5. The Quiet Before the Storm

As the radicalising wave from the Russian Revolution and the German strike movement subsided, pressure eased on the leadership of the SPD. They were more than happy that the revolutionary unrest had died down. Now they could return their attention to the parliamentary work that was so dear to them. However, to Luxemburg and the most radicalised layers of the SPD nothing remained as it used to be. They had felt the touch of the Russian Revolution, and had drawn conclusions that were quite different to those drawn by the leaders of the SPD and the trade unions.

In the following years, it wasn’t just the divide between Luxemburg and the party leadership as a whole that widened. In 1910, a break came in her relationship with Karl Kautsky, who had stood with her through thick and thin – particularly in the years building up to the 1905 Revolution.

The period between 1905 and the First World War was fairly calm. During this time, Luxemburg lectured at the new party school, wrote The Accumulation of Capital, and took up the political struggle against imperialism and the rising tide of nationalism at the head of the SPD. This degeneration was ultimately expressed in 1914 in the shameful betrayal of the SPD’s support for the German bourgeoisie in the First World War.

The Party School and ‘The Accumulation of Capital’

Luxemburg was not particularly active in the German party following her return from Russian-occupied Poland. In December 1906, she was sentenced to two months in jail for the speech she had delivered at the Jena congress, which she served until the summer of 1907.

In 1906, the SPD founded a party school in Berlin, with the participants selected by local party organisations and trade unions. They were, supposedly, of a political level such that they ought to be able to educate others. The school opened in November 1906, and from 1 October of the following year, having served her sentence, Luxemburg started teaching there. She taught political economy and economic history, and from 1911 she took over Franz Mehring’s course on the history of socialism. Enjoying the work, Luxemburg was widely praised by the course’s participants, who were by no means belonged to her wing of the party. Based on her lectures in political economy, and the studies which she undertook in preparation for them, she wrote two books: Introduction to Political Economy^[1] and The Accumulation of Capital.

Through her lectures, Luxemburg encountered what she believed to be a shortcoming in the second volume of Marx’s Capital regarding what is called the ‘realisation’ of surplus value. Determined to clarify the question, she put pen to paper. Following on from the Bernstein controversy, any attempt to ‘correct’ Marx, even by someone like Rosa Luxemburg, was certainly treading on thin ice.

Nonetheless, she proceeded to write a book based on the questions prompted by her studies, and the result was The Accumulation of Capital. The book deals with how surplus value is realised rather than how it is produced, a question which she believed Marx had not given a complete answer to. The whole book is based on a theoretical analysis, with little in the way of political conclusions, besides the characterisation she gives of imperialism. Given its highly theoretical character, and its analysis of Marx’s schema from volume two of Capital, it must be said that Luxemburg’s book is by no means easy to follow.

When it first appeared, the book created quite a stir, and it had no shortage of critics. Much of the criticism she faced was published in Vorwärts and other Social-Democratic newspapers. In response to this, whilst in prison, she wrote a shorter book entitled The Accumulation of Capital: An Anti-Critique, which was not published until 1921. Compared to the first book, it is a much easier read.

It seems that the original idea behind The Accumulation of Capital was not simply to address the problem of realisation, but also to examine the causes of imperialism, as the original work’s subtitle indicates: ‘A Contribution to an Economic Explanation of Imperialism’. In a letter to Konstantin Zetkin,^[2] written in November 1911, Luxemburg wrote:

I want to find the cause of imperialism. I am following up the economic aspects of this concept… it will be a strictly scientific explanation of imperialism and its contradictions.^[3]

However, it was the examination of these “economic aspects” that led her to re-evaluate what Marx had written in volume two of Capital, dealing with capital accumulation and what he called extended reproduction. She thus wrote:

I could not succeed in depicting the total process of capitalist production in all its practical relations and with its objective historical limitations with sufficient clarity. Closer examination of the matter then convinced me that it was a question of rather more than the mere art of representation, and that a problem remained to be solved which is connected with the theoretical matter of volume two of Marx’s Capital and at the same time closely connected with present-day imperialist politics and their economic roots.^[4]

She believed that Marx had not fully grasped the question on account of the fact that his work was still unfinished by the time of his death in 1883. It is certainly true that Marx never finished writing the three volumes of Capital, and the manuscripts for the last two volumes that he left behind were edited by Engels. But Luxemburg went a lot further than this. She believed that Marx had in fact been mistaken.

In Capital, Marx had attempted to lay bare the laws of motion of capitalism. The first volume deals with capitalist production and the creation of surplus value. It analyses the processes in the workplace, where commodities are produced, and surplus value arises from the unpaid labour of the working class. The second volume is concerned with the circulation of capital, and deals with market relations, where commodities are sold and surplus value is realised by the capitalists. The third volume, dealing with the capitalist system as a whole, draws all the threads together, and analyses the deepening contradictions of capitalism.

In volume two, Marx explains how surplus value is accumulated by the capitalists. In a letter to Engels, he explained:

In Book 1, lastly, we content ourselves with the assumption that if in the production of surplus value £100 becomes £110, the latter will find already in existence in the market the elements into which it will change once more. But now we investigate the conditions under which these elements are found at hand, namely the social intertwining of different capitals, of component parts of capital and of revenue (=s).^[5]

The question for Marx, which Rosa Luxemburg also took up, was: How do the capitalists sell the commodities they produce, when the working class only receives a part of the total value that it creates? While a portion is taken by the capitalists for their own consumption, where does the extra demand come from for accumulation? How do you resolve this problem of capitalism’s reproduction on an increasingly expanded scale? Clearly, this is a rather complicated question.

To begin with, we need to understand Marx’s approach. In volume one of Capital, he deals with simple reproduction, stripping everything down to its essentials (a ‘pure’ capitalism, so to speak), to show how exploitation exists and how surplus value is created in production, without taking into account production on an ever-expanding scale. Luxemburg quoted Marx:

We here take no account of export trade, by means of which a nation can change articles of luxury either into means of production or means of subsistence, and vice versa. In order to examine the object of our investigation in its integrity, free from all disturbing subsidiary circumstances, we must treat the whole world as one nation, and assume that capitalist production is everywhere established and has possessed itself of every branch of industry.^[6]

To clarify things, Marx assumes that there are only two classes and that capitalism forms a single, closed system. By investing in materials and equipment and purchasing labour-power, the capitalists set the productive process in motion. The end result is that all the value that goes into the production process is transferred to the commodities that are produced, while an additional amount of surplus value is also created. The total value created in production consists of constant capital (raw materials, unfinished goods, depreciation of machinery), which merely transfers its value to the finished product; variable capital (wages), which covers the maintenance of the workers; and surplus value (profit), which belongs to the capitalist.

Having produced surplus value, the commodities need to be sold so as to actually realise a profit. While surplus value is created in production, it is only realised through exchange on the market. In simple reproduction, realisation of surplus value presents no difficulties as the capitalists consume the total surplus value unproductively, namely they expend it on their personal needs and not on accumulating additional capital. The capitalist merely sells his product, pays the wages to his workers, covers his raw material costs and consumes the rest. He uses the revenues to replace the materials and the labour power needed to continue production, and in this way the cycle continues. But in simple reproduction, there is no new investment or increased capacity.

Marx divides the economy into two sectors: Department 1 (producing means of production) and Department 2 (producing means of consumption). If capitalism is to sustain itself, and even develop, it needs to maintain a balance between the two sectors of the economy. Therefore, in simple reproduction, the products of Department 1 must be equal to the constant capital required for the production processes of both Department 1 and Department 2. Were Department 1 to produce more machinery than is required by itself and Department 2, then there would be overproduction, and complete dislocation would ensue. Similarly, too few machines would create shortages and bottlenecks. Likewise, the products of Department 2 must be equal to the wages and surplus value of both departments combined, otherwise overproduction or scarcity would arise in this part of the market.

