5

A Bridge to the Present:
Rosa Luxemburg and
the Underground Tradition

Economic reformism and political authoritarianism vied for influence over the labor movement for most of the twentieth century. But there was always another tradition lurking in the background. Its trajectory would extend from the Paris Commune and the Russian mass strike of 1905 to the European workers’ uprisings of 1918–23 over the Spanish Civil War and to the student revolts of 1968. Its partisans were eclectic and bound by a spirit of revolutionary humanism and libertarian socialism. Most of them are regrettably forgotten. The most visible representative of this underground tradition remains Rosa Luxemburg.¹

Two films have been made about her, she remains the subject of scholarly work,² her death is still marked by mass demonstrations, and the German Party of Democratic Socialism has even named a foundation after her. Luxemburg was one of those genuinely charismatic personalities who extracted intense loyalty from her friends and, according to those who participated in her classes at the social democratic party school, she must also have been an exceptional teacher. Luxemburg had her difficulties as a Pole and a Jew. But she made her way. She confronted the sexism of many in the Second International and she showed that a woman could become a major theorist, a superb orator, and a leading revolutionary activist. Her brutal death at the hands of protofascist soldiers during the Spartacus Revolt of 1919, and the later communist assault on the “syphilitic bacillus of Luxemburgism” during the 1920s, certified her as a genuine heretic and an authentic martyr.

It was understandable that, following her death, friends should have begun publishing works intended to humanize Luxemburg in the public eye.³ But the current preoccupation with her personal life and her sense of identity, or lack of it,⁴ has resulted in a discussion more intent on determining what she was, or how she should have “felt,” than what she thought and what she did. Luxemburg herself would have had little use for any of this. She scorned all attempts to “transform political questions into personal, sentimental ones.”⁵ And she was right. Luxemburg was indeed sensitive and brave and she died tragically. But there were surely many men and women—just as sensitive and just as brave—who died just as tragically. The point is to discern her real contributions.

Luxemburg’s sensibility and charisma say nothing about her salience. There is no use artificially trying to turn her into a forerunner of feminist theory or practice.⁶ It also makes little sense debating her Jewish or Polish “identity” or suggesting that her support for national cultural autonomy somehow mitigates her critique of the right to national self-determination. Luxemburg was uninterested in the influential Jewish Bund in imperial Russia, she rejected Polish nationalism, and she vehemently disagreed with activists intent on forming a separate women’s movement like Lili Braun. Luxemburg deserves to be judged in the terms by which she defined herself.

Her struggles were undertaken in the name of socialism, democracy, and internationalism. She was beholden to no dogma. She employed the method of Marx to contest his own predictions and claims.⁷ Consistent in her attacks on reformism, and clear about the authoritarian dangers of communism, her reflections on the mass strike are remarkably salient in thinking about 1989. Her views on internationalism and “self-administration” also strike a chord given the need for a progressive response to globalization. There is something invigorating, moreover, about her radical understanding of democracy and its role in public life. Indeed, perhaps more than any other thinker of the “golden age,” her ideas speak to the concerns of modern activists intent upon changing the progressive discourse.

Internationalism and Imperialism

Born in the little city of Zamosc, Poland, in 1871, to a middle-class Jewish family, Rosa Luxemburg experienced, firsthand, the terrible Jewish pogrom of 1881 in Warsaw.⁸ It left an indelible mark and she would maintain a profound concern with what is today called human rights. Luxemburg never sought to deny what she was, but she refused to make what she was the foundation of her politics. Her position came down to the following:

The duty of the class party of the proletariat to protest and resist national oppression arises not from any special ‘right of nations’ just as, for example, its striving for the social and political equality of sexes does not at all result from any special ‘rights of women’ which the movement of bourgeois emancipation refers to. This duty arises solely from the general opposition to every form of social inequality and social domination, in a word, from the basic position of socialism.⁹

Luxemburg first became involved in socialist politics during her high school years when she participated in various clandestine and semiclandestine organizations like the radically internationalist and partially terrorist organization Proletariat.¹⁰ Her activities led to her flight shortly after graduation from Poland to Zurich, where she met her future lover Leo Jogiches who, whatever the personal and romantic conflicts between them,¹¹ remained her political collaborator until her death. In Zurich she studied mathematics, natural science, law, and political economy at the university. There she also first systematically read the works of Marx and Engels and completed her dissertation The Industrial Development of Poland (1898). Its conclusions stood in accord with those of her articles for the journal she and Jogiches founded in 1893: Sprawa Robotnicza (The Workers’ Voice).¹²

The Industrial Development of Poland argued that Polish industrial development was dependent upon that of Russian capitalism. The implications were clear: support for Polish nationalism must prove counterproductive for socialists since its success would hinder the general economic development of the Russian empire on which the expansion of the proletariat depended. It would also undermine class solidarity and divert concern from overthrowing the czar. Luxemburg no less than Lenin sought to make a bourgeois revolution against the inclinations of an underdeveloped and servile bourgeoisie. But she drew different conclusions: the weakness of the bourgeoisie would make any practical concession by an ideologically cohesive proletariat unnecessary. This belief put her at odds with the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and its chief, Josef Pilsudski, who would later defect from socialism altogether as the dictator of Poland in the 1920s. Luxemburg and Jogiches wished to place primacy upon securing a constitution for the Russian empire rather than national self-determination for Poland. This indeed led them to form the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPL).

