build a working class party and to politically intervene and lead the masses. You could say the difference was that Lenin understood and carried out the need to build a revolutionary cadre organisation, I will get back to that in the end, but before I return to that I will go into the second myth, the question of the Russian Revolution.

The main myth is that Rosa Luxemburg was opposed to Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution of 1917 and how the Bolsheviks acted during that revolution and after, this is a pure lie. The text that is used to create this myth is the only long text she wrote about the subject, called ‘The Russian Revolution’ and written in 1918. I think you will have all seen inspirational quotes in nice graphics, floating around on Facebook, trying to portray Rosa Luxemburg as this defender of democracy against the dictatorship of Russia and the Bolsheviks, the “Luxemburgists” try to use the article to present Rosa Luxemburg as a defender of Bourgeois Parliamentarism as opposed to Soviet Power. Basically saying that you can be a revolutionary, you can be a Marxist, you can follow Rosa Luxemburg, but within the capitalist democratic system. This is absolutely false, these was not the idea of Rosa Luxemburg. First of all, some facts regarding when and under what conditions the article was written, facts that the “Luxemburgists” completely ignore when using the article.

When the Russian Revolution broke out it was during the First World War and Rosa Luxemburg was in prison. She was put in prison by the German authorities “for her own safety” which meant that she had no sentence, no right to try and have that sentence overturned and no time limit for when she would get out and she was only freed by the German Revolution. I think that it must have been really frustrating for her; her access to information was extremely limited and, and I think she knew this, what information she was fed was being filtered through the German authorities, so she wasn’t getting the clear picture. So she wrote down her observations for her own clarification and she refused to publish it because she knew full-well that it would be distorted by the enemies of the revolution. Clara Zetkin, who was a close friend of Luxemburg, stated that after Luxemburg was released from prison in 1918, she had said that her views had been wrong and based on insufficient information. The text was only published three years after her death, it was published in 1922 by Paul Levi and without Luxemburg having allowed him to do it before her death; at that time Paul Levi had just been expelled from the German Communist Party and it was a way of him getting back at the movement. So you should take this text and use it with a bit of care, but the “Luxemburgists” don’t do that.

But, all that being said, you cannot read this text and come to the conclusion that Luxemburg was opposed to the October Revolution or the Bolsheviks. It is only if you take quotes completely out of context and completely distort the entire article that you can portray it like this and I dare anyone who disagrees to read the article from beginning to end. The text both begins and ends with long praises of the Bolsheviks, the Revolution and of Lenin and Trotsky, I have taken one quote, but there are many, many like this throughout the article. In the beginning of the article, Luxemburg wrote the following: “Whatever a party could offer of courage, revolutionary far-sightedness and consistency in an historic hour, Lenin, Trotsky and all the other comrades have given in good measure. All the revolutionary honour 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 honour of international socialism. ” I think that from this quote alone it should be quite clear and, as I said, there are several quotes like this; but these are not the ones that are put on inspirational graphics on Facebook. What is taken from the article is that she raised some concrete points of criticism against the Bolsheviks, but her criticism is a comradely critique of specific steps taken by the Bolsheviks, not a denunciation of the October Revolution and mainly it was written as a warning against thinking that you could take the experience of the Russian Revolution and mechanically transfer that onto, for example, Germany. She explained that the problems facing the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks were a direct consequence of the isolation of the Revolution in the backward conditions of the country and she laid the responsibility for this on the German working class, and not least the leadership of the German working class. She explained that the solution to the problems faced by the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks was to break the isolation by carrying out to German Revolution, the purpose of the article and the task of the German revolutionaries was to learn from the Russian experience in order to prepare for the German Revolution. So if we read the article in its entirety, instead of choosing quotes out of context in order to misrepresent her views, it’s impossible to interpret Rosa Luxemburg as being against Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks. She agreed with the way that the October Revolution was carried out, she agreed with what Lenin and Trotsky had to do to defend the young Soviet Republic, and as a genuine internationalist, she understood that the German Revolution had to succeed in order to save the Russian Revolution and come to their aid.