While this holds up well in regard to simple reproduction, in the case of expanded reproduction, matters become more complicated. No society can produce on the same scale year after year. Accumulation is a law of the capitalist economy. Under expanded reproduction, the surplus value is not, in large measure, unproductively consumed by the capitalist. Rather, it is used instead for expansion. Production proceeds therefore in “not a circle but a spiral”.^[7] Under such circumstances, the production of the means of production increases at a faster rate than the production of the means of consumption.

However, Rosa Luxemburg believed she detected a problem here. According to her, demand enabling such expansion (accumulation) cannot come from the working class, as the latter only needs to buy consumer goods. Nor can it come from the capitalists, who buy both consumer goods and capital goods from one another. She believed that in a closed system, as Marx assumed, capitalist accumulation is impossible. As Luxemburg writes:

Who then could be the buyer and consumer of that portion of commodities whose sale is only the beginning of accumulation? So far as we have seen, it can be neither the workers nor the capitalists.^[8]

She then concedes, however, that the capitalists are consumers of the surplus, who use it for the extension of production and accumulation. But this, she maintains, doesn’t solve the problem, only pushing it further into the future.

After we have assumed that accumulation has started and that the increased production throws an even bigger amount of commodities onto the market the following year, the same question arises again: where do we then find the consumers for this even greater amount of commodities? Will we answer: well, this growing amount of goods will again be exchanged among the capitalists to extend production again, and so forth, year after year?^[9]

She describes this process as a “roundabout”, revolving around itself in “empty space”, which cannot explain accumulation.

As far as Luxemburg is concerned, the only solution to this “realisation problem” lies in the abandonment of the closed model of an economy based only on workers and capitalists. In other words, we need to abandon Marx’s framework of analysis. She proceeds to look at other intermediary layers, such as civil servants, academics, artists, etc., as a possible solution, but discounts them, as their income is only derived from the redistribution of the existing consumption within the closed capitalist economy. She argues instead that the surplus value for accumulation can only be realised by the sale of commodities to non-capitalist countries, outside of the capitalist system. Of course, these areas are eventually conquered and absorbed, but this only reveals the limits of capitalism. This idea also provides Luxemburg with the economic explanation for imperialism.

Thus capitalism expands because of its mutual relationship with non-capitalist social strata and countries, accumulating at their expense and at the same time pushing them aside to take their place. The more capitalist countries participate in this hunting for accumulation areas, the rarer the non-capitalist places still open to the expansion of capital become and the tougher the competition; its raids turn into a chain of economic and political catastrophes: world crises, wars, revolution.^[10]

However, Luxemburg’s criticism of Marx leads her to some dangerous conclusions. She believed that accepting the idea that capitalism creates its own market would rule out capitalist crisis and destroy the very foundations of Marxist economic theory.

First consequence: if capitalist production can act limitlessly as its own consumer, i.e., production and market are identical, it becomes totally impossible to explain the periodic appearance of crises. […]

Second consequence: capitalist accumulation becomes (objectively) limitless once capitalist production has built a sufficient market for itself. As production will still grow, i.e., the productive forces will develop without limit, even when all mankind is divided into capitalists and proletarians, as there is no end to the economic development of capitalism, the one specifically Marxist foundation crumbles.^[11]

She believes that to accept this proposition is to:

[…] take refuge in the mist of pre-Marxist systems and schools which attempted to deduce socialism solely on the basis of the injustice and evils of today’s world and the revolutionary determination of the working classes.^[12]

The fact is, however, that Marx’s analysis is absolutely sound. The expansion of capitalism and the creation of new markets accompanies the accumulation of capital. Contrary to what Luxemburg implies, this is not a concession to Say’s Law, where every seller automatically brings their buyer to market, resulting in equilibrium and therefore the impossibility of crisis. On the contrary, as Marx explained, the very development of capitalism creates its own contradictions. Nevertheless, the capitalist system does in fact develop and expand. New demands are created within the system for capital and consumer goods. With additional constant capital invested in buildings and machines, there is also additional variable capital in the taking on of more workers. They receive wages and this means increased consumption. To admit the growth of one, means to admit the growth of the other. There is a chain of buying and selling, which interact with one another. In so doing, there exists a mutual interconnection between various branches of production, which results in the expansion of the market. But as Marx explains, within these processes there are contradictions. While capitalism strives to overcome them, they produce new contradictions on an ever-higher level. Eventually, the basis is laid for a crisis of overproduction. Overproduction of capital means an overproduction of commodities. This process does not invalidate the Marxist theory of crisis, but rather confirms it.

Luxemburg argues that if capitalism is able to sustain itself, as Marx explained, why is there a need to expand and conquer new markets elsewhere?

Third consequence: when capitalist production builds itself a sufficient market and permits expansion of the total accumulated value, there appears another riddle of modern development: competition for the most distant markets and capital exports, the most dominant feature of modern imperialism. Indeed incomprehensible! Why all this fuss? Why conquer colonies, why the opium wars of the forties and sixties, why the squabble for swamps in the Congo, for Mesopotamian deserts? Capital should stay at home and earn an honest living. Krupp should go along and produce for Thyssen, Thyssen for Krupp, let them invest their capital in their own enterprises and expand them mutually, and so on and so on. The historical movement of capital, and with it modern imperialism, becomes quite incomprehensible.^[13]

But here, Rosa Luxemburg is mixing things up. Marx proved in volume two of Capital that capitalist production is quite conceivable without foreign markets. However, at a certain point, production reaches a level when it can no longer remain within the limits of the nation state. As Lenin explained:

Capitalism’s need for a foreign market is by no means to be explained by the impossibility of realising the product on the home market, but by the circumstance that capitalism is in no position to go on repeating the same processes of production on the former scale, under unchanging conditions (as was the case under pre-capitalist regimes), and that it inevitably leads to an unlimited growth of production which overflows the old, narrow limits of earlier economic units.^[14]

The capitalists cannot exist without accumulating and expanding, on pain of ruin. The inevitable concentration of capital increases the productivity of labour and increases output. Competition compels them to keep expanding production and search for new markets. With the development of capitalism comes the export of capital, which reaches its height in its imperialist stage. The conquest of new markets and sources of raw materials becomes an integral part of the system. Desperate for fields of profitable investment, the capitalists invest in foreign lands, exporting capital to countries where it can yield a higher rate of profit through the super-exploitation of the labour and resources of colonial and semi-colonial nations. However, this frantic search is not about realisation of value in commodities already produced, but which are unable to find a market in the imperialist nations. Rather, it is about exploitation and the search for surplus profit.

While Luxemburg denies the possibility of realisation of surplus value and accumulation within a closed system, Marx states that these are an absolute necessity, although they by no means develop in a harmonious manner. On the contrary, the whole process is saturated with contradictions.

He^[15] cannot therefore admit that the bourgeois mode of production contains within itself a barrier to the free development of the productive forces, a barrier which comes to the surface in crises and, in particular, in overproduction – the basic phenomenon in crises.^[16]

This incidentally answers Luxemburg’s assertion that the ability of capitalism to create markets eradicates crises. It does not. Marx adds:

The contradictions inherent in the circulation of commodities, which are further developed in the circulation of money – and thus, also, the possibilities of crisis – reproduce themselves, automatically, in capital […]

But now the further development of the potential crisis has to be traced – the real crisis can only be educed from the real movement of capitalist production, competition and credit – in so far as crises arise out of the special aspects of capital which are peculiar to it as capital, and not merely comprised in its existence as commodities and money.^[17]

The whole basis of Luxemburg’s criticism of Marx is that capitalism cannot create its own market but must find some external source outside of capitalist commodity production. But this has been shown to be false. If capitalism couldn’t create its own internal market, there would be an immediate and permanent crisis of overproduction from day one. This is clearly not the case. The capitalists overcome this problem by reinvesting the surplus created by the working class.

But even on Luxemburg’s premise, if you could sell the surplus to non-capitalist consumers, you would also have to buy from them. The question is who would buy these imported commodities?