Luxemburg’s critique of nationalism was distinctive. She opposed the support for Polish independence given by Marx and Engels and then seconded by Karl Kautsky and the major figures of the Second International.¹³ It was a daring position for her to take. Luxemburg may not have learned the lesson of 1848 when she identified nationalism solely with the interests of the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeoisie. Unlike Trotsky or Lenin, moreover, she probably never fully comprehended Marx’s strategic idea that the national revolution had to serve as an opening to the permanent international revolution. Unwilling to remain content with merely quoting what Marx said, however, she was unafraid to contest his stance in the light of her empirical research and with an eye on its modern implications.¹⁴ Thus, Luxemburg employed Marx’s method to criticize his own position on Polish independence.¹⁵

Virtually all her contemporaries assumed that support for nationalism—whether in the form of respect for “national” interests or self-determination—could stand in accord with internationalist principles. Bernstein wrote little about the matter: it was enough that the quest for political reforms should take place within national boundaries and, in the best scenario, that their achievement would foster cooperation between nations. It was, of course, different for Lenin. He endorsed the “right to national self-determination” as a principle and a constituent element of the international revolutionary enterprise. He never assumed that every minority would exercise this right, given economic exigencies and the existence of an ideologically disciplined vanguard supposedly immune to nationalist temptations.

Lenin surely anticipated the rise of national liberation movements in a way Luxemburg did not: she was clearly mistaken when, following the onset of World War I, she claimed that national wars were no longer possible.¹⁶ But, ironically, Luxemburg understood the power of nationalism better than her opponents. In contrast to Lenin or Bernstein, for her, it was not susceptible to manipulation by the vanguard and its allure could not simply be forestalled by the prospect of economic gain. Luxemburg never considered nationalism as a necessary step in bringing about internationalism. Instead of relying upon historical “laws,” or the march of the “dialectic,” she always insisted on establishing a plausible relation between means and ends.

Luxemburg believed that an unqualified commitment to the right of national self-determination would chain the socialist movement to the ideology of the very class it opposed.¹⁷ Championing nationalism would prevent workers from understanding the class structure of the state and its increasingly atavistic character in the light of global capitalist expansion. She also recognized that securing civil liberties demanded more than the institutional blank check provided by the unqualified commitment to nationalism. Moreover, she believed, this ideology could only help inspire militarism and imperialist ambitions. Luxemburg would indeed develop this idea in The Accumulation of Capital (1913).

What became her major economic work, once again, pitted her against Bernstein and Lenin—as well as, in a certain way, Marx himself. Luxemburg sought to investigate the systemic conditions that made capitalist accumulation possible rather than the empirical or organizational forms that capital would take. She agreed with Marx that goods had to be sold in order to accumulate the profits that capitalists would reinvest to perpetuate the system. But she claimed that his analysis in the second volume of Das Kapital had not fully grasped the implications stemming from the growing imbalance between the increase of goods and the buying power of consumers.

Because capitalist production outstrips demand, according to Luxemburg, there is no apparent incentive for capitalists to reinvest. Unless such investment takes place, however, the system will collapse. Something within the very structure of capitalism must subsequently allow for the consumption of its surplus and the likelihood of reinvestment. The ability to export what has been overproduced to precapitalist territories thus becomes the safety valve for the system. Or putting it another way: capitalism not only depends upon imperialism, but the existence of noncapitalist areas is required for its very survival. Insofar as these territories are brought into the capitalist orbit, however, the system produces its own historical limit beyond which looms its breakdown. But that is for the future. The interim will be marked by increasing competition among capitalist states for these steadily diminishing precapitalist territories. Herein lies the connection between capitalism, militarism, nationalism, and imperialism.

Lenin was wrong. Imperialism is not the “highest stage of capitalism,” according to Luxemburg, but a constituent element of capitalism from its inception. This calls into question his belief that the proletariat must engage in a two-stage process of revolution in which it must first ally with the bourgeoisie against the colonial aggressor under the banner of nationalism and, only then, attempt the socialist revolution. By the same token, against the revisionists, Luxemburg stressed that imperialism is not susceptible to reform. Effectively opposing it is impossible without opposing capitalism. Socialist politics must subsequently abolish its political reliance upon “national interest” in favor of an internationalism alone capable of furthering the anti-imperialist struggle. This position indeed fit perfectly with the argument outlined by Luxemburg nearly twenty years earlier in The Industrial Development of Poland.

Luxemburg never assumed that the breakdown of capitalism would mechanically result in the creation of socialism.¹⁸ But she did maintain that a breakdown was inscribed within the logic of the system and that capitalism could not continue once it became a closed system. With her insistence that overproduction is the cause for the impending crisis, moreover, she ignored the fact that economic crises can result from any number of causes ranging from a falling rate of profit to faulty credit policies. Luxemburg underestimated the role capitalist governments can play in warding off disaster by subsidizing industries, manipulating fiscal policies, and introducing welfare legislation. She paid little attention to how businesses can overcome stagnation and avoid collapse by reorganizing or simply intensifying exploitation. Luxemburg also tended to forget that economic crisis can serve a positive function for the accumulation process by clearing away inefficient industries and failing markets. Nevertheless, the marginality of her imperialism thesis was not merely due to its logical flaws.

In contrast to the theory of Lenin, whose arguments justify his belief in the need for a vanguard, her perspective lacks any organizational or strategic program for anti-imperialist struggles. The elegance of her structural analysis does not compensate for her inability to explain why nationalism has proven so dominant among the exploited. Her rejection of “national self-determination” would also not only conflict with the interests of many nationalist cliques, which claim to rule in the name of the masses, but perhaps also with the genuine sentiments of the masses themselves. Her powerful descriptive theory, in short, lacked any major insights for political practice.

The Accumulation of Capital provided a retort to those right-wing social democrats who believed that capitalism was not dependent upon expansion and that, if pursued, imperialism could take the form of “peaceful expansion.” In contrast to the reformers, however, Luxemburg offered no possibility for mitigating imperialist policies other than by revolution. She rejected their belief that imperialist policies retain a contingent character even as her theory made it difficult to explain why not every capitalist state embraced them. Imperialism became, for her, an all or nothing proposition. Its political character, its independent dynamic, was obscured by her economic theory.