When she faced the problems of the Revolution, she ended up with the same conclusions as the Bolsheviks, because a few months after she had written this article the German Revolution did break out; it released Rosa from prison and from then on she threw all she had into ensuring the victory of the German Revolution and here the problems of revolution became concrete. One of the things that she had criticised the Bolsheviks for was the disbanding of the constituent assembly, it’s a criticism that is eagerly seised upon by those reformists who try to portray Lenin and Trotsky as undemocratic or antidemocratic or authoritarian as opposed to Luxemburg’s “democratic socialism”. But what were the facts? The Bolsheviks throughout their history has supported the call for the constituent assembly, seeing this as a step forward from Czarist despotism, but at the time of its dissolution in January 1918, the Constituent Assembly no longer represented the Russian masses. The Russian masses were organising their power in a higher power of government, the Soviets, which was based on the power of the working class. No bourgeois parliament is capable of expressing the rapidly changing views of the mass of working people in the course of a revolutionary upheaval, quite the opposite – it becomes the force of derailing the actions of the masses into a careerist debating club, to take the power out of the movement of the masses. The Constituent Assembly in Russia was lagging behind revolutionary events, it had become a focal point for counter-revolutionary forces, who worked to defend the essence of the reactionary Czarist Regime. The Constituent Assembly had come into being when its existence had been overtaken by the real revolutionary events and this justified its dissolution by the Bolshevik government. By shutting down the Constituent Assembly, the Bolsheviks were not shutting down democracy, as it is claimed, rather they were defending genuine worker’s democracy, as represented by the Soviets. But from her prison cell, Rosa Luxemburg couldn’t see this and in her articles, she asked, which is basically a question for herself because it was a question of self-clarification, “why can’t the Constituent Assembly and the Soviets exist side by side?”, but she answered that question herself, when she faced the same situation in Germany a few months later.

In November 1918, in the German Revolution, worker’s councils sprang up throughout Germany and the leadership of the SPD, who by this time had become thoroughly reformist and pillars of support for capitalism. In the Revolution they pushed for the calling of a National Assembly, which is basically the same as a Constituent Assembly, and it became clear for Rosa Luxemburg that this was a way for the leadership of the SPD to derail the revolution away from Worker’s Councils and towards bourgeois democratic channels. It was part of their attempt to try and prevent a Socialist Revolution from taking place in Germany and now Rosa Luxemburg could see clearly that the two, the National Assembly, or the Constituent Assembly, on one side and the Workers Councils, the Soviets, on the other, were mutually exclusive. She called the National Assembly “an outmoded legacy of bourgeois revolutions, an empty shell” and she said: “To resort to the National Assembly today is consciously or unconsciously to turn the revolution back to the historical stage of bourgeois revolutions; anyone advocating it is a secret agent of the bourgeoisie or an unconscious spokesman of petit-bourgeois ideology.” I think that says very clearly what she would have thought about those people who try and use her to defend bourgeois democracy against the workers taking power. But these words of Rosa are totally ignored by our “Luxemburgists” of today and the reason is evident, she is clearly calling for the abolition of the bourgeois democratic National Assembly. Does this mean that Rosa Luxemburg was out to destroy democracy? Quite the contrary. Luxemburg, in exactly the same manner as Lenin and Trotsky, was defending the real institutions of workers democracy, the Worker’s Councils, the Soviets, and she was fighting the distraction and confusion that the National Assembly would have created for the Revolution and basically exposing it for being a tool of Counter-Revolution.

So to conclude and sum up this talk, I think that if you look at the life of Rosa Luxemburg, she didn’t get to fight this fight to the end – her life was cut short. I have sometimes been asked why I think it is that these left-reformists can use Rosa Luxemburg and I think the reason is that she didn’t lead a victorious revolution, she was killed and she didn’t live long enough to comment on the development taking place in Russia, either in the years after the Revolution or during the Stalinist degeneration. Therefore her ideas stayed a bit abstract, like her ideas on organisation, and you don’t have her writing anything actually for publication on the Russian Revolution, for example, and I am sure that if she had lived longer, she would have been implacably on the side of the Revolution. I am sure she would have been a staunch enemy of the Stalinist degeneration and I think she would have been just as hated as Lenin by both the bourgeoisie and the reformists. After all, it was the reformists that had her killed. In January 1919, her life was cut short by the reactionary Freikorp soldier, they were spurred on by the Social Democrats, who lead a murderous campaign against Rosa Luxemburg and the other outstanding leader of the German Communist Party, Karl Liebknecht, and the rest of the leadership of the newly formed German Communist Party. It happened at a time when the Communist Party was only two weeks old, it had just been formed on New Years Eve of 1918/1919.

