4. Mass Strike and Spontaneity

22 January 1905^[1] has gone down in history as Bloody Sunday – the day that the first shots of the 1905 Russian Revolution were fired. That fateful day set in motion a revolutionary movement that culminated, eleven months later, in a mass armed uprising against the Tsar, led by the revolutionaries. All of the processes, parties and trends that would play a part in the Russian Revolution of 1917 were already present in 1905, if only in embryo. Lenin would later describe the mighty events of 1905 as the “dress rehearsal” for the October Revolution itself. It was a revolutionary movement that tested all programmes, all parties, and all leaders. And it showed that, for all their disagreements on the question of organisation, on the crucial questions of the revolution, Luxemburg and Lenin were on the same side.

Rosa Luxemburg enthusiastically welcomed the arrival of the revolution. On 8 February she hailed the fact that, while it would not be easy, and while the struggle would be long and not without setbacks, nevertheless, the revolution had arrived:

[A]ll lovers of civilisation and freedom, that is, the international working class, can rejoice from the bottom of their hearts. The cause of freedom has now been won in Russia; the cause of international reaction has now, on 22 January, on the streets of Petersburg, had its bloody Jena.^[2] For on this day the Russian proletariat burst on the political stage as a class for the first time; for the first time the only power which historically is qualified and able to cast Tsarism into the dustbin and to raise the banner of civilisation in Russia and everywhere has appeared on the scene of action.^[3]

Luxemburg analysed the situation as it progressed, both as a participant through the Polish party, SDKPiL, and in order to digest and transfer the Russian experience to Germany for the benefit of members of the SPD.

While the leaders of the SPD had narrow, national horizons, Rosa Luxemburg was an internationalist not only in words but also in deeds. To her, the Russian Revolution was of fundamental importance to the world political situation:

The connection of political and social life among all capitalist states is today so intense that the effects of the Russian revolution will be enormous throughout the whole so-called civilised world – much greater than the effect of any bourgeois revolution in history.^[4]

Simultaneously with the 1905 Revolution in Russia, a large strike wave swept across Germany. The German workers watched the developing revolution in Russia with sympathy. The leadership of the SPD thus found itself pushed significantly to the left in the debate that unfolded over the so-called ‘mass strike’. But it was also in the wake of these events that the beginnings of a split started to emerge between Rosa Luxemburg and the revolutionaries of the German party on the one hand, and the reformist leadership of the SPD on the other. For Luxemburg, the first Russian Revolution formed an important element in her understanding of a revolutionary mass movement. It only served to strengthen her belief in the necessity of the revolutionary overthrow of the old social system.

The 1905 Revolution

In her piece ‘The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions’, Rosa Luxemburg described the revolution and the process that led to it in detail. The 1905 Russian Revolution did not materialise out of thin air. Rather, it developed following a period of years in which strikes had broken out among various layers of workers. In the same period, flames of discontent among broad layers of the population were fanned by Russia’s war with Japan.

Luxemburg described how strikes broke out over seemingly minor questions but that, dialectically, these became “the straw that broke the camel’s back”.

The strike movement intensified, culminating in a procession of workers, women and children to present a petition to the Russian tsar on 22 January 1905. In front of the Winter Palace they read aloud their appeal. They pleaded with the Tsar to alleviate their need and misery:

Sire, our strength is at an end! The limit of our patience has been reached: the terrible moment has come for us when it is better to die than to continue suffering intolerable torment.^[5]

But the Tsar ordered the army to fire live rounds upon the peaceful protesters. All over the city, the marchers came under fire from the soldiers. The number of casualties was at the very least in the hundreds, and possibly in the thousands, whilst tens of thousands were wounded. Tsar Nicholas II was henceforth known to his subjects as ‘Nicholas the Bloody’. In a mere twenty-four hours, the situation had utterly changed: the workers who hours before had appealed to the Tsar for aid, now appealed to the revolutionaries for weapons.

The following day, barricades were thrown up in the streets of St. Petersburg and 160,000 workers came out on strike. The 1905 Revolution had begun, initiating months of strikes, demonstrations and rebellions, in which one layer after another would be drawn into the struggle. The movement initially raised economic demands, but increasingly political demands were also being called: for the downfall of the Tsarist regime and a constitutional assembly.

Luxemburg described the shift as follows:

The sudden general rising of the proletariat in January under the powerful impetus of the St. Petersburg events was outwardly a political act of the revolutionary declaration of war on absolutism. But this first general direct action reacted inwardly all the more powerfully as it for the first time awoke class feeling and class-consciousness in millions upon millions as if by an electric shock. And this awakening of class feeling expressed itself forthwith in the circumstances that the proletarian mass, counted by millions, quite suddenly and sharply came to realise how intolerable was that social and economic existence which they had patiently endured for decades in the chains of capitalism. Thereupon, there began a spontaneous general shaking of and tugging at these chains.^[6]

This spontaneous mass movement of solidarity with the workers in the capital quickly spread across the breadth of the country. The revolutionary movement quickly reached the Russian part of Poland, which formed at that time one of the most industrialised parts of the Russian Empire. Between 14-20 January, the Polish capital, Warsaw, was paralysed by a revolutionary general strike. On 16 January, various socialist groups called a demonstration in which 100,000 people participated. The city was besieged by Russian troops, who fired on the protesters. According to official reports, sixty-four people were killed and sixty-nine wounded. The city was placed under martial law. In the following months, Poland would also be shaken by strikes and demonstrations.

The Social Democratic Parties and the Revolution

The movement was by no means initiated by any of the parties. It had arisen spontaneously, and had caught the social democrats unprepared. Before Bloody Sunday, the workers were sceptical of and even hostile towards the revolutionaries, who they treated for the most part as outsiders and troublemakers. But in twenty-four hours, the attitude of the workers changed from one of hostility to enthusiasm.

The SDKPiL immediately welcomed the revolution and threw itself into the struggle, with a programme drafted by Luxemburg. When the revolution broke out in 1905, the SDKPiL would have numbered a couple of hundred members at most. But the influence of the party grew rapidly in the course of the revolution. By February 1906, its membership had increased to about 30,000, despite the fact that the party was once again illegal. Meanwhile, the number of workers organised in trade unions expanded explosively.

The revolution also led to a split in the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), between the nationalist wing led by Piłsudski (the future dictator of Poland), who believed that victory could only be secured by the armed actions of a small core of dedicated activists, and a wing that supported the revolutionary movement of the masses. At the congress of the PPS in March 1905, Piłsudski’s wing lost control of the central committee, although he maintained control of the party’s armed wing.

The Russian social democracy meanwhile was in poor shape, weakened by splits and arrests when the revolution broke out. The underground conditions of its work make it impossible to accurately guess their strength. Alan Woods, author of the book Bolshevism: The Road to Revolution, estimates that at the end of 1905, there were perhaps 8,400 “organised Bolsheviks”, while the Mensheviks probably had about the same number of people. Their influence, however, was far greater than their numerical strength would suggest. Members of the party were recognised as local leaders in their factories and communities and, as such, the reality was that hundreds of thousands of workers were actually ‘organised’ under the leadership of the social democrats.

During the revolution, it became clear that when Rosa Luxemburg emphasised the conservatism of the party apparatus, her words certainly contained a grain of truth. This conservatism expressed itself in sections of the Bolshevik Party, specifically among what were called the ‘committeemen’. These individuals were unable to adapt themselves to the changed situation. While Lenin now argued for the doors of the party to be opened wide to the revolutionary workers, drawing the latter in as quickly as possible to leading positions in the party, the committeemen continued to cling to the old methods, structures, and perspectives with which they had become familiar and comfortable.

Conservatism of the party apparatus was not an exclusive feature of Bolshevism. In all parties, a certain routine is built up, and indeed is absolutely necessary if an organisation is to work in any way effectively. But routine becomes a problem for the party when its leading layer clings to routine and finds itself unable to adapt once the situation is transformed. The Bolshevik committeemen took Lenin’s words from 1903 as eternally given principles. They had become used to working in small, underground circles and thus had a hard time connecting with the broad masses. Yet that was precisely the task that was now being posed: in order to carry through a revolution, it is not enough to simply reach the most advanced layer of workers. The revolutionary party must connect with the masses that have entered the political stage. In 1905, the key to connecting with the masses was the St. Petersburg soviet.

In the 1905 Revolution, workers’ councils, known as ‘soviets’,^[7] appeared for the first time. Emerging from the strike committees that had led the movement, the soviets were made up of representatives elected by the workers themselves. In 1917, they would form the basis of the new workers’ state, but they were no invention of Marx, Engels, Lenin, or anyone else. They were organs which, in 1905, were created on the initiative of the workers themselves to solve the problem of organising the struggle. In St. Petersburg, the home of the leading soviet to which everyone looked, delegates were elected from the factories on the basis of one deputy for every 500 workers. Representatives from the larger unions and workers’ parties were also eventually invited. From here, the soviets spread to fifty cities in the course of the autumn of 1905.

While Lenin welcomed the soviets as the embryonic form of workers’ power, members of the Bolshevik central committee in St. Petersburg were sceptical towards them. Rather than regarding the soviet as an organ uniting the masses – and therefore as an arena in which the Bolsheviks could fight to win influence over the broader mass of workers – they saw them as being in competition with the party. The Bolshevik leadership in St. Petersburg even went as far as moving a resolution demanding the soviet subordinate itself to the party. When the resolution was rejected, the Bolshevik delegates simply departed. Such behaviour on the part of these ‘committeemen’ was the height of sectarianism. The soviets united around themselves all those layers which had just awoken to political life through the struggle. They presented a golden opportunity for the social democrats to connect Marxist ideas with the politically uneducated masses. Lenin was furious with the behaviour of the ‘committeemen’, although he eventually managed to change the party’s course. However, important time had been lost.

The Culmination of the Revolution

In October 1905, the revolution reached a new stage. The Tsar’s government decided to convoke an advisory Duma,^[8] the so-called Bulygin Duma. All of the socialist parties in Russia and Poland described it as a farce and boycotted it. At the beginning of October, the print workers of Moscow went out on strike. This soon spread, transforming into a wave of general strikes that swept over the whole Russian Empire. The Tsar, in an attempt to ward off the revolution, issued his ‘October Manifesto’, which promised a new constitution and a new, more effective Duma. At the same time, he granted amnesty to political prisoners and activists in exile. The formerly illegal revolutionary struggle could now be conducted out in the open, and the revolutionary leaders – who had to remain in exile during the first months of the revolution – could now return to Russia.

Trotsky, who arrived in Kiev in February, was the only exile to return at the beginning of the revolution, and it was he who played the most prominent role as leader of the St. Petersburg soviet. Martov arrived in Russia on 17 October, and Lenin on 4 November. Rosa Luxemburg, who was deeply involved in the debate on the question of the mass strike and the importance of the Russian Revolution then raging inside the SPD, initially remained in Germany. However, she soon felt that it would be impossible to write adequate articles and analysis without directly participating in the revolution and following the Polish and Russian newspapers. As a revolutionary, she felt the powerful draw of revolution, and so she too set off for Poland, albeit arriving considerably later.