The Accumulation of Capital is devoid of both the organizational implications of Leninism and the possibilities for intervention offered by revisionism. Imperialism is left as a structural component of capitalism breeding the worst ideological values and the most dangerous practical undertakings. But that is insufficient. “Socialist” states have clearly not been preserved from imperialist ambitions and it was not simply economic motives driving the imperialist policies of Nazi Germany in Russia or the United States in Vietnam. The choice is also never simply between revolution and despair. Imperialist policies have been successfully contested within the framework of capitalism and, especially in the modern era, international institutions are becoming increasingly capable of opposing the imperialist ambitions of certain nation-states.

Rosa Luxemburg lived her slogan that “the International is the fatherland of the proletariat.” But she underestimated the importance of transclass movements and international organizations, like the Red Cross, dedicated to peace. Luxemburg also did not envision a situation in which it would become necessary to support existing international institutions in spite of their “bourgeois” character. But her work contests the still popular attempts to identify the left with national or ethnic aspirations. It also begs questions concerning the need for new forms of international coordination predicated on new understandings of class consciousness. Her thinking can indeed only inspire the development of a new internationalist form of political theory.

Organization and Empowerment

Following shortly on the completion of her thesis, uninterested in returning to Poland, Rosa Luxemburg arranged a marriage of convenience. She left Zurich for Germany, whose Social Democratic Party (SPD) stood at the center of the world stage and served as the fortress of orthodox Marxism. Luxemburg would remain active in East European politics throughout her life, and many of her friends and followers like Jogiches, Feliks Dzerzinski, and Adolf Warski played prominent roles in the communist movement. Nevertheless, she would gain her worldwide fame in Germany.

Kautsky took her under his wing. August Bebel, Franz Mehring, and Wilhelm Liebknecht noted her combination of intellect, boundless energy, and oratorical skill. She agreed with their contention that socialism was the inheritor of enlightenment political theory and her outlook was already teleological. She understood the revolution as the work of the great majority of society, which capitalism would render proletarian, and its aim as the establishment of civil liberties and republican institutions. She was already willing to judge issues in terms of their impact upon the “self-administration” of the working class.¹⁹ But she was also proud that the SPD had grown to the point where keeping it illegal had become impossible for the German authorities. That the labor movement was growing elsewhere only seemed to justify the amalgam of reformist proposals and revolutionary theory in the Erfurt Program.

Her shock was real when Eduard Bernstein began publishing the articles that would comprise Evolutionary Socialism. The erupting storm brought her into the limelight while she was still in her twenties. Other more famous figures had already entered the fray. But Luxemburg provided the most articulate response to the revisionist heresy in her pamphlet Reform or Revolution (1898). It too opposed claims that capitalism was no longer “objectively” and “inevitably” doomed to destruction, that the middle strata were on the rise, and that the extension of credit had overcome the contradictions associated with the capitalist accumulation process.²⁰ She too insisted that capitalism must be seen in structural terms rather than in terms of “empirical capitalists” who, according to Luxemburg, had by now given way to monopolistic firms and trusts.²¹

Her work highlighted the structural contradictions of the production process and refused to subordinate them to questions of redistribution.²² Capitalism is also seen as bearing no intrinsic relation to democracy. It can coexist with any number of political forms, and it constitutes no “general law of historic development.”²³ Luxemburg rejected “economic determinism,” and any crude division between base and superstructure. Thus, even in 1898, she could note that:

Materialists who assert 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—you won’t find even a trace of such a conception, not even in the most backward Russian provinces (and, as you know, in this respect, they are very talented in Russia; on request they will prepare for you such a gruel of old and new materialists that you will feel all topsy-turvey). If ever you should find such a prodigy, have him exhibited in the waxworks.²⁴

Reform or Revolution offered more than a simple defense of established beliefs. Luxemburg considered the warnings against any “premature” seizure of power, which had become a staple of orthodox Marxism, absurd since they always posited a fixed point outside and independent of the class struggle as a basis of judgment.²⁵ She maintained that the SPD should be a party of “class struggle and not of ‘historical laws.’”²⁶ And so: where Bernstein called upon the SPD to alter its theory to fit its reformist practice, and Kautsky wished to reassert the objective truth of Marxism, Luxemburg demanded that the party act in accordance with its self-professed revolutionary goal. Understanding the goal in purely metaphysical terms would result in adventurism, according to Luxemburg, while ignoring the goal entirely would transform the struggle for socialism into the struggle to ameliorate capitalism.²⁷ Her pamphlet constituted an attempt to help social democracy “grope on its road of development between the following two rocks: abandoning the mass character of the party or abandoning its final aim, falling into bourgeois reformism or into sectarianism, anarchism or opportunism.”²⁸

But the immediate danger in 1898 was reformism. Its contempt for theory was, according to Luxemburg, an intrinsic part of its appeal.²⁹ Its unacknowledged philosophical assumptions retained practical implications: an unwillingness to look beyond the historical moment and the given system. She considered its exclusive emphasis upon short-term interests dangerous for the long-term prospects of the movement. Luxemburg would subsequently reject the proposal of the arch-revisionist, Max Schippel, that the SPD support an increase in military expenditure in order to reduce unemployment.³⁰ Indeed, from the beginning, Luxemburg argued that the work of the party must be based less on the prospect of economic benefits than the pursuit of principle.

Her pamphlet offered a political critique concerning the limits of economic reform. It showed why trade unions can never govern the actual level of wages or resolve the contradiction between the social production and private appropriation of wealth under capitalism. Dealing with the structure of the economy, according to Luxemburg, demands political power. Without it, so long as capitalism exists, any reform granted under one set of conditions can always be retracted under another. Luxemburg rejected the evolutionary idea that one reform will build upon the next and that socialism will “automatically” emerge from the daily struggle of the working class.³¹ She would indeed earn the undying hatred of the unions with her claim that their exclusive emphasis on economic issues would result only in a “labor of Sisyphus.”

