From Socialist Worker, No. 111, 1 March 1969, pp. 2–3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
ROSA LUXEMBURG was born in Russian Poland and as a schoolgirl of 15 she joined the revolutionary organisation Proletariat. Within a few years she was recognised as a leading theoretician of Polish socialism. In 1889, warned of impending arrest, she escaped to Switzerland hidden in a haycart. In opposition to the largest section of the Polish movement, Luxemburg was a thoroughgoing internationalist. She despised the nationalism of Pilsudski and saw the national movement as a diversion at best and counterrevolutionary at worst. Together with her friend Jogiches she mounted within the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) a campaign against any tendency to nationalism. Basing herself on Marx and observable facts, she argued that with the development of industry and capitalist economy, the Polish aristocracy, which had once led the national movement, were losing ground socially and economically and were turning to the Russian Tsar for support.
Polish industry found that it had a massive market in less developed Russia and was equally against the idea of national independence. ‘Poland’, Luxemburg said, ‘is bound to Russia with chains of gold ... Not the national state but the state of rapine corresponds to capitalist development.’ The working class, she claimed, also had no interest in national independence. Their interests were identical with the Russian workers and their future was indissolubly linked. Under capitalism there was no possibility of national independence and under socialism there was no need for it. This theory, although neatly interlocking, makes a number of quite unwarranted assertions. The description of the attitude of the respective classes involved certainly represented tendencies within those classes and was a fair estimation of what the various class interests should be, but the ideas inside people’s heads do not directly reflect their economic interest. There was a Polish national sentiment and the PPS right-wing did have some support in the country. To understand this uncompromising stand of the Luxemburgists it is necessary to see the context in which their ideas developed. The mainstream of the PPS was devoted more to the national idea than to the struggle for socialism. Pilsudski (later dictator of Poland) engaged in terrorist attacks, intrigues with foreign capitalist governments and the desire for war to fulfill the independence of Poland in the break up of the Russian Empire.
Daszinski, PPS leader in Galicia, even went so far as to condemn Polish mass strikes because they tended to identify the struggle of the Polish workers with that of the Russian workers and undermine the national unity of the Poles. The opposition to the extreme nationalism of the PPS is understandable and perhaps merited, but the opposition to rights of self-determination is less so. The Russian socialist position, as outlined by Lenin, was more in tune with realities of the situation. The Polish socialists should avoid the establishment of a national state, the Russian socialists should fight for the right of the Poles to have their separate state if they so wished. Under these conditions the question of self-determination is not incompatible with the class struggle, but becomes, in the Russian Empire, an adjunct to the overthrow of Tsarism. As in her polemics with Lenin on the question of party organisation, Luxemburg was arguing from abstract principles derived from the experience of a particular set of circumstances and places. But in all this there is magnificently principled consistency. For her there was only one nation – the working class whose activity and struggle were the centre of socialism.
THE LARGEST, the most influential and the most theoretically developed party of the Second International, was the SPD (German Socialist Party). A million party members, 2½ million trade union members, over 100 Reichstag deputies gave the impression of a powerful and well-nigh invincible organisation. Formed in 1875 as the result of a fusion between the followers of Lassalle and the followers of Marx, it displayed a formidable monolithic unity. Its founder member and great organiser was Bebel and its theoretician, ‘the Pope of Marxism’, was Karl Kautsky. But despite its formidable appearance, the SPD was in many ways an empty shell. Its large Reichstag contingent and its dedicated mass following disguised the fact that the real power in Germany was held by the Bundesrat (the council of princes) that ruled with semi-feudal privilege.
The verbal adherence to Marx’s formulations, exemplified by Kautsky’s theoretical work, covered a profoundly reformist practice. It was to this rotten centre of world socialism that Rosa Luxemburg came in 1898. Her arrival coincided with the publication of a series of articles by Eduard Bernstein, who, under the influence of the British Fabians, produced a fundamental revision of marxism. He suggested that continuing prosperity, trade union pressure and increasing Reichstag representation made unnecessary and irrelevant the revolutionary content of the party programme. Luxemburg entered this struggle immediately and in a brilliant pamphlet Reform or Revolution she effectively answered Bernstein, demonstrating that the development of capitalism deepened its contradictions. In her own words, ‘Hardly had Bernstein rejected, in 1898, Marx’s theory of crises, when a profound crisis broke out in 1900’. The trade unions’ attempt to increase the share of the workers in society was doomed to failure because ‘This share is being reduced with the fatality of a natural process, by the growth of the productivity of labour.’ Parliament, she said, was not the citadel of power that was stormed by the aggregation of votes and could in no way be described as a socialist institution: ‘It is on the contrary, a specific form of the bourgeois class state.’ After the fashion of the SPD, the controversy was debated at the party congress and the ideas of Bernstein were rejected in theory but in practice the SPD continued as if he had been right.