The newly formed Communist Party was left without its head and the German Revolution was defeated, as we know. It was a catastrophe for the workers worldwide, it left the Russian Revolution isolated and paved the way for fascism in Germany. I think as revolutionaries and Marxists today we have to ask ourselves “could it have been otherwise?” and “what can we learn from this?” And we have to look at the difference between Germany and Russia, why did the Russian Revolution succeed while the German Revolution was defeated? Of course there are many different aspects, but I think the main and decisive question was the existence of the Bolshevik Party in Russia and the lack of an equivalent in Germany. The Bolshevik Party was a cadre organisation built over years, it was based on a solid foundation of Marxist theory and had roots in the working class, this was what Lenin had striven for and worked for since 1903. When we look at the German Revolution, when that broke out, no such cadre organisation existed – the revolutionaries were seen in a loose network of a few thousand and only had fifty in Berlin, the Communist Party was only formed during the Revolution, two months into the Revolution. At this time it becomes clear in retrospect that it was only Lenin who understood the need to build a revolutionary cadre organisation. For many years Luxemburg thought that the SPD would be the Revolutionary Party, would become the Revolutionary Party, and that the masses of the workers would force it to become the Revolutionary Party, but Lenin also for many years hauled out the SPD as a model. In hindsight it is clear to see that what Rosa Luxemburg should have done is to build a revolutionary tendency inside the SPD long before, and this would have made the split between the reformists and the revolutionaries much clearer when it happened.

But it is much easier to see in hindsight, we know what happened in the German and the Russian Revolution, so I think Luxemburg might be excused, but the point is that her followers are not excused. Those of us who live today are not excused if we do not learn from the experience, on the basis of the German and Russian Revolution, we can see that Lenin was correct on the need to build a cadre organisation and towards the end of her life, Luxemburg formed the same conclusion and set out to for the German Communist Party. So I think that now it is time for us to reclaim the revolutionary legacy of Rosa Luxemburg and to learn from her life and her experience and it is up to us to fulfil the tasks set by Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, and all the other revolutionaries who cam before us. To struggle with all that we have in order to ensure the victory of the Socialist World Revolution. Thank you.

Interventions

Ben: Lenin explained that in every revolution the most basic question is the question of state power, the Bourgeois State must be smashed by the revolution and replaced with the Worker’s State. Attempts to reform the Bourgeois State or transform it into a tool of the workers are doomed to fail and it’s this that distinguishes reformists from revolutionaries. This question formed a very important part of Rosa Luxemburg’s battle against reformism and against revisionism. In her text, ‘Social Reform or Revolution’, she wrote: “The theory of the gradual introduction of socialism proposes progressive reform of capitalist property and the capitalist State in the direction of socialism … [Bernstein, the theoretician of revisionism and reformism, proposes] to change the sea of capitalist bitterness into a sea of socialist sweetness by pouring into it bottles of social reformist lemonade”. And Rosa Luxemburg says that this is a ridiculous idea, because she goes on to say: “The production relations of capitalist society approach more and more the production relations of socialist society.” That is to say that as capitalism expands it socialises production from individual craftsmen to production lines that span the globe, involving thousands of workers. But, she continues, “on the other hand, its political and juridical relations [that is to say, that state] established between capitalist society and socialist society a steadily rising wall.” So even as capitalism socialises production, on the question of the state it establishes a wall between capitalist and socialist society, and she says: “ This wall is not overthrown, but is on the contrary strengthened and consolidated by the development of social reforms and the course of democracy. Only the hammer blow of revolution, that is to say, the conquest of political power by the proletariat can break down this wall.” Now this is a really crucial theoretical point, Luxemburg is saying that social reforms willingly granted by a bourgeois democratic regime can actually strengthen the Capitalist State as a weapon of class rule because the illusion is created that the state acts in the interests of all classes. Of course, we are in favour of reforms, but how you win the reforms is the crucial question. We want class struggle to force the ruling class to grant those reforms, because that strengthens the working class. It strengthens the confidence of the workers in their own institutions and their own abilities, which prepares the working class for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the capitalist state. What we do not want is to debate, convince, trade favours with the bourgeois state with diplomacy or parliamentary manoeuvrers, and so on. This is not our method for winning reforms, because it demobilises the working class, it builds illusions in the capitalist state, and it throws back the struggle for revolution.

