Final Considerations: The Eagle
Rosa Luxemburg dedicated her entire adult life to the fight for world socialist revolution, a goal for which she ended up giving her life. The picture painted of Luxemburg as the proponent of a ‘soft’, ‘democratic’ socialism in opposition to Lenin’s ‘tyrannical dictatorship’ is an abuse of history – a distortion without any basis.
Luxemburg was one of the first individuals to take cognisance of and take up arms against the reformist degeneration of the SPD. She saw more clearly than anybody else, including Lenin, how reformism had infected not only the right wing of the party, but also many of those so-called ‘Marxists’ like Kautsky, who could use revolutionary language but whose radicalism went no further than mere words. For a long time she was alone in her struggle against the party’s degeneration, until finally the rot became obvious to all and sundry: on 4 August 1914, when the SPD leaders openly betrayed the working class. She fought tooth and nail against every attempt to water down the party’s revolutionary programme, and predicted that the moment social democracy gave up on the historical task of socialist revolution, it would give up its very right to existence. It would end up as little more than a pillar propping up capitalism. This perspective has been wholly confirmed today, when the social-democratic parties have degenerated to a degree that far surpasses anything seen in Luxemburg’s time. Most of these parties are either implementing bourgeois austerity policies or have shown that they would gladly do so if handed the reins of government.
Despite her revolutionary ideas and uncompromising struggle against reformism, Luxemburg has been adopted – quite unjustifiably – by those who stand to the left of the unalloyed reformism of today’s social democracy, but whose own politics are soft and opposed to the revolutionary politics of Lenin. In the opinion of this author, this is nothing short of a crime against Luxemburg’s life and everything she fought and died for. Not only did Rosa Luxemburg condemn the openly reformist leaders of the social-democratic movement, she also condemned and fought against that section of the left wing of the party that sounded radical and revolutionary, but whose radical rhetoric provided cover for a reformist, ‘soft’ approach. Such was the case with Kautsky. Rosa Luxemburg would turn in her grave if she knew just how her name and authority are used today to justify reformism, softness, and anti-revolutionary ideas.
Rosa Luxemburg‘s actions and ideas were, are, and will remain revolutionary to the core. All she said and did – including her mistakes – came from a revolutionary perspective. On all questions, she took the side of the working class and the revolution. Her disagreement with Lenin in 1904 on the organisational question of the Russian party is latched upon time after time by those wishing to portray Luxemburg as anti-Leninist. The small detail that she changed her mind is, of course, left out in the course of the myth-making.
After the 1905 Revolution, she was in no doubt that the Bolsheviks were correct in their struggle against the Mensheviks, i.e., on the question of the revolution itself. Of those things she had written in 1904 in criticism of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, she would later write in 1906:
[T]hat belongs to the past – a distant past, since today life is proceeding at a dizzying speed. These errors have been corrected by life itself and there is no danger they might recur.[1]
Her critique of the conduct of the Bolsheviks following the October Revolution was also, more or less, dispelled by the experience of the German Revolution. Here, Rosa Luxemburg was faced with many of the same concrete questions that the Bolsheviks had faced. For the Constituent Assembly or for the workers’ and soldiers’ councils? When faced with the choice, Luxemburg was in no doubt: only the seizure of power by the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, following the Russian example, offered a way forward. She showed that she was more than capable of revising her stance, and when faced with a task concretely, she was instinctively drawn to a correct revolutionary position. In Poland, she rightly fought against Polish nationalism. But despite criticising the Bolshevik policy in defence of the right of nations to self-determination, which she wrongly believed could only assist the nationalists, she did not hesitate in condemning the German national chauvinism expressed by the SPD leadership in the midst of the Moroccan Crisis and in the run up to the First World War. When faced concretely with the same problem that Lenin and the Bolsheviks had faced, she took the same course.
Only by ripping quotes out of context can we sustain the myth that Luxemburg opposed the October Revolution and the Bolsheviks. Luxemburg celebrated the October Revolution and those who led it, despite her criticisms, which pertained to particular questions. This is how she expressed her general position:
The Bolsheviks have shown that they are capable of everything that a genuine revolutionary party can contribute within the limits of historical possibilities. […]
In this, Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the first, those who went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world […]
This is essential and enduring in Bolshevik policy. In this sense theirs is the immortal historical service of having marched at the head of the international proletariat […][2]
Once more, when the question of the necessity of a revolutionary organisation posed itself concretely, she likewise changed her mind. Once the German Revolution broke out, she realised that building a revolutionary party was imperative. But the problem was that it was too late to begin this task in the middle of the revolution. And that was her gravest mistake: she failed to understand in time the necessity of building a revolutionary party based upon a cadre of professional revolutionaries. As early as 1905, she clearly recognised how the leadership of the SPD had degenerated and she fought tooth and nail against its degeneration. But she did not draw the conclusion that flows from this fact: that a revolutionary faction had to be built within the party. Had she built such an organisation of cadres in 1905 and the succeeding years – that is, an organisation comprising revolutionaries steeped in Marxist theory and endowed with rich practical experience – the German working class would have been in a much stronger position. It would have meant that when the war broke out, and above all when the German Revolution broke out, the backbone of a mass revolutionary party would have been in place. The presence of such a party would have decisively changed the outcome of the revolution, and thus world history itself.