Luxemburg seems to confuse simple reproduction with extended reproduction, and ignores the contradictory dynamics of the system. Capitalism, after all, is a revolutionary system of production that sweeps aside everything in its path. As the Communist Manifesto explained, the capitalist mode of production revolutionised everything, and in the process created a world market.

Despite its revolutionary role, capitalist development is not harmonious, but anarchic and contradictory. As Engels stressed:

Anarchy reigns in socialised production.

But the production of commodities, like every other form of production, has its peculiar, inherent laws inseparable from it; and these laws work, despite anarchy, in and through anarchy. They reveal themselves in the only persistent form of social interrelations, i.e., in exchange, and here they affect the individual producers as compulsory laws of competition.^[18]

The whole rationale of capitalism, its historic mission, is to take the surplus value created from the exploitation of the working class and plough it back into the expansion of industry. This eventually lays the material basis for a classless society, for socialism. The capitalists, under the whip of competition, are forced to raise the productivity of labour, resulting in an enormous development and expansion of the productive forces of industry, technique and science. With the growth of production, we have the expansion of the market, and also of consumption. Both are interconnected. This process takes place according to the laws of capitalist accumulation, which were outlined by Marx.

In An Anti-Critique, Luxemburg returns to her argument from Reform or Revolution? that the breakdown of capitalism forms a necessary link in the argument for socialism. The assertions of her critics – that expanded reproduction occurs within capitalism – in Luxemburg’s view, meant giving up on the idea that socialism is an objective necessity, because it necessarily meant abandoning the idea that capitalism would inevitably break down:

So the ‘experts’ are faced with having to choose between two alternatives. Either – as they deduce from Marx’s models – capitalist production is identical with its market, and the historical materialist explanation for imperialism disappears, or capital accumulation can only take place in so far as customers can be found beyond capitalists and workers, in which case growing sales in non-capitalist strata and countries are the essential precondition for accumulation.^[19]

Rosa Luxemburg makes some simple, but fundamental errors in her search for the answer to the so-called ‘realisation problem’. Capitalists do indeed have to sell in order to realise the surplus value contained in the commodities that have been produced. However, their intention is not the accumulation of money, but rather to throw that money back into circulation in the form of new investments, which can be used to squeeze even more surplus value out of the working class. A hoard of money is not capital in the Marxist sense, but simply a product of money grabbing. Capital, in the sense understood by Marx, is value that is constantly being transformed into means of production for the exploitation of labour power, and thus for the creation of more surplus value. Capital sitting idle and remaining unused for the purpose of exploitation is merely ‘lying fallow’.

The industrial capitalist, according to Marx:

[I]s dominated by the same absolute drive to enrich himself as the hoarder, except that he does not satisfy it in the illusory form of building up a treasure of gold and silver, but in the creation of capital, which is real production.^[20]

“Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie”, explained Marx.^[21]

Where then does Marx’s crisis of overproduction enter the picture? In Anti-Dühring, Engels explained that in every form of class society that has ever existed, the masses have been blighted by “underconsumption”. Under capitalism the working class sells its labour power to the capitalist for wages. However, the secret is that, when put to work, labour power produces more value than its own value. This is the source of surplus value. Put another way, the working day can be divided between necessary labour-time and surplus labour-time. The necessary labour-time is that period when the worker produces value that covers their wages. The period of surplus-time is when the worker produces surplus value. Clearly the worker does not receive enough in wages to buy back the full value of their labour.

However, as explained, the capitalist class overcomes this problem by reinvesting the surplus value into means of production. As long as they continue doing so – even taking loans out in order to build new machines, factories, technology etc., in the hope that by expanding their capacity, they can expand their market share at their competitors’ expense – the expansion phase of the capitalist cycle will continue. In this way, workers are put to work, wages are paid, and so they can purchase consumer goods, while the capitalists purchase means of production. There is no overproduction. The problem is that all the new means of production which have been created must, over time, translate into more consumer goods. But the sales of these goods are limited by the restraints of the market, which in turn is limited by private ownership and production for profit – the majority of consumers are proletarians.

The hoarding of cash, which Luxemburg mistakenly regards as the final purpose of accumulation, only becomes widespread when the contradiction between the build up of productive capacity and a limited consumer market reaches a breaking point. We have a crisis of overproduction. At this point, the capitalists attempt to realise the value of their commodities by cutting prices and pull their capital out of circulation. Everyone attempts to sell their commodities without buying new ones. Circulation breaks down, prices collapse, and enormous amounts of value are destroyed. The crisis sets in.

Capitalist crises do not generally express themselves in the first instance in the consumer goods sector. The gap between this sector and realisation on the market is relatively short, and as such supply and demand maintain the market in relative balance. Furthermore, in general, crises are not triggered by sudden changes in patterns of consumption, which tend to remain stable. Instead, problems almost always initially express themselves in the reproduction process of capital. The industrial capitalist either sells to another capitalist, or a wholesaler if they produce consumer goods. They do not then wait for the consumer goods to fall into the hands of the final consumer before they plough their profits into new investments and new means of production. Only with a delay does the fact of overproduction make itself felt in the chain of production, at which point a crisis breaks out in the exchanges between capitalists. Realising that markets are over-saturated, capitalists demand immediate payment from one another. Having speculatively overinvested, long-term investments are now frozen. The credit markets collapse. From a factor propelling capital circulation forward, credit, as debt, becomes a direct hindrance. And finally, the workers find themselves being fired and their purchasing power now vanishes from the market, causing the consumer goods market to now collapse.

Had Luxemburg had access to Lenin’s writings, she might have come across his polemical response to the Russian Narodniks^[22] on this question, which would have helped to clarify her views. What is striking about the economic theories espoused by the latter is how closely they resemble Rosa Luxemburg’s own theory of capital accumulation. As Lenin explained:

Do we deny that capitalism needs a foreign market? Of course not. But the question of a foreign market has absolutely nothing to do with the question of realisation […] That is nonsense. A foreign market is needed because it is inherent in capitalist production to strive for unlimited expansion […]^[23]

He explained that it was not so much the growth of consumption as the demands of production that expands the home market. Therefore, it is not necessary for a ‘closed’ capitalist economy to look ceaselessly for consumers beyond its borders, in the non-capitalist world. Capital accumulation itself creates new markets, although not without contradictions, as new, more powerful productive forces periodically produce greater, more gigantic crises of overproduction.

We can then see how imperialism is not fundamentally a product of the capitalists being unable to realise the value of their surplus of commodities, without which capital cannot accumulate, and that they therefore scour the world for foreign markets. First and foremost, imperialism – the highest stage of capitalism – is about the export of capital. That is to say, it is about building factories and new productive capacity in countries with a plentiful supply of cheap raw materials and labour power, and so where super profits can be made. Connected to this export of capital are other questions, such as the securing of maritime routes and sources of raw materials, colonial expansion, etc.

In chapter two, we described how and why Rosa Luxemburg bent the stick too far in her polemic with Bernstein, asserting that capitalism would meet with a final crisis, which would result in economic collapse. The same error in method that led Luxemburg to such a conclusion is at the heart of the misunderstanding that led her to the ‘correction’ of Marx that we have just examined. However, since 1915, the ideas contained in The Accumulation of Capital have had little impact. With the passage of time, reality has falsified Luxemburg’s theory: capitalism today has settled in every part of the globe, and has not automatically collapsed in one great, final crisis. As Marx showed, expanded reproduction is simply an objective part of a closed capitalist system, and it has proceeded and continues to proceed without capitalism itself collapsing. The final overthrow of capitalism is not an automatic outcome of the purely economic development of capitalism, but rather is fundamentally dependent on the outcome of the class struggle.