Luxemburg took this up theoretically against Bernstein but also concretely against Millerand and some of the French Social Democrats. Millerand was a socialist politician who joined a bourgeois government in France. He aimed to secure gains for the Working Class, but not through class struggle, but through deals and diplomacy and parliamentary cretinism and the result of that was that instead of Millerand reforming the Bourgeois Government and making the Bourgeois Government a bit more socialist, the French bourgeoisie used Millerand as a left cover for their reactionary policies – they made him a bit more capitalist. Luxemburg fought very hard against Millerandism, she wrote the following: “The entry of a socialist into a bourgeois government is not … a partial conquest of the bourgeois state by the socialists, but a partial conquest of the socialist party by the bourgeois state.” Marie explained how the question of state power was posed very sharply by the Russian Revolution and Marie explained how Luxemburg was initially inconsistent in applying her own ideas to this concrete situation; she recognised the supreme importance of the Soviets as the basis for a new Worker’s State, but at the same time she argued that a Constituent Assembly, a bourgeois parliament, should also be convened because she said it could be pushed to the left by the masses. This is a vacillating, a middle, position which tries to combine the smashing of the bourgeois state machine with reforming it, with pushing it to the left, but, as Marie explained, this was corrected by Luxemburg during the revolution in Germany. The same question of the state was posed, point blank – should there be a state based on the Workers Councils or should it be based on a bourgeois democratic National Assembly, essentially a bourgeois parliament? And Luxemburg’s position could not have been clearer, she wrote: “No evasions, no ambiguities – the die must be cast. Yesterday parliamentary cretinism was a weakness; today it is an ambiguity; tomorrow it will be a betrayal of socialism.” In other words, any illusions in bourgeois democracy were condemned by Luxemburg as a betrayal of socialism. These were the revolutionary ideas of Rosa Luxemburg on the state and if we can steel ourselves in these ideas then the Worker’s State that we will build in the future will be our legacy. Thanks, comrades.

Stamatis: Okay comrades. Rosa Luxemburg, in addition to her important general contribution to Marxist theory was particularly distinguished in the important theoretical and political cause of Marxist polemic against reformism and it would not be an exaggeration to say that Rosa and the founder of Russian Marxism, Georgi Plekhanov, produced the most systematic and complete responses to reformism’s most prominent theorist, Eduard Bernstein. Bernstein, from 1896 to 1898, in his articles in the German Social Democratic Journal ‘Die Neue Zeit’ and in his book ‘The Preconditions of Socialism’ had put forward the idea that socialists should emancipate themselves from outdated phraseology, meaning the revolutionary ideas, and become the party of reforms. Bernstein’s revisionist theory raised the question of the true relationship between reform and revolution. According to Bernstein, in his foreword in ‘The German Social Democracy’: “The constant pursuit of legitimate reforms can lead gradually, and without the need for revolution, to socialism” [I have been unable to find the work or the quotation to which the comrade is here referring – transcriber] Rosa’s response came with a series of articles and documents in 1898 and 1899 that make up her work ‘Social Reform or Revolution?’ and this was the beginning of Rosa’s five year theoretical struggle against Bernstein’s conceptions, with various documents. Rosa as her answer to the general relationship between reform and revolution, while defending as an orthodox Marxist the revolutionary road to socialism, does not renounce as the frivolous, ultra-left sectarians might consider, reforms in general. She explained that revolution and reform are not two different methods of historical process that someone can choose from the buffet of history, but they are different moments in the evolution of class society. In history, she explained, progressive reforms are, as a rule, the product of revolutions. She pointed out that whoever, in the name of struggle for democracy, chooses reform as a substitute, an opposite element, to revolution, does not choose a peaceful path for the same purpose, but in fact chooses another purpose. Instead of worker’s power and socialism, he or she chooses capitalism and one of the political forms of the bourgeoisie’s rule, bourgeois democracy. So Rosa was not at all against reforms, but in the struggle for reforms she saw the means of preparing, organising, and educating the working class for the seizure of power.