Rosa’s researches into the Belgian general strikes of 1891 and 1893, together with her experiences of the Russian revolution of 1905 in Russian Poland, led her to develop her theory of the mass strike. In brief, she saw the development of industry and the workers’ organisations as making redundant the old revolutionary idea of direct confrontation with the state power at the barricades. As the class became more mature and organised, its ability to participate en masse, breaking down the distinctions between unions and trades, became possible. The mass strike is seen as the first stage in the mobilisation for a revolutionary seizure of power. In this schema the party has a new role to play. It must develop the mass movement in demonstrations and strikes, ‘not as a party government – not as rulers, but genuinely as leaders, as the “advance guard’’ of the proletariat.’ The economic struggle leads on to the political struggle and after every political struggle, ‘there remains a fertile sediment from which sprout a thousand economic struggles’. The movement is thus self-sustaining and self-regenerating, with the revolutionary goal built in to each action. Not surprisingly, Luxemburg’s thesis was not welcomed by the SPD’s comfortable captains of controlled radicalism. Kautsky attacked her ideas and suggested that the revolution must come as the result of a parliamentary victory for the SPD (an incredibly poor joke in the light of H. Wilson). Luxemburg replied with quotations from Kautsky’s past verbal radicalism. The trade union bureaucracy, the SPD functionaries and the SPD centre sided with Kautsky in the argument. The theoretical struggle opened by Reform and Revolution against Bernstein reached its fulfillment in the break with Kautsky and the centre. The real dividing line was not only about who is really for the revolution but also whether the working class would occupy the centre of the analysis or be relegated to a stage army conjured up by the all-seeing, all-knowing leadership. Luxemburg and her co-thinkers were to remain in the SPD until the split in 1916, but the break was really made in 1910. Long before anyone else (including Lenin) Luxemburg saw the inadequacy and incapacity of classical social democracy.
FRANZ MEHRING said she was ‘The finest brain among the scientific successors of Marx and Engels’. Lenin thought of her as an eagle, Klara Zetkin saw her as the ‘brightest star on the socialist horizon’. There is no need to attempt to outdo them in praise of Rosa Luxemburg. The correct tribute to a revolutionary thinker and writer is to read her work, to place it and her actions in the perspective of her time and to apply that which is appropriate to our own action today. The task of reading and understanding her thought has been sadly neglected. In Stalin’s Russia she was posthumously designated a Trotskyist, an unconscious tribute to her own and Trotsky’s uncompromising revolutionism. At various times she has been claimed by all manner of anarchists, reformists and literary phrasemongers as a useful stick with which to beat Lenin, and it is true that their controversies were deeply felt and hard fought. But it is also true, and of far more importance, that they shared a common revolutionary socialist objective. In the fight for that objective they discarded and renounced, in their different ways, anarchism and reformism and all the other rubbish that stood in the way.
The very core of her thought was the primacy of the working class as the active factor in socialist change. The structure and organisation of the party should be built from below.She knew that without the widest workers’ democracy ‘officials behind their desks would replace the workers’ hold on political power ... Socialism cannot be decreed by ukase’ (autocratic order). Her major theoretical work The Accumulation of Capital showed that imperialism, while stabilising capitalism for a time, also threatened mankind with war and barbarism. Liebknecht, when compared with Luxemburg, seems to be a much lesser figure. His activity until 1914 was largely carried out in the youth and anti-war agitation and his association with the revolutionary Left around Luxemburg was virtually non-existent. But during the war he completely dedicated himself to the whole Spartakist programme and activity. While he was no theoretician, his courage and activity as an orator and propagandist were an indispensable element in the struggle.Liebknecht was in incredibly brave and indomitable fighter. Luxemburg combined these qualities, with a genius for socialist theory and explanation. Their deaths robbed the international movement of their talents at a time when they were most needed. It is no exaggeration of their stature and importance to suggest that had they lived the whole of subsequent German and world history might have been very different. This is the fiftieth anniversary of their death, but it is not in its martyrs that the movement seeks inspiration. Death always wins in the end. The triumph and the inspiration is in the fight for the emancipation of the working class that filled the lives of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.
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WHEN WAR BROKE OUT in 1914, with the notable exception of the Italian, the Serbian and Russian Socialist Parties, all the sections of the Socialist International rallied to the support of their national regimes. With a complete disregard for their often repeated resolutions in the International Congresses, they voted the money and the men for the greater glory of their respective Kings, Emperors and Kaisers. In Germany 5 members of the Social Democratic Reichstag group called for a vote against the war credits. They were defeated in the caucus meeting and did not carry their opposition to the floor of the Reichstag. The long years of loyalty to the party line were too hard to break.
It was not until December 1914 that Liebknecht broke discipline and voted against further war credits. Outside the Reichstag, even as early as December 1914, there was discontent with the war, particularly among the Berlin metal workers and several strikes took place. A letter, signed by Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin and Franz Mehring, attacking the SPD’s war policy, stimulated the opposition within the party. By early 1915, the anti-war movement had struck roots in the Social Democratic sections in the trade unions. In large measure, it was around the figures of Liebknecht and Luxemburg that this opposition began to crystallise. In February 1915 Luxemburg, was arrested to serve a prison sentence passed the previous year. With the exception of a few short months in, 1916, she was to spend the rest of the war in prison. From this dubious vantage point she directed a stream of articles and letters against the war, the SPD policy and the International. In April 1915 the magazine Die Internationale was published. The police seized as many copies as they could get hold of, but not enough.For the first time the German socialists saw the rounded view of the revolutionary Left. On New Year’s Day 1916 the group around Die Internationale (Gruppe Internationale) met in Liebknecht’s flat and adopted Luxemburg’s document The Crisis of Social Democracy as their policy statement. Ten days later Liebknecht was expelled from the Social Democratic Reichstag caucus. The expulsion was followed in short order, by his induction into the army where he was posted to a punishment battalion. On May Day 1916, Liebknecht, in uniform, went to Berlin and posted himself near the main railway station, where troops were awaiting transport to the front. He shouted ‘Down with the imperialist war’, ‘Get out of the army, long live socialism’.
At first sight this was a courageous but ridiculous action. but in fact the gesture was not lost on the growing numbers of workers who were rapidly tiring of the war. At