3. The Russian Organisational Question
In 1903 the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party held a congress. It was the first real congress of the party, where the party set out to define its role and character. It was here that the signs of a split made their first appearance – if somewhat unclearly – between the ‘hard’ Bolshevik and ‘soft’ Menshevik factions of the party. In this question too, Luxemburg was not one for sitting on the sidelines.
Rosa Luxemburg and the SDKPiL were strongly opposed to any form of nationalism and, as such, they were opposed to Polish independence from Germany, Austria, and Russia. As social democrats of the Russian-controlled part of Poland, they therefore believed, in principle, that they should form part of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. At the SDKPiL congress of July 1903, the party resolved to begin negotiations concerning merging with the Russian party. They therefore elected two delegates, Warszawski and Hanecki, who were sent to participate in the Russian congress in order to determine whether they ought to join.
When Luxemburg moved to Germany, she ceased being active in the Polish party, though after Jogiches arrived in Berlin in 1900, she recommenced her activity, albeit unofficially. As such, Luxemburg didn’t directly participate in the merger negotiations with the Russians. Despite believing that a joint party was correct in principle, it doesn’t seem as though she was especially bent on the idea that the relatively well-established Polish party ought to subject itself to the Russian party, which was only now taking steps towards becoming a united party. Furthermore, as has been explained, a fairly hostile personal relationship existed between herself and Plekhanov. She did not oppose a fusion but did give rather detailed instructions to the Polish delegates at the congress.
The driving force behind the congress of the Russian party in 1903 was the group centred around the newspaper Iskra, the editorial board of which was made up of Lenin and Plekhanov, among others. The Iskraists were fighting for a union of the many isolated social-democratic groups in Russia into one unified party, and for the liquidation of Economism – the Russian variant of Bernstein’s revisionist tendency. In the beginning, it seemed there was agreement between the Russians and the Poles on all the essential political questions. Luxemburg could only have agreed with the Iskraists’ political critique of the Russian advocates of Bernsteinism. According to Nettl,[1] the Polish party made no comments on Lenin’s What is to Be Done?, which formed the political foundation of the congress for the Iskraists.
The congress then achieved its goal of creating a unified party to a large extent. However, internal disagreements between the Iskraists started to appear. These were the beginnings of the split between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. Later, the Stalinists would present the formation of the Bolshevik Party as being akin to the rising of a phoenix out of the ashes, with the Russian party congress of 1903 being given almost mythical status. However, things were not as simple as the Stalinists made out, as we shall see.
The split at the congress also led to a confrontation between Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, who she subjected to a scathing critique. This has later been used to ‘prove’ the anti-Leninism and anti-Bolshevism of Luxemburg, but here too things were not quite so simple. Before we take a closer look at her critique, however, we have to examine the question that led to the Polish delegation leaving the congress in 1903, before the split between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks took place.
The National Question
The national question formed a fundamental point of disagreement between Russian and Polish social democrats. During the congress, the Polish delegates became aware of an article that Lenin had written a short while earlier for Iskra, outlining the Russian Marxists’ position on the national question. In his article, Lenin stressed the need for the Russian party to support the oppressed nations’ “right to self-determination”. Lenin argued that, in general, social democrats must advocate that the people of the oppressed nations be allowed to decide for themselves whether they wished to form an independent nation or not.
Lenin’s article said nothing new. The essential ideas it contained were part of the draft programme of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which the Poles had been familiar with for a long time and had made objections to. But the article specified that, for the Russians, the slogan of “the right of nations to self-determination” was no mere empty phrase. Rather, it was an important part of their programme, both theoretically and tactically. The article was not intended as a provocation against the Poles, and Lenin went to great lengths to explain that it was not to be understood as support for Polish nationalism or for the nationalist-oriented PPS.
Luxemburg and Jogiches reacted swiftly and instructed the Polish delegates to make it clear to the Russians that negotiations were now hanging by a thread. In Luxemburg’s detailed instructions, she demanded, among other things, that the paragraph containing the formulation on the rights of nations to self-determination be changed, or else the Poles would be forced to break off their plans for affiliation to the Russian party. When the Russian party congress refused to submit to these demands, the Polish delegation withdrew. The rest of the congress, which was moved from Brussels to London because of the interference of the Belgian police, took place without the Polish delegation.
On many questions, Rosa Luxemburg appears to have changed her opinion as revolutionary events drew nearer. However, her views on the national question do not fall under this category. This question formed a real point of political disagreement between Lenin and Luxemburg. For both of these great revolutionaries, it stood at the very heart of what they were fighting for. When Luxemburg and the group around her broke with the PPS to form the SDKPiL, it was over the question of Polish independence. The PPS had supported the demand for Polish independence while the SDKPiL had rejected it.[2]
Rosa Luxemburg quite bluntly decried the demand of Polish independence as “a utopian mirage, a delusion of the workers to detract them from their class struggle”.[3] She fought tooth and nail against Polish nationalism from what was fundamentally a position of uncompromising internationalism. However, her position led her to lump together and reject all struggles against national oppression as, in essence, reactionary nationalism. First putting forward her ideas on the question in the early 1890s, she further developed them in a number of articles on the national question and the question of autonomy between 1908 and 1909.[4]
Lenin too settled his position on the question early on, further developing it over years without fundamentally changing its essence. In 1914, Lenin wrote a lengthy article titled ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’. Despite the fact that he penned the piece five years after Luxemburg had written her own articles, it was principally formulated as a response to her writings. Lenin was provoked into writing the article after a number of opportunists within the Bolshevik Party attacked paragraph nine of the party’s constitution, which committed the party to the defence of the right of nations to self-determination. But according to Lenin, “none of the opportunists named […] has offered a single argument of his own; they all merely repeat what Rosa Luxemburg said in her lengthy Polish article of 1908-09: ‘The National Question and Autonomy’.”[5] That it was her arguments Lenin picked out to criticise despite a five-year delay speaks volumes about the authority Luxemburg enjoyed in the movement.