The German leaders attempted to dissuade her from going. Bebel and Mehring^[9] warned that this would be putting herself at personal risk. However, by pointing out that the danger to her life was, if anything, greater because she was a woman, they only served to stiffen her resolve to leave. Kautsky’s arguments had a similar effect. He tried to convince her that the place of an intellectual was behind a desk, and that her role must be to remain in Germany, continuing their successful work radicalising the SPD. She shrugged all these objections off and, on 28 December 1905, Luxemburg left Berlin under the alias, Anna Matschke. On account of a rail workers’ strike, she was forced to smuggle herself aboard a troop transport. The only civilian and woman on the train, she reached Warsaw on 30 December 1905. Although it was not yet clear to its participants, the revolution had in fact already reached its climax by this point, and the movement was in decline by the time Luxemburg reached Poland.

The forces of reaction were preparing a crackdown. The October Manifesto of the Tsar had been nothing but a manoeuvre to buy time in order to prepare to crush the revolution. In the first month after the manifesto’s publication, 4,000 people were murdered in pogroms^[10] that targeted Jews, socialists, and intellectuals. On 2 December, the deputies of the St. Petersburg soviet were arrested, including its chairman, Leon Trotsky. The workers of St. Petersburg were exhausted, and the epicentre of the revolution moved to Moscow, where the workers mounted a general strike that developed into an armed uprising. As the uprising developed, it spread to other cities. But the Bolshevik Party was too weak to exert a decisive influence. The soviet vacillated. Finally, the uprising in Moscow was isolated and crushed. On 18 December, the leadership of the Moscow soviet was forced to call off the struggle and the uprising was over. Bloody repression and mass arrests followed. Outbreaks of armed uprisings happened in other places, but they were disconnected from one another and were all crushed.

Although it was difficult to accurately assess whether the revolution had suffered a final defeat or a mere temporary setback, Luxemburg had a feel for the direction events were heading in. She was of the opinion that the method of the general strike had played out its role by now, and that the only way forward would be on the basis of an armed uprising. In a letter to Luise and Karl Kautsky written on 20 December 1905 (Julian calendar), she wrote:

To characterise the situation in two words (but only for yourselves): the general strike has just about failed – most of all in St. Petersburg, where the railway men made no real effort to carry it through […] Everywhere people are hesitant and in a state of expectancy. The reason for all this is the simple circumstance that a mere general strike alone has ceased to play the role it once had. Now nothing but a direct, general fight on the streets can bring about the decision, but for this the right moment must be prepared more carefully. This expectant condition of affairs may therefore continue for a while, unless indeed some ‘accident’ – a new manifesto, etc. – brings about a spontaneous and sudden uprising.^[11]

Beginning in March 1906, the Tsar launched a counter-revolutionary offensive. A wave of arrests, sometimes followed by summary execution, swept the country and the secret police stepped up their infiltration of the revolutionary organisations. Many of the SDKPiL’s leaders were arrested, the rest returning to Krakow (at that time occupied by the Austro–Hungarian Empire), barring a few specialists in conspiratorial methods.

Luxemburg planned to return to Berlin in mid-March. However, on 4 March, Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches were swept up by the police. Initially, both managed to keep up their aliases: Anna Matsche and Otto Engelmann. But after the police searched the home of Rosa’s sister and found photographs, hiding her identity became untenable. Jogiches managed to keep up his alias until mid-June. Luxemburg was crammed into a cell designed for one person along with thirteen others – luckily, all of them political prisoners. On 11 April, she was moved to the infamous Tenth Pavilion in the Warsaw Citadel. Here, her family was allowed to visit her and witnessed the abhorrent conditions of the prison with their own eyes. Much later, Rosa Luxemburg described the first visit from her brothers and sisters in the Warsaw Citadel in a letter to Sophie Liebknecht:

There, one is brought out into an actual double cage of wire netting: that is to say, a little cage stands within a larger one, and you must converse through the moiré-like glimmer of the double mesh. On top of it all, since the meeting took place right after a six-day hunger strike, I was so weak that the captain of the fortress nearly had to carry me into the visiting room, and in the cage I had to hold onto the wire with both hands, which probably reinforced the impression of a wild animal in a zoo.

The cage stood in a fairly dark corner of the room, and my brother pressed his face very close to the wire: “Where are you?” he asked over and over, wiping from his [glasses] the tears which kept him from seeing me.^[12]

Luxemburg was convicted of serious crimes against the state. Her family did their best to free her, first by proposing an appeal to the Russian Prime Minister, which Luxemburg decidedly rejected. She likewise fiercely rejected appealing to the German consul, but her family nonetheless contacted the German authorities. Her brother travelled to Berlin to raise money for her bail. He succeeded in raising the required sum, most likely from the executive committee of the SPD, a fact of which Rosa was unlikely to have been aware at the time. Had she known, she would most likely have rejected the money so as to be free from any feeling that she owed the executive committee anything. On 8 July 1906, she was released on bail on the grounds of medical concerns. She was free, but she was not permitted to leave Warsaw.

Jogiches was accused of “plotting to overthrow by armed violence the monarchical form of government as laid down in the constitution” and, ironically, of “trying to obtain the independence of Poland”.^[13] Jogiches was put on trial in January 1907, and sentenced to eight years of hard labour for high treason and military desertion. Nevertheless, he succeeded in fleeing shortly after the completion of his trial.

The revolution of 1905 had been defeated. However, it had not all been in vain. As mentioned, Lenin aptly described the 1905 Revolution as the dress rehearsal for the October Revolution of 1917. In that year, all leaders and parties were tested, and the dividing lines of the Russian and international labour movement were clearly drawn.

Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks

Rosa Luxemburg was finally permitted to leave Warsaw and go to Finland on 8 August 1906. In the second week of August 1906 she arrived in Kuokkala, where all the main leaders of the Bolshevik party were based. Here they could maintain close contact with the Russian capital from a position of relative safety. Whilst here, Luxemburg was able to devote a great deal of time to discussing the political and theoretical lessons of the revolution:

[…] Rosa Luxemburg spent much of her time with Lenin and his immediate Bolshevik circle. She had met him personally only once before, during 1901 in Munich, through the good offices of Parvus who, in the early halcyon days of Iskra, had been the only contact with the German Social Democrats which Russian conspiratorial caution had permitted. Now at last, after polemics and dislike at a distance, they got to know each other well. Evening after evening she sat in Lenin’s ground-floor flat in the house of the Leiteisen family in Kuokkala and talked over the Russian revolution at length with Lenin, Zinoviev,^[14] Kamenev and Bogdanov. She made a considerable impression on them; “the first Marxist who was able to evaluate the Russian revolution correctly and as a whole”. A personal sympathy between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg – based, like all of Lenin’s friendships, on mutual intellectual respect – was born in this time and was to survive for six years until party differences drowned it once more in the froth of polemics. Even then a spark of personal sympathy always survived the renewed hostilities […]^[15]

The revolution had brought Luxemburg closer to the Bolsheviks while her view of the Mensheviks had grown more and more critical. According to Luxemburg, it was the Bolsheviks who had behaved as revolutionaries ought to behave, and she fundamentally agreed with their analysis of the situation. Finally, she agreed with the assessment of the Bolsheviks regarding the goal of revolution:

If today the Bolshevik comrades speak of the dictatorship of the proletariat, they have never given it the old Blanquist meaning; neither have they ever made the mistake of Narodnaya Volya,^[16] which dreamt of “taking power for itself” (zachvat vlasti). On the contrary, they have affirmed that the present revolution will succeed when the proletariat – all the revolutionary class – takes possession of the state machine. The proletariat, as the most revolutionary element, will perhaps assume the role of liquidator of the old regime by “taking power for itself” in order to defeat counter-revolution and prevent the revolution being led astray by a bourgeoisie that is reactionary in its very nature. No revolution can succeed other than by the dictatorship of one class, and all the signs are that the proletariat can become this liquidator at the present time.^[17]

The quote above was a defence of the Bolsheviks’ goal of the dictatorship of the proletariat^[18] against an attack from Plekhanov who had accused the Bolsheviks in the 1905 Revolution of Blanquism. Here it is important to bear in mind that the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was taken from Marx, long pre-dating the era of Hitler and Stalin, and the connotations that are associated with the word ‘dictatorship’ today. On the contrary, the term was inspired by a practice from the oldest Roman Republic, in which the Republic would appoint a leader and give him absolute authority during extraordinary situations such as wars. This would last until he had completed his task but for no longer than six months. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a term referring to a transitional society, in which the working class has seized power and established itself as a ruling class. Using its control of the state, the proletariat would thus prevent the former ruling class from reconquering its lost power and privileges. We can contrast this idea with the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie today, in which the bourgeoisie as a class is completely dominant, irrespective of whether the government takes the form of a parliamentary democracy or a military dictatorship.

Luxemburg declared herself to be in agreement with the Bolsheviks, and explained that the establishment of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ had nothing in common with a coup conducted by a minority. The shared understanding of Luxemburg and Lenin was founded on the classic Marxist conception of the state, as described by Friedrich Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Engels explained that, in the final analysis, the state can be reduced to “special bodies of armed men”,^[19] whose task it is to defend the property relations and dominant position of the ruling class. In all previous societies, the ruling class has constituted a small minority of the population: slave owners, feudal lords, capitalists. Their respective states ensured the class domination of a minority section of society. A workers’ state would, on the contrary, for the first time in history, constitute a state in the interest of the majority. It would thus possess a quite distinct character to all forms of state that had preceded it. With the collectivisation of the means of production, a path would be cleared to a more extensive democracy, precisely because it would also encompass the economic sphere, which, under capitalism, is governed exclusively by the profit motive. With the abolition of class contradictions generally, the foundations of the state itself would disappear and as such it would start to wither away.^[20]

Rosa Luxemburg’s imprisonment prevented her from participating in either the SDKPiL’s congress in June 1906, or in the unity congress of the Russian party in 1906, in which the Mensheviks – having been pushed to the left by the revolution – reunited once more with the Bolsheviks. At the 1906 congress, the SDKPiL too had joined the united party, and had supported the Bolsheviks on all of the most important political questions. Not until the party congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party of 1907 in London could Luxemburg finally participate. In this congress, all the important leaders of the Russian movement participated: Plekhanov, Martov, Lenin and Trotsky among others were all in attendance, discussing the lessons of the 1905 Revolution.

Rosa Luxemburg made a long speech on behalf of the Polish organisation in which she presented the views of the Polish comrades. The vast majority of Luxemburg’s speech was a razor-sharp critique of the Mensheviks, which can leave no doubt as to the fact that Rosa Luxemburg and the Polish comrades were on the side of the Bolsheviks. Luxemburg criticised the Mensheviks for having put their faith in the bourgeoisie and the liberal parties, and for surrendering the class independence of the proletarian struggle. According to Luxemburg, the Mensheviks had not pursued a revolutionary proletarian policy, but rather had subjugated the interests of the working class to those of the bourgeoisie and its parties. Rather than spurring on the movement, the Mensheviks had attempted to hold back the workers from any revolutionary initiative.