But Luxemburg was equally scathing in her criticisms of vanguardism. An acknowledged expert on Eastern Europe within the Second International, she kept abreast of developments and welcomed the creation of a unified Russian Social Democratic Party (RSDP) in 1898. She also knew it would be beset by tensions between those wishing to imitate Western social democracy and a younger group intent on transforming the organization into a revolutionary “vanguard” for the struggle against a semiabsolutist police state. Underestimating the extent of the breach between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, which few fully understood, Luxemburg called for unity following the bitter RSDP party congress of 1902. As her hopes dwindled over the years, however, she moved away from the Mensheviks who had begun allying themselves with Pilsudski and the PPS. Nevertheless, she would remain committed to the spirit of her original response to Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? (1903) and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904).

When Lenin’s pamphlet first appeared, interestingly enough, it caused very little fuss in the West. Given the backward economic and political conditions of Imperial Russia, it seemed merely a cruder exposition of what everyone already knew: the party incorporated the political possibilities of the proletariat, party members must accept party discipline, and party activists, who were usually intellectuals, must forge the “consciousness” of the masses. Luxemburg was among the few who recognized its importance. She stood close to Lenin on most political matters pertaining to the Second International. But her essay, Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy (1904), rejected his emphasis upon bringing revolutionary consciousness to the working class “from the outside.” It also insisted that consciousness could only emerge organically through the democratic interaction between a party and its constituency.³²

Many consider Luxemburg an apostle of “spontaneity.”³³ But that is a mistake. She recognized the need for political organization, but she was also intent on mitigating its bureaucratic development. An organic understanding of the class struggle informed her equally organic understanding of the way in which class consciousness arose from it. If she considered Lenin’s notion of the vanguard more indebted to Blanqui than to Marx, and contested his military understanding of organization, she also considered the trade unions as primarily “defensive” and rejected the technocratic character of revisionism. Achieving economic reforms, in her view, did not directly translate into political power. She understood that organizing a disparate and fragmented working class required some degree of centralization. But she feared an “ultracentralism” that, while seeking to prevent opportunism by fiat, would undermine the prospects of proletarian self-administration. Thus, she could write that:

If the Social Democratic tactics are not created by a central committee, but by the whole party—or better still by the whole movement—then it is obviously necessary that the individual party organizations have the elbow-room which alone makes possible the utilization of the means presented by the given situation to strengthen the struggle, as well as to develop the revolutionary initiative. The ultracentralism which Lenin demands seems to us, however, not at all positive and creative, but essentially sterile and domineering. Lenin’s concern is essentially the control of the activity of the party and not its fruition, the narrowing and not the development, the harassment and not the unification of the movement.³⁴

Luxemburg believed that political decisionmaking must depend upon public debate at the base. If socialism is to transform workers from “dead machines” into the “free and independent directors” of society as a whole, as she hoped, then they must have the chance to learn and exercise their knowledge. Building consciousness at the base was, for her, more important than simply embracing the instrumental exigencies of the organization. Thus, in what would become a famous phrase, she frankly admitted that “errors made by a truly revolutionary labor movement are historically infinitely more fruitful and more valuable than the infallibility of the best of all possible ‘central committees.’”³⁵

Just as she rejected the vision of a party run by bureaucrats, and almost exclusively concerned with economic issues, she opposed the idea of a revolutionary organization intent upon erecting an “absolute dividing wall” between members and nonmembers.³⁶ According to Luxemburg, while the party should seek to influence the masses—by formulating a program, carrying on with revolutionary agitation during periods of lull, and playing a fundamentally pedagogic role—it should not have the arrogance to rule them. Freedom was, in her view, never identifiable with the interests of the vanguard.³⁷

The key to her political theory is an organizational dialectic wherein the party should actually seek to create the basis for its own disappearance. This means mobilizing the latent self-administrative capacities of the masses. But Luxemburg never specified any particular relation between the moments of “organization, enlightenment and struggle.” Perhaps that was only sensible since the relation between them would be constantly shifting. In any event, however, she had little use for rigid organizational proscriptions. Her political aim was simply to confront the socialist means of struggle with the democratic ends they were meant to serve. That would prove difficult enough.

Mass Action and Solidarity

Luxemburg was always concerned more with the working class than its organization. Opportunism was, for her, a way of shifting the emphasis in the wrong direction.³⁸ This form of thinking was, for her, the handmaiden of bureaucracy. Organizational hierarchy, instrumental reason, regulated division of labor, and routine all militate against the self-administration of the proletariat. Resisting revisionist calls for evolutionary reform or an authoritarian vanguard, however, seemed possible only if its purposive aim—the revolution—had a secure philosophical foundation. And so, in keeping with her elders, she chose to view Marxism as a “science.” Luxemburg was aware that class consciousness was a contingent phenomenon and she needed the objective insight into reality upon which the subjective action of the proletariat could rely. “Scientific socialism” provided the rational basis for her belief in the future success of her radical democratic vision.

Placing the empowerment of the class over the exigencies of the party would put Luxemburg at odds with the party regulars of both social democracy and communism. It turned her into an outsider far more surely than her background or her gender. Her problems began with the enthusiasm she expressed for the Belgian mass strike of 1902,³⁹ and the personal attacks against her intensified during the Russian Revolution of 1905. The future was seemingly prefigured in these new expressions of democratic self-administration. Luxemburg saw how a general strike by over 300,000 workers had spread from the coal towns to Brussels, thereby paralyzing the state and resulting in various radical political reforms, if not, to her dismay, the enfranchisement of women.⁴⁰ The uprising subsided. But when the next strike wave broke out in Russia, she was ready. Her concern with crystallizing practice in theory inspired what is undoubtedly her finest work: Mass Strike, Party, and Trade Unions (1906).