Rosa Luxemburg’s position on the question can be summed up as follows: the goal of socialism is to abolish all forms of oppression, including the oppression of one nation by another. Without abolishing all forms of oppression, there can be no socialism. But that does not mean that Marxists should struggle for national autonomy. Above all, in the era of imperialism, the autonomy of one nation would go against the grain of the historical tendency of capitalism towards larger and larger economic units. According to Luxemburg, this is a historically progressive tendency. Thus, there could be nothing progressive about Marxists supporting the right of nations to self-determination, as it would simply mean the fragmentation rather than the unification of larger economic units. At any rate, small oppressed nations can never be free of the economic and political domination of the imperialist nations, and therefore to speak of autonomy amounts to pulling the wool over people’s eyes. Not only would the demand for national self-determination be misused by the national bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation, but it would also be used by the great powers of imperialism in the furtherance of their own interests. In Rosa Luxemburg’s opinion, the call for the right of nations to self-determination was, therefore, a bogus, reactionary and petty-bourgeois demand:
[…] the hope of realising this “right” on the basis of the existing setup is a utopia; it is in direct contradiction to the tendency of capitalist development on which Social Democracy has based its existence. A general attempt to divide all existing states into national units and to re-tailor them on the model of national states and statelets is a completely hopeless and, historically speaking, reactionary undertaking.[6]
According to Luxemburg, in the oppressed nations it was only the national bourgeoisie who had any interest in presenting the demand for national self-determination. Even then, the national bourgeoisie had no serious intention of fighting to achieve real autonomy but, rather, they only put forward such demands to further their own narrow interests. As such, the demand for national self-determination, she believed, could only express a reactionary nationalism. The proletariat, on the contrary, has no interest in the right to self-determination. Under capitalism, the demand constitutes a petty-bourgeois utopia. Under socialism, it would be rendered wholly unnecessary, as socialism would remove all national borders – at least of an economic kind – and secondary linguistic and cultural questions could be solved with little fuss.
Strategically speaking, she believed that it was extremely dangerous for the international workers’ movement to raise such a demand. To do so, she believed, would merely strengthen nationalist movements, which must inevitably come under the domination of the national bourgeoisie. The strengthening of such movements would only create or exacerbate existing divisions within the working class along national lines. What was actually needed was, on the contrary, a unified struggle against the ruling class of all nations.[7]
Lenin completely agreed with Rosa Luxemburg and the SDKPiL insofar as they argued it was necessary to fight against Polish and indeed all forms of nationalism. He also agreed that larger economic units were progressive, and that the goal of Marxists was to do away with the nation-state and borders. But, in Lenin’s view, this was far from exhausting the question. Many nations were suffering under the most brutal national oppression. For the masses of these countries, the struggle against such domination could form the starting point for a struggle against all forms of oppression. It thus contained within it a revolutionary potential. According to Lenin, it was therefore the task of revolutionaries to connect with this struggle. By doing this, Marxists could explain how liberation from national oppression in and of itself cannot solve the problems that the masses face. Rather, it would also be necessary to take the fight to the national bourgeoisie. That is, it would be necessary to turn the struggle of the working class against national oppression into a generalised struggle against class oppression. If Marxists simply rejected the struggle against national oppression, they would leave the door open for the bourgeoisie. The latter would then channel the struggle towards the furtherance of their own class interests, thus giving the struggle for national independence a reactionary character.
Luxemburg’s disagreement with Lenin was certainly coloured by her own personal background, given that she was born in an oppressed nation: Poland. The oppression of Poland by the Russian Tsar meant that the Polish Marxists came under a great deal of pressure from petty-bourgeois Polish nationalism. As a true internationalist, Luxemburg fought mercilessly against every manifestation of this nationalism that penetrated the Polish working class. Lenin on the other hand came from Russia, which was an oppressor nation, and as such he fought consistently against any sign of Great Russian chauvinism infiltrating the Russian workers’ movement.
Whilst Luxemburg considered the question from a Polish point of view, Lenin regarded it with a broader perspective. According to him, the paragraph on the right of nations to self-determination in the programme of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party did not exclude Luxemburg and the Polish Marxists, as future members of the Russian party, from concretely opposing Polish independence. Lenin actually supported the struggle of Luxemburg and the Polish comrades against every instance of Polish nationalism. But the right to self-determination took on a completely different significance in Russia, as Lenin explained:
The question of the “right to self-determination” is of course not so important to the Polish Social-Democrats as it is to the Russian. It is quite understandable that in their zeal (sometimes a little excessive, perhaps) to combat the nationalistically blinded petty bourgeoisie of Poland, the Polish Social-Democrats should overdo things. No Russian Marxist has ever thought of blaming the Polish Social-Democrats for being opposed to the secession of Poland. These Social-Democrats err only when, like Rosa Luxemburg, they try to deny the necessity of including the recognition of the right to self-determination in the programme of the Russian Marxists.[8]
The Tsarist Russian Empire was made up of a great number of oppressed national minorities, which were violently subjugated by the chauvinist Great Russian regime. Lenin, like Luxemburg, knew that secession would not, in and of itself, solve the problems of the working class of any given nationality. Being exploited and oppressed by a Polish rather than a Russian capitalist would make no difference to the worker. Nonetheless, Lenin argued that it was essential for Marxists in Russia, as the oppressor nation, to demonstrate to the oppressed minorities that the Russian Marxists really did wish to bring about a complete end to Great Russian oppression and chauvinism. Emphasising the right to self-determination was imperative in order that the Russian party might clearly demonstrate to the workers of the oppressed nationalities that the Great Russian workers had no interest in maintaining their oppression. Lenin’s goal was the same as Luxemburg’s: to overcome the national divisions which split the world working class. But Lenin believed that real unity could not be forced onto the oppressed national minorities. Actual unity would arrive only on the basis of a voluntary association.
After the seizure of power in 1917, the Bolsheviks showed that they were quite serious about this point in their programme. By leaving the choice up to the workers of the oppressed nations themselves as to their future affiliation – which included the right to secession should they choose it – the Bolsheviks showed that they had no interest in perpetuating national oppression. It was with this policy that they won over the populations of the oppressed nations and a voluntary association of Soviet Republics became possible. Incidentally, this policy was completely abandoned upon Stalin’s rise to power.
In short, Lenin’s disagreement with Rosa Luxemburg was not concerned with the struggle being waged by herself and her Polish party comrades against Polish nationalism and the Polish bourgeoisie. Rather, his criticism was that from this she went too far, drawing out a generalised, principled rejection of the right of nations to self-determination in all instances. Rosa Luxemburg’s categorical approach meant that, in her struggle against the Polish bourgeoisie, she inadvertently and indirectly ended up supporting the Great Russian nationalism of the Russian ruling class:
We have seen that the following argument is one of Rosa Luxemburg’s ‘trump cards’ in her struggle against the programme of the Marxists in Russia: recognition of the right to self-determination is tantamount to supporting the bourgeois nationalism of the oppressed nations. On the other hand, she says, if we take this right to mean no more than combating all violence against other nations, there is no need for a special clause in the programme, for Social-Democrats are, in general, opposed to all national oppression and inequality.