Of particular value in her work ‘Social Reform or Revolution’ is the Marxist critique of Bernstein’s ideas on the question of the capitalist economy and the character and role of labour unions. Because according to Bernstein, who arbitrarily generalised a phase when capitalism was developing and could in Western Europe make concessions of a few crumbs to the working class, of course from the table of the robbery of the colonies, according to Bernstein capitalism is capable of adaptation and it’s economic crises are now like momentary fluctuations. He argued that the contradictions of capitalism are no longer acting, this makes socialism no longer objectively necessary, and so socialism cannot be founded scientifically but only morally and so it returns to the state it was before Marx - a Utopia. According to Bernstein, the means of overcoming these contradictions is on the one hand the development of credit and on the other hand the development of trusts and cartels. In relation to credit, Rosa replied that it does not prevent a crisis from occurring, but in fact makes it more acute when it occurs. In periods of capitalist prosperity, credit increases the possibility of expansion of production but it does not deal with the basic contradiction that produces the crisis, and that is the contradiction between the expansionary nature of production and the private property of production, because as soon as the first symptoms of recession appear credit falls and stops expanding, just when the system needs it, in this way it worsens the crisis. In relation to cartels and trusts, Rosa explained that it may seen at the national market level that these monopolies evade competition, but because the global market is imposed on all states, cartels and trusts, at the international level, make the competition much stronger, so does not soften but sharpen the contradictions of the system.

Finally, reflecting the illusions created in this period by the increasing power of the trade unions in Germany, Bernstein wrote in his book that the struggle of the trade unions would gradually reduce profits so much that surplus value would eventually disappear and exploitation itself would be abolished. But, according to Rosa, unions, by demanding higher wages for better purchasing power, of course do not abolish surplus value and exploitation; she explained that the trade union struggle is like the work of Sisyphus who was condemned by Zeus to carry a large rock on his back up a mountain which would fall from the mountain and the process of transportation start again. That is why the bureaucrats of the German trade unions declared Rosa an enemy of the trade unions, they argued that trade unions would gradually gain power in big enterprises, firstly together with employers and then without them. But for Rosa, the co-management of trade unions and bosses in big business, with joint price fixing, would constitute an employer-labour cartel at the expense of the entire working class but also a blow of the militancy of the labour movement.

Oscar: I would like to give just one example of how the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg is being distorted. I think, in general, the enemies of Marxism have two main ways of discouraging radical people from revolutionary politics. The first way is what was done with Lenin and the Bolsheviks for example, to attack the image of the leaders of Marxism ruthlessly, they make Lenin out to be a bloodthirsty dictator, responsible for the death of millions and they equate Bolshevism with Stalinism. Of course we know that none of this is true but it serves the purpose of alienating people from genuine Marxism. The second way is to transform the person in question into a harmless symbol, a person who doesn’t stand for anything that can really harm the capitalist system, and I think this second example is what was done with Rosa Luxemburg. The reformists, the feminists, the anarchists, they, time and time again, distorted her views through quoting out of context and misunderstanding what she actually wrote. Consciously or not, they have often ended up portraying her views as being the opposite of what they actually were.

I actually recently read an article which was published in the American left-wing magazine ‘Jacobin’ where this is the case, it was published last year and I think it’s a good example of how this distortion is usually done. The article was actually called ‘The Revolutionary Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg’, which sounds good but ironically, the whole point of the article seems to be that she tried to combine reformism and revolutionary politics. What they did first is that it distorts the fight for actual reforms and the ideology of reformism and they make it out to seem like us revolutionaries are against the reforms themselves and not the ideology of reformism, then they say: “When Luxemburg criticized Bernstein, her main point of dissatisfaction was that Bernstein was committed to dismantling the very ideal of socialism as access to political power … It’s not a question of saying that Luxemburg is a revolutionary and not a reformist. It’s rather a question of seeing what purpose reform should serve.” So, in other words, they are saying that we shouldn’t bother with this question of reformism or revolution and that they can actually be combined, they literally say that reform and revolution “weren’t different ways of doing things” and obviously this is a great argument if you want to keep the question of how the workers actually take power away from the discussion. But for Marxists, the question of reformism or revolution is not something that can be brushed away so easily, it’s a crucial question. We will obviously always fight for reforms but you can’t reform capitalism into socialism, that’s what we believe, and Rosa Luxemburg fought against reformism her whole life. As the comrades have explained, and she gave her life in the struggle for a socialist revolution, which is what makes it especially scandalous that reformists and opportunists of all kinds try to use these quotes out of context to make it seem as if she stood for something which is the opposite of what she actually stood for. This article also claims that she was against the organising of a party along the lines of the Bolsheviks and even though the author admits that she defended the Russian Revolution of 1917, they use the debate that she had with Lenin about the Party and the role of the masses to present it as if Bolshevism automatically lead to Stalinism. In the end of the article they do their best, but they struggle, to present this new “Luxemburgism” which is supposed to be a continuation or development of Marxism, but whose most prominent feature is to combine reformism and revolution.