Luxemburg devoted special attention to Plekhanov in her contribution, criticising him in biting terms. In Luxemburg’s opinion, Plekhanov had summed up the attitude of the Mensheviks magnificently when, in the wake of the revolution, he lamented, “they should not have taken up arms!” Rosa Luxemburg agreed with Lenin, who responded:

On the contrary, we should have taken to arms more resolutely, energetically and aggressively: we should have explained to the masses that it was impossible to confine ourselves to a peaceful strike, that a fearless and relentless armed fight was indispensable.^[21]

To the Mensheviks’ critique of the Bolsheviks for being too “narrow minded” and “intolerant”, Luxemburg responded that these features were simply an expression of the fact that the Bolsheviks were forced to defend the fundamental principle of the independent class politics of the proletariat against the opposition of the Mensheviks:

You comrades of the right wing [Luxemburg is here referring to the Mensheviks – MF] complain at length about narrowness, intolerance, and a certain mechanistic disposition in the views of our comrades, the so-called Bolsheviks. [Cries: “Among the Mensheviks”.] On that matter we agree with you completely. [Applause.]

It is possible that Polish comrades, who are accustomed to thinking more or less in ways adopted by the West-European movement, find this particular steadfastness even more startling than you do. But do you know, comrades, where all these disagreeable features come from? These features are very familiar to someone acquainted with internal party relations in other countries: they represent the typical spiritual character of that trend within socialism that has to defend the very principle of the proletariat’s independent class policy against an opposing trend that is also very strong. [Applause.]

Rigidity is the form taken by Social-Democratic tactics on the one side, when the other side represents the formlessness of jelly that creeps in every direction under the pressure of events. [Applause from the Bolsheviks and parts of the Centre.]^[22]

We can see then that Luxemburg was in agreement with the Bolsheviks as far as the goal of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the necessity of an armed uprising was concerned. However, she also expressed a critique of the Bolsheviks, although not of a fundamental character: she criticised them for having placed too much emphasis on the technical rather than the political side of the revolution:

Of course, we think it necessary to clarify for the broad masses of the proletariat that their direct confrontation with the armed forces of reaction, a general popular uprising, is the sole outcome of the revolutionary struggle that can guarantee victory as the inevitable finale of its gradual development, although it is not within the capacity of Social Democracy to prescribe and prepare this outcome by technical means.^[23]

Her critique is pointing towards the discussion of the relationship between the spontaneous movement of the masses and the role of the party, a discussion which we shall return to later in this chapter.

Luxemburg and the Permanent Revolution

In the Russian social-democratic movement, up to and beyond 1905, there was a lively discussion about the character of the Russian revolution. The Mensheviks believed that the revolution would be a bourgeois revolution, and on this account that the bourgeoisie must lead it, while the working class would be reduced to a supporting role, subordinating its own interests to those of the bourgeoisie.

The Bolsheviks were in full agreement with the Mensheviks on the idea that the tasks of the coming revolution were bourgeois and national-democratic. The tasks posed before the revolution were: the removal of the autocracy and the formation of a republic, the establishment of parliamentary democracy, the distribution of land to the peasantry, and the unification of the nation. However, this was where agreement ended. Disagreeing with the Menshevik conception of the role of the bourgeoisie in the movement, the Bolsheviks were of the opinion that the bourgeoisie would play a reactionary role. The working class, therefore, could in no way support the bourgeoisie, and had to firmly maintain complete class independence. Rather than tailing the bourgeoisie, the working class, in alliance with the peasantry, ought to take upon itself the role of eradicating the last vestiges of feudalism. That is, they must carry through a consistent democratic revolution. The Bolsheviks summed up their programme in the slogan: “the democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasantry”.

But there was also a third position developed by the man who had led the St. Petersburg soviet during the revolution: Leon Trotsky. Trotsky agreed with the Bolsheviks that the bourgeoisie was utterly reactionary. However, he criticised their slogan of “the democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasantry”. According to Trotsky, whilst Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ slogan correctly expressed the need for a revolutionary alliance of the proletariat and the poor peasantry, it did not answer the question of which between the two would be the leading force in the revolution, thus determining its character and direction. Once the workers and peasants actually seized power, the contradictions between these two classes would reveal themselves. Indeed, that is precisely what happened after the October Revolution in 1917.

Trotsky did not believe that the future revolution in Russia would limit its scope to that of a bourgeois revolution. This idea, which he had begun formulating even before the 1905 Revolution, was developed by Trotsky to a far greater degree than any other contemporary Marxist, and has come to be known as the theory of ‘permanent revolution’.

To give a brief summary of this idea: according to Trotsky, Marxists had to discard the schematic view, then dominant, that all countries must necessarily pass through the same stages of development: from feudalism, to capitalism, and then socialism. On a global scale, capitalism had developed into world imperialism, at the forefront of which were countries such as England and France. The domination of the world market forced all nations to enter into the web of global capitalist relations, irrespective of their present stage of development. This meant that a country like Russia could hardly follow the same path of development as the older capitalist nations, which had begun their process of development long before the rise of global imperialism. The backward countries were thrown into global capitalist relations at their given stage of development, despite the fact that they were yet to carry out their bourgeois revolutions. In a process that Trotsky termed ‘combined and uneven development’, the imperialist countries exported capital to and established industries in the less developed countries, and thus laid the foundations of modern industrial centres in the midst of backward, agrarian economies such as that of Russia.

In Russia, this meant that much of the bourgeoisie developed out of the old feudal aristocracy. It was often the aristocrat who established themselves as a capitalist, or else the two would be connected through old family ties. The enormous financial power of the imperialist countries meant that the Russian bourgeoisie was completely dependent on international capital, which thus came to own practically the entirety of Russia’s industrial and financial sectors. At the same time, foreign investment in industry spurred the development of a sizeable proletariat. These factors combined to ensure that the bourgeoisie could never play a progressive role in the coming Russian Revolution. They could neither do away with the old aristocracy to whom they were connected – as the Great French Revolution had done – nor could they free the nation from the dominance of imperialism, to which they were likewise connected. At the same time, the working class had grown incomparably stronger than at the time of any of the classic bourgeois revolutions that had gone before. By the twentieth century, the bourgeoisie trembled with fear at the thought of arousing a revolutionary movement that would raise the working masses to their feet. On the contrary, the bourgeoisie would pose as defenders of the status quo, which formed the very foundation of their wealth and privileges. The Russian bourgeoisie was thus unable to lead a bourgeois, national-democratic revolution, the tasks of which would be the implementation of democracy, land reform, and the establishment of a nation state free from the domination of foreign imperialism. Only the proletariat could carry through the tasks of the bourgeois revolution. But once the proletariat was on the move, Trotsky explained that it would not stop at implementing the tasks of the bourgeois revolution against the opposition to the national bourgeoisie itself. The proletariat would not settle for formal equality but would demand social equality, and thus it would begin the tasks of the socialist revolution. In other words, the revolution would become permanent.

But the revolution would also become ‘permanent’ in another sense: it would have to spread internationally. Marx already explained that the global character of capitalism meant that socialism had to be international. But before Trotsky came forward with his theory of permanent revolution, no Marxist had yet foreseen that capitalism might break at its weakest link. Marx, who lived at a time when revolution and counter-revolution swept the heart of Europe, imagined that the socialist revolution would take place first in one of the most advanced capitalist countries. In the opinion of Leon Trotsky, conditions had changed since Marx’s times and the socialist revolution could indeed begin in a backward country, but should it do so it was all the more paramount that it spread to the developed capitalist countries with their advanced level of technology, education, culture etc.

When Stalin began his crusade against Rosa Luxemburg in 1931, one of the accusations he levelled against her was that it was she who was behind the theory of the permanent revolution. As Trotsky pointed out, this was another of Stalin’s lies. Trotsky himself rather than Luxemburg was the one behind this theory. Nonetheless, it is true that her analysis closely resembled that of Trotsky.

In his autobiography, My Life, Trotsky described how, at the 1907 congress, Rosa Luxemburg agreed with him on the theory of permanent revolution:

On the question of the so-called permanent revolution, Rosa took the same stand as I did. In this connection, Lenin and I once had a half-humorous conversation in the lobby. The delegates stood about us in a close ring. “It is all because she does not speak Russian too well”, he said, referring to Rosa. “But then, she speaks excellent Marxism”, I retorted. The delegates laughed, and so did we.^[24]

At the 1907 congress, Luxemburg sharply criticised the Mensheviks’ conclusions that the working class ought to subordinate itself to the bourgeoisie and its parties. She lined up fully with the Bolsheviks and Trotsky in holding the view that the bourgeoisie and the liberal parties would play a counter-revolutionary role, completely agreeing that the proletariat had to play an independent role.

Luxemburg also agreed with Trotsky’s critique of the Bolshevik position on the peasantry, and on the slogan of “the democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants”. In the opinion of Luxemburg and Trotsky, history had shown that the peasants cannot play an independent role and must follow one or other of the urban classes: the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. Luxemburg expressed her view as follows in her concluding remarks to the congress:

But precisely because they are utopian and incapable of fulfilment by their nature, peasant movements are completely unable to play any independent role and are subordinated in every historical context to the leadership of other classes that are more energetic and more clearly defined.^[25]

It was obvious to Luxemburg that the peasantry must be brought under the leadership of the proletariat:

It is clear that political leadership of the chaotic peasant movement in Russia today, and the exercise of influence over it, are the natural historical responsibility of the conscious proletariat.^[26]

To which Trotsky replied at the congress:

I am pleased to say that the point of view presented here by comrade Luxemburg on behalf of the Polish delegation is very close to the one that I have defended and continue to defend. Any possible differences between us are more a matter of individual nuances than of political direction. Our thinking moves on one and the same track of materialistic analysis.^[27]

Both Luxemburg and Trotsky were later criticised by the Stalinists for ‘ignoring the role of the peasantry’, but this is a false accusation. Luxemburg and Trotsky believed, in opposition to the Mensheviks, that the peasants would play an objectively revolutionary role by demanding a solution to the land question, which, in the last analysis, could not be solved without a socialist revolution. Luxemburg summarised the revolutionary potential of the peasantry thus:

And in this still undifferentiated mass of the Russian peasantry, which the current revolution has put in motion, there are important strata that are not just our temporary political allies but also our natural future comrades. To disavow subordinating them even now to our leadership and our influence would be precisely an act of sectarianism that is unforgivable on the part of the revolution’s leading detachment. […]

As for the peasantry, despite all the confusion and contradictoriness of its demands, and despite all the fog and ambiguity of its efforts, in the current revolution it is an objectively revolutionary factor because, by placing on the revolution’s order of the day, in the most acute manner, the question of revolutionary land change, it thereby poses a question that cannot be solved within the limits of bourgeois society and points beyond that society by its very nature.^[28]

We can see then that there was agreement between Luxemburg and Trotsky on the question of the role of the peasantry, and on their attitude towards the Bolsheviks’ slogan. Whether or not Luxemburg agreed with Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution in its totality is somewhat less clear. She did not mention the theory by name, and when it came to describing the character of the revolution, she did so in terms that were not as clear as those of Trotsky. On numerous occasions she stated that the tasks of the revolution were bourgeois-democratic and that all talk of going beyond them was nonsense. In her article, ‘Blanquism and Social Democracy’, she wrote, for instance, that the proletariat would surely seize power, but that once in power, it would constitute a minority and thus power would shift to a constituent assembly elected by the people in its entirety.