The first argument, as Kautsky irrefutably proved nearly twenty years ago, is a case of blaming other people for one’s own nationalism; in her fear of the nationalism of the bourgeoisie of oppressed nations, Rosa Luxemburg is actually playing into the hands of the Black-Hundred[9] nationalism of the Great Russians![10]
And:
If, in our political agitation, we fail to advance and advocate the slogan of the right to secession, we shall play into the hands, not only of the bourgeoisie, but also of the feudal landlords and the absolutism of the oppressor nation.[11]
However, according to Lenin, defending the right of nations to self-determination by no means implied that Marxists ought to positively support every concrete demand for national self-determination, or every national movement at all times, irrespective of context, as Luxemburg claimed. Rather, Lenin understood this as essentially a negative right. In order to explain his position, Lenin compared the question of self-determination to divorce: just because Marxists support the right to divorce, this by no means implies that Marxists must demand that every married couple ought to divorce. In a similar manner, this or that concrete demand for self-determination had to be answered by a concrete analysis. What is the character of this particular movement for national self-determination? What are the relations between the classes within such a national group? And so on, and so forth. But, at all times, for Lenin the question always had to be subordinated to the class struggle. This meant that the proletariat must never, regardless of the character of the national movement, allow itself to be led by the national bourgeoisie and that it must always have an independent class position. In other words, only the proletariat could put a real stop to national oppression:
Insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation fights the oppressor, we are always, in every case, and more strongly than anyone else, in favour [of the struggle], for we are the staunchest and the most consistent enemies of oppression. But insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation stands for its own bourgeois nationalism, we stand against [it]. We fight against the privileges and violence of the oppressor nation, and do not in any way condone strivings for privileges on the part of the oppressed nation.[12]
Lenin also criticised Luxemburg’s view that self-determination could not be achieved under capitalism. Lenin highlighted the example of Norway, which achieved independence from Sweden following a referendum in 1905. The ruling class in Sweden opposed Norwegian independence, but the threat of strike action from the Swedish workers left the ruling class with no choice but to reluctantly accept the decision of the Norwegians to secede.
Lenin argued that Marxists must support the right to self-determination just as they must support other democratic demands. Lenin used the same argument that Luxemburg herself had used in Reform or Revolution? – namely, that it is through the struggle for democratic demands that the working class will become conscious of the limitations of bourgeois democracy. In response to Luxemburg’s argument that the demand of the right of the nations to self-determination would be used by the bourgeoisie, Lenin responded that all democratic demands could be used in a similar manner to deceive and distract the workers.
However, Lenin and Luxemburg were firmly in agreement on one point: that in the revolutionary party, there should exist no divisions along national lines. So it was somewhat paradoxical that in the beginning it was precisely differences over the national question that kept the Polish party outside the unified Russian party. Lenin and Luxemburg agreed that the task of Marxists is to do away with national division, and that the working class has no country, just as Marx and Engels themselves explained in The Communist Manifesto. Their disagreement was over how this unity could be achieved. But to both, the party was the highest organisation of the working class and therefore must represent the highest ideas, including the purest internationalism. From this, it followed that the party could not allow any room for expressions of nationalism or of any other prejudice. The vanguard of the working class must foster the greatest possible unity in the party, such that its members are knitted together as closely as possible by a voluntary class discipline across nationality.
This agreement on party unity was expressed during the party congress of 1903, in which the Poles supported the position of Lenin and the Iskraists on the need for a single, unified party, which was incompatible with the existence of separate groups for separate communities, each claiming the exclusive right to speak on that community’s behalf. This question particularly concerned the Bund, an organisation which represented the Jewish social democrats. The Bundists demanded, as a condition of their fusion with the Russian social democrats, the exclusive right to speak on behalf of Jewish workers in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Iskra, on the contrary, demanded that the Bund dissolve itself and become an integrated part of the party, and in this they were supported by the Poles. The Poles, however, were not ready to allow the same principles to be applied to their own party. In a speech which Luxemburg probably had a hand in writing, the two Polish delegates put forward two conditions for fusion: Firstly, that the SDKPiL become the exclusive representative of the Polish social democrats in the Russian party (a condition intended to keep the PPS outside of the party), and secondly that the SDKPiL be allowed to keep its organisational structures intact. Whether the Russians and Poles would have been able to reach an agreement on this question, we will never know. Their disagreement over the paragraph concerning the right of nations to self-determination meant that the Poles left the congress before fusion negotiations progressed that far.
The walk-out by the Polish delegates subsequently caused a certain amount of internal unrest in the Polish party. The leadership never gave the members an official report from the congress and there was discontent over the fact that Luxemburg and Jogiches had primarily conducted the negotiations themselves through informal channels, without the rest of the party necessarily being in agreement with their perspective on the question, ending finally with the breaking off of negotiations. Incidentally, this dispute led Cezaryna Wojnarowska, the Polish representative in the International Bureau, which was the leadership of the Second International, to withdraw from her role, with Rosa Luxemburg replacing her.
The Split Between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks
Later on in the 1903 congress, after the Polish delegation had departed, a number of disagreements arose in the Iskra group, which subsequently sparked a fierce debate not only in Russia, but in the entire International. Luxemburg threw herself into this debate on the side of the Mensheviks, and in 1904 wrote a scathing critique of What is to Be Done? and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back – the two principal books in which Lenin had laid out his view concerning the construction of a revolutionary organisation in Russia. His two books were written shortly before and shortly after the 1903 congress, respectively.
Luxemburg put forward her critique in an article titled ‘Organisational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy’, to which Lenin wrote a response. This polemic has since become the centrepiece of all efforts to portray Rosa Luxemburg as the democratic anti-centralist in contradistinction to Lenin, the ultra-centralist, whose ideas led directly to the dictatorship of Stalin. The anti-Leninist Bertram D. Wolfe later even re-christened Luxemburg’s article, ‘Leninism or Marxism?’, precisely to further emphasise this presentation of the polemic. But the commonplace conceptions of both Luxemburg’s and Lenin’s positions on the question of organisation are wrong.
Luxemburg’s developed view on questions of organisation cannot be separated from her piece on the mass strike, which she wrote in the year that followed the Russian Revolution of 1905. The revolution cast the polemic between these two Marxists in a completely different light, and clarified most of their disagreements. It will be dealt with in the next chapter. But before we come onto these events, we first must kill off the myths that directly concern the 1904 polemic between Luxemburg and Lenin.
The Background to the Split of 1903
Before we delve into Luxemburg’s critique, it is first of all necessary to give something of an introduction to the split that emerged in the RSDLP during the now-fabled party congress of 1903.
The founding congress of the RSDLP was actually held in 1898, but almost immediately, the eight participants in this meeting were arrested. As such, the attempt to form a unified organisation remained largely unrealised. The party continued to consist of what were essentially unconnected groups spread out across Russia and in the exterior. One of the groups that worked most tirelessly for the holding of a proper party congress was gathered around the newspaper Iskra (The Spark), of which Plekhanov was the editor. As the first person to introduce Marxist ideas into the Russian movement, Plekhanov enjoyed an enormous authority among Russia’s revolutionaries. Alongside Plekhanov, the editorial board consisted of Lenin and Martov – who later became the leaders of the Bolshevik and the Menshevik factions respectively – as well as Axelrod, Vera Zasulich and Potresov.