So in the end, we are left with Rosa Luxemburg as a harmless thinker who developed her own Marxism. With the help of half-truths, distortions, and lies, this is presented in contradiction to the so-called “dictatorship” of Lenin. The aim of this is to stop all those who come into contact with such things as revolutions, Marxism, Luxemburg, and Lenin from drawing the conclusions that should flow from the life and work of Lenin and Luxemburg. So I think it is time that we drag the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg out of the dirt, so that we can truly learn from her life and struggle and prepare a victory for our class in the future. Thank you comrades.

Fred: It was long overdue, I think, a book by ourselves on Rosa Luxemburg. For decades now, I’ve had Rosa Luxemburg in the background as this person who you had to explain a lot about, because she would always come up in the movement as a figure representing, as comrades have explained, an alternative to Leninism. In the 1970’s in Italy, I remember that she was very fashionable. I was a little bit younger in the ‘70s, but invariably I remember that whenever anybody used Rosa Luxemburg, it was never to bring out the revolutionary side of her. It was always about everything else but her revolutionary ideas and I remember she was quite popular in the left wing of the Italian Socialist Party in the 1970’s because you had a phenomenon then, which you could describe as a kind of centrism that emerged, a sudden lurch to the left in words, in moments of class struggle like in the 1970’s. Centrism is a phenomenon that appears in moments of acute class struggle and these socialist leaders trying to give themselves a left image as they moved to the left under the pressure found in Rosa Luxemburg a useful tool. But I was looking through some of her letters and it’s clear that Rosa Luxemburg realised, long before Lenin, how far the leaders of the SPD had degenerated. She was very close to the Kautskys, Kautsky and his wife, but in Easter 1908 she went on a trip with Kautsky to Lake Geneva and it was on this trip that she started to lose the illusions that she had had. She could see the personality of this friend that she had; she realised for the first time that she found him boring, monotonous, with no imagination, heavy-going, and heavy to listen to. She realised then that her long-held friendship was now in decline, it was from then that she expressed in her letters that she found the Sunday dinners at the Kautskys boring and she wrote in a letter dated 27th June 1908: “Soon I will not be able to read one line of Kautsky … It is like a disgusting mass of cobwebs … from which you can free yourself only by a mental bath of Marx himself.” So she had begun to see the limitations and in fact she expressed the position she found herself in in a letter to Clara Zetkin in 1907, she wrote: “I feel rather isolated … August [Bebel], and the others … have gone over completely to parliamentarism” So she explained that the official left, August Bebel was the centre of the Party, used Rosa Luxemburg against Eduard Bernstein but then she says in her letter that: “But when it comes to launching an offensive against opportunism, the older leaders always side with Ede [Bernstein], Vollmar and David” Basically, she’s saying that when it comes down to the real battle, they’re always on the other side and this is the dilemma she found herself in, for years actually, inside the Party.

Now, she finally came to correct conclusions; before dying she understood the need to build the communist party. The myth they present of her being anti-Leninist doesn’t stand up to the test because she was building a party which was a section of the Communist International, lead by Lenin. What the so-called “Luxemburgists” really express when they use Luxemburg is that they reject the discipline of a revolutionary party, they reject it’s centralism and its revolutionary essence. Marie referenced Lenin’s twenty year battle for the Bolshevik Party and eventually of course the Bolshevik Party emerged after years of being a faction together with the Mensheviks into an independent force, but it took years to achieve that. Now sometimes I find a stupid polemic on the Left about “What should Rosa have done?”, they say that she should have split a long time before, but that’s not the point; the point is that she should have organised a faction like the Bolshevik Party, inside the Party, which prepared the ground for what Lenin eventually achieved.