A couple of years after the publication of Luxemburg’s book, Lenin wrote Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. In it, he makes no mention of Luxemburg’s book, and yet he disproves some of her core arguments. Nevertheless, both Lenin and Luxemburg agreed that imperialism was an unavoidable consequence of the development of capitalism. This view was in sharp contrast with Kautsky’s theory of ‘ultra-imperialism’, which stated that capitalism was embarking on a more peaceful and democratic stage beyond imperialism, simply by way of regulation. However, Lenin strongly disagreed with the fundamental idea contained in Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital, when he explained that imperialism was not characterised simply by the export of commodities, but rather by the export of capital. In Lenin’s opinion, capitalism was not destined to simply collapse of its own accord, but needed to be consciously overthrown.

In Imperialism, Lenin gave a scientific and solidly-founded characterisation of imperialism and its causes, showing how, hand-in-hand, finance capital and the state conquer raw materials, markets, and spheres of influence, using both economic and military means.

Despite her errors on this question, the Stalinists have unjustly picked out The Accumulation of Capital as the source of all of Luxemburg’s mistakes. They have claimed that her ideas regarding the collapse of capitalism necessarily led her to develop a ‘theory of spontaneity’, which in turn caused her to reject the building of the revolutionary party. The ultra-left Ruth Fischer,^[24] one of the main architects of the Communist Party’s crusade against Luxemburg, put it this way:

The German party based its theory and practice in the main on Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of accumulation, and this is the fount of all errors, all theories of spontaneity, all erroneous conceptions of organisational problems.^[25]

As we have already discussed, there is no truth in the Stalinist claim that Luxemburg was a fatalist: by no means did she stand with her arms crossed waiting for capitalism to collapse of its own volition. On the contrary, she worked to prepare Social Democracy for the coming revolution, and would later begin the building of the German Communist Party. Despite the disagreements between Lenin and Luxemburg, they wrote a joint amendment for the World Congress of the Second International, which specifically dealt with imperialism. That is to say, as far as imperialism was concerned, they were in perfect agreement as to how the workers’ movement ought to respond.

Luxemburg and Women’s Suffrage

Before discussing the evolution of Rosa Luxemburg’s relationship with the SPD – its leadership and Kautsky in particular – between the 1905 Revolution and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, it is worth taking a short detour to discuss Luxemburg’s position on the women’s question. The reason why this detour is short is that, in truth, Luxemburg wrote very little on the question, although some of her more significant remarks on it belong to this period. When Rosa Luxemburg arrived in Germany in the 1890s, the SPD bureaucracy attempted to safely deal with this youthful firebrand by directing her exclusively towards work among women. But, as we saw, she was not to be so easily pigeonholed. She instead threw herself fully into the most important struggle of the day, which at that time was the struggle against revisionism. But, certainly, none of this is to say that she believed the women’s question was unimportant. In November 1918, she wrote the following in a letter to her close friend Clara Zetkin who was responsible for this question in the SPD:

I wait with longing for your article – [keep it] quite short! Don’t put in a lot of work. We want to have your name [in our paper] right away. Write something perhaps about women, that is so important now, and none of us here understand anything about it.^[26]

A speech at a social-democratic women’s conference in May 1912 in Stuttgart offers one of the few occasions in which Luxemburg put forward her ideas on the women’s question publicly. Speaking on ‘women’s suffrage and the class struggle’, she unconditionally supported the demand for a woman’s right to vote, showing how the women’s struggle could not be separated from the class struggle:

A hundred years ago, the Frenchman Charles Fourier, one of the first great prophets of socialist ideals, wrote these memorable words: In any society, the degree of female emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation. This is completely true for our present society. The current mass struggle for women’s political rights is only an expression and a part of the proletariat’s general struggle for liberation. In this lies its strength and its future. Because of the female proletariat, general, equal, direct suffrage for women would immensely advance and intensify the proletarian class struggle. This is why bourgeois society abhors and fears women’s suffrage. And this is why we want and will achieve it. Fighting for women’s suffrage, we will also hasten the coming of the hour when the present society falls in ruins under the hammer strokes of the revolutionary proletariat.^[27]

To Luxemburg, the struggle for women’s suffrage was inseparably linked to the general struggle for a socialist revolution. She was therefore quite explicitly hostile to bourgeois women whom, she believed, would stand on the opposite side of the struggle to working-class women:

The women of the property-owning classes will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.^[28]

Luxemburg sharply demarcated between the struggle of working women and the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois women’s movement:

In truth, our state is interested in keeping the vote from working women and from them alone. It rightly fears they will threaten the traditional institutions of class rule, for instance militarism (of which no thinking proletarian woman can help being a deadly enemy), monarchy, the systematic robbery of duties and taxes on groceries, etc. Women’s suffrage is a horror and abomination for the present capitalist state because behind it stand millions of women who would strengthen the enemy within, i.e., revolutionary Social Democracy. If it were a matter of bourgeois ladies voting, the capitalist state could expect nothing but effective support for the reaction. Most of those bourgeois women who act like lionesses in the struggle against ‘male prerogatives’ would trot like docile lambs in the camp of conservative and clerical reaction if they had suffrage. Indeed, they would certainly be a good deal more reactionary than the male part of their class. Aside from the few who have jobs or professions, the women of the bourgeoisie do not take part in social production. They are nothing but co-consumers of the surplus value their men extort from the proletariat. They are parasites of the parasites of the social body. And consumers are usually even more rabid and cruel in defending their ‘right’ to a parasite’s life than the direct agents of class rule and exploitation.^[29]

The Break with Kautsky

The year 1905 made a deep impression on Rosa Luxemburg. On the surface, however, nothing had changed – Luxemburg continued to enjoy a good relationship with the leadership of the SPD, and her Sunday dinners at the home of the Kautsky family continued. Nonetheless, disillusionment with the leadership of the SPD and with Karl Kautsky in particular had begun to develop. In early 1907, she wrote to Clara Zetkin:

Since my return from Russia I feel rather isolated… I feel the pettiness and the hesitancy of our party régime more clearly and more painfully than ever before. However, I can’t get so excited about the situation as you do, because I see with depressing clarity that neither things nor people can be changed – until the whole situation has changed, and even then we shall just have to reckon with inevitable resistance if we want to lead the masses on. I have come to that conclusion after mature reflection. The plain truth is that August [Bebel], and still more so the others, have completely pledged themselves to parliament and parliamentarianism, and whenever anything happens which transcends the limits of parliamentary action they are hopeless – no, worse than hopeless, because they then do their utmost to force the movement back into parliamentary channels, and they will ferociously defame as ‘an enemy of the people’ anyone who dares to venture beyond their own limits. I feel that those of the masses who are organised in the party are tired of parliamentarianism, and would welcome a new line in party tactics, but the party leaders and still more of the upper stratum of opportunist editors, deputies, and trade union leaders are like an incubus. We must protest vigorously against this general stagnation, but it is quite clear that in doing so we shall find ourselves against the opportunists as well as the party leaders and August. As long as it was a question of defending themselves against Bernstein and his friends, August and Co. were glad of our assistance, because they were shaking in their shoes. But when it is a question of launching an offensive against opportunism then August and the rest are with Ede [Bernstein], Vollmar, and David against us. That’s how I see matters, but the chief thing is to keep your chin up and not get too excited about it. Our job will take years.^[30]

Rosa Luxemburg could already see quite clearly how the party leadership had gone over to reformism. Nevertheless, she persisted in her attempts to ‘influence’ the party, without yet organising an opposition around herself, neither as a network nor as a firmer organisation. The process that Luxemburg described in the letter to Zetkin only worsened in the years that followed. The reformism of the leadership would become increasingly flavoured with nationalism and an opportunistic adaptation to the imperialist interests of the German bourgeoisie.

In early 1907, the German government called an election. The ‘Hottentot Election’, as Luxemburg and others called it, was called as a result of questions relating to Germany’s colonial possessions and foreign policy. The sitting government succeeded in making the election a nationalistic question of securing Germany’s imperialist, colonial interests. They intended to use this as a means to attack the SPD, which was weak on this point. For the first time in its history, the SPD experienced a decline in votes, falling from eighty-one seats in the Reichstag to forty-three. The party leadership obsessed over this electoral defeat. In its wake, they toned down the party’s revolutionary rhetoric and made concessions to nationalism in an effort to win back the votes they had lost.

