https://socialistworker.org/2019/01/15/rosa-luxemburgs-revolutionary-socialism
Rosa Luxemburg’s revolutionary socialism
January 15, 2019
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One hundred years ago today, one of the most important figures in the
history of the socialist movement was murdered by a far-right death
squad along with her comrade Karl Liebknecht. Veteran socialist Paul Le
Blanc, author of numerous books, including Lenin and the Revolutionary
Party and October Song: Bolshevik Triumph, Communist Tragedy, tells her
story and explains her contributions.
TEN YEARS after the murder of Rosa Luxemburg in January 1919, playwright
and poet Bertolt Brecht wrote in his typically stark, homely verse:
Red Rosa now has vanished too.
Where she lies is hid from view.
She told the poor what life’s about.
And so now the rich have rubbed her out.
Luxemburg was born in 1871, in a Poland divided under German and Russian
domination, and she played a role in the working-class socialist
movement of each country.
Yet her influence has been global. She was part of a mass working-class
movement seeking a transition from capitalism to socialism. The decades
following her death saw increasing crises and finally a half-century
decline and collapse of that movement.
Rosa Luxemburg speaks outside a congress of the the Second International
in 1907
Rosa Luxemburg speaks outside a congress of the the Second International
in 1907
But triumphant capitalism has (by its very nature, Luxemburg would tell
us) generated a growing discontent and socialist renewal — giving new
relevance to what Luxemburg thought and did and tried to do.
The Quality of Her Thought and Life
Luxemburg’s Marxism denied that “economic development rushes headlong,
like an autonomous locomotive on the tracks of history, and that
politics, ideology, etc. are content to toddle behind like forsaken,
passive freight wagons.”
Her passion was unusual among theoreticians of the socialist movement.
“Unrelenting revolutionary activity coupled with boundless humanity —
that alone is the real life-giving force of socialism,” she wrote amid
crashing empires and working-class insurgency following the First World War.
Joining the massive Social Democratic Party of Germany in the 1890s, she
explained to a Polish friend: “I do not agree with the view that it is
foolish to be an idealist in the German movement.”
Noting that idealistic impulses permeated the movement, she added that
“the ultimate principle” in all of her revolutionary activity was “to
remain true to myself without regard for the surroundings and the others
— thus, I am and will remain an idealist in the German as well as the
Polish movement.”
Luxemburg’s blend of critical-minded social science and humanistic
idealism was matched by activism, from the time she was a teenager to
the moment of her death.
She wrote articles, essays, pamphlets and books. She lectured at a
socialist party school educating activist cadres, and at meetings of
workers in various cities and towns of Germany and Poland, with eloquent
speeches at mass rallies.
Luxemburg also worked with comrades — openly and legally when possible,
in the revolutionary underground when necessary — to develop effective
organizations, strategies and tactics, in workplaces and in the streets,
to challenge the capitalist status quo. For this, she was imprisoned
more than once — and finally murdered by a reactionary death squad.
According to one comrade, Max Adler:
An untamed revolutionary force was alive in this frail little woman. It
was characteristic of her, however, that her intellect never lost
control of her temperament, so that the revolutionary fire with which
she always spoke was also mingled with coolheaded reflectiveness, and
the effect of this fire was not destructive but warming and illuminating.
Luxemburg’s student and biographer Paul Frölich remembered “large, dark
and bright eyes...very expressive, at times searching with a penetrating
scrutiny, or thoughtful; at times merry and flashing with excitement.
They reflected an ever-alert intellect and an indomitable soul.” Her
slight Polish accent “lent character to her voice and added a special
zest to her humor...All this made every private moment with her a
special gift.”
Private life was also animated by passionate engagement — her deepest
friendships within a substantial circle of women, comradeship and, in a
few cases, love relationships among a select number of men.