Something else that Rosa did realise that is not highlighted is that she realised the difficulties the Bolsheviks faced once they came to power and she did not criticise them for taking power, that’s the false picture that they present, she understood the problems faced by the revolution is isolation and she says this very, very clearly. She also puts the blame for this isolation on the leaders of the SPD in Germany because by not carrying out the revolution in Germany, they contributed directly to the isolation of the Russian Revolution. To see how important this was for Lenin, in March 1918, in a speech, Lenin said this: “it is the absolute truth that without a German revolution, we are doomed”, this was the clarity of Lenin on the need for the German Revolution. Now we’re discussing history here and how, as Marie said, it’s easy to see the mistakes after a hundred years, but imagine if the German Revolution had succeeded, imagine the effect that would have had across the whole of Europe. The Russian Revolution was not an isolated revolution in the sense that it wasn’t just one revolution – there was a revolution in many countries; it was the German revolution in 1918, Hungary in 1919, Italy in 1920, a few years later China in 1926, and the big general strike in Britain also in 1926, and then of course the revolutionary events in Spain and France in the 1930’s. Then, of course, even when the Communist Party was created in Germany, it was infantile, inexperienced, and suffered also from ultra-leftism and this effected many of the Communist Parties in Europe. So a discussion of Rosa Luxemburg is about what: we take the best of Rosa, we underline that she was a revolutionary, but we also look at her with open eyes and also see the mistakes.

They were genuine mistakes of a genuine revolutionary and she was also capable of learning from her mistakes, which she did many times, but as Marie said, she was weak on particularly the question of organisation. So what monument can we build to Rosa Luxemburg? Well, first of all, build a genuine Bolshevik Organisation is Germany, which we are beginning to do, and also also do it on a global scale. And remember, we have to be prepared long before the events. That’s the difference between the experience of Bolshevism in Russia and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, when the revolution broke out, the Germans were not ready, they were not ready both theoretically and organisationally. This school is about educating our comrades in theory, to avoid repeating those mistakes, and then to build an organisation to take those ideas into the movement.

Sum Up

Marie: Thank you to all who contributed to the discussion, I think it has been marvellous, with some really good contributions. First of all, I want to say that this discussion and my lead off have been very limited in scope; there were many questions that I didn’t touch upon and this talk focussed on these two main myths that have been created by all those, like the ‘Jacobin’ magazine and people like that, who try to take Luxemburg and use her for their own purpose, but there are many other questions. She lived until she was forty seven and there were many questions which she touched upon and things where I think she was correct and things where I think she was wrong, but I think it’s essential to take the essence of her life and her legacy and I think mistakes she made, and all she did, she did from the perspective of fighting for revolution and because she had an unwavering faith in the working class and their ability to take power, in opposition to most of those who try to use her, who have no faith in working class but call themselves Marxists anyway. I think Luxemburg was a Marxist in the true Marxist sense, there are many so-called “Marxists” today, academic “Marxists”, who use the method and analysis of Marx and find them interesting to look at different aspects of society today but Marx said it very clearly himself, he said that it was not up to him to invent to notion of class struggle, and if you look at society today there are many who accept the notion of class struggle, also in the bourgeoisie, that doesn’t make you are Marxist to talk about class struggle and the existence of classes. His and Engels’s contribution was the realisation that the workers could not, as Ben pointed out, take the bourgeois state and use it for its own purposes, that the workers have to smash the bourgeois state and create a new state, a worker’s state, and this is what Rosa Luxemburg fought for.

I think it’s worth quoting Lenin when it comes to Luxemburg, he wrote an article in 1922 in which he lists some points where he thought that Rosa Luxemburg was wrong, like the national question, a question which they never agreed on, but first of all he wrote in ‘“Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder’ that: “What applies to individuals also applies—with necessary modifications—to politics and parties. It is not he who makes no mistakes that is intelligent. There are no such men, nor can there be. It is he whose errors are not very grave and who is able to rectify them easily and quickly that is intelligent”, this was not in relation to Luxemburg, but in relation to Luxemburg he used a Russian proverb to describe her after her death, saying “Eagles may at times fly lower than hens, but hens can never rise to the height of eagles … in spite of her mistakes she was—and remains for us—an eagle.” This is Lenin’s appraisal of Rosa Luxemburg. So when we say that we want to reclaim the legacy of Luxemburg, it is not down to every dot and comma she ever wrote, but it is exactly to rescue her, not for the sake of her, but because she is being used to try and derail young people who are getting radicalised away from revolutionary ideas and that is a lie, it is false, and these people belong to Revolutionary Marxism and not to left-reformism. The young people who are looking for revolutionary ideas belong in the IMT and that is why we are trying to save the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg.