Luxemburg called for importing the new form of struggle into an old world: the East should now offer guidance to the West. The general strike had originally been the philosophical province of anarcho-syndicalism before Trotsky’s collaborator on the “permanent revolution,” Alexander Helphand, better known as Parvus, appropriated it for Marxism.⁴¹ But Luxemburg went further. She interpreted the mass strike as reflective of new historical developments to which genuine revolutionaries must respond. She again employed the method of Marx against the positions taken by Marx himself. Thus, in keeping with her approach to issues like Polish independence, she could write: “If, therefore, the Russian Revolution of 1905 makes imperative a fundamental revision in the old position of Marxism on the question of the mass strike, it is once again only Marxism whose general methods and viewpoints have thereby, in a new form, won the victory. The Moor’s beloved can die only at the hand of the Moor.”⁴²

Luxemburg viewed the mass strike not merely as a single spontaneous action in the manner of the anarchists, or even certain radical socialists, but as a process. And this only makes sense given the historical context of its composition. It is, after all, misleading to speak of the Russian Revolution of “1905.” A strike wave had been building since 1902, when workers rose in Batum. In December of that year the strikes spread to Rostov-on-Don, while 1903 witnessed outbreaks first in Baku and then in Tiflis, Odessa, Kiev, and other cities. Nevertheless, it was only in 1905 that this movement gained worldwide attention with a strike of 140,000 workers in St. Petersburg, which produced a “soviet” whose “presiding spirit” was the youthful Trotsky.⁴³

News spread slowly to the West, but when it finally came, it struck with incredible force. The response in the bourgeois press was hysterical. Luxemburg was castigated as a traitorous Jew, a “blood-thirsty bitch,” a Polish agitator, and much worse. The Reverend Friedrich Naumann, leader of the Progressive Party, attacked her personally for supporting violent revolution in the East while sitting safely in Germany. Her answer was to take a pseudonym and leave immediately for Warsaw, then still part of the Russian Empire, where the revolution was in progress. There, before her arrest in 1906, she experienced firsthand the power and innovative possibilities of the masses in democratically organizing their milieu. Her observations are quite telling:

Workers everywhere are, by themselves, reaching agreements whereby for instance, the employed give up one day’s wages every week for the unemployed. Or, where employment is reduced to four days a week, there they arrange it in such a way that no one is laid off, but that everyone works a few hours less per week. All this is done as a matter of course, with such simplicity and smoothness that the Party is informed of it only in passing…. And then too, an interesting result of the revolution: in all factories, committees, elected by the workers, have arisen ‘on their own,’ which decide on all matters relating to working conditions, hirings and firings of workers, etc. The employer has actually ceased being ‘the master in his own house.’⁴⁴

But, for all that, the prospect of a mass strike in Germany provoked a party crisis on par with the revisionism debate. Between the genuine fear it created among the propertied classes and the middle strata, and the jingoism it artificially generated on the far right, the SPD suffered its first severe electoral defeat. Nearly half its parliamentary seats were lost as nonproletarian voters abandoned the party in the elections of 1907. Its right wing was incensed. Openly threatening to split the trade unions from the party, blaming the loss on the radicals, the trade union leader Karl Legien made the conservative position clear when he stated: “the general strike is general nonsense.”

Not much support was forthcoming from the followers of Kautsky. He had helped garner funds to secure Luxemburg’s release from a Polish prison. No less than Bernstein, however, he was skeptical about her romantic depictions of events. Kautsky criticized her transformation of what seemed a tactic into a general strategy. The mass strike might prove useful for “defensive purposes,” or to prevent incursions on gains already won, but its “offensive” employment was another matter. Kautsky castigated Luxemburg for adventurism and ignoring the prospect of governmental repression against both the workers and their organizations. The political differences between them intensified until they exploded in 1910, whereupon Luxemburg found herself relegated to the leadership of a relatively small “radical” faction within the party. But the broader implications of the split were even worse. It immeasurably strengthened the right wing of the SPD whose partisans would ultimately cause the party to endorse the entry of Germany into World War I.

Luxemburg’s theory of the mass strike took the democratic impulse within orthodox Marxism to its most radical conclusion. It confronted what she considered an artificial distinction between the economic struggle of the trade unions and the political struggle of the party. The mass strike can, in this way, be seen as offering an organic response to the concerns of both Bernstein and Lenin.⁴⁵ It was, after all, neither the culmination of a policy that stressed incremental economic reforms nor the product of a plan by some central committee. Luxemburg saw it instead as the spontaneous result of empirical developments indirectly influenced by a party engaged in a pedagogic process. Thus, she argued the need for preparatory work and the creation of “friction” between classes.

Manifesting the latent possibilities of the working class, while perhaps lasting years, the mass strike would undoubtedly go through periods of radical ebb and flow.⁴⁶ Understanding the mass strike as an expression of proletarian self-administration, and irreducible to any established organizational form,⁴⁷ she viewed it as the “phenomenal form of the proletarian struggle in revolution.” The product of a radicalized class consciousness, and also its producer, she considered it experimental in character: the mass strike would generate new institutions and then, at a different stage of the struggle, still newer ones. Indeed, if 1905 introduced a new legislature (Duma) and the short-lived promise of a forty-hour week, it also generated a vision of proletarian democracy more radical than what had been envisaged by bourgeois liberalism.

This image of a proletariat gathering its revolutionary energies stayed with her during the war years. She spent most of them in a tiny prison cell where she responded to the critics of her imperialism thesis in a work known as the Antikritik (1915), translated Russian authors into German, composed her beautiful letters to friends and lovers, and—under the pseudonym Junius—produced the great pacifist pamphlet with a revolutionary intent: The Crisis of German Social Democracy (1916).