Why did Rosa Luxemburg not build such a party in time? An answer to that question can only be given if we understand the history of the period and the trajectory of her own life. In the SPD, she had seen how the bureaucracy had grown strong and taken control of the party and the movement. The SPD bureaucracy played the most conservative role, straining every fibre of its being to hinder the initiative of the working class. In the end, upon the outbreak of war, it crossed over to direct betrayal of the working class. During the revolution it played an even more counter-revolutionary role, if such a thing is possible. Luxemburg’s distrust and opposition to the SPD apparatus was therefore wholly understandable and well-founded. Instead, she placed unwavering confidence in the spontaneous movement of the masses. Indeed, only the movement of the masses could transform the world, as Luxemburg well understood. But her belief that the movement of masses alone would automatically resolve the problem of revolutionary leadership was misplaced. The Russian Revolution, and the German Revolution that followed it, both showed – albeit one positively and the other negatively – why a revolutionary leadership must necessarily be built before the revolution breaks out. What is needed is a leadership that can not only give the movement a correct political programme, but which is also strong enough to reach the entire working class with its ideas and win sufficient political authority among them, such that, in the end, it can organise the seizure of power itself. It takes years to build such an organisation. The cadres have to be educated. The leadership has to be built, it must be tested in practice and go through a rigorous process of selection. Only in this way can its political authority in the working class be developed. It is Lenin’s greatest merit that he managed to build this necessary leadership, in the form of the Bolshevik Party, before the revolution broke out in Russia. Unfortunately, Luxemburg began the process of building the revolutionary party too late.
But hindsight is a marvellous thing. At the time, Lenin alone really understood the necessity of constructing a revolutionary party. He managed to build such a party capable of leading the October Revolution: the Bolshevik Party. It was a party that was unique up until that point in history: no one had built anything like it before. As such, Rosa Luxemburg had few lessons upon which to draw. But whilst we may excuse Rosa Luxemburg for that reason, those who have come after cannot be so easily excused for committing the same mistakes. Those on the left who refuse to build a revolutionary party, and in so doing claim they are following the path of Rosa Luxemburg, draw upon her weak side, emphasising this alone, ripped from its historical context. They do not account for – or else consciously ignore – the fact that she drew other conclusions based upon her experience, and that, in the midst of the German revolution, she began the task of building the party.
This was the essential – and fatal – difference between Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin. But to make the leap from this to the idea that Luxemburg was an anti-Leninist Marxist is, at best, an expression of ignorance and, at worst, a complete lie. Luxemburg and Lenin both fought for the seizure of power by the working class and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They shared the perspective that the Russian Revolution must spread – that it was impossible to build socialism in one country. For both, the only salvation for mankind lay in the world socialist revolution.