But Luxemburg also stated many times that the Russian revolution would not simply be a bourgeois revolution. According to Rosa Luxemburg, the Russian Revolution of 1905 had closed a period of almost sixty years of peaceful parliamentary rule by the bourgeoisie, and had opened a transitional period from capitalist to socialist society. It made no sense to speculate as to how long this transitional period would last. Thus, according to Luxemburg, the revolution in Russia would have a character that would be transitional between that of the bourgeois revolutions of the past and the socialist revolution of the future:

Thus, in its content, the present revolution in Russia goes far beyond previous revolutions, and, in its methods, it cannot simply follow either the old bourgeois revolutions or the previous – parliamentary – struggles of the modern proletariat. It has created a new method of struggle, which accords both with its proletarian character and with the combination of the struggle for democracy and the struggle against capital – namely, the revolutionary mass strike. In terms of content and methods, it is therefore a completely new type of revolution. Being formally bourgeois-democratic, but essentially proletarian-socialist, it is, in both content and method, a transitional form from the bourgeois revolutions of the past to the proletarian revolutions of the future, which will directly involve the dictatorship of the proletariat and the realisation of socialism.^[29]

Luxemburg believed, then, that the revolution in Russia would differ from earlier bourgeois revolutions first of all because the proletariat, led by the Social Democrats, would be at the fore, and because the struggles for formal bourgeois and proletarian-socialist demands would merge:

The Russian proletariat, however, who are destined to play the leading part in the bourgeois revolution, enter the fight free from all illusions of bourgeois democracy, with a strongly developed consciousness of their own specific class interests, and at a time when the antagonism between capital and labour has reached its height. This contradictory situation finds expression in the fact that in this formally bourgeois revolution, the antagonism of bourgeois society to absolutism is governed by the antagonism of the proletariat to bourgeois society, that the struggle of the proletariat to bourgeois society is directed simultaneously and with equal energy against both absolutism and capitalist exploitation, and that the programme of the revolutionary struggle concentrates with equal emphasis on political freedom, the winning of the eight-hour day, and a human standard of material existence for the proletariat. This two-fold character of the Russian Revolution is expressed in that close union of the economic with the political struggle and in their mutual interaction which we have seen is a feature of the Russian events and which finds its appropriate expression in the mass strike.^[30]

Luxemburg agreed with Trotsky, and Lenin for that matter, that the conditions for realising socialism in Russia were not present and that for this reason international revolution was necessary. She put forward the perspective that the Russian Revolution would be a “forerunner of the new series of proletarian revolutions of the West”.^[31] She was somewhat less optimistic than Trotsky, however, whose perspective was based on the Russian Revolution spreading, and the workers of the West coming to the aid of the Russian workers.

On the contrary, Luxemburg believed that a temporary defeat of the Russian workers was the most likely outcome:

[…] I even think that if the Russian working class rises completely to its task, that is, if through its actions it carries revolutionary developments to the most extreme limit permitted by the objective development of social relations, then what will almost inevitably await it at this limit will be a major temporary defeat.^[32]

But she by no means took this to mean that social democrats should limit their work towards a revolution. In her opinion, “it is a poor leader and a pitiful army that goes in to battle only when it knows in advance that victory is in its pocket.” The defeats were simply “inevitable historical steps that are leading to the final victory of socialism.”^[33]

Luxemburg and Trotsky differed as far as the possibility of a revolution in Russia spreading internationally was concerned. They therefore considered different likely outcomes of the revolution. Luxemburg thought the coming Russian Revolution would be a more isolated affair, as was the case in 1905. Trotsky, on the contrary, held the perspective that the coming revolution would spread internationally, as indeed it did in the years that followed the October Revolution of 1917.

In short, we can say that Rosa Luxemburg largely shared Trotsky’s analysis as laid out in his theory of the permanent revolution, but she did not follow that analysis as consistently and far as Trotsky, and therefore did not draw such clear and far-sighted conclusions.

Regardless of their disagreements in 1905 and those that surfaced in subsequent years, when the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky were in agreement on all fundamental questions. In Russia in 1917, the theory of the permanent revolution was confirmed in practice. The bourgeoisie played a counter-revolutionary role. The working class took the leadership and it did not halt at the bourgeois-democratic tasks of the revolution. Rather, it moved on to the socialist revolution, seizing power in its own hands, under the leadership of the Bolsheviks, in the course of the October Revolution. And the Russian Revolution provided precisely the spark that ignited the world revolution, which Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg all emphasised was an essential factor in the survival of the revolution in Russia. There can be no question that Luxemburg would have harshly rejected Stalin’s so-called theory of ‘socialism in one country’, which he put forward after Lenin’s death in 1924. In fact, she would not have even been capable of conceiving of anyone putting such an idea forward and seriously calling it ‘Marxist’.

Strikes and Radicalisation in Germany

When the revolution broke out in Russia in early 1905, it was initially met with sympathy on the part of German SPD, although the party was not known for its sympathy or understanding of the Russian revolutionaries, their illegal work, and their internal political ‘chaos’ that contrasted so starkly with the ‘order’ prevailing in the German party. This opinion began to change especially when German authorities began persecuting Russian exiles. All across the country, meetings were held in solidarity with the revolution, with SPD leaders delivering fiery speeches, and financial collections being held. Amongst the German workers, who looked up to the example being set by the Russian Revolution, a clear process of radicalisation was underway.

Amidst the broader layers of the German working class too, something was stirring. In the first months of 1905, the number and intensity of strikes rose. In 1905, 507,964 workers participated in work stoppages, more than the entire decade of the 1890s, and more than the five previous years put together.^[34] Under the influence of events in Russia, the class struggle in Germany became increasingly intense, whilst the connection between economic and political questions grew stronger – a point that Luxemburg described as a special characteristic of revolutionary periods. Simultaneously, a mass movement in the state of Prussia arose around the changing of electoral law, something that the SPD was particularly heavily focused on. In the course of this movement, the question was posed of using the general strike as a weapon. This was the first time the question of a general strike had been placed on the agenda in Germany as a means of political struggle.

The revolutionary movement in Russia and the escalating class struggle in Germany pushed the leadership of the SPD to the left. They became more open, for instance, to the idea of a general strike, termed a “political mass strike”^[35] in Germany, being a legitimate tactical weapon in the class struggle. Already in 1904, the debate on the general strike had begun in Die Neue Zeit. Until then, the general strike had primarily been something that anarchists and syndicalists had argued for, and for that reason it had met strong opposition in social-democratic circles. In 1902, the Belgian workers had launched a general strike in an attempt to win the right to vote, and in 1903 the Dutch workers’ movement had used the same weapon to fight an anti-strike law. Meanwhile, the Swedish social democrats had called a large protest strike in order to force a new electoral law through parliament. Even avid revisionists like Bernstein put forward the possibility of a general strike – although only ever as a defensive measure. The debate was no longer about whether a mass strike was possible, but whether the party leadership could call for it.

When the 1905 Russian Revolution broke out, the debate over reformism had just concluded in the SPD. The reformist line had, apparently, been defeated, and the line of Luxemburg and Kautsky had won. However, in the course of this entire debate, the trade union leaders remained more or less silent. Their opinion was that the theoreticians could debate as much as they liked, but ultimately the union leaders would continue with business as usual once all was said and done. But now the debate over the general strike was being raised not only in Die Neue Zeit but also at political meetings and among workers on the factory floor. It had become a direct threat to the ‘pragmatic’ plans of the trade union leaders who wished to get on with peaceful negotiations to the exclusion of all else.

The trade union leaders did what they could to stop the strikes from growing – fearful lest the movement run out of their control and threaten to sour their relationship with the employers at the negotiating table. In January 1905 the leaders of the miners attempted to prevent a large strike in the Ruhr district, while the central leadership of the trade unions did everything in its means to prevent the strike from spreading. When the union leaders started hearing talk of a general strike to force through electoral reform in Prussia – a political demand – they decided they had to take the offensive, which they did at the Trade Union Congress of May 1905 in Cologne. This was not the time for ‘experiments’, they cried. They threw up a host of practical objections: the unions were not strong enough; the workers would be unable to feed their families during the strike; and who could stop the employers from profiting from this political strike? No, it was not the time for strikes. It was time to keep working away to strengthen the labour organisations. That required peace and quiet. They summed up their opposition to the general strike with the phrase: “general strikes are general nonsense”.^[36]

Rosa Luxemburg became the main target of the union leaders. After all, this was the woman who had called their work a “Sisyphean labour”, and who now came out advocating a mass strike in Germany. This woman, this Pole, now came to their methodical, organised Germany with her revolutionary nonsense, and was spreading dangerous ideas and creating unrest. In July of 1905, before Luxemburg left for Poland to participate in the revolution, the leader of the miners, Otto Hue, wrote contemptuously in his trade union magazine:

In Russia the struggle for liberty has been raging almost a year. We always have wondered why our experts on the ‘general strike theory’ don’t take themselves off speedily to Russia, to get practical experience, to join in the battle. In Russia the workers are paying with their lives; why don’t all those theoreticians, who anyhow come from Poland and Russia and now sit in Germany, France and Switzerland scribbling ‘revolutionary’ articles, get themselves on to the battlefield? High time for all those with such an excess of revolutionary zeal to take a practical part in the Russian battle for freedom, instead of carrying on mass-strike discussions from summer holiday resorts. Trying is better than lying, so off with you to the Russian front, you class-war theoreticians.^[37]

Rosa Luxemburg was foremost among those for whom these poisonous barbs were intended. The revisionists joined in the chorus, as did the liberal press, who nicknamed her ‘Bloody Rosa’. Rosa Luxemburg, as might be expected, picked up the gauntlet and threw herself into the struggle against the reformism of the labour leaders. She struck back first and foremost on the plane of theory. For the first time, she identified the trade union leaders as the most dangerous tool of reformism in the party. She criticised them for their complete misunderstanding of the social relations that had led to the mass strike in other countries, and for having a narrow national view that didn’t extend beyond their own German nose:

Belgium isn’t worth studying… a latin, ‘irresponsible’ country, on which the German trade-union experts can afford to look down. Russia, well Russia, that ‘savage land’… without organisation, trade-union funds, officials – how can serious, ‘experienced’ German officials possibly be expected to learn from there… even though precisely in Russia this mass-strike weapon has found unexpected, magnificent application, instructive and exemplary for the whole working-class world.^[38]

In September of 1905, the SPD held its annual congress in Jena. Here, Rosa Luxemburg advanced her views on the mass strike. Bebel gave a three-hour long speech, which was fairly radical in words, but fairly vague as far as practical conclusions went. His sentiment was essentially: we must wait and see if our class enemies move against us, and only then will we respond to them.^[39] Bebel, and the SPD executive committee with him, saw the mass strike as a purely defensive measure that might be taken in the case of an attack on the right to vote or some other basic democratic right.