Especially vibrant was a connection with Mimi, her imperious cat. We
find in her writings powerful traces of attention to and appreciation
for multiple creatures (birds, oxen, insects and more), not to mention
plants and multiple manifestations of the natural world. Her
environmental sensibilities are particularly relevant to troubling
realities of today.
Reform, Mass Action and Revolution
Insights can be gained by considering Luxemburg’s interactions with
other prominent theoreticians of the mass socialist workers’ movement
when the 25-year-old moved to Germany: Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky.
An opportunistic variant of trade unionism and a vote-getting electoral
fixation had become prevalent in the movement’s organizational
apparatus. This bureaucratic conservatism was reflected in an approach
developed by Bernstein.
The traditional approach, grounded in the Communist Manifesto by Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, called for masses of workers to struggle for
improvements within capitalist society, learning how to defend their
rights and confront capitalism.
“Between social reforms and revolution there exists for the Social
Democracy an indissoluble tie,” Luxemburg explained. “The struggle for
reforms is its means; the social revolution, its aim.”
Bernstein revised this, arguing for piling up reforms without a
revolution, enabling socialists to collaborate as partners in progress
with liberal-minded capitalists for a gradual evolution to socialism.
This was incredibly naïve, Luxemburg insisted. The violence-prone
capitalist elite would not willingly give up its power, and the dynamics
of the capitalist economy would not allow for such a painless
transition. Bernstein’s orientation would transform the German Social
Democratic Party from a socialist party into “a party of bourgeois
social reform.”
Capitalist dynamics periodically generated crises that jolted
semi-spontaneous upsurges, Luxemburg concluded, based on insurgent
explosions of 1905 in Russia. She vividly described “the whirlwind and
the storm” and “the fire and glow of the mass strike and the street
fighting.”
This would not necessarily result in socialist revolution, she felt, but
could become “the starting point of a feverish work of organization”
that would embrace more of the working class, enabling it to fight for
reforms in a manner that would help prepare it for the revolutionary
struggle.
She believed “the most enlightened, most class-conscious vanguard of the
proletariat” in Germany, Poland, Russia and elsewhere should play an
essential role in this process.
Initially, her friend and prominent Marxist co-thinker Karl Kautsky had
stood with Luxemburg in rejecting Bernstein’s revisionism. Yet pressures
of the social democratic and trade union bureaucracy made him retreat
into an increasingly rigid (but also diluted) Marxist “orthodoxy.” By
1910, he worked to marginalize Luxemburg’s revolutionary orientation
within the German Social Democratic Party.
Kautsky’s political compromises with more conservative elements in his
party were not simply inconsistent with the spirit of Marx or Luxemburg.
No less than Bernstein, he was failing to prepare the working class for
tumultuous crises and violence inherent in the nature of capitalism.
Luxemburg’s take on capitalism can be found in her 1913 classic The
Accumulation of Capital.
The Accumulation of Capital
Luxemburg embraced Marx’s stricture to “doubt everything” — including
daring to question and disagree with some of what Marx himself had to say.
In her economic analysis, Luxemburg criticized the second volume of
Marx’s Capital, which she considered an underdeveloped and incomplete
aspect of Marx’s analysis of how surplus value is realized. Focusing on
the global dynamics of the capitalist system, she saw imperialism as at
the heart of capitalist development.
Capitalism is an expansive system driven by the dynamic of accumulation.
Capital in the form of money is invested in capital in the form of raw
materials, tools and labor-power, which is transformed — by the
squeezing of actual labor out of the labor-power of the workers — into
capital in the form of the commodities thereby produced, whose increased
value is realized through the sale of the commodities for more money
than was originally invested.
The capitalists extract their profits from this increased capital, only
to be driven to invest more capital in order to achieve ever-greater
capital accumulation.
Capitalism’s global expansion, Luxemburg emphasized, aggressively
coexists in a world of different cultures, different types of society
and different modes of production — that is, different economic systems.
Imperialism exists at the earliest beginnings of capitalism and
continues nonstop, with increasing and overwhelming reach and velocity,
down to the present.