Rosa Luxemburg was not afraid of disagreements or polemics – even of the very harshest character. She disagreed with Lenin on several occasions. It is the considered belief of this author that on most of those occasions Lenin was right and Luxemburg was wrong. But those disagreements by no means made Luxemburg ‘anti-Leninist’. Lenin, incidentally, also had no hesitations in his characterisation of Luxemburg. Following her death, he explained how she was one of the first to grasp the real significance of the 1905 Revolution:
Thus the fundamental questions (Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat) that are now engaging the minds of class-conscious workers all over the world were posed in a practical form at the end of 1905. While such outstanding representatives of the revolutionary proletariat and of unfalsified Marxism as Rosa Luxemburg [my emphasis – MF] immediately realised the significance of this practical experience and made a critical analysis of it at meetings and in the press, the vast majority of the official representatives of the official Social-Democratic and socialist parties – including both the reformists and people of the type of the future ‘Kautskyites’ […] – proved absolutely incapable of grasping the significance of this experience and of performing their duty as revolutionaries, i.e., of setting to work to study and propagate the lessons of this experience.[3]
Yes, Luxemburg had her disagreements with Lenin. But these were disagreements between two sincere revolutionaries over how to best secure the victory of the world socialist revolution. After Luxemburg’s death, Lenin summarised the points on which the two had disagreed:
Rosa Luxemburg was mistaken on the question of the independence of Poland; she was mistaken in 1903 in her appraisal of Menshevism; she was mistaken on the theory of the accumulation of capital; she was mistaken in July 1914 when, together with Plekhanov, Vandervelde, Kautsky and others, she advocated unity between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks; she was mistaken in what she wrote in prison in 1918 [‘The Russian Revolution’ – MF] (she corrected most of these mistakes at the end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919 after she was released).[4]
To acknowledge that Luxemburg was occasionally wrong by no means entails rejecting her credentials as a Marxist or a revolutionary. Nor does it imply that we cannot learn anything from her life and ideas. In ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Lenin wrote:
What applies to individuals also applies – with necessary modifications – to politics and to parties. It is not he who makes no mistakes that is intelligent. There are no such men, nor can there be. It is he whose errors are not very grave and who is able to rectify them easily and quickly that is intelligent.[5]
The notion of a ‘flawless’ revolutionary and a ‘flawless’ party was the invention of Stalinism. It implies blind obedience to such a ‘flawless’ leader. Far from guaranteeing that revolutionaries will not make mistakes, it instead guarantees that they will not learn from them. The idea of the flawless leader was invented precisely to give cover to the fatal mistakes of the Stalinist bureaucracy and of its ‘supreme’ leader – mistakes that they had no intention of understanding or correcting. However, the fact that Lenin believed Luxemburg made mistakes did not change his fundamental view of her, which he expressed in the words of a Russian proverb:
“Eagles may at times fly lower than hens, but hens can never rise to the height of eagles.” […]
[I]n spite of her mistakes she was – and remains for us – an eagle. And not only will Communists all over the world cherish her memory, but her biography and her complete works […] will serve as useful manuals for training many generations of Communists all over the world.[6]
Trotsky too took up the defence of Luxemburg’s revolutionary legacy. In an article titled ‘Hands off Rosa Luxemburg!’ he said of her disagreements with Lenin:
If one were to take the disagreements between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg in their entirety, then historical correctness is unconditionally on Lenin’s side. But this does not exclude the fact that on certain questions and during definite periods Rosa Luxemburg was correct as against Lenin. In any case, the disagreements, despite their importance and at times their extreme sharpness, developed on the bases of revolutionary proletarian policies common to them both.[7]
Trotsky was in no doubt that her theoretical legacy belonged to the Fourth International as the successor of Bolshevism:
The latest spontaneity confusionists have just as little right to refer to Rosa as the miserable Comintern bureaucrats have to refer to Lenin. Put aside the incidentals which developments have overcome, and we can, with full justification, place our work for the Fourth International under the sign of the “three L’s”, that is, not only under the sign of Lenin, but also of Luxemburg and Liebknecht.[8]
Today, we continue to honour the legacy of the heroic revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg. We do so not by converting her into a mere symbol. Rather, we can best honour her legacy by carrying it on into our time. More than a century after her murder, capitalism has found itself in a dead end. Revolution – and counter-revolution – are on the order of the day. We are all the more duty-bound, therefore, to familiarise ourselves with Luxemburg’s life and ideas; to learn from her best sides – her tireless struggle for the socialist world revolution, her unwavering faith in the will and ability of the working class to change society. We must build the revolutionary organisation that she began, but was tragically unable to finish constructing before her life was cut short by the reactionary Freikorps. Such an organisation is vital to ensure that the future struggles of the working class will not share the same fate that befell the German Revolution. Such an organisation will guarantee that they will end in victory. This is the only monument worthy of Rosa Luxemburg’s towering legacy, because Rosa Luxemburg was a revolutionary to her core and that is the legacy that we must defend.
Endnotes
[1] R. Luxemburg, ‘Blanquism and Social Democracy’, Marxist Internet Archive [website].
[2] R. Luxemburg, ‘The Russian Revolution’, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, p. 395.
[3] V. I. Lenin, ‘A Contribution to the History of the Question of the Dictatorship’, LCW, Vol. 31, pp. 341-2.
[4] V. I. Lenin, ‘Notes of a Publicist’, LCW, Vol. 33, p. 210.
[5] V. I. Lenin, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism, an Infantile Disorder, The Classics of Marxism: Volume Two, p. 124 note.
[6] V. I. Lenin, ‘Notes of a Publicist’, LCW, Vol. 33, p. 210.
[7] L. Trotsky, ‘Hands off Rosa Luxemburg!’, Writings of Leon Trotsky: 1932, p. 136.
[8] L. Trotsky, ‘Luxemburg and the Fourth International’, Writings of Leon Trotsky: 1935-36, p. 32.