Rosa Luxemburg believed that the attitude of the party executive committee was far too defensive on this question, but instead of attacking them openly she used the mass movement to put positive pressure on the leaders, putting them in a position where they would have to actually do what they said they would. This meant that, on the surface, there was no apparent disagreement between the executive committee and Luxemburg, and their line seemed to score victory at the congress. But things were not as one-sided as they appeared. Luxemburg wrote in a letter to Henriette Roland-Holst:^[40]

I certainly agree with you that Bebel’s resolution deals with the problem of the mass strike very one-sidedly and without excitement. When we saw it in Jena, a few of us decided to mount an offensive during the discussion so as to nudge it away from a mechanical recipe for defence of political rights, and towards recognition as one of the fundamental revolutionary manifestations. However, Bebel’s speech put a different complexion on things, and the attitude of the opportunists (Heine, etc.) did even more. On several occasions we, the ‘far left’, found ourselves forced to fight, not against him [Bebel], but with him against the opportunists, in spite of the important difference between Bebel and us… It was rather a case of joining with Bebel and then giving his resolution a more revolutionary appearance during the discussion… And in fact the mass strike was treated, even by Bebel himself – though he may have been unaware of it – as a manifestation of popular revolutionary struggle – the ghost of revolution dominated the whole debate, indeed the whole congress.^[41]

Support for Luxemburg’s position showed the growing radicalisation of SPD members. This was given a certain expression among the party tops who, for a time, moved to the left (at least in words). But the lines quoted above also demonstrate the paradox of Luxemburg’s approach: she had ‘won’ the congress, in the sense that it supported her understanding of the resolution, but what difference did that make when that was not what the leaders really meant and, furthermore, when this political divergence was not brought out clearly in the eyes of the members of the party? The apparent agreement between the leaders of the SPD and the far-left wing fostered illusions in the radicalisation of the leaders. But as soon as pressure from the masses disappeared, the radical speeches of the party tops also stopped. The left wing of the party could point to a congress resolution, but to no avail – it was the leadership that determined the politics of the SPD and its actions in the real world, not resolutions. Luxemburg viewed the adoption of the resolution as a sign that the movement of the masses could push the leaders to the left, but it was soon revealed that this was not an expression of any real leftward turn among the leaders. Rather, she and the radical left wing had merely given the SPD leadership a left cover in the eyes of the membership.

The executive committee saw the Jena congress, first and foremost, as legitimising their four-year-long struggle against reformism. They used the occasion to remove the editorial board of Vorwärts, the party’s central organ, which was mostly composed of reformists. In the end, six editors were removed and, on Bebel’s recommendation, Rosa Luxemburg was appointed as one of the newspaper’s new editors. From late October 1905 she began writing regularly for the paper, and in November and December she wrote almost daily of the revolutionary events taking place in Russia and Poland. But Luxemburg quickly grew disillusioned with the work at Vorwärts – the new editors were, in her opinion, mediocre and unable to write clearly and in a revolutionary manner. In December, she decided to quit her post at Vorwärts, travelling to Poland instead to throw herself into the Russian Revolution, as we have already seen.

And, as we know, her absence from Germany was prolonged by her imprisonment and her stay in Finland. In all, Luxemburg was away from Germany for nine months. In that period, a drastic shift took place at the top of the SPD. The Russian Revolution of 1905 was defeated and ceased to be a factor in the radicalisation of the German workers. Even prior to the defeat of the revolution, developments in Russia – with general strikes and insurrections – had already become a bit too ‘revolutionary’ for the party leaders and above all for the leaders of the trade unions. The strike movement inside Germany was now declining, and leftward pressure on the party leadership was therefore also easing. The latter now turned sharply right and drew close to the union leaders. However, enthusiasm for the revolution still ran high among the workers, and when Rosa Luxemburg returned to Germany, she was in high demand as a speaker on those events at meetings across the country.

After her absence of nine months, Luxemburg left Kuokkala in Finland on 14 September 1906 to return to Germany. She was uncertain as to whether she might be arrested as soon as she set foot on German soil on account of the speech she had given at the Jena congress at the end of 1905. But she could not wait any longer. In Finland she had written a piece titled ‘The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions’ at the request of German social democrats in Hamburg, who were asking for it as a contribution to the debate for the party congress of the SPD in Mannheim, scheduled for 23-29 September 1906. Intended to summarise the lessons of the Russian Revolution for a German audience, the piece also delved into the German debate over the mass strike as a weapon in the class struggle. For Luxemburg, the lessons of the 1905 Revolution were not merely a Russian concern:

Accordingly it appears, when looked at in this way, to be entirely wrong to regard the Russian Revolution as a fine play, as something specifically ‘Russian’, and at best to admire the heroism of the fighting men, that is, the last accessories of the struggle. It is much more important that the German workers should learn to look upon the Russian Revolution as their own affair, not merely as a matter of international solidarity with the Russian proletariat, but first and foremost, as a chapter of their own social and political history.^[42]

On her way back from Finland, Luxemburg spent a couple of days in Hamburg in order to work with the publisher. She had sent the manuscript one month prior so that it could be ready for the congress, and did not expect to have to do anything other than the final proofreading. However, the executive committee of the SPD had stopped the publication. They demanded the printing blocks be destroyed (which was a normal precaution in case of police raids) and that the text be thoroughly watered down as a condition for its publication. The beginnings of the split between Rosa Luxemburg and the leadership of the SPD really begin from here. Karl Radek^[43] later wrote that, “with [Rosa Luxemburg’s] ‘Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions’ begins the separation of the Communist movement from Social Democracy in Germany”.^[44]

The local political leadership in Hamburg – where the strike movement of 1905 had achieved its broadest sweep – were indignant at the interference of the SPD executive committee, and they ensured that the work was still released in its original form. On account of the delay of several days, it would not be circulated among delegates of the congress, but it lost none of its relevance in spite of this.

Party and Trade Unions

The executive committee of the SPD did not limit itself to attempting to stop the publication of Rosa Luxemburg’s piece. They took extensive measures to prevent radical ideas and methods from gaining an influence within the party. In February 1906, they entered into a secret agreement with the trade union leadership, giving the trade unions official autonomy in all trade union related questions, including the question of strike action. This meant that the trade union leadership was de facto granted a right of veto over the methods the party could use, with which they would make liberal use of in the years that followed. Until this point, the industrial struggle had been seen as subordinate to the political struggle to change society more broadly.

The relationship between the political and the industrial aspects of the workers’ movement was a central question of ‘The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions’. Rosa Luxemburg took a sharp stance against this attempt to erect a divide between the two. In the first instance, she argued that it was nonsense to believe that a mass movement would seek the kind permission of the union leaders. If they took a stand against a mass struggle, they would be swept aside by the movement. Furthermore, attempts to insulate the industrial and political movements of the working class from one another would prove utterly artificial. Such attempts were the product of the parliamentary phase through which social democracy had passed. In the course of this stage in its development, the trade unions had simply been left to look after the economic struggle, while the social democracy had placed all of its focus on the political struggle. The new agreement, in placing the political and industrial struggles on the same plane, actually served to raise the daily struggle for reforms above the struggle for socialism:

The theory of the ‘equal authority’ of trade-unions and social democracy is likewise not a mere theoretical misunderstanding, not a mere case of confusion but an expression of the well-known tendency of that opportunist wing of social democracy which reduced the political struggle of the working class to the parliamentary contest, and desires to change social democracy from a revolutionary proletarian party into a petty-bourgeois reform one.^[45] If social democracy should accept the theory of the ‘equal authority’ of the trade-unions, it would thereby accept, indirectly and tacitly, that transformation which has long been striven for by the representatives of the opportunist tendency.^[46]

Luxemburg described the process that had taken place in the labour organisations at length. It had resulted in their bureaucratisation and the spread of a narrow, trade-unionist outlook, where the organisation itself had become the end goal. The trade-union leaders were therefore working against strikes and mass struggle because they feared that this would hurt the organisation:

The specialisation of professional activity as trade-union leaders, as well as the naturally restricted horizon which is bound up with disconnected economic struggles in a peaceful period, leads only too easily, amongst trade-union officials, to bureaucratism and a certain narrowness of outlook. Both, however, express themselves in a whole series of tendencies which may be fateful in the highest degree for the future of the trade-union movement. There is first of all the overvaluation of the organisation, which from a means has gradually been changed into an end in itself, a precious thing, to which the interests of the struggles should be subordinated.^[47]

This course of development meant that the leadership had come to focus narrowly on the smallest of reforms, celebrating them as advances, even though they were succeeded by a general degradation of workers’ conditions:

The trade-union leaders, constantly absorbed in the economic guerrilla war whose plausible task it is to make the workers place the highest value on the smallest economic achievement, every increase in wages and shortening of the working day, gradually lose the power of seeing the larger connections and of taking a survey of the whole position. Only in this way can one explain why many trade-union leaders refer with the greatest satisfaction to the achievements of the last fifteen years, instead of, on the contrary, emphasising the other side of the medal; the simultaneous and immense reduction of the proletarian standard of life by land usury, by the whole tax and customs policy, by landlord rapacity which has increased house rents to such an exorbitant extent, in short, by all the objective tendencies of bourgeois policy which have largely neutralised the advantages of the fifteen years of trade-union struggle.^[48]

In their hunt for daily reforms, the trade-union leaders closed their eyes to the overarching limitations of capitalism. Yet, in the opinion of Luxemburg, the task of social democracy was precisely to use these daily struggles to draw out capitalism’s limitations. This was precisely why the trade-union leaders of the SPD ended up wishing to free themselves from the control of the party and why they defended a revision of the theoretical foundations of social democracy:

From the whole social-democratic truth which, while emphasising the importance of the present work and its absolute necessity, attaches the chief importance to the criticism and the limits to this work, the half trade-union truth is taken which emphasises only the positive side of the daily struggle.

And finally, from the concealment of the objective limits drawn by the bourgeois social order to the trade-union struggle, there arises a hostility to every theoretical criticism which refers to these limits in connection with the ultimate aims of the labour movement. Fulsome flattery and boundless optimism are considered to be the duty of every ‘friend of the trade union movement’. But as the social democratic standpoint consists precisely in fighting against uncritical parliamentary optimism, a front is at last made against the social democratic theory: men grope for a ‘new trade-union theory’, that is, a theory which would open an illimitable vista of economic progress to the trade-union struggle within the capitalist system, in opposition to the social-democratic doctrine.^[49]

The agreement between the trade-union leaders and the party leaders constituted the first time that a division between the two sides of the movement had been established. It was quite clear that this was a concession to the narrow, reformist interests of the trade-union leadership. The agreement was initially hidden from party members precisely because the SPD leaders were aware that it constituted a breach in their former methods, and that the party members would not give such an innovation a warm welcome.

‘The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions’

It was against this narrow viewpoint that was prevailing at the top of the German workers’ movement that Rosa Luxemburg wrote ‘The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions’, as part of the debate over mass strikes in the German SPD.

Until 1905, the mass strike had been rejected as a social-democratic method of struggle because it was considered to be an anarchist method, focusing solely on the economic struggle and rejecting the political struggle. Furthermore, the mass strike had been viewed as a utopia because:

[…] either the proletariat as a whole are not yet in possession of the powerful organisation and financial resources required, in which case they cannot carry through the general strike; or they are already sufficiently well organised, in which case they do not need the general strike.^[50]

But Luxemburg argued that the situation had changed:

For the first time in the history of the class struggle it [the 1905 Russian Revolution] has achieved a grandiose realisation of the idea of the mass strike and – as we shall discuss later – has even matured the general strike and thereby opened a new epoch in the development of the labour movement.^[51]

This was not because Luxemburg had suddenly turned anarchist, on the contrary:

The Russian Revolution, which is the first historical experiment on the model of the mass strike, not merely does not afford a vindication of anarchism, but actually means the historical liquidation of anarchism. […]

Anarchism has become in the Russian Revolution, not the theory of the struggling proletariat, but the ideological signboard of the counter-revolutionary lumpen-proletariat, who, like a school of sharks, swarm in the wake of the battleship of the revolution. And therewith the historical career of anarchism is well-nigh ended.^[52]

According to Luxemburg, the mass strike cannot replace the political struggle for democratic rights, as the anarchists argue. In fact, the mass strike should become a means in the political struggle. For Luxemburg, the economic and the political struggles had to be linked up:

On the other hand, the mass strike in Russia has been realised not as means of evading the political struggle of the working class, and especially of parliamentarism, not as a means of jumping suddenly into the social revolution by means of a theatrical coup, but as a means, firstly, of creating for the proletariat the conditions of the daily political struggle and especially of parliamentarism. The revolutionary struggle in Russia, in which mass strikes are the most important weapon, is, by the working people, and above all by the proletariat, conducted for those political rights and conditions whose necessity and importance in the struggle for the emancipation of the working class Marx and Engels first pointed out, and in opposition to anarchism fought for with all their might in the International.^[53]

But in Germany, the trade union leaders were steadfast in their opposition to the use of the mass strike, even as a defensive weapon. They argued that the workers’ organisations were not yet strong enough, and they presented a long list of objections: trade union membership was too low, strike funds were insufficient, etc. Luxemburg fiercely criticised their mechanistic manner of debating the question.