“The Junius Brochure” created a sensation. It reflected the spirit of the generally unreported antiwar demonstrations in 1914 of 30,000 in Berlin and 35,000 in Dresden.⁴⁸ It mercilessly assaulted the SPD for its false estimation of what the war would entail, its obsession with votes, its cowardice in the face of public opinion, its obeisance to imperial authority, and its abdication of working-class interests. The organizational question was again seen by her less as a primary concern than as a function of the demands raised by the class struggle at a crucial historical conjuncture. Thus, she could write:

That is the difference between the great historical upheavals, and the small show-demonstrations that a well-disciplined party can carry out in times of peace, orderly, well-trained performances, responding obediently to the baton in the hands of the party leaders. The great historical hour itself creates the forms that will carry the revolutionary movements to a successful outcome, creates and improvises new weapons, enriches the arsenal of the people with weapons unknown and unheard of by the parties and their leaders.⁴⁹

Luxemburg decried the party’s unbridled instrumentalism by claiming that its support for the war had tied its hands and saved no lives. Where the SPD could have become a rallying point of antiwar opposition, a beacon of sanity and civilization, it chose instead to betray socialist internationalism and help bring about a monumental calamity. Honor demanded that the party roll the dice, according to Luxemburg, but its leaders walked away from the table:

‘Would the masses have supported the social democracy in its attitude against the war?’ That is a question that no one can answer. But neither is it an important one. Did our parliamentarians demand an absolute assurance of victory from the generals of the Prussian army before voting in favor of war credits? What is true of military armies is equally true of revolutionary armies. They go into the fight, wherever necessity demands it, without previous assurance of success. At worst, the party would have been doomed, in the first few months of the war, to political ineffectuality.⁵⁰

Luxemburg insisted that the SPD should have called for a mass strike even without assurances of success. She was correct in noting that the pragmatism of the party had proven profoundly unpragmatic: it was indeed condemned to “political ineffectuality.” Her call to act simply on principle made her unique among socialists. It highlighted her courage and her charisma. It also justified her own “impractical” decision to risk imprisonment for her convictions. This becomes evident in a justly famous letter from prison, which provides an insight into her personality and her politics, to Mathilde Wurm, who stood close to Kautsky and would later serve as a Reichstag deputy for the USPD:

In your melancholy view, I have been complaining that you people are not marching up to the cannon’s mouth. ‘Not marching’ is a good one! You people do not march; you do not even walk; you creep. It is not simply a difference of degree, but rather of kind. On the whole, you people are a different zoological species than I, and your grousing, peevish, cowardly and half-hearted nature has never been as alien, as hateful to me, as it is now. You think that audacity would surely please you, but because of it one can be thrown into the cooler and is then ‘of little use!’ Ach!—you miserable little mercenaries. You would be ready enough to put a little bit of ‘heroism’ up for sale—but only ‘for cash,’ even if only for three mouldy copper pennies. After all, one must immediately see its ‘use’ on the sales counter…. For you people, the simple words of honest and upright men have not been spoken: ‘Here I stand, I can’t do otherwise; God help me!’ Luckily, world history, up until this point, has not been made by people like yourselves. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have had a Reformation, and we probably would still be living in the ancien régime.⁵¹

Luxemburg was a romantic revolutionary. She had no use for the utilitarian caution of the socialist party leaders and her resistance to the war took the form of a moral appeal. But her antiwar politics were not all that different from those, now in the minority of the SPD, who had already grown sick of the slaughter by 1915. The only important politician in the antiwar movement willing to take a more radical position, and call for turning the international war between states into an international revolutionary class war, was Lenin. He considered Luxemburg too soft on the need for a break with the social democrats and the creation of a new organization, too preoccupied with the spontaneous rising of the masses and too accepting of “opportunism.” Luxemburg did indeed believe that social democracy could reinvigorate itself. She rejected vanguardism, opposed the call for a new international organization, and never turned her back on the original values informing her politics.

At the same time, however, criticism by the right-wing “majority” of the SPD was growing increasingly vicious. Many of its members felt personally insulted by the Junius Brochure and they considered it evidence of her impracticality and revolutionary fanaticism. They accused Luxemburg of breaking party discipline, defeatism, and setting the stage for a split in the labor movement. She would indeed soon help found a group known as the Spartacists that would serve as the nucleus for the German Communist Party (KPD).Luxemburg was also explicit in demanding that the antiwar movement build the revolutionary and anti-imperialist instincts of the masses and that the movement rehabilitate the old slogan of “war against war.”⁵²

But her pacifism was never absolute: she understood war as a historical phenomenon which, in the modern context, lacked its earlier progressive function.⁵³ Her revulsion was directed against “bourgeois” wars and she obviously endorsed revolutionary action by the working class.⁵⁴ This she considered a constructive rather than a destructive undertaking. Interestingly enough, in contrast to Lenin, she never gave it any military connotations. Proletarian revolution was seen by her as a transformative political action intent upon minimizing the use of violence. Her democratic image of this radical project would indeed prove decisive for her response to the explosive events of 1917: The Russian Revolution (1918).

Liberty and Revolution

Written in jail for Paul Levi, her courageous successor as leader of the KPD, her essay attempted to qualify his unbridled enthusiasm for the Bolshevik Revolution. It was, of course, also meant for publication. Believing it might provide fuel for the counterrevolution, however, Levi convinced Luxemburg not to publish it. His feelings changed soon enough when, after calling upon the Comintern to reverse its “offensive” revolutionary strategy following the defeat of the Spartacus Revolt, Lenin and Trotsky ordered his unprepared and undermanned party to embark on the March Action of 1920. Its failure led Levi to insist that they assume public responsibility and, in response, Lenin expelled him from the Comintern for breach of discipline in 1921.⁵⁵ The Russian Revolution appeared in Europe the following year: it would only be published in East Germany in 1963 and in Russia in 1990.⁵⁶

The pamphlet stands in the tradition of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire. In ill health, suffering the general psychological effects of imprisonment, Luxemburg had no library facilities and little current information other than newspapers. But her work would prove as trenchant and prophetic as any testimony ever produced by the contemporary of a world-historical event. Written as a lesson for the future, without any explicit policy recommendations, many of her specific criticisms can be contested.⁵⁷ But the mistakes of the pamphlet recede behind its ethical consistency and democratic impulse. The whole looms larger than the sum of its parts.