This further accelerated the process of bureaucratisation and degeneration of the party. Revisionism, to which parts of the party apparatus had secretly converted, began spreading. The apparatus was increasingly expanded, the leaders having by and large given up on the idea of revolution, and having become completely absorbed in day-to-day work. To them, building the party became the goal in and of itself. Revolution, meanwhile, was viewed simply as a force of destruction. The creeping process of degeneration went on over a long period of time, through an accumulation of numerous small changes. Officially, the party resolutions were still binding and sounded quite radical, but reformism permeated the party’s practical work and the outlook of its leadership. The extent to which reformism and bureaucratisation had penetrated the party would only become fully apparent when a sharp turn in the situation – namely, the outbreak of the First World War – ripped the cloak away from the party leaders’ opportunism.

Rosa Luxemburg was working jointly with Karl Kautsky on Die Neue Zeit, when the two editors visited Lake Geneva in Easter of 1907. Their trip was designed to allow the two of them to work on the journal’s politics, while allowing Luxemburg the opportunity to get much needed rest. It was here that Luxemburg’s disillusionment with Karl Kautsky began setting in. Returning from the trip, she described Kautsky as “heavy, dull, unimaginative, and ponderous”, and his ideas as, “cold, pedantic, and doctrinaire”.^[31] That her regard for Kautsky had begun declining was obvious from her letters at this time. Only later did she realise that this was the beginning of the end of their friendship. From 1908 onward, Sunday dinners at the Kautsky household increasingly became boring to Luxemburg. She increasingly regarded their conversation as little more than gossip. In June 1908, she wrote the following to a friend:

Soon I shall be quite unable to read anything written by Karl Kautsky… It is like a disgusting series of spiders’ webs… which can only be washed away by the mental bath of reading Marx himself…^[32]

In late 1909, the political situation started brightening up somewhat: the right-wing bloc that had won the election in 1907 began falling apart. In Prussia, the so-called ‘three-class’ electoral system meant that the SPD received a mere six seats for its 600,000 votes, while the conservatives with 418,000 votes had received 212 seats. Dissatisfaction with this system had been rife for some time, and in 1910 a draft law for electoral reform was announced. However, it didn’t in the least bit alter the electoral status of the great majority of voters. Rather, it simply moved a few groups – primarily academics – from the lowest voter class to the middle. The Social Democrats subjected the reform law to heavy criticism, and there was widespread discontent with the electoral reform law among the membership of the SPD. At the regional party congress in Prussia, where the question was debated, the party leadership suggested an alliance with different ‘progressive’ liberal groups in the Reichstag. But the mood among Prussian SPD members was far more radical. They regarded it as futile to conduct the campaign through a parliament that gave the Social Democrats such lousy representation. The congress, therefore, rejected the idea of an alliance with the liberals. In place of parliamentary manoeuvring, the congress decided to launch an “offensive for electoral rights” – i.e., a mass campaign to force through real electoral reform. The liberals were moving quickly to the right, while the ranks of the SPD were rapidly shifting to the left. The executive committee of the SPD was thus left more or less isolated, along with the revisionist wing of the party which had also proposed cooperation with the liberals.

The release of the draft reform law by the government fired the starting pistol on what became a continuous series of protests and demonstrations that would gather every Sunday. The proposal was then adopted by the Prussian Landtag in March, but the Upper House proved unable to agree on the wording and, in the end, the reform was retracted all together. Meanwhile, the demonstrations organised by the social democrats continued unabated. Each Sunday, the protests grew, and there were clashes with the police. A number of strikes broke out in the mining and construction industries, organised by the trade unions. By 1910 almost 370,000 workers were involved in strike action, and in March of that year the political and economic demands started to merge.

Luxemburg was politically reinvigorated. She threw all her effort into the movement, writing articles and conducting a three-month-long speaking tour all over Germany. Given these circumstances, she paused her work at the party school. At the mass meetings at which she appeared, she was greeted with overwhelming enthusiasm.

As the movement reawakened, Luxemburg penned an article titled ‘The Next Step’ where she outlined what she believed were the next steps that the SPD ought to take. She encouraged the party to fan the flames of the strike movement, helping it advance and ensuring that it did not end in disillusionment. The next step of the party ought to have been to push forward towards a mass strike. Luxemburg called on the party to raise the political demand for a republic in order to radicalise the movement:

Nevertheless, if the latest impressive street demonstrations already signify a welcome innovation in the outward forms of Social Democracy’s struggle, and if at the same time they have set off a most powerful mass struggle for the right to vote in Prussia, then they for their part impose certain obligations on the party to whose initiative and leadership they are attributable. In view of the mass movement it has unleashed, our party must have a clear and definite plan of how it intends to continue the mass action which it has already begun. Street demonstrations, like military demonstrations, are usually only a prelude to the battle. There are cases in which demonstrations alone attain their end by intimidating the enemy. But apart from the undeniable fact that the enemy, in this case the unified reaction of the Junkers,^[33] haute bourgeoisie and monarchists in Prussia and Germany, is not in the least inclined to give in, demonstrations can exert an effective pressure only when they are backed up by the firm resolve and readiness to resort, if necessary, to stronger methods of doing battle. Above all we must be clear about what we intend to do if the street demonstrations prove inadequate to achieve their direct end.

The necessity of complete lucidity and determination in this regard has been proven by the party’s experience until now. Two years ago we made the first attempts at street demonstrations in Prussia. Even then the masses proved equal to the situation, and enthusiastically followed the Social-Democratic rallying cry. Among the aroused masses one could sense a fresh breeze, a hope for new and more effective forms of struggle, a resolve not to be intimidated or to shrink from any sacrifice. And what was the end result? The party advanced no new demands and the action was not extended and continued. On the contrary, the masses were tacitly warned to desist, the general agitation ebbed away forthwith, and the whole affair in fact ran aground.

This first experiment might be an indication and a warning to our party that mass demonstrations have their own logic and their own psychology; to take these into account is an urgent necessity for politicians who wish to master them. For the expressions of the masses’ will in the political struggle cannot be held at one and the same level artificially or for any length of time, nor can they be encapsulated in one and the same form. They must be intensified, concentrated and must take on new and more effective forms. Once unleashed, the mass action must go forward. And if at the acknowledged moment the leading party lacks the resolve to provide the masses with the necessary watchwords, then they are inevitably overcome by a certain disillusionment, their courage vanishes and the action collapses of itself.^[34]

She submitted her article to the editorial board of the party newspaper, Vorwärts, as she believed that the official party organ was precisely the most appropriate place to discuss the tactic of the mass strike. But on 2 March, the editors returned her article with a note stating that it had been decided that the question of mass strike should not be discussed at this time:

We have regretfully to decline your article since, in accordance with an agreement between the party executive, the executive commission of the Prussian provincial organisation (of the SPD), and the editor, the question of mass strike shall not be elaborated in Vorwärts for the time being.^[35]

Luxemburg then submitted her article to Die Neue Zeit, where her articles were usually given precedence. Karl Kautsky responded with kind words about how “beautiful and important” he found the article, and how he would very much like to publish it, albeit with his own answer to those points in her article that he disagreed with. However, he point-blank refused to publish that part of the article that raised the demand for a republic, which he was emphatically against. He claimed that the demand for a republic was an entirely new question, one which the SPD had not yet discussed, and which they therefore could not express a public position on. In the end, Kautsky returned Luxemburg’s article, explaining that he could not publish an article that encouraged workers to use the mass strike, which he claimed would be doomed to inevitable failure. Having been rejected by Kautsky, Luxemburg immediately sent it on to several other newspapers, and in March it was printed in Konrad Haenisch’s^[36] paper in Dortmund, Arbeiterzeitung.