Distinctive to Luxemburg’s contribution is her anthropological
sensitivity to the impact of capitalist expansion on the rich variety of
the world’s peoples and cultures: the destruction of the English
peasants and artisans; the destruction of the Indians or Native American
peoples; the enslavement of African peoples by the European powers; the
ruination of small farmers in the Midwestern and Western regions of the
United States; the onslaught of French colonialism in Algeria; the
onslaught of British colonialism in India; British incursions into
China, with special reference to the Opium wars; the onslaught of
British colonialism in South Africa (she made lengthy reference to the
three-way struggle of Black African peoples, the Dutch Boers and the
British).
No less dramatic is Luxemburg’s perception of the economic role of
militarism in the globalization of the market economy. “Militarism
fulfills a quite definite function in the history of capital,
accompanying as it does every historical phase of accumulation,” she
commented noting that it was decisive in subordinating portions of the
world to exploitation by capitalist enterprise.
It played an explosive role in rivalry between competing imperialist
powers. More than this, military spending “is in itself a province of
accumulation,” making the modern state a primary “buyer for the mass of
products containing the capitalized surplus value,” she wrote — although
through taxes, “the workers foot the bill.”
Socialism or Barbarism
The violence and inhumanity visited on those victimized by imperialist
oppression in “faraway lands” of Asia and Africa became a murderous
backdraft which exploded into Europe with the imperialist slaughter of
1914-1918: the First World War.
Luxemburg concluded that humanity stood at a crossroads — “either
forward to socialism or a downward slide into barbarism.” She was
horrified that a majority of social democratic leaders, in Germany and
most other countries, ended up going along with their various countries’
war efforts. Others who, like Luxemburg, remained true to their
revolutionary socialist principles were arrested and imprisoned.
She and her comrades in the newly formed Spartacus League — expelled
from the German Social Democratic Party and soon to become the German
Communist Party — warned: “The beast of capital that conjured up the
hell of the world war is not capable of banishing it again, of restoring
real order, of insuring bread and work, peace and civilization, and
justice and liberty to tortured humanity.”
There were like-minded comrades around the world — and in Russia, some
of these were able to lead a successful revolution in 1917. As Luxemburg
wrote in celebration of the revolution:
All the revolutionary honor and capacity which western Social-Democracy
lacked was represented by the Bolsheviks. Their October uprising was not
only the actual salvation of the Russian Revolution; it was also the
salvation of the honor of international socialism...Whatever a party
could offer of courage, revolutionary farsightedness and consistency in
an historic hour, Lenin, Trotsky and all the other comrades have given
in good measure.
Yet she was critical of the Bolsheviks’ glorification of authoritarian
practices when confronted with a brutal civil war.
“Socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised
land after the foundations of socialist economy are created,” she
argued. “It does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the
worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of
socialist dictators.”
Luxemburg insisted that the best way to help the Russian Revolution
remain true to its initial democratic and socialist ideals was for other
workers’ movements to end their Russian comrades’ terrible isolation by
making revolutions in their own countries.
But revolutionary hopes and possibilities in Germany were betrayed by
opportunistic, deal-making social democratic leaders, who supported the
repression and murder of revolutionaries like Luxemburg.
Capitalist elites ultimately backed the fascism of Mussolini and Hitler,
whose grim qualities were matched — thanks to revolutionary Russia’s
isolation — by the Stalin dictatorship’s barbaric corruption of the
communist movement. An even more devastating Second World War engulfed
the planet, followed by decades of instability, violence, cultural and
environmental degradation.
Yet amid what some have perceived as a downward slide into barbarism,
many have continued to be inspired by the last words Red Rosa wrote:
“Tomorrow the revolution...will proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I
am, I shall be.”
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Rosa Luxemburg and the pathway to socialism
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Reform or Revolution
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nothing to them. ”
― Jules Verne