Luxemburg was critical of Lenin’s signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. She was not alone in her skepticism. But she had little sense about the desperate military straits in which the USSR found itself and her prediction that only an international revolution could end the imperialist war would prove both empirically false and politically unhelpful. Her limited understanding of the Russian situation was also apparent in her critique of Bolshevik agrarian policy. She didn’t seem to realize that Lenin had already been faced with a fait accompli when he told the peasants: “Go take the land for yourselves.” Her call for immediate collectivization would undoubtedly have turned the peasantry against the new state and brought about great bloodshed: this was, in fact, precisely what occurred during the ill-fated Hungarian Revolution of 1919. But, still, she anticipated how Bolshevik policy would produce a stratum of property-owning peasants with material interests inimically opposed to any future socialization of the economy.⁵⁸ She also foresaw the conflicts between “town and country” that would result from Lenin’s policy if not the solution Stalin would introduce with his own form of collectivization. Her own stance was clear: the revolutionary society cannot achieve socialist aims by using capitalist methods.

It was the same with respect to the “right” of national self-determination. Her earlier writings already made clear that such an appeal had no place in the revolutionary arsenal. Luxemburg considered it mistaken simply to assume that support for national movements of liberation in the Russian border states would create faithful allies for the revolution.⁵⁹ She also considered it potentially dangerous to the unity of the USSR and unrealistic. The Bolsheviks would find themselves in the contradictory position of offering independence to those nations over which they lacked control, or direct political interest, while denying it to the rest. Luxemburg again rejected the idea that support for nationalism was a necessary step in bringing about internationalism.

Most important, however, was the matter of democracy. An inability to admit defeat in World War I or deal with a looming counterrevolution, according to Lenin and Trotsky, justified the abolition of the provisional government and the creation of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” led by the Bolsheviks. Luxemburg remained unconvinced. Dissolution of the provisional government could have been legitimated, from her perspective, either by convening a new constituent assembly or transferring power to the thriving “soviet” movement. But the Bolsheviks rejected both options in favor of a one-party state.⁶⁰ She feared the effect of this decision and the use of terror upon the future of the revolution no less than the meaning of socialism. Luxemburg recognized that a single dynamic tied the elimination of representative democracy with its civil liberties to the subjugation of the soviets and the repression of political life in the country as a whole.

It is rule by terror which demoralizes…. In place of the representative bodies created by general popular elections, Lenin and Trotsky have laid down the soviets as the only true representation of the laboring masses. But with the repression of political life in the land as a whole, life in the soviets must also become more and more crippled…. Without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element…. The public life of countries with limited freedom is so poverty-stricken, so miserable, so rigid, so unfruitful, precisely because, through the exclusion of democracy, it cuts off the living sources of all spiritual riches and progress…. The whole mass of the people must take part in it. Otherwise, socialism will be decreed from behind a few official desks by a dozen intellectuals.⁶¹

Luxemburg refused to choose between a republic and soviets: only in 1919 during the Spartacus Revolt would she unequivocally endorse the creation of workers’ and soldiers’ “councils.” Her pamphlet also does not deal with the question regarding which institutional form might best secure civil liberties: Luxemburg was content to call upon the Bolsheviks to permit unrestricted freedom of the press and assembly, expand the dialogue, and allow hitherto neglected interests to emerge. She was adamant in her contention that the supposedly new proletarian dictatorship must introduce radically new democratic forms of proletarian self-administration. Indeed, extending her earlier criticisms of the vanguard party, she condemned Lenin’s restrictions on what she liked to call the “school of public life.”

There is no place in Luxemburg’s understanding of socialism for party decrees, draconian penalties, and the arbitrary use of force. The dictatorship of the proletariat must be the work of a class rather than a clique acting in its name. It must distinguish itself “in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination.”⁶² Socialism is an experiment and its interests are irreducible to those of any party or institution. Because the purpose of the “transition” is to provide the proletariat with a chance to exercise its power, according to Luxemburg, the ability to contest authority lies at the heart of the entire enterprise. Therein lies the meaning behind her famous claim that “freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party—however numerous they may be—is no freedom at all. Freedom is only and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.”⁶³

Rosa Luxemburg may have been more radical in her vision of socialist democracy than Kautsky and other social democrats. She was also surely more supportive of the revolutionary seizure of power in 1917. But singular was really her internationalist interpretation of the events and her contention that the authoritarian development of the Soviet Union was not inevitable. Luxemburg saw its deformations less as a result of economic backwardness than as the political failure of Western social democracy to meet its international revolutionary obligations. Her “Spartacus Letters” argued that the Bolsheviks’ use of terror and their suspension of democratic rights were expressions of weakness deriving from the isolation of the revolutionary undertaking in Russia. Luxemburg also stated her position succinctly in a private letter to Warski:

To be sure, terrorism indicates fundamental weakness, but the terror is directed against internal enemies whose hopes rest upon the continuation of capitalism outside Russia, and who receive support and encouragement for their views from abroad. If the European revolution takes place, the Russian counterrevolutionaries will not only lose this support, but—more importantly—their courage as well. In short, the terror in Russia is above all an expression of the weakness of the European proletariat.⁶⁴

Luxemburg recognized the bankruptcy of the Second International in 1914. But, in contrast to Lenin, she sought a revamped socialist international with democratic procedures and open, mass parties. She sensed the dangers attendant upon the formation of a new international and its domination by the Bolsheviks. Even in 1919, Luxemburg was hesitant about splitting communists off from the majority of workers still loyal to the socialists.⁶⁵ Nevertheless, following her release from prison, she resumed her activity in support of the Spartacists and, when its members helped form the KPD, she agreed to serve as its first president.