While Luxemburg travelled across the country speaking at mass meetings, Kautsky published his response to her article in his own piece, titled ‘Now What?’ Kautsky completely disagreed with Luxemburg’s analysis of the situation. Among other things, he wrote:

The excitement of the masses is not nearly sufficient for such an extreme course… but it was certainly great enough for the stimulus provided by Comrade Luxemburg to produce isolated attempts, experiments with the mass strike which were bound to fail.^[37]

Kautsky’s opinion was that the protests could continue, but that the party should not encourage them. Instead, the party should focus on the coming election for the Reichstag, and the radicalisation of the workers could be harnessed to boost the vote for the SPD. For Kautsky, this would form a stepping stone to an absolute SPD majority, which for him was a stepping stone towards the revolution itself.

Rosa Luxemburg was furious with Kautsky, writing, “[Karl Kautsky] this coward who only has courage enough to attack others from behind, but I’ll deal with him”.^[38] The final break between the two had now come.

From now on, three clearly distinct wings could be recognised inside the SPD: a right wing, made up of the party leadership; a centre, led by Kautsky; and a revolutionary left wing led, among others, by Luxemburg. This left would go on to form the core of the Spartacus League. When Luxemburg returned from her tour, she launched her counter-attack against Kautsky. A polemic now began in Die Neue Zeit and would last for a number of weeks.

The revisionists rejoiced. What had been the left wing of the party was now split. In open defiance of party decisions, the SPD leadership in the southern German state of Baden, who were notorious for their class collaboration in the federal parliament, proclaimed that they would continue to vote in favour of federal budgets. The revisionists were on the offensive and launched an attack on what they now saw as the divided ‘Marxist wing’. Kautsky attempted to convince Luxemburg to set aside their disagreements in order to jointly combat the attacks of the opportunists. Luxemburg, however, refused. In her opinion, the time for sweeping disagreements under the carpet was over. From now on, her critique became particularly focused on Kautsky and the ‘centre’ of the party. This certainly did not help to mend her relationship with Kautsky. Not always elegantly, Kautsky tried to paint himself as the true heir of Marx against Luxemburg’s radical left wing. He wrote:

When we look at the Duchies of Baden and Luxemburg on the map we find that between them lies Trier, the city of Karl Marx. If from there you go left across the border, you come to Luxemburg. If you turn sharp right and cross the Rhine, you reach Baden. The situation on the map is a symbol for the situation of German Social Democracy today.^[39]

To Luxemburg, the movement for electoral rights in Prussia and the situation in Baden were not two separate questions. She didn’t simply see the behaviour of the Baden opportunists as a question of the violation of party discipline. For her, the opportunism in southern Germany was inseparably connected with the overall state of the party. It was obvious to Rosa Luxemburg that all Kautsky and the party leadership had to offer about revolution were empty words. When their rhetoric was tested by events, it collapsed like a house of cards. Sharp criticism had to be directed at both the right and the so-called ‘centre’. Luxemburg could already see how the so-called ‘Marxism’ of Karl Kautsky was little more than a theoretical cover for the reformism as practiced by the party leadership.

In the conflict between Luxemburg and Kautsky, most foreign social democrats were on the side of Kautsky. This even extended to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Indeed, right up until 1914, Lenin regarded Kautsky as the foremost defender of Marxism in the International. But Lenin was geographically far removed from Germany. At such a distance, he was unable to discern the degeneration of the German party, and of Kautsky specifically. On the other hand, Luxemburg could witness this degeneration at close quarters, and was therefore able to assess the process much more clearly. When the final betrayal came in 1914, Lenin readily admitted that he had been wrong, and that Luxemburg had been right all along. His critique of Kautsky was all the more bitter as a result. In a letter to Shlyapnikov dated 27 October 1914, Lenin wrote:

Rosa Luxemburg was right when she wrote, long ago, that Kautsky has the “subservience of a theoretician” – servility, in plainer language, servility to the majority of the Party, to opportunism. Just now there is nothing in the world more harmful and dangerous for the ideological independence of the proletariat than this rotten self-satisfaction and disgusting hypocrisy of Kautsky, who wants to smother and cover up everything, to tranquillise the awakened conscience of the workers by sophistries and pseudo-scientific chatter. If Kautsky succeeds in this, he will become the main representative of bourgeois corruption in the working-class movement.^[40]

Luxemburg Alone

Rosa Luxemburg had criticised the party leadership before her break with Kautsky. The final break between her and Bebel – who until that point had fought her politically, but had nonetheless treated her well – came during the so-called Second Moroccan Crisis.^[41]

In April 1911, the French government sent troops to Morocco, where it had imperialist interests, in order to assist the regime in defeating a rebellion. The German government attempted to exploit the situation to boost its own presence in the region, whilst also putting France’s alliance with Great Britain to the test. The Germans first sent a gunboat, the SMS Panter, and then a cruiser to the harbour of Agadir. The French and British responded by rearming.

It was an event of international significance. As such, the secretary of the International, Camille Huysmans, circulated a notice to the parties of the International, requesting that they send their reactions to these events. It was also proposed that, should it come to it, a meeting be called so that the International could issue a joint response to the threat of war by the imperialist governments.

With Bebel absent from Berlin, an SPD secretary named Molkenbuhr answered Huysmans’ call. His answer, however, was evasive. The German party leadership was absorbed in the coming Reichstag election, and their biggest fear was that a mood of national chauvinism might cut across the party, hurting its electoral prospects as it had in 1907. The party leadership therefore attempted to pass the question by in silence. They hoped that this expression of German imperialism might pass harmlessly by, without doing their electoral chances any harm. They therefore told Huysmans that they did not believe the question of Morocco should be allowed to overshadow domestic political questions, and as such it would be unnecessary for the International to call a meeting to discuss it.

Members of the SPD, however, were not prepared to let this pass in silence. In Berlin in particular, meetings were held and were well attended. A strong mood of opposition was expressed against the aggression of the German government. In the final week of July the crisis was approaching a climax, yet the party leadership still had not expressed any clear position on it.

As the representative of the SDKPiL’s international bureau, Luxemburg also received a copy of Molkenbuhr’s letter. For her, this was a principal question. The party had a duty to expose the imperialist politics of the German government and to oppose it.

On 24 July she decided to publish the correspondence between Huysmans and the Executive Committee of the SPD. In it, she severely criticised the party leaders for hoping to avoid the Moroccan question merely for the sake of an electoral campaign. She was emphatic that seats and votes for the SPD were not the priority. On the contrary, the electoral campaign itself ought to be a means for spreading social-democratic propaganda, above all on the crucial question of Morocco. The party ought to be resolute in its condemnation of German imperialism:

Finally, the position of the Party Executive exhibits a general conception of the electoral struggle that does not appear entirely satisfactory to us. They say that we should restrict our agitation exclusively to matters of domestic policy, to questions of taxation and social legislation. But financial policy, the rule of the Junkers and the stagnation of social reform are organically bound up with militarism, naval policy, colonial policy, and with personal rule and its foreign policy. Any artificial separation of these spheres can only present an incomplete and one-sided picture of the state of our public affairs. Above all we should propagate socialist enlightenment in the Reichstag elections, but this we cannot do if we restrict our criticism to Germany’s domestic circumstances, if we fail to depict the great international relationships, the growing dominance of capitalism, in all parts of the world, the obvious anarchy in every corner of the globe, and the major role played by colonial and global policy in this process. We must conduct our electoral agitation not as an abridged political primer reduced to a few simple points now ‘in vogue’, but as the socialist world view in all its comprehensiveness, richness and diversity.^[42]

As Luxemburg made their correspondence public, the Executive Committee could no longer evade a discussion, and so they decided to go on the offensive. Launching a campaign aimed at Luxemburg personally, they hoped to divert the discussion at the party congress away from themselves and the principled questions involved, and make it instead about Rosa Luxemburg, her disloyalty, and her breach of party discipline. Luxemburg, however, would not back down from her criticism of the Executive Committee and the fact that they had tried to bury any discussion on such an essential question inside the party. A majority of the party membership, including even those on the right wing of the party, agreed with her critique of the leadership. But the strength of support for her position among the membership only increased the hostility of the party leadership, leaving her even more isolated.