I want to give another quote regarding what Fred pointed out, what is the purpose of this school we are having now, what was the purpose of Rosa Luxemburg in her life, and what is always hidden by these left-reformists? They ridicule the fact that we are orthodox Marxists, that we focus on theory, but this is what Rosa Luxemburg had to say about theory and the need for theory: “What appears to characterise this practice [reformism] above all? A certain hostility to ‘theory.’ This is quite natural, for our ‘theory,’ that is, the principles of scientific socialism, impose clearly marked limitations to practical activity – insofar as it concerns the aims of this activity, the means used in attaining these aims and the method employed in this activity. It is quite natural for people who run after immediate ‘practical’ results to want to free themselves from such limitations and to render their practice independent of our ‘theory.’” I think that this is quite an excellent reply to all those reformists who you can meet in overflow, today also, who try and dismiss theory as something unnecessary, but also to the other side of the coin – those who are “Marxists” in the academic, scholastic way where you take no practical consequences and organise. For Luxemburg, and for us, theory is a guide to action, that is why we study and that is why we have discussions like these. What she did, and I think Fred explained this very well, in this debate in the SPD, and I think this debate against Bernstein and revisionism is one of her strongest points, is that she took the discussion head on while the leaders of the SPD tried to avoid: “this is a question of nuance”, “this is not important for the practical questions right now”, and so on. One of the leaders actually said to Bernstein: “Dear friend, we don’t usually go around saying these things, we just do them.” I.e. we don’t throw ourselves into theoretical debates about revolution, we just continue with our reformist practice and I think that that is the situation in most working class organisations today. As has been explained very well by several contributions, the question of reform and revolution is not a question of us or Luxemburg being against reforms, it is against the idea that capitalism can be reformed to capitalism with a human face, and I think this is also why the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg is not a historical question – these questions which she touched upon are the burning questions of today.

She has become famous for saying “Socialism or Barbarism?”, that was actually referencing Engels, but she has become famous for saying this, that the fate which humanity is facing is either socialism or barbarism. And I think that that has become very clear, that the fate facing humanity today is either socialism or barbarism; when it comes to wars, to climate change, to hunger, to the economy and I think that this is the main question for us: why are we revolutionaries? If we look at the history of the labour movement since the time of Rosa Luxemburg, it is very clear that all attempts to create this capitalism with a human face, the basic idea of reformism, that is the revision of Marxism that Bernstein put forward, is that we slowly, reform by reform, can create a better capitalism and that maybe sometime that will automatically turn into socialism. But that is not the important question, whether we end up in socialism or not, that the important point is that we, bit by bit, improve the conditions of the workers. The basic idea in reformism is that the end goal, as Bernstein said it, is not important, the important thing is the road forward and that we bit by bit can improve the conditions of the workers. And I would say that if that were true, that if we bit by bit could make life better for the great majority of humanity, I might be a reformist – if we could make sure that tomorrow will be better than yesterday and that sometime in the not so distant future, we could irradiate hunger. But the problem is that that is not how reality is, life is not getting better for the majority bit by bit. It was a historical exception at the time of the post war boom, a period where semi-civilised conditions could be created for some part of the working class in some part of the world, this is not how it is today. Capitalism finds itself in a blind alley, it cannot create a better life for the great majority of the population, and it cannot solve the burning questions for the majority of humanity. So the fact now is that we are not bit by bit going towards a better future, quite the opposite all that was won in the past is now being taken back. So this discussion between Bernstein and Luxemburg and other revolutionaries on the question of reform or revolution is just as valid today as it was back then and you see the exact same arguments being put forward today. As I remember, the finance minister of the Greek Syriza government, Varoufakis, said at the time of the referendum and the fight against the European central bank imposing cuts and austerity towards the Greek workers that: “now is not the time to talk about socialism, first we have to create a better capitalism and then we can talk about socialism”, and there are arguments like this all over the left wing.

But the point is that we cannot create a better capitalism and therefore the only way forward is to fight for a socialist overthrow of this system and to take this from Rosa Luxemburg, her faith in the working class to move and also their ability to change society. But we also must learn from her in the negative sense, you might say, the need to build a strong revolutionary cadre organisation before the revolution, capable of securing the victory of the working class, and I think that task is up to us. Thank you.