Luxemburg appeared terribly frail following her release from prison, her hair had turned white, and Alfred Döblin actually implied that her judgment was impaired by a nervous breakdown in his novel Karl und Rosa (1950). Her feelings were clearly torn with respect to the KPD. She supported its public advocacy of revolutionary “soviets”, or workers’ councils, in imitation of the Bolshevik experiment. But she had no desire to bring Eastern authoritarianism to a Western state.⁶⁶ Neither the Spartacists nor the fledgling KPD had the support of a proletarian majority, and Luxemburg opposed the decision to begin a revolutionary uprising in Berlin. But she remained at her post when she was dramatically outvoted. The same fate awaited her proposal to participate in the parliamentary elections for a National Assembly that would solidify the nascent Weimar Republic. And so, ironically, Luxemburg found herself in the minority of the only movement she was ever elected to lead. Wishing to stay “in contact with the masses,” however, she made her peace with the Spartacus Revolt. Luxemburg indeed became its most visible symbol when she was beaten to death in 1919 by proto-Nazi thugs in the employ of a new provisional government led by some of her most vicious detractors in the SPD.⁶⁷

The Underground Legacy

That was the year in which socialism was lost. Following the defeat of Spartacus, the collapse of the Bavarian Soviet, and the failure of the Hungarian Revolution, any real chance of bringing about the international revolution in support of an increasingly isolated and authoritarian USSR was effectively nullified. The opportunity of translating the revolutionary dream into reality would never again present itself in quite the same way: Socialism turned into a regulative ideal.

Rosa Luxemburg would never have agreed with this analysis. She would never have gone that far. Her ideas were still expressive of the old world. But, like few others, she provided an insight into the new one. Luxemburg may have seen capitalism as objectively harboring the seeds of its own destruction: the crash looming in the future, beyond the “limit” on expansion imposed by imperialism, would ultimately condemn it to the dustbin of history. But she was also among the very few who truly foresaw the global character of capitalism, its planetary reach, and the importance of internationalism for any modern form of left-wing politics. Her thinking would also play a pivotal role, though still usually unacknowledged,⁶⁸ in transforming historical materialism from a “science” into a critical method preoccupied with questions of consciousness and intent on highlighting radical democratic aims. Indeed, if her critique of reformism may seem outmoded in its assumptions and its language, it anticipates the conceits of modern pragmatists whose instrumentalism has undermined class solidarity and the spirit of resistance.

Realizing that mass action always incorporates an experimental dimension, highlighting the ideals of popular empowerment, Luxemburg never identified the interests of working people with those of even the most dynamic party or revolutionary movement. She refused to admit that socialism is exhausted by the reforms and programs of professional politicians. Luxemburg hated watering down differences and seeking to please all factions and interests. In a world where the language of politics is becoming increasingly narrow, and professional, her thinking provides a useful corrective to the ideology of compromise.

Luxemburg has much to offer in making sense of 1989 and, especially given the lack of an alternative general outlook, it is appalling how her theory of the mass strike has been ignored. The year 1989 was, of course, not simply a revisitation of 1905. Activists everywhere in Eastern Europe, however, sought the introduction of a constitutional republic and a new democratic form of civil society. The uprisings were prepared less by the tactics of any underground party than by traditions of resistance and the most diverse forms of pedagogical work. The demonstrations and strikes, moreover, spread from one nation to the next over decades: from the workers’ uprising of 1953 in East Berlin to the upheaval in Poland and the Hungarian Revolt of 1956 to the Prague Spring of 1968 and the formation of Solidarity in Gdansk in 1980 to the street actions of 1989 in East Germany and Hungary and the “velvet revolution” in Czechoslovakia. There is a sense in which all of this was part of the same process: the mass strike undertaken in new conditions and with self-consciously liberal aims.

Luxemburg also has a unique contribution to make in terms of what is commonly known as “democratic theory.” She was concerned with the lack of institutional accountability no less than the self-administrative capacities of working people. By introducing the production process as a point of reference and raising the image of “soviets” or workers’ councils, however, she looked beyond a notion of democracy divorced from economic life or grounded in nostalgic visions of the New England “town meeting.” It is simply astonishing that most self-styled radical democrats should simply ignore the mass strike and the councilist tradition. Luxemburg highlighted the arbitrary power exercised by capital no less than the impact of reification and alienation on everyday life. She indeed projected a world in which workers no longer serve as a simple cost of production and in which democracy becomes a genuine part of everyday life.

Luxemburg still understood socialism as the alternative, the emancipated other, guaranteed in some way by the dialectical workings of capitalism. But she refused to rely upon what Hegel called the “cunning” of history. Luxemburg rejected the notion that capitalist methods could produce socialist results, nationalism would somehow generate internationalism, and authoritarianism would ultimately produce democracy. Her principled concern with unifying means and ends in practice contested the avowedly teleological framework of her general theory. Indeed, if the thought of Lenin was predicated on what has been called the “teleological suspension of the ethical,” the politics of Luxemburg rested upon an ethical suspension of the teleological.

There is a decidedly romantic quality in her thinking and her critics were largely correct in noting her exaggerated contempt for bureaucracy and her lack of concern with the institutional foundations of a democratic order. Luxemburg was never quite sure what she wanted. She opposed a purely formal parliamentarism as surely as an unchecked authoritarianism. Her convictions had little resonance with what would become the dominant sentiments of the socialist and the communist movements. Her thinking would also prove unbecoming in a later age marked by instrumentalism and subjectivism. The martyr could work no miracles: her influence diminished following her death and her politics found itself expelled from the school of public life. Her tradition was driven underground. But it would resurface from time to time. It might even resurface again when the next attempt is made to light the torch of freedom.