The congress of 1903 was larger than that of 1898 and drew in representatives from a variety of groups, serving to lay the groundwork for a real, unified Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. The Iskra group had argued that it was imperative that the dispersed social democratic groups unite into a centralised political party. Before the congress, Lenin expounded his view on this in the book What is to Be Done? Here he outlined what the Iskraists saw as the most important struggle: the struggle against Economism, the Russian variant of Bernstein’s tendency, which Luxemburg had fought valiantly in Germany.
The Economists believed that it was the task of revolutionaries to raise the economic demands of the workers to the exclusion of engaging in political and theoretical struggle. By extension, they aimed to build the party on the model of a loose and trade union-like organisation. While the Economists spoke of an organisation of the working class, in practice they showed a condescending attitude towards the workers. According to them, workers either could not understand or were unconcerned about questions of theory. Lenin replied that, on the contrary, workers were interested not only in daily economic questions, but in understanding the world more broadly, and as such there existed a demand for theory. Indeed, Lenin explained that, without revolutionary theory there could be no revolutionary movement at all. Luxemburg had used the same arguments in her struggle against Bernstein.
The following formulation by Lenin from What is to Be Done? has long been the cause of dispute:
The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia.[13]
Based on this exaggeration, the assertion has been made that Lenin simply viewed the workers as cattle who could only be educated by a revolutionary elite. At the 1903 congress, Lenin himself admitted that he had gone too far in this passage: “We all now know that the ‘economists’ have gone to one extreme. To straighten matters out somebody had to pull in the other direction – and that is what I have done.”[14] History has indeed shown that the working class can achieve socialist consciousness through struggle, beginning with the Chartist movement in Britain in the 1840s. But the purpose of what Lenin called his “simplified sharpness” was obvious. He wanted to hammer home the point that the task of Marxists is not to pander to the lowest common denominator, as per the Economists’ misguided conception of the workers as uninterested in anything other than economic struggle and “tangible results” – i.e., reforms – in the here and now. Rather, he emphasised that Marxists have the task of raising the consciousness of the working class; of elevating their outlook above daily life and immediate problems. Incidentally, the workers themselves are quite aware of their daily problems. The Marxists instead must connect these daily questions to the broader political questions, and the question of the struggle against the overall system itself. That is to say, Marxists must play the role of the vanguard of the workers’ struggle, not of a mere appendage to it.
The Iskraists also clashed with the Economists over questions of organisation. The Social Democratic circles were more or less isolated and, as such, were in need of a unifying direction and perspective. In the opinion of Lenin and the other Iskraists, centralisation and a central party organ were necessary to give a political perspective that transcended the narrow, local view that dominated in the small circles spread across Russia. Under the Tsarist regime, the average Social-Democratic small circle would generally only survive for six months. It would then find itself crushed by the secret police, after which the circle would have to be built afresh by new, inexperienced forces. This led, naturally enough, to the circles suffering chronic “dilettantism”, as Lenin called it. On the contrary, he explained, the revolutionary organisation had to primarily consist of professional revolutionaries, schooled in conspiratorial work. This was by no means incompatible with simultaneously attempting to build a broader labour organisation among the workers. Nonetheless, for Lenin, building a revolutionary party of professional revolutionaries had to be a prerequisite.
In the period preceding the congress, there was agreement among the Iskraists over Lenin’s core ideas in the struggle against Economism. This consensus encompassed individual members of Iskra including Martov and Plekhanov, who, following the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, ended up on the opposite side of the division to Lenin.
During the congress, however, disagreements started to appear internally among the Iskraists. The first of these arose over the formulation of the first paragraph of the party statutes dealing with who could be a member. Lenin’s proposed formulation was as follows:
A member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party is one who accepts its programme and who supports the Party both financially and by personal participation in one of the Party organisations.[15]
Martov proposed an alternative that defined a member of the party as one who accepts its programme and who supports the Party both financially and by personal “work under the control and direction of one of the Party organisations”.[16] The difference was virtually unnoticeable. The small difference lay in the fact that Lenin proposed that only those who actively participated in the work of the party under the direction of the party leadership could be viewed as members, whilst Martov’s proposal was somewhat more ill-defined. For instance, under Martov’s definition of membership, a professor who was not prepared to work directly under the control of the party but who viewed himself as a social democrat might still be considered a member. Martov’s proposal won in the end but, in Lenin’s opinion, this was not a catastrophe.
The split between the two tendencies really became well defined upon the election of a new editorial board for Iskra. The old board had agreed to reduce the number of members from six to three: Plekhanov, Martov, and Lenin. Potresov, Zasulich, and Axelrod had played an important role in the difficult years when Marxist ideas were engaged in a tough struggle swimming against the stream. But they no longer played a role in developing the organisation and in writing for the newspaper. They had a hard time adjusting to the new tasks and in adapting themselves to the professionalism that was now required. Furthermore, a reduction in the size of the editorial board from six to three would make its work easier and would eliminate the possibility of a tied vote on the body. Despite the fact that the proposal of the new editorial board had been agreed upon beforehand, the question suddenly created outrage at the congress, as some delegates expressed a mood of pity for the three ‘rejected’ editors. Nonetheless, Lenin’s proposal gained the majority – and henceforth his faction came to be known as the ‘Bolsheviki’, meaning majority, whilst the opposing faction came to be known as the ‘Mensheviki’, meaning minority.
Martov was able to win the majority for his formulation of the conditions of membership, while Lenin could win the majority for his proposal of the composition of the editorial board, because several delegates left the congress in the meantime, dissatisfied with the decisions that had been made. Among others, these included the Economists and representatives of the Jewish Bund. These tendencies accused all Iskraists – that is both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks – of wanting to introduce ultra-centralism, “organised distrust”, “martial law” etc., into the party. In a word, they accused both factions of everything that Lenin would later be accused of by the Mensheviks and by Rosa Luxemburg.
After the congress, the split escalated. The Mensheviks refused to accept their position as a minority, and whipped up hostility towards Lenin and the Bolsheviks, throwing around all kinds of accusations. They also sought support from their international contacts. Lenin, for example, was accused by Karl Kautsky of excluding the three members from the editorial committee. The claim was an absurd one. The three were not excluded by Lenin. He didn’t have the power to exclude anyone from the editorial board, even if he had wished to do so. Rather, they were simply not re-elected by the congress. The minority, the Mensheviks, refused to take the posts they had been elected to on the editorial board and on the central committee following the congress, despite the fact that twelve out of the fourteen local committees in Russia condemned their undemocratic behaviour. But the Mensheviks, despite being a minority, continued to sabotage the decisions of the congress and hurl accusations at the majority. They claimed that the latter wanted to introduce blind obedience, strangle all initiative, etc. Plekhanov, who had initially sided with Lenin, finally succumbed to the pressure and went over to the Mensheviks. In the end, Lenin withdrew from the editorial board of Iskra and as such the minority ended up taking over the central organ of the party and the rest of the leading institutions, despite having been in the minority at the congress.
At the time, the significance of the split was unclear to most. It even came as a shock to Lenin himself, although he very soon began to grasp what lay behind it. In his response to Rosa Luxemburg’s criticism in 1904, he wrote:
Anyone who does not wilfully close his eyes to what happened at our Congress is bound to see that our new division into minority and majority is only a variant of the old division into a proletarian-revolutionary and an intellectual-opportunist wing of our Party.[17]
Despite making this point, Lenin continued to make it clear that he definitely did not view the differences as being of such a principled character that they must necessarily lead to a split:
I would willingly respond to this appeal [i.e., for an agreement with the ‘Mensheviks’] for I by no means consider our differences so vital as to be a matter of life or death to the Party. We shall certainly not perish because of an unfortunate clause in the Rules![18]
The political disagreements behind the split did, however, begin to become more clear. It became increasingly obvious that the Mensheviks formed a ‘soft’ wing of the party that did not believe the working class had an independent role to play in a future revolution in Russia. The role of the working class, they believed, was limited to supporting the liberal bourgeoisie and of hoping the latter would bring about a parliamentary republic. The Bolsheviks, known as the ‘hard’ wing of the party, instead focused on the independent, revolutionary role of the working class. All of this, however, only became clear along the way. Indeed, before the final parting of the ways between the two factions in the split of 1912, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks even achieved a brief reunification after the revolution of 1905. After the February Revolution of 1917, however, it became abundantly clear that the Mensheviks were moderate socialists who were not prepared to go further than the bourgeois revolution. During the Russian Civil War, they ended up on the side of the counter-revolutionary White Army, engaged in an armed struggle against the Soviet power. But, naturally, none of this could have been foreseen in 1903.
Luxemburg’s Criticism of Lenin
After the congress of 1903, both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks attempted to win the International to their side. In this, the German SPD was a decisive factor. The Mensheviks, among whom could be found most of the ‘old’ leaders of the party, had made numerous acquaintances across the whole European labour movement through their many years of exile. As such, it was they who emerged with the most support in the international movement. Indeed, the Mensheviks managed to win over most of the prominent leaders of the German SPD, among whom could be counted Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg. Incidentally, it was on the basis of the requests of, and relying upon information from the Mensheviks, that Luxemburg wrote ‘Organisational Questions of Russian Social Democracy’. The article was written as a response to Lenin’s book One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, in which he evaluated the congress and subsequent split. Luxemburg’s article was published both in Iskra, which had fallen under the control of the Mensheviks after the congress, and in the German theoretical magazine, Die Neue Zeit.
Luxemburg opened her article by reviewing the tasks faced by the Russian social democrats: principally, the task of transitioning from small, divided, local organisations to a unified, centralised organisation:
The problem on which Russian Social Democracy has laboured for several years is how to effect a transition from the type of divided, totally independent circles and local clubs – which corresponds to the preparatory, mostly propagandistic phase of the movement – to an organisation such as is necessary for a unified political action of the masses in the entire state. Division and total autonomy, the self-rule of the local organisations, were the dominant characteristics of the old type of organisation. Inasmuch as the old organisational model has become unbearable and politically out of date, it is natural that the motto of the new phase of the great organisational work should be: centralism.
The accentuation of the idea of centralism was the theme of the three-year campaign of the Iskra in preparation for the last Party Congress, which was, in fact, the constituent assembly of the Party. The same idea is dominant among the entire young guard of Social Democracy in Russia.[19]
We can see then that Luxemburg did not argue against the necessity of centralism – a view that has so often been attributed to her. She explained that centralism was part of the very character of Social Democracy. What she criticised Lenin for was what she referred to as “ultra-centralism” and “Blanquism”,[20] in which the revolutionaries are separated from the masses in a small conspiratorial group:
The book [Lenin’s One Step Forward, Two Steps Back] is the systematic presentation of the ultra-centralist viewpoint in the Russian party. The conception expressed here in a rigorous and exhaustive manner is that of a relentless centralism. The life-principle of this centralism is, on the one hand, the sharp accentuation of the distinction of the organised troops of explicit and active revolutionaries from the unorganised, though revolutionary, milieu which surrounds them; on the other hand, it is the strict discipline and the direct, decisive, and determining intervention of the central committee in all activities of the local organisations of the party. It is sufficient to remark that, for example, according to this conception the central committee has the power to organise all partial committees of the party.[21]
Furthermore, Luxemburg accused Lenin of elevating the idea of uniting a strong, organised centralism with a social democratic mass movement to the level of a “specific revolutionary-Marxist principle”.[22]
Lenin’s Response
At this time, Lenin was still little-known outside of Russian revolutionary circles. He wrote a response to Luxemburg’s critique, but Kautsky refused to publish it. In the German party, it was primarily the Menshevik leaders who were known, and, furthermore, there was an opinion among the leadership that the Russian disagreements were unlikely to be of any interest to German social democrats.
Kautsky told Lyadov, who had been sent to put the position of the Bolsheviks:
Look, we do not know your Lenin. He is an unknown quantity for us, but we do know Plekhanov and Axelrod very well. It is only thanks to them that we have been able to obtain any light on the situation in Russia. We simply cannot accept your contention that Plekhanov and Axelrod have turned into opportunists all of a sudden.[23]
Furthermore, Vorwärts explained their refusal to print Lenin’s article, arguing that they “could not spare much space for the movement abroad, especially the Russian, which is still so young and can give so little to the German movement”.[24]
The leaders of the German movement looked down on the split in the Russian party – they did not understand it, or else did not care about the questions that were at play. To them, the Russians were simply splitters who put party unity at risk and whose disagreements wasted time that could be put to better use. Thus, one could already see the germ of a narrow national view among the German social-democratic leaders, which would find its full expression in the support rendered by the SPD to the German bourgeoisie during the First World War in 1914.
According to Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg had dealt with the organisational question entirely in the abstract, and she had failed to respond to his concrete analysis of the congress, as outlined in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. Rather, she had accepted the arguments of the Mensheviks as good coin, and had ended up reinforcing the same straw men that they had erected.
In order to illustrate Luxemburg’s abstract approach, Lenin highlighted the ‘evidence’ Luxemburg had laid out as part of her allegation of Lenin’s ultra-centralism, disproving it bit by bit. For instance, Luxemburg used as evidence a formulation which did not in fact belong to Lenin, but which was actually a creation of the Mensheviks, namely that he had argued for the right of the central committee to “organise all of the party’s sub-committees”. This formulation did not exist in Lenin’s draft statutes. It was a formulation introduced into the statutes by the statutes commission of the congress, in which the Mensheviks held a majority. In a similar fashion, the rest of Luxemburg’s ‘evidence’ of Lenin’s ‘ultra-centralism’ turned out to be equally false.
But Lenin’s main line of argument against Luxemburg’s article was that she had falsely believed he was defending one organisational principle against another. This, Lenin explained, was simply untrue; he was simply trying to ensure that the decisions made by the congress of 1903 were actually upheld.
Comrade Luxemburg says, for example, that my book [One Step Forward, Two Steps Back] is a clear and detailed expression of the point of view of “intransigent centralism”. Comrade Luxemburg thus supposes that I defend one system of organisation against another. But actually that is not so. From the first to the last page of my book, I defend the elementary principles of any conceivable system of party organisation. My book is not concerned with the difference between one system of organisation and another, but with how any system is to be maintained, criticised, and rectified in a manner consistent with the party idea.[25]
And furthermore:
Comrade Rosa Luxemburg says that there are no two opinions among the Russian Social-Democrats as to the need for a united party, and that the whole controversy is over the degree of centralisation. Actually that is not so. If Comrade Luxemburg had taken the trouble to acquaint herself with the resolutions of the many local Party committees that constitute the majority, she would readily have seen (which incidentally is also clear from my book) that our controversy has principally been over whether the Central Committee and Central Organ should represent the trend of the majority of the Party Congress, or whether they should not. About this “ultra-centralist” and “purely Blanquist” demand the worthy comrade says not a word, she prefers to declaim against mechanical subordination of the part to the whole, against slavish submission, blind obedience, and other such bogeys. I am very grateful to Comrade Luxemburg for explaining the profound idea that slavish submission is very harmful to the Party, but I should like to know: does the comrade consider it normal for supposed party central institutions to be dominated by the minority of the Party Congress? – can she imagine such a thing? – has she ever seen it in any party?[26]
Politically, What is to Be Done? was an attack on the opportunism of the Economists. At its core, What is to Be Done? and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back did not express eternal organisational principles applicable to the party for once and for all time. Rather, these books addressed the concrete task of the moment: how can a centralised, nationwide party organisation, operating under illegality and the constant threat of the tsarist secret police, be established?
Lenin’s view of the organisation was based on democratic centralism: that there must be free debate inside the party, but that once the majority has made a decision, every member must pull together to enact that decision. Once enacted, however, each of the party’s actions could be once more submitted for democratic evaluation. Beyond this general position, Lenin believed that a revolutionary organisation had to be extremely adaptable to the given conditions it faced.
It was precisely the conditions faced by the Marxists in Russia in 1903 that gave the Iskraists reason for insisting on the necessity of conspiratorial methods, and on certain restrictions on internal democracy compared to what was possible for parties operating in those countries enjoying greater democratic freedoms and less persecution. Lenin’s flexible views on organisational questions were later demonstrated in practice. In the midst of the revolutionary movement of 1905, just two years after arguing for the application of stringent criteria for party membership, Lenin now argued for opening the doors of the party to the revolutionary masses. But this was at a time when membership to such an organisation carried extreme danger with it, ensuring that careerists and opportunists would keep a safe distance from the party. In 1912, when the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks had definitively divided into two separate parties and the Bolshevik Party was a mass force, Lenin once more argued that the party must open the doors wide to all workers who considered themselves as Bolsheviks. Such a formulation went much further even than Martov’s formulation of 1903. This by no means meant that Lenin had come round to the view that Martov had in fact been correct in 1903. In 1903, the organisational task of the day was to lay the foundations of the party. This meant that it was paramount to centralise and professionalise the work of the party, especially with regard to conspiratorial methods, and to begin by building cadres, i.e., Marxists educated in the ideas and methods of Marxism.
Lenin later became concerned that What is to Be Done? could be misinterpreted and misused. In 1921, he wrote the following lines in response to a proposal to translate What is to Be Done? for the guidance of the Communist Parties springing up outside Russia:
That is not desirable; the translation must at least be issued with good commentaries, which would have to be written by a Russian comrade very well acquainted with the history of the Communist Party of Russia, in order to avoid false application.[27]
In the preface to a collection of texts about the history of the party from the period 1895-1905, he described What is to Be Done? as a “controversial correction of the Economistic distortions”, which it would be “incorrect to view […] in any other way”. In this preface, he gives the real context to the book and the entire internal party struggle of 1903:
The basic mistake made by those who now criticise What Is To Be Done? is to treat the pamphlet apart from its connection with the concrete historical situation of a definite, and now long past, period in the development of our Party.
[…] Unfortunately, many of those who judge our Party are outsiders, who do not know the subject, who do not realise that today the idea of an organisation of professional revolutionaries has already scored a complete victory. That victory would have been impossible if this idea had not been pushed to the forefront at the time, if we had not ‘exaggerated’ so as to drive it home to people who were trying to prevent it from being realised.[28]
The Stalinists, on the other hand, would later distort the organisational ideas developed in What is to Be Done? and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, elevating them to the level of principles that are true regardless of time and place. The ideas developed by Lenin were part of a polemic in a relatively small organisation, aimed at combating tendencies towards the dissolution of the party into a simple trade union organisation. All the while, this small party had to operate under illegal conditions, and for this reason it was forced to put a limit on internal information, to appoint leaders from above, etc. To apply these methods to a large mass organisation in a completely different context would be fatal to the internal life of that organisation. By such means, the Stalinists have distorted Lenin’s ideas on the question of organisation beyond all recognition in order to justify their own undemocratic organisations.
It was for such purposes that the Stalinists would later attempt to make use of this debate between Luxemburg and Lenin. However, whilst her criticisms and formulations miss the target in the case of Lenin and the Bolsheviks circa 1903, they sound remarkably exact as a description of the bureaucratic centralism after Stalin’s seizure of power in the late 1920s. For example, Luxemburg says that:
[…] errors made by a truly revolutionary labour movement are historically infinitely more fruitful and more valuable than even the infallibility of the best of all possible ‘central committees’.[29]
Blind obedience, the “infallible central committee” which cannot be refuted, and members reduced to the position of obedient automata carrying out the commands of the leadership was characteristic of the atmosphere inside the stalinised communist parties.
But we have yet to address an important question: why did Luxemburg take such a sharp approach in her polemic against Lenin? In reality, her criticism was not so much aimed at the Bolsheviks, but rather at the bureaucratic tendencies inside the SPD.
The German SPD
Luxemburg’s sharp critique of Lenin can only be understood by looking at the context in which it was written. By the time Luxemburg wrote it, she had been an active member of the German SPD for some years. In the SPD, as discussed, a process of bureaucratisation had set in among its full-time apparatus. A job in the party was far from a question of putting one’s life on the line. In fact, it offered rather good career opportunities and prestige. The party apparatus increasingly represented a conservative bloc which acted as a brake on the initiative and movement of the masses. Luxemburg observed this process at close quarters and identified it much earlier than, say, Lenin, who was far away and not in a position to intimately observe the internal life and debate of the party. On the contrary, Lenin regarded the SPD as a model all the way up until 1914.
In the introduction to her article about the split in Russia, Luxemburg explained that her piece was in fact intended for a German audience, and that on several occasions she dealt with the problems of the German party rather than of the Russian. She described the conservative role played by the social-democratic leadership, which focused on parliamentary tactics to the exclusion of all else. Thus, Luxemburg was actually polemicising to a far greater degree against the bureaucratic centralism which existed in the German SPD than against the ideas of Lenin:
But what do we see in the previous developments of the Russian movement? Its most important and most fruitful tactical developments during the last decade have not been “invented” by several leaders of the movement, and even less by any directional organisations. In each case, they were the spontaneous product of the movement in action. This was the case in the first stage of the veritable proletarian movement in Russia, which began with the rudimentary outbreak of the giant strike in Petersburg in 1896, an event which inaugurated the economic mass action of the Russian proletariat. The same is true of the second phase, that of political street demonstrations, which began in a wholly spontaneous manner with the student agitation in Petersburg in March 1901. The next significant tactical turn was the mass strike in Rostov-on-Don, which opened new horizons. “By itself”, with its street agitation, great outdoor meetings, and public speeches – all improvised ad hoc – this strike was such that the boldest Social Democratic daredevil would not have dared to imagine it only a few years before.
In all these cases, in the beginning was “the act”. The initiative and conscious direction of the Social Democratic organisations played an extremely limited role. This was not, however, the fault of the insufficient preparation of these specific organisations for their roles (though this may, to a certain degree, have entered into the picture), and it was certainly not that of the absence of an all-powerful central committee, as Lenin’s plan presents it. On the contrary, such a central committee would more than likely have only had the effect of increasing the indecisiveness of the individual committees of the party, and have brought forth a division between the turbulent masses and the temporising Social Democracy.
The same phenomenon – the limited role of the conscious initiative of the party direction in the formation of tactics – can be seen in Germany and in all other countries. In general, the tactical policy of Social Democracy, in its main lines, is not “invented”; it is the product of a progressive series of great creative acts in the often rudimentary experiments of the class struggle. Here too, the unconscious comes before the conscious, the logic of the objective historical process before the subjective logic of its bearers. The role of the Social Democratic leadership is, therefore, of an essentially conservative character. On the basis of these new experiences, it attempts to develop the newly won terrain of struggle to its most extreme consequences. But this attempt reverses itself and becomes a bulwark against further great innovations on a wider scale. The present tactics of German Social Democracy, for example, are universally admired for their remarkable multiformity, suppleness, and reliability. But this only signifies that in its daily struggle our party has adapted itself wonderfully, in the smallest detail, to the parliamentary system, that it knows how to exploit the entire field of struggle offered by parliamentarism, and to do this in accord with its principles. At the same time, however, this specific tactical form so thoroughly covers the further horizons that, to a great degree, the inclination to eternalise, to consider the parliamentary tactic as purely and simply the tactic of Social Democracy makes itself felt.[30]
It is in the light cast by the context in Germany that one must consider her warning against Lenin’s proposal for centralisation, which in the SPD would only serve to strengthen the conservative party bureaucracy:
However, to grant to the party leadership such absolute powers of a negative character as Lenin does is to artificially strengthen to a dangerous extent the conservatism inherent in the essence of that institution. 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 organisations have the elbow-room which alone makes possible the utilisation of the means presented by the given situation to strengthen the struggle, as well as to develop the revolutionary initiative. The ultra-centralism 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.[31]
What Luxemburg warned would happen in the Bolshevik Party was exactly what happened in the German SPD: the conservatism of the leading layer gained the upper hand over the movement of the masses. That was demonstrated in the wake of the movement in 1905 and to an even greater degree during the German Revolution of 1918-1919, which we will return to later. The masses were not able to simply ‘correct’ the opportunist tendency in the SPD. Rather, it was the leaders of the SPD who managed to divert the mass movement and betray the revolution.
Nettl, who was certainly no fan of Lenin, wrote of the debate between Lenin and Luxemburg that there was no fundamental disagreement between the two, but that one had to bear in mind that Lenin and Luxemburg came from different starting points:
But the debate should not be seen – though it usually is – as a collision between two fundamentally irreconcilable concepts of organisation, or even revolution. First, Rosa Luxemburg’s knowledge of Russian conditions was in fact more limited than might appear; her competence was substantial only by comparison with other people in Germany. […] She was arguing from the German experience to the Russian. […] Moreover, as we have noted, her own attitudes in the Polish party hardly bore out such demands for more ‘democracy’; instead of controlling local organisations, she simply ignored them altogether.[32]
Luxemburg had emphasised the spontaneous movement of the masses as a counterweight to the conservative bureaucracy of the SPD. This bureaucracy enjoyed an enormous and almost all-encompassing apparatus, which conducted legal work within parliament and had politically drifted far from revolutionary politics. Reacting against this bureaucracy in disgust, Luxemburg ended up going to the opposite extreme.
Lenin emphasised the necessity of building a centralised – and above all a fiercely revolutionary – organisation where no such organisation as yet existed. Where it ought to be, there existed only an array of small groups, which were regularly broken up by the secret police on account of their amateurism. The difference between Luxemburg and Lenin was fundamentally a difference of approach. Lenin considered the question of organisation concretely: how was the organisation to be built; what were its tasks here and now, in Russia in 1903?
On the contrary, Rosa Luxemburg dealt with the question of organisation in an abstract manner: she agreed that an organisation was necessary, yet she did not deal concretely with how such a thing ought to be built. In Poland, it was Jogiches and other comrades who undertook the organisational side of the work, taking care of the myriad of daily tasks connected to building an organisation. In Germany, meanwhile, a strong organisation already existed.
The wisdom of hindsight is a marvellous thing. History has shown that Lenin managed to build the Bolshevik Party, which was the determining factor in leading the victorious Russian Revolution of 1917. Fatally, Luxemburg did not manage to build an organisation capable of leading the German workers to victory.
But what is easy to see in hindsight was not so clear in the midst of events. In 1903 and subsequent years, Lenin stood out as more or less the only political leader in the international labour movement who understood the necessity of building a revolutionary cadre organisation. That is to say, he alone understood the necessity of building an organisational core on the solid foundations of Marxist theory, composed of cadres firmly educated in Marxist theory and schooled in the class struggle. Once the masses began to move, such a core could constitute the spine of a future mass party.
Lenin himself saw the German SPD as his model. For him, the Bolshevik Party was merely the German party adapted to Russian conditions. Very few people supported him. Indeed, Trotsky, who ended up standing side by side with Lenin at the forefront of the Russian Revolution in 1917, held the same position as Luxemburg back in 1903. Trotsky later described how he had simply been ‘lucky’ in Russia, as Lenin had already built the Bolshevik Party. Luxemburg in Germany was not blessed with such luck.
Despite the fact that, fundamentally, Luxemburg was incorrect in her critique of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, in the course of the 1905 Revolution in Russia it became apparent that some of the dangers she pointed to are undeniably implicit in a centralised and professional party apparatus. We will deal with this question in the coming chapter.
In short, it is quite true that there were disagreements between Luxemburg and Lenin on the question of organisation. However, their disagreement was not a question of whether one favours a revolutionary organisation, or the necessity or otherwise of such an organisation being centralised, much less a question of whether one was for or against revolution in general. On these questions they were in wholehearted agreement. For both Luxemburg and Lenin, the essential question was: how do we most efficiently achieve the socialist revolution? The meaning of Luxemburg’s critique certainly was not, as anti-Leninists have distorted it to suggest, that the organisation Lenin was building would lead to dictatorship. Rather, she was concerned that Lenin’s organisation would not be able to fulfil its goal – the goal of leading the revolution. As Paul le Blanc writes:
The essence of Luxemburg’s 1904 critique, however, is the opposite of that put forward by latter-day anti-Leninists. She is not saying that the kind of party Lenin is building will establish a bureaucratic dictatorship once it makes a revolution. She is saying that such a party is in danger of degenerating into a sect that is incapable of leading a revolution.[33]
Shortly after the congress of 1903 and the polemic between Lenin and Luxemburg, the first Russian Revolution of 1905 erupted. Leaders and organisations were put to the test in practice. Rosa Luxemburg threw herself fully into the revolution, joining Lenin on the same side of the barricade. The revolution turned her view of the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks on its head. In her article ‘Blanquism and Social Democracy’, written in June 1906 in response to Plekhanov’s attack against the Bolsheviks, she described how the revolution had pushed the disagreements of 1903-4 into a distant past:
We would dispute comrade Plekhanov’s reproach to the Russian comrades of the current ‘majority’ [the Bolsheviks] that they have committed Blanquist errors during the revolution. It is possible that there were hints of them in the organisational draft that comrade Lenin drew up in 1902 [What is to Be Done?], but that belongs to the past – a distant past, since today life is proceeding at a dizzying speed. These errors have been corrected by life itself and there is no danger they might recur. And we should not be afraid of the ghost of Blanquism, for it cannot be resuscitated at this time.[34]
The congress of 1903 had not led to a unified party in Russia. Rather, it had ended with a split in the Iskra group between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, while the Poles had maintained their own independent party. The congress had revealed certain fundamental disagreements and had brought about a division that, with time, would prove to contain historical significance. Luxemburg sided with the Mensheviks against Lenin during the first debate because she viewed the disagreement in the Russian party through the lens of the situation prevailing in the German SPD. But shortly thereafter, everything was turned on its head. The 1905 Russian Revolution drew out the essence of the schism that lurked behind the polemics of the different wings of the party. This clarification led to a regroupment among social democrats and, thereafter, Luxemburg and Lenin ending up in the same revolutionary camp: in opposition to the Mensheviks.
Endnotes
[1] J. P. Nettl – professor of political science and sociology at University of Pennsylvania. Wrote a very thorough (and academic) biography of Rosa Luxemburg, published in 1962.
[2] Luxemburg did not only disagree with the PPS on this question, but with more or less all leading figures of the Second International. On behalf of the Polish comrades, she put forward a motion for a resolution at the world congress of 1896, which sought to make the International reject any and all demands of Polish independence. Both Plekhanov and Kautsky wrote a response, criticising her position. The Polish resolution was rejected, as was the position of the PPS for an independent Poland. Eventually, a resolution which did not concretely speak of Poland, but recognised the right of nations to self-determination, was adopted. It was a resolution that was directly opposed to Luxemburg’s position, which viewed all struggles for national self-determination as reactionary by definition.
[3] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 76.
[4] The starting point of the articles from 1908 and 1909 was a critique of paragraph nine in the programme of the Bolsheviks, about the right of nations to self-determination. Very uncharacteristic of Luxemburg – who often criticised the leaders of the SPD when they did not follow congress resolutions – she brushed aside the Bolsheviks, stating that they simply repeated the decision made by the congress, but that it was not intended such as they wrote it.
[5] V. I. Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, LCW, Vol. 20, p. 395.
[6] R. Luxemburg, The National Question, ‘Chapter 1. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Marxist Internet Archive [website].
[7] The above summary is based on Mary-Alice Waters’ excellent introduction to Rosa Luxemburg Speaks.
[8] V. I. Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, LCW, Vol. 20, p. 430.
[9] The Black-Hundred was a fascist group in Russia which, amongst other things, carried out pogroms against Jewish people and the left, and was unofficially supported by the Russian Tsar.
[10] Ibid., pp. 414-5.
[11] Ibid., p. 412.
[12] Ibid., pp. 411-2.
[13] V. I. Lenin, What is to Be Done?, p. 33.
[14] V. I. Lenin, ‘Speech on the Party Programme’, Second Congress of the RSDLP, 17 (30) July – 10 (23) August 1903, LCW, Vol. 6, p. 491.
[15] V. I. Lenin, ‘Account of the Second Congress of the RSDLP’, LCW, Vol. 7, p. 27.
[16] Ibid., p. 27.
[17] V. I. Lenin, ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back – Reply by Lenin to Rosa Luxemburg’, LCW, Vol. 7, p. 482.
[18] V. I. Lenin, ‘Second Speech in the Discussion on the Party Rules’, Second Congress of the RSDLP, 17 (30) July – 10 (23) August 1903, LCW, Vol. 6, p. 501.
[19] R. Luxemburg, ‘Organisational Questions of Russian Social Democracy’, Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, pp. 285-6.
[20] Blanquism refers to the ideas put forward by Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) who argued that the socialist revolution had to be carried via a coup by a small conspiratorial group rather than through the political mass movement of the workers.
[21] Ibid., p. 286.
[22] Ibid., p. 287.
[23] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 284.
[24] Quoted in A. Woods, Bolshevism: The Road to Revolution, p. 161.
[25] V. I. Lenin, ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back – Reply by Lenin to Rosa Luxemburg’, LCW, Vol. 7, p. 474.
[26] Ibid., pp. 475-6.
[27] Quoted in P. Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, p. 57.
[28] V. I. Lenin, ‘Preface to the Collection Twelve Years’, LCW, Vol. 13, pp. 101-2.
[29] R. Luxemburg, ‘Organisational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy’, Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, p. 306.
[30] Ibid., pp. 292-4.
[31] Ibid., pp. 294-5.
[32] J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, pp. 287-8.
[33] P. Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, p. 78.
[34] R. Luxemburg, ‘Blanquism and Social Democracy’, Marxist Internet Archive [website].