Luxemburg didn’t limit herself to combating the arguments of the opponents of the mass strike alone. She also polemicised against that wing of the SPD that defended the idea of the mass strike but which saw in it a purely defensive measure that might be used if the government attacked the right to vote, for instance. That wing included the German party leadership and Bernstein. For them, the mass strike was reduced to a weapon completely under the control of the party and the trade unions. It became a ‘mere appendage’ to the parliamentary struggle rather than part of the revolutionary struggle to transform society.

In ‘The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions’, Rosa Luxemburg described concretely how the mass strike in Russia developed as a spontaneous movement of the masses themselves. The 1905 Revolution was the culmination of a strike movement that had developed over the course of years. The strike wave was not decreed by the party or the trade unions, but broke out when the workers’ frustration had reached a critical level, at which point some apparently accidental question would become the straw that broke the camel’s back. The revolution that began on Bloody Sunday was the culmination of this strike movement, and it began spontaneously. In the course of the movement, economic and political demands followed one after another, and the economic and political struggles merged together.

The main point that Luxemburg contended was that, contrary to the SPD leadership’s conception, the mass strike is not something exclusively initiated and determined by the party and the trade unions as an appendage to the parliamentary struggle:

The mass strike, as it appears for the most part in the discussion in Germany, is a very clear and simply thought out, sharply sketched isolated phenomenon. It is the political mass strike exclusively that is spoken of. What is meant by it is a single grand rising of the industrial proletariat springing from some political motive of the highest importance, and undertaken on the basis of an opportune and mutual understanding on the part of the controlling authorities of the party and of the trade unions, and carried through in the spirit of party discipline and in perfect order, and in still more perfect order brought to the directing committees as a signal given at the proper time, by which committees the regulation of support, the cost, the sacrifice – in a word, the whole material balance of the mass strike – is exactly determined in advance.^[54]

She mocked the argument of the German labour leaders that the mass strike would destroy the labour organisations – on the contrary, she explained, the workers’ organisations in Russia grew out of and emerged greatly strengthened by the mass strikes in the course of the revolution:

[T]he apparently ‘chaotic’ strikes and the ‘disorganised’ revolutionary action after the January general strike [in Russia, 1905] are becoming the starting point of a feverish work of organisation. Dame History, from afar, smilingly hoaxes the bureaucratic lay figures who keep grim watch at the gate over the fate of the German trade unions. The firm organisations which, as the indispensable hypothesis for an eventual German mass strike, should be fortified like an impregnable citadel – these organisations are in Russia, on the contrary, already born from the mass strike. And while the guardians of the German trade unions for the most part fear that the organisations will fall in pieces in a revolutionary whirlwind like rare porcelain, the Russian revolution shows us the exact opposite picture; from the whirlwind and the storm, out of the fire and glow of the mass strike and the street fighting rise again, like Venus from the foam, fresh, young, powerful, buoyant trade unions.^[55]

For Luxemburg, both the opponents and the supporters of the Bernsteinian ‘mass strike’ stood on the “same platform”. They understood it in the same – incorrect – way, as something that the party and the unions could “decide upon” and “forbid” as they pleased; “a kind of pocketknife which can be kept in the pocket clasped ‘ready for any emergency’, and according to the decision, can be unclasped and used.”^[56] Luxemburg argued that both sides had completely misunderstood the character of the mass strike.

If, therefore, the Russian Revolution teaches us anything, it teaches above all that the mass strike is not artificially ‘made’, not ‘decided’ at random, not ‘propagated’, but that it is a historical phenomenon which, at a given moment, results from social conditions with historical inevitability.^[57]

It was this mechanical conception, which reigned supreme in the highest echelons of the SPD, that Luxemburg took aim at. She counterposed the spontaneous movement of the masses against those political and trade union leaders who thought they could turn the class struggle on and off like a tap. She wished to shake the SPD out of its parliamentary routine, and bring it to the realisation that the revolutionary movement is something utterly removed from the orderly protest strikes on the pattern of May Day. A revolution is a deadly serious question for the working class. The idea of the mass strike then dominant in the SPD – of a limited protest strike, planned and organised down to the last-minute detail – loses all relevance in a genuinely revolutionary movement. In a revolution, it ceases to be enough for the masses to show their discontent and turn out to protest:

It is precisely those factors which objectively facilitate the realisation of the demonstration strike after a preconceived plan and at the party’s word of command – namely, the growth of political consciousness and the training of the proletariat – make this kind of mass strike impossible; today the proletariat in Russia, the most capable vanguard of the masses, does not want to know about mass strikes; the workers are no longer in a mood for jesting and will now think only of a serious struggle with all its consequences.^[58]

Luxemburg and the leaders of the SPD were speaking in completely different tongues. The leadership of the SPD viewed the strike as an orderly, time-limited, defensive measure. Meanwhile, Luxemburg considered the mass strike as one step in the revolutionary process, the logical conclusion of which was an uprising along the lines of that which had been seen in Moscow in 1905:

By the logical internal development of progressive experience the mass strike this time changes into an open insurrection, to armed barricades, and street fighting in Moscow. The December days in Moscow close the first eventful year of the revolution as the highest point in the ascending line of political action and of the mass strike movement.

The Moscow events show a typical picture of the logical development and at the same time of the future of the revolutionary movement on the whole: their inevitable close in a general open insurrection, which again on its part cannot come in any other way than through the school of a series of preparatory partial insurrections, which end in partial outward ‘defeats’ and, considered individually, may appear to be ‘premature’.^[59]

In Rosa Luxemburg’s opinion, the argument of the labour leaders – that one had to calculate all the costs of a strike – was senseless in the context of a revolutionary period, when the workers have shown a readiness to make the ultimate sacrifice:

The leading organisations in Russia certainly attempt to support the direct victims to the best of their ability. Thus, for example, the brave victims of the gigantic lockout in St. Petersburg, which followed upon the eight-hour day campaign, were supported for weeks. But all these measures are, in the enormous balance of the revolution, but as a drop in the ocean. At the moment that a real, earnest period of mass strikes begins, all these ‘calculations’ of ‘cost’ become merely projects for exhausting the ocean with a tumbler. And it is a veritable ocean of frightful privations and sufferings which is brought by every revolution to the proletarian masses. And the solution which a revolutionary period makes of this apparently invincible difficulty consists in the circumstances that such an immense volume of mass idealism is simultaneously released that the masses are insensible to the bitterest sufferings. With the psychology of a trade unionist who will not stay off his work on May Day unless he is assured in advance of a definite amount of support in the event of his being victimised, neither revolution nor mass strike can be made. But in the storm of the revolutionary period even the proletarian is transformed from a provident pater familias demanding support, into a ‘revolutionary romanticist’, for whom even the highest good, life itself, to say nothing of material well-being, possesses but little in comparison with the ideals of the struggle.^[60]

A Particular Theory of Spontaneity?

Since her death, Luxemburg’s ‘The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions’ in particular has been used to support the idea that ‘Luxemburgism’ exists as a distinct theory. In Frölich’s opinion, the idea that Luxemburg had her own particular theory of spontaneity was invented by Zinoviev, when he was leading the Third (Communist) International, in 1921. The idea, later on, was repeated obsessively by the Stalinists. But Rosa Luxemburg in no way advanced a particular theory of the spontaneity of the masses.

As has been explained, she was responding to the reformist, mechanical understanding of the mass strike, prevalent at the top of the SPD, as a purely defensive measure. She described how the Russian Revolution arose and developed spontaneously. Her goal was to break the SPD’s parliamentary routinism and politically rearm the party to face the tasks that a revolutionary situation would present by drawing the lessons from Russian Revolution and transposing them to Germany:

In this way we arrive at the same conclusions in Germany in relation to the peculiar tasks of direction in relation to the role of social democracy in mass strikes, as in our analysis of events in Russia. […]

The social democrats are the most enlightened, most class-conscious vanguard of the proletariat. They cannot and dare not wait, in a fatalist fashion, with folded arms for the advent of the ‘revolutionary situation’, to wait for that which in every spontaneous peoples’ movement, falls from the clouds. On the contrary, they must now, as always, hasten the development of things and endeavour to accelerate events. This they cannot do, however, by suddenly issuing the ‘slogan’ for a mass strike at random at any odd moment, but first and foremost, by making clear to the widest layers of the proletariat the inevitable advent of this revolutionary period, the inner social factors making for it and the political consequences of it. If the widest proletarian layer should be won for a political mass action of the social democrats, and if, vice versa, the social democrats should seize and maintain the real leadership of a mass movement – should they become, in a political sense, the rulers of the whole movement, then they must, with the utmost clearness, consistency and resoluteness, inform the German proletariat of their tactics and aims in the period of coming struggle.^[61]

Contrary to the claims of the Stalinists, Rosa Luxemburg in no way rejected the role of the party in a revolutionary movement. Her point was merely that revolutions do not arise at the command of the party. Revolutions arise when the masses can no longer endure the old order:

It is sufficient in order to comprehend the foregoing to obtain an explanation of the question of the conscious direction and initiative in the mass strike. If the mass strike is not an isolated act but a whole period of the class struggle, and if this period is identical with a period of revolution, it is clear that the mass strike cannot be called at will, even when the decision to do so may come from the highest committee of the strongest social democratic party. As long as the social democracy has not the power to stage and countermand revolutions according to its fancy, even the greatest enthusiasm and impatience of the social democratic troops will not suffice to call into being a real period of mass strike as a living, powerful movement of the people. […]

Of course, even during the revolution, mass strikes do not exactly fall from heaven. They must be brought about in some way or another by the workers. The resolution and determination of the workers also play a part and indeed the initiative and the wider direction naturally fall to the share of the organised and most enlightened kernel of the proletariat. But the scope of this initiative and this direction, for the most part, is confined to application to individual acts, to individual strikes, when the revolutionary period is already begun, and indeed, in most cases, is confined within the boundaries of a single town. […]

During the revolution it is extremely difficult for any directing organ of the proletarian movement to foresee and to calculate which occasions and factors can lead to explosions and which cannot. Here also initiative and direction do not consist in issuing commands according to one’s inclinations, but in the most adroit adaptability to the given situation, and the closest possible contact with the mood of the masses. The element of spontaneity, as we have seen, plays a great part in all Russian mass strikes without exception, be it as a driving force or as a restraining influence.^[62]

According to Luxemburg, the party’s task was to provide political leadership:

If, however, the direction of the mass strike in the sense of command over its origin, and in the sense of the calculating and reckoning of the cost, is a matter of the revolutionary period itself, the directing of the mass strike becomes, in an altogether different sense, the duty of social democracy and its leading organs. Instead of puzzling their heads with the technical side, with the mechanism of the mass strike, the social democrats are called upon to assume political leadership in the midst of the revolutionary period.

To give the cue for, and the direction to, the fight; to so regulate the tactics of the political struggle in its every phase and at its every moment that the entire sum of the available power of the proletariat which is already released and active, will find expression in the battle array of the party; to see that the tactics of the social democrats are decided according to their resoluteness and acuteness and that they never fall below the level demanded by the actual relations of forces, but rather rise above it – that is the most important task of the directing body in a period of mass strikes. And this direction changes of itself, to a certain extent, into technical direction. A consistent, resolute, progressive tactic on the part of the social democrats produces in the masses a feeling of security, self-confidence and desire for struggle; a vacillating weak tactic, based on an underestimation of the proletariat, has a crippling and confusing effect upon the masses. In the first case mass strikes break out ‘of themselves’ and ‘opportunely’; in the second case they remain ineffective amidst direct summonses of the directing body to mass strikes. And of both the Russian Revolution affords striking examples.^[63]

In all revolutionary movements, the spontaneous movement of the masses has played a determining role. Luxemburg didn’t develop a particular ‘theory’, but merely gave a description of the revolution as was played out in Russia in 1905. Lenin by no means disagreed with Luxemburg’s description of the spontaneous character of the revolution. In May 1917, in words that very much accord with Luxemburg’s, Lenin said of the masses that they were “100 times more leftward than we [the revolutionaries] are”.^[64] And, in ‘Lessons of the Moscow Uprising’ he wrote: “The proletariat understood the development of the objective circumstances of the struggle, which demanded a transition from strike to uprising, earlier than its leaders.”^[65]

Luxemburg and Lenin differed on the question of how the party would exercise its leadership of the movement. As previously discussed, this disagreement was expressed at the 1907 congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, at which Luxemburg criticised the Bolsheviks for putting too much emphasis on the technical side of the uprising in the 1905 Revolution, while believing that they ought instead to have focused on giving the movement political leadership. In this sense, Luxemburg’s approach to the revolution was abstract: the masses will move, and when they do it is up to the party to provide the correct political programme. From her experience in the SPD, focus on the practical side of organising was the hallmark of a conservative leadership that held back the movement of the masses. Instead of rejecting the bureaucratic character of the SPD, she rejected the technical, practical side of organising altogether as an evil in and of itself. Luxemburg seemed to believe that the movement of the masses itself would solve the problem of organisation and technical leadership.

Trotsky summed up Luxemburg’s understanding as follows:

There is no gainsaying that Rosa Luxemburg impassionately counterposed the spontaneity of mass actions to the ‘victory-crowned’ conservative policy of the German social democracy especially after the Revolution of 1905. This counterposition had a thoroughly revolutionary and progressive character. At a much earlier date than Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg grasped the retarding character of the ossified party and trade-union apparatus and began a struggle against it. Inasmuch as she counted upon the inevitable accentuation of class conflicts, she always predicted the certainty of the independent elemental appearance of the masses against the will and against the line of march of officialdom. In these broad historical outlines, Rosa was proved right. For the [German] Revolution of 1918 was ‘spontaneous’, that is, it was accomplished by the masses against all the provisions and all the precautions of the party officialdom. On the other hand, the whole of Germany’s subsequent history amply showed that spontaneity alone is far from enough for success; Hitler’s regime is a weighty argument against the panacea of spontaneity.

Rosa herself never confined herself to the mere theory of spontaneity, like Parvus, for example, who later bartered his social revolutionary fatalism for the most revolting fatalism. In contrast to Parvus, Rosa Luxemburg exerted herself to educate the revolutionary wing of the proletariat in advance and to bring it together organisationally as far as possible. In Poland, she built up a very rigid independent organisation. The most that can be said is that in her historical-philosophical evaluation of the labour movement, the preparatory selection of the vanguard, in comparison with the mass actions that were to be expected, fell too short with Rosa; whereas Lenin – without consoling himself with the miracles of future actions – took the advanced workers and constantly and tirelessly welded them together into firm nuclei, illegally or legally, in the mass organisations or underground, by means of a sharply defined programme.

Rosa’s theory of spontaneity was a wholesome weapon against the ossified apparatus of reformism. That it was often directed against Lenin’s work of building up a revolutionary apparatus, reveals – to be sure, only in embryo – its reactionary features. With Rosa herself this occurred only episodically. She was much too realistic in the revolutionary sense to develop the elements of the theory of spontaneity into a consummate metaphysics. In practice, she herself, as has already been said, undermined this theory at every step. After the revolution of November 1918, she began the ardent labour of assembling the proletarian vanguard.^[66]

When reading ‘The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions’, it is possible to come away with the impression that Luxemburg believed the role of the party was limited to waiting with folded arms until strikes break out, and then jumping in to give political leadership. Her attention was focused, as we’ve discussed, on politically rearming the SPD and the German workers. She explained how a revolutionary movement is very different from ordinary trade-union and parliamentary struggles, and that the party must be ready for it. But, as Trotsky was careful to point out, Luxemburg did not succumb to pure fatalism. She by no means relegated the party’s role to that of merely reacting to the movement of the masses, placing all her faith in the latter. In Poland, she took part in building a strictly centralised party. In the final years of her life, she helped found the German Communist Party (KPD). In 1910 a mass movement for electoral reform erupted in Prussia, which she sharply criticised the SPD for failing to organise and lead. The difference between Luxemburg and Lenin lay in the fact that the latter had understood early on the need to build a strong and centralised organisation of educated Marxist cadres as the backbone of a revolutionary mass party. He had understood this before the revolution broke out, while Luxemburg only began this work whilst the German Revolution of 1918 was in progress – by which time it was too late.

As Trotsky explained, contained within Luxemburg’s critique of the Bolsheviks’ focus on the technical, practical side of organising, was a germ that – if elevated to a theoretical principle – would become reactionary. Incidentally, many so-called ‘Luxemburgists’ have focused solely on this theoretically weak side of Luxemburg. They have torn this side of her writings out of context, and have elevated it to the level of a novel and distinct ‘theory’. The Stalinists too have nurtured this myth of a distinct ‘Luxemburgist theory of spontaneity’ and have counterposed it to their own representation of the party as infallible and in control at all times. As the spontaneous movement of the masses became a threat to the position of the Stalinist bureaucracy, so they sought to open up a divide between Luxemburg and Lenin.

Luxemburg’s faith in the movement and revolutionary potential of the masses was thoroughly revolutionary. It represented a healthy reaction against the reformism that emanated from the tops of the German workers’ movement, who substituted themselves for the movement of the masses, and who actually became the strongest pillar in support for bourgeois society. The weak side of Luxemburg’s position meanwhile was already apparent in the course of the 1905 Revolution itself. The revolution was defeated precisely because the revolutionary organisations were too weak and the revolution insufficiently well organised. The general strike could certainly pose the question of power. In and of itself, however, it could not solve it, as Trotsky explained. The weakness of Luxemburg’s position was further exposed at various points in the course of the victorious Russian Revolution of 1917, and in the defeats suffered by the German Revolution after 1918 and in 1923. The essential difference lay in the existence of a revolutionary party – the Bolshevik Party, in Russia – and the lack of such a party in Germany. In the latter case, the Communist Party was only founded during the revolution itself.

The success or defeat of a socialist revolution is intimately dependent on the question of leadership. It is impossible for a revolutionary situation to last forever. The working class cannot indefinitely be mobilised in constant struggle. The successful revolutionary conquest of power is a question of timing. If the moment is not seized – the moment where all of the forces of the working class are mobilised and its confidence is at its zenith, whilst the class enemy is simultaneously helpless and demoralised – should the workers fail to seize power in this narrow window of opportunity, the revolutionary momentum is lost, demoralisation sets in and the balance of class forces shifts. The opportunity is missed, and the revolution is defeated. In order to prevent this, the presence of a revolutionary party is crucial. But the revolutionary party cannot be summoned into existence during the revolution itself. It must be built before the revolution erupts. It is necessary to combine the ‘spontaneous’ movement of the masses with organisation, programme, perspective, strategy and tactics – in other words, with a revolutionary party led by experienced cadres.

Trotsky who, like Rosa Luxemburg, had sharply criticised Lenin in 1903 and who did not join the Bolshevik party until 1917, admitted openly that Lenin had been right and that he had been wrong on this question. Basing himself on the lessons of the Bolshevik Party in Russia, his 1924 pamphlet Lessons of October describes in detail how history had demonstrated the necessity of a revolutionary party and of a leadership trained for this task. Only combined with this factor could the proletariat hope to achieve victory in a revolutionary period:

With respect to Germany, the case is quite a clear one. The German revolution might have been triumphant both in 1918 and in 1919, had a proper party leadership been secured. […]

Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer. That is the principal lesson of the past decade. It is true that the English trade unions may become a mighty lever of the proletarian revolution; they may, for instance, even take the place of workers’ soviets under certain conditions and for a certain period of time. They can fill such a role, however, not apart from a Communist party, and certainly not against the party, but only on the condition that communist influence becomes the decisive influence in the trade unions. We have paid far too dearly for this conclusion – with regard to the role and importance of a party in a proletarian revolution – to renounce it so lightly or even to minimise its significance.

Consciousness, premeditation, and planning played a far smaller part in bourgeois revolutions than they are destined to play, and already do play, in proletarian revolutions. In the former instance the motive force of the revolution was also furnished by the masses, but the latter were much less organised and much less conscious than at the present time. The leadership remained in the hands of different sections of the bourgeoisie, and the latter had at its disposal wealth, education, and all the organisational advantages connected with them (the cities, the universities, the press, etc.). The bureaucratic monarchy defended itself in a hand-to-mouth manner, probing in the dark and then acting. The bourgeoisie would bide its time to seize a favourable moment when it could profit from the movement of the lower classes, throw its whole social weight into the scale, and so seize the state power. The proletarian revolution is precisely distinguished by the fact that the proletariat – in the person of its vanguard – acts in it not only as the main offensive force but also as the guiding force. The part played in bourgeois revolutions by the economic power of the bourgeoisie, by its education, by its municipalities and universities, is a part which can be filled in a proletarian revolution only by the party of the proletariat.

The role of the party has become all the more important in view of the fact that the enemy has also become far more conscious. The bourgeoisie, in the course of centuries of rule, has perfected a political schooling far superior to the schooling of the old bureaucratic monarchy. If parliamentarism served the proletariat to a certain extent as a training school for revolution, then it also served the bourgeoisie to a far greater extent as the school of counter-revolutionary strategy. Suffice it to say that by means of parliamentarism the bourgeoisie was able to train the social democracy so that it is today the main prop of private property. The epoch of the social revolution in Europe, as has been shown by its very first steps, will be an epoch not only of strenuous and ruthless struggle but also of planned and calculated battles – far more planned than with us in 1917.