Her opponents in the party now counted all of those who had been considered radicals back in 1909; the entire editorial board of Die Neue Zeit; her colleagues of the party school and, naturally enough, the Executive Committee and most of the party apparatus. Luxemburg was more or less alone.

The Moroccan Crisis ended with German imperialism pulling back from the brink. However, it did manage to force through the demand that part of French-occupied Congo be ceded to German colonial control. Despite the fact that war was seemingly avoided, the crisis actually elevated the threat of war between the imperialist powers of Europe. Animosity between French and English imperialism on the one hand and German imperialism on the other was raised to a fever pitch.

The Reichstag elections of January 1912 represented another milestone on the SPD’s path towards reformism. The vote for the party increased from 3,250,000 to 4,250,000, making it by far the largest party in Germany, with more than double the parliamentary seats as its closest competitor, ‘The Catholic Centre’. But in the second round of the election, the SPD entered into an electoral alliance with the Progressive Party and the liberals. This allowed the progressives to win seats thanks to SPD votes, but it by no means provided any additional votes for the SPD.

Luxemburg criticised this alliance in no uncertain terms. For her, that the proletarian movement must maintain its class independence was paramount. Before the election, she had warned the SPD not to trust the right-wing parties. After the election it was quite obvious that the liberals had done nothing to live up to their agreement with the social democrats. But the electoral success of the SPD – the party’s fraction in the Reichstag more than doubled – meant that the influence of the parliamentarians, who were increasingly being corrupted by the milieu in which they worked, became stronger, further accelerating the party’s reformist degeneration.

Luxemburg’s disappointment in the leadership grew, but she had not yet drawn the conclusion that flowed from this: that it was necessary to build an organised revolutionary wing. In the whole period prior to the outbreak of the First World War, the left wing of the SPD consisted of nothing more than a loose gathering of individuals.

Nonetheless, the germ of what would become the Spartacus League was forming precisely in this period. After the 1912 election, Luxemburg was surprised to receive the support of Franz Mehring, who had originally favoured the alliance with the liberals but who had grown critical of it. Here, the core of a new left wing in the SPD began crystallising. Luxemburg and Mehring had both written regularly for the Leipziger Volkszeitung, but when its editor changed, they soon found their articles were often rejected, or else had most of their radical passages deleted. As such, in late 1913 they began publishing the Sozialdemokratische Korrespondenz in cooperation with Marchlewski, which came out on a weekly basis. The paper would usually contain an editorial written by either Luxemburg or Mehring, and an economic note by Marchlewski. The initial idea was that the paper wouldn’t have a large circulation, and that instead, local party newspapers could borrow articles from it and publish them themselves. In practice things didn’t work out this way. Only four local newspapers printed articles from their paper.

In 1913, Bebel died and was replaced as party chairman by Friedrich Ebert, who would later become one of the principal gravediggers of the German Revolution. The most pressing political questions of the day were imperialism and the impending war, which now towered on the horizon. The entire party, including its left wing, now seemed to be gripped by a kind of apathy and disillusionment. Rosa Luxemburg refused to succumb to this mood. At a meeting on 16 September 1913 in Bockenheim, Luxemburg spoke for two hours on the struggle against imperialism. Among the many things that she touched upon, she also spoke out against the war and called for the workers to fight any attempt to drag them into it. In her speech, she is reported to have said the following: “If they think we are going to lift the weapons of murder against our French and other brethren, then we shall shout: ‘We will not do it’.”^[43] This supposed utterance became the foundation of the public prosecutor’s charge against Luxemburg for “public disobedience of the law”. The case was heard at a court in Frankfurt on 20 February 1914.

Taking the stand in court, Luxemburg turned her defence into an attack against her accusers in the best revolutionary tradition. The fiery political speech that she delivered from the dock became an instant classic with SPD members, despite the leadership’s opposition. The speech was printed in all the major party organs, including those that had refused to publish her articles of late. She again went on a tour, speaking at packed party meetings. Finally, she was convicted and sentenced to one year in prison. Her appeal against the sentence was rejected in October 1914, and in early 1915 she was brought in by authorities to serve out her sentence. After her initial conviction, the public prosecutors decided to comb through her speeches looking for further grounds to increase her sentence. They decided that she had also committed the crime of violating the honour of the German army by claiming that German soldiers were systematically maltreated. The lawsuit was supposed to be heard from 29 June to 3 July. The judge, however, decided to postpone the hearing because thousands of soldiers volunteered to testify to their ill treatment! The socialist press widely distributed the testimonies of these soldiers, exposing the German state. In the end, the case caused such an embarrassment for the government and the general staff that it was dropped entirely.

In the first six months of 1914, political and economic unrest flared up across Germany and Russia. The heavy weight of disillusionment was cast aside, and a new fighting spirit gripped the working class. Luxemburg once more posed the question of launching a mass strike – now as a weapon in the struggle against imperialism.

Polish and Russian Split

Since the 1905 Revolution, as well as being active in the SPD, Luxemburg had also participated in the Polish and Russian movements, regularly writing articles for their various party newspapers. However, she was increasingly withdrawing from the work of the Polish party. She did not participate in the Polish party congress of 1908, despite the fact that she did a lot of preparatory political work for it and that Jogiches had thoroughly discussed his main speech with her. Still, until 1911 she had been the main point of reference on theoretical questions in the Polish movement. She was the foremost writer for the Polish party’s theoretical magazine, Przeglad Socjaldemokratyczny, and was Leo Jogiches’ main source of advice on editorial questions. All articles went through her. Her role was nothing short of essential:

To a large extent the reputation of the SDKPiL in the Russian party and beyond was due to the quality of this review; for a time it was probably the most interesting and stimulating of all Socialist publications in the Second International. The subjects treated ranged as widely as those in Neue Zeit but without the latter’s pedantry and often excessively academic atmosphere. The Lenin–Trotsky debate on the nature of the revolution took place partly in the pages of the Przeglad Socjaldemokratyczny in the course of 1908.^[44]

But her advice and opinions were increasingly ignored by the Polish party leadership, and her commitment was declining. In 1911 the Polish party split. This appeared, above all, to arise from discontent with the leadership, and especially the methods employed by Jogiches, who was regarded by many of the party’s branches as having a dictatorial approach and a lack of regard for internal party democracy.^[45] Following the split, Luxemburg’s involvement in the party declined further. In 1913 she published only one article in Polish. After that, she wrote none at all. In November 1916 the two Polish groups would reunite, and at the end of the war the left wing of the PPS would also fuse with them to form the Polish Communist Party. Both fusions took place with Luxemburg’s approval, but she was not directly involved.

The good relationship that Luxemburg and Lenin had established in Finland after the 1905 Russian Revolution became closer still in the following years. Its culmination was a joint amendment that the two revolutionaries submitted to the world congress of the Second International in 1907.

Though Rosa Luxemburg personally stood outside the Russian organisation and had no direct voice in its policies or feuds, her contact with the Bolsheviks and particularly with Lenin was not confined to public speeches of support. The consensus reached during the long sessions with him, Zinoviev, and Bogdanov at Kuokkala in the summer of 1906 were confirmed by the meetings in London and at the International congress at Stuttgart the following August.^[46]

But when the Russian party experienced its final split between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in 1912, Luxemburg and Lenin once more found themselves at odds. Jogiches and Luxemburg were against the split. Indeed, Luxemburg had a deep-rooted opposition to any kind of split in the social-democratic movement. Luxemburg wished to preserve party unity above all else. In her eyes, a split would be a sectarian mistake that would isolate revolutionaries from the masses. Lenin, however, was convinced that this split was absolutely necessary. A clear theoretical line of demarcation separated the reformists and revolutionaries in Russia. The revolutionary party had to be built on a solid theoretical foundation. This was not possible in unity with the Mensheviks, who constantly attempted to water down the party’s revolutionary programme and to dissolve the party into an alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie.

During the 1912 split, Luxemburg was involved in a particular incident involving a sum of money that belonged to the Russian party. The fund was under the control of Kautsky, Mehring and Clara Zetkin and, naturally, all the factions in the Russian party tried to make a claim on it. As a contact between the German and Russian social democrats, Luxemburg was consulted about what to do with the money. She advised that it should not be given to the Bolsheviks, and that advice was followed. As could be imagined, such a decision provoked an angry reaction from Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Nevertheless, Luxemburg’s advice should not be read as a sign of her political support for Menshevism. On the contrary, the Mensheviks continued to regard Luxemburg as an ally of the Bolsheviks:

To the Mensheviks Rosa Luxemburg was still quite simply Lenin’s most active partisan in Germany […] As late as February 1912, when relations between Lenin and Jogiches had already been broken off, Rosa Luxemburg still got Lenin’s emissary Poletaev an introduction to Kautsky. Most important of all, she begged Jogiches on at least two occasions not to use the money as blackmail […] As we shall see, she was not prepared to follow Jogiches into unbridled condemnation of Lenin after the dust-up in Paris,^[47] not even when Lenin attacked her openly and specifically in 1912.^[48]

The disagreements between Lenin and Luxemburg were several. Lenin moved to Krakow and supported the splitters from the Polish party, whilst at the same time Luxemburg did what she could to unify the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks into a single party again. Through the International Socialist Bureau she pressured the Bolsheviks in order to unify the two wings. Here, for the first time in four years – and for the last – she agreed with Kautsky. The question of the money and of her agreement with Kautsky has later been used by the Stalinists to claim that she was on the side of the Mensheviks. But despite the disagreements between Lenin and Luxemburg, contact between the two was not broken off and they would, for instance, write in each other’s press. As Nettl explained:

Certainly they were close collaborators during these years, and much of their mutual respect was to survive their renewed political enmity. […]

SDKPiL policy […] was to support the Bolsheviks within the Russian party; that is, on all issues save those which patently lead to organisational disintegration – the much feared split.^[49]

And further:

It should therefore not be wholly surprising to find that in 1912 personal contact between Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin still existed. At the end of February that year Lenin came to Berlin personally to succeed where Poletaev had failed, and carried out an assault on Kautsky for further payments of the trustee moneys. He took the opportunity of calling upon Rosa Luxemburg several times in two days. “Lenin was here yesterday and has been back four times today. I like talking to him, he is clever and educated – I like seeing his ugly mug… He found Mimi [Rosa’s cat, whose approval of visitors was an essential preliminary to her mistress’s sympathy] very imposing, a barskii kot [a lordly cat].” It was not until the row in the International Bureau at the end of 1913 that personal animosity really grew between them.^[50]

The International Socialist Bureau processed the Russian organisational question in preparation of the coming world congress, where the question was due to be discussed by the whole International. But the Russian party question was never destined to be discussed by the International. While Luxemburg was at a meeting of the International leadership in Brussels, news arrived of the assassination of the archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo. By the time Luxemburg returned to Berlin, war was on the agenda.

Endnotes

[1] According to Paul Frölich, only fragments of this text were preserved.

[2] Konstantin Zetkin (1885-1980) – Clara Zetkin’s son and a friend of Luxemburg.

[3] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 530.

[4] Quoted in P. Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 135.

[5] K. Marx, ‘To F. Engels, 30 April 1868’, Marx and Engels Selected Correspondence, p. 245.

[6] K. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Marx and Engels Collected Works (Henceforth referred to as MECW), Vol. 35. p. 580, footnote 1.

[7] K. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, MECW, Vol. 32, p. 153. (Also see Marx’s analysis of this in the unabridged 1967 edition of Capital, Vol. 1 by International Publishers, pp. 581, 627.)

[8] R. Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital – An Anti-Critique, p. 56.

[9] Ibid., p. 57.

[10] Ibid., p. 60.

[11] Ibid., pp. 75-6.

[12] Ibid., p. 76.

[13] Ibid., p. 77.

[14] V. I. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, LCW, Vol. 3, p. 590.

[15] Here Marx is speaking of David Ricardo, the British classical economist.

[16] K. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, MECW, Vol. 32, p. 157.

[17] Ibid., p. 143.

[18] F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 322.

[19] R. Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital – An Anti-Critique, p. 77.

[20] K. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, MECW, Vol. 31, p. 179.

[21] K. Marx, Capital , Vol. 1, MECW, Vol. 35, p. 558.

[22] The Narodniks – a political movement in Russia in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They were made up of dedicated revolutionaries, primarily young people, who came from the intelligentsia and had broken with their class background in order to go to the ‘people’. What back then was called ‘terrorist actions’ was an important part of their political activity. This involved assassinations of high-level officials in the tsarist regime, including the tsar himself. Russian Marxism originated from this movement but simultaneously through a theoretical struggle against it.

[23] V. I. Lenin, A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism, LCW, Vol.2, pp. 162-4.

[24] Ruth Fischer (1895-1961) – leader of the Berlin branch of the German Communist Party, and was elected as party chair (together with Maslow) in 1924.

[25] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 533.

[26] R. Luxemburg, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg [2013], p. 480.

[27] R. Luxemburg, ‘Women’s Suffrage and Class Struggle’, Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, p. 222.

[28] Ibid., p. 220.

[29] Ibid., pp. 219-20.

[30] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 375.

[31] Quoted ibid., p. 376.

[32] Quoted ibid., p. 411.

[33] Junker – “…(from Middle Low German junkher, literally ‘young lord’), German noble title used since medieval times for young counts, and from the nineteenth century used, often disparagingly, as a description of German landlords in the old Prussian core provinces east of the Elbe. The Junkers were, for centuries, the most powerful social group in Prussia/Germany thanks to their power over their dependent peasants and their leading positions in the army and administration and in political life. The domination of the Junkers in the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century has been judged, particularly by social-liberal German historians, to be a substantial part in a particular German authoritarian tradition which helped the Nazis take power in 1933.” (From denstoredanske.dk, accessed on 8 December 2018.)

[34] R. Luxemburg, ‘The Next Step’, Marxist Internet Archive [website].

[35] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, pp. 420-1.

[36] Konrad Haenisch (1876-1925) – on the radical left wing of the SPD. Together with Rosa Luxemburg, he argued in 1910 that the party should make use of the mass strike. During the war he went over to the right wing of the party and spoke in support of the SPD’s support for war credits in the Reichstag.

[37] Ibid., p. 427.

[38] Quoted ibid., p. 423.

[39] Quoted ibid., p. 430.

[40] V. I. Lenin, ‘To A. G. Shlyapnikov’, LCW, Vol. 35, pp. 167-8.

[41] The First Moroccan Crisis took place in 1905 when the German emperor attempted to weaken French influence in Morocco and increase German presence. The crisis brought France and Germany to the brink of war, but it was averted by a conference where Germany was supported only by Austria–Hungary and thus had to give up on its demands.

[42] R. Luxemburg, ‘Concerning Morocco’, Marxist Internet Archive [website].

[43] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 481.

[44] Ibid., pp. 572-3.

[45] For a thorough examination see ibid., p. 571.

[46] Ibid., p. 557.

[47] This refers to a split in the Bolshevik group between Lenin and others on one side and those dubbed the “liquidators” (who Lenin accused of wanting to liquidate the party) on the other. Jogiches supported the liquidators against Lenin. For more, see: J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 348.

[48] Ibid., p. 581.

[49] Ibid., p. 559.

[50] Ibid., p. 591 (additions are made by Nettl).