That is why we require an approach entirely different from the prevailing one to the questions of civil war in general and of armed insurrection in particular. Following Lenin, all of us keep repeating time and again Marx’s words that insurrection is an art. But this idea is transformed into a hollow phrase, to the extent that Marx’s formula is not supplemented with a study of the fundamental elements of the art of civil war, on the basis of the vast accumulated experience of recent years. It is necessary to say candidly that a superficial attitude to questions of armed insurrection is a token that the power of the social democratic tradition has not yet been overcome. A party which pays superficial attention to the question of civil war, in the hope that everything will somehow settle itself at the crucial moment, is certain to be shipwrecked. We must analyse in a collective manner the experience of the proletarian struggles beginning with 1917. […]

History secured for our party revolutionary advantages that are truly inestimable. The traditions of the heroic struggle against the tsarist monarchy; the habituation to revolutionary self-sacrifice bound up with the conditions of underground activity; the broad theoretical study and assimilation of the revolutionary experience of humanity; the struggle against Menshevism, against the Narodniks, and against conciliationism; the supreme experience of the 1905 Revolution; the theoretical study and assimilation of this experience during the years of counter-revolution; the examination of the problems of the international labour movement in the light of the revolutionary lessons of 1905 – these were the things which in their totality gave our party an exceptional revolutionary temper, supreme theoretical penetration, and unparalleled revolutionary sweep. Nevertheless, even within this party, among its leaders, on the eve of decisive action there was formed a group of experienced revolutionists, Old Bolsheviks, who were in sharp opposition to the proletarian revolution and who, in the course of the most critical period of the revolution from February 1917 to approximately February 1918, adopted on all fundamental questions an essentially social democratic position. It required Lenin, and Lenin’s exceptional influence in the party, unprecedented even at that time, to safeguard the party and the revolution against the supreme confusion following from such a situation. This must never be forgotten if we wish other Communist parties to learn anything from us.

The question of selecting the leading staff is of exceptional importance to the parties of Western Europe. The experience of the abortive German October is shocking proof of this. But this selection must proceed in the light of revolutionary action. During these recent years, Germany has provided ample opportunities for the testing of the leading party members in moments of direct struggle. Failing this criterion, the rest is worthless. France, during these years, was much poorer in revolutionary upheavals – even partial ones. But even in the political life of France we have had flashes of civil war, times when the Central Committee of the party and the trade union leadership had to react in action to unpostponable and acute questions […]. A careful study of such acute episodes provides irreplaceable material for the evaluation of a party leadership, the conduct of various party organs, and individual leading members. To ignore these lessons – not to draw the necessary conclusions from them as to the choice of personalities – is to invite inevitable defeats; for without a penetrating, resolute, and courageous party leadership, the victory of the proletarian revolution is impossible.

Each party, even the most revolutionary party, must inevitably produce its own organisational conservatism; for otherwise it would lack the necessary stability. This is wholly a question of degree. In a revolutionary party the vitally necessary dose of conservatism must be combined with a complete freedom from routine, with initiative in orientation and daring in action. These qualities are put to the severest test during turning points in history. We have already quoted the words of Lenin to the effect that even the most revolutionary parties, when an abrupt change occurs in a situation and when new tasks arise as a consequence, frequently pursue the political line of yesterday and thereby become, or threaten to become, a brake upon the revolutionary process. Both conservatism and revolutionary initiative find their most concentrated expression in the leading organs of the party. In the meantime, the European communist parties have still to face their sharpest ‘turning point’ – the turn from preparatory work to the actual seizure of power. This turn is the most exacting, the most unpostponable, the most responsible, and the most formidable. To miss the moment for the turn is to incur the greatest defeat that a party can possibly suffer. […]

Much has been spoken and written lately on the necessity of ‘Bolshevising’ the Comintern.^[67] This is a task that cannot be disputed or delayed; it is made particularly urgent after the cruel lessons of Bulgaria and Germany a year ago. Bolshevism is not a doctrine (i.e., not merely a doctrine) but a system of revolutionary training for the proletarian uprising. What is the Bolshevisation of Communist parties? It is giving them such a training, and effecting such a selection of the leading staff, as would prevent them from drifting when the hour for their October strikes. “That is the whole of Hegel, and the wisdom of books, and the meaning of all philosophy…”^[68]

1905: A Seminal Year

The 1905 Russian Revolution had provided invaluable lessons for the workers and especially for revolutionaries – both inside and outside of Russia. For Rosa Luxemburg, the lessons of the 1905 Revolution were decisive. She had experienced, in practice, the revolutionary movement of the masses. The revolution caused her to break with the Mensheviks, and placed her on the same side as Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the Russian party.

In the German SPD, likewise, 1905 caused initial dividing lines to be drawn. While Luxemburg and others on the left in Germany drew radical conclusions from the revolution and the strike movement, the tops of the SPD moved in the opposite direction, drawing closer to the reformists and the labour leaders. Luxemburg threw everything she had into defeating the reformism then spreading through the upper echelons of the German workers’ movement.

Luxemburg’s approach to the questions of organisation and the role of the party in a revolution remained abstract, and thus open to a potentially negative interpretation, whilst Lenin was extremely clear on these questions. However, the 1905 Revolution nevertheless placed them on the same side of the barricade on the essential question: the question of revolution. In subsequent years, the schism between revolutionaries and reformists widened in the international workers’ movement. It was not until 1914, however, with the outbreak of the First World War, that this division really burst to the surface.

Endnotes

[1] Russia at that time followed the Julian calendar, which at that time was thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar used by most of the capitalist world. Unless noted otherwise, I will be using the Russian dates when dealing with events in Russia, since it was that calendar that ended up being used for naming the revolutionary events (for example, the February Revolution of 1917 started on 8 March and the October Revolution started on 7 November following the Gregorian calendar). The new Soviet power changed to the Gregorian calendar in February 1918.

[2] Rosa Luxemburg is likely referring here to the battle of Jena and Auerstadt (German towns) in 1806 where the Prussian army was defeated by Napoleon and the French army.

[3] R. Luxemburg, ‘The Revolution in Russia (1905)’, Marxist Internet Archive [website].

[4] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 296.

[5] Quoted in A. Woods, Bolshevism: The Road to Revolution, p. 179.

[6] R. Luxemburg, ‘The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions’, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, p. 171.

[7] The Russian word ‘soviet’ literally translates to ‘council’ in English.

[8] Duma – an ancient Russian word, virtually synonymous with soviet. During the reign of Nicholas II the State Duma was the name given to the national parliament. There were also local dumas, the equivalent of local councils.

[9] Franz Mehring (1846-1919) – long-standing member of the SPD, contributor to Die Neue Zeit and editor of Leipziger Volkszeitung between 1902-07. He moved towards a revolutionary position during the First World War, supporting Bolshevism and the October Revolution. Co-founder of the Spartacus League and the KPD, together with Rosa Luxemburg.

[10] Pogrom – a violent riot directed at ethnic persecution and purging, particularly of Jewish people. Was also orchestrated as a political tool by the tsarist secret police.

[11] R. Luxemburg, Letters to Karl and Luise Kautsky from 1896 to 1918, p. 98.

[12] R. Luxemburg, ‘To Sonja Liebknecht, 18 February 1917’, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg [1978], p. 180.

[13] J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 359.

[14] Grigory Zinoviev (1883-1936) – Bolshevik party leader, president of the Communist International 1919-1926.

[15] Ibid., pp. 356-7.

[16] Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) – Russian revolutionary organisation formed in 1879. Worked towards general democratic rights and the elimination of absolutism. Their means were, amongst others, terror against the top of society. In 1881, they killed Tsar Alexander II.

[17] R. Luxemburg, ‘Blanquism and Social Democracy’, Marxist Internet Archive [website].

[18] Nettl and others claim that Luxemburg did not support the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the quote above, as well as many others, prove that this is wrong. Luxemburg supported the idea of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” as it was put forward by the Bolsheviks.

[19] V. I. Lenin, State and Revolution, p. 10.

[20] For a more thorough introduction to the Bolsheviks’ understanding of the workers’ state, we refer to Lenin’s State and Revolution.

[21] Quoted in A. Woods, Bolshevism: The Road to Revolution, p. 265.

[22] R. Luxemburg, ‘“The Role of the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat in the Russian Revolution”, Speech to the Fifth (London) Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (25 May 1907)’, in R. B. Day and D. Gaido (eds.), Witnesses to Permanent Revolution, p. 559.

[23] Ibid., p. 557.

[24] L. Trotsky, My Life, p. 178.

[25] R. Luxemburg, ‘The Role of the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat in the Russian Revolution’. Witnesses to Permanent Revolution, p. 564.

[26] Ibid., p. 564.

[27] Quoted ibid., p. 544.

[28] Ibid., p. 563.

[29] R. Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution (20 December 1905)’, in R. B. Day and D. Gaido (eds.), Witnesses to Permanent Revolution, p. 586.

[30] R. Luxemburg, ‘The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions’, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, pp. 201-2 (my emphasis – MF).

[31] Ibid., p. 203.

[32] R. Luxemburg, ‘The Role of the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat in the Russian Revolution’. Witnesses to Permanent Revolution, p. 566.

[33] Ibid.

[34] The numbers are from C. E. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905-1917: The Development of the Great Schism.

[35] This assessment is made in C. E. Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905-1917: The Development of the Great Schism. Therefore, I will not be distinguishing between mass strike and general strike.

[36] J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 300.

[37] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 301.

[38] Quoted ibid., p. 302.

[39] See ibid., p. 307.

[40] Henriette Roland-Holst (1869-1952) – Dutch writer and socialist, in 1918 a member of the Dutch communist party.

[41] Quoted ibid., p. 308.

[42] R. Luxemburg, ‘The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions’, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, pp. 203-4.

[43] Karl Radek (1885-1939) – joined the SDKPiL in 1904, took part in the 1905 Revolution in Warsaw. Moved to Germany, where he was active in the SPD left. Close to the Bolsheviks, he joined Lenin in Switzerland during the war and took part in the Zimmerwald conference in 1915. Moved to Russia after the October Revolution to play a leading role in the Communist International. He attended the founding congress of the KPD and participated in the Spartacist uprising. Radek sided with Trotsky’s Left Opposition, but eventually capitulated to Stalin. He was nevertheless framed in the Stalinist Purges and executed.

[44] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 298.

[45] Here Luxemburg has added a long footnote with a quote from one of the revisionists which shows their opinion of the mass strike. The footnote has not been included, as it can be found on p. 209 in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks.

[46] R. Luxemburg, ‘The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions’, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, p. 209.

[47] Ibid., p. 214.

[48] Ibid., p. 215.

[49] Ibid.

[50] Ibid., p. 156.

[51] Ibid.

[52] Ibid., pp. 157-8.

[53] Ibid., p. 158.

[54] Ibid., pp. 162-3.

[55] Ibid., p. 176.

[56] Ibid., p. 159.

[57] Ibid., pp. 160-1.

[58] Ibid., p. 184.

[59] Ibid., pp. 180-1.

[60] Ibid., p. 189.

[61] Ibid., p. 200.

[62] Ibid., pp. 187-8.

[63] Ibid., pp. 189-90.

[64] V. I. Lenin, ‘Titbits for the “Newborn” Government’, LCW, Vol. 24, p. 364.

[65] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 333.

[66] L. Trotsky, ‘Luxemburg and the Fourth International’, Writings of Leon Trotsky: 1935-36, p. 30.

[67] Comintern – the Communist (Third) International, founded in 1919.

[68] L. Trotsky, Lessons of October, pp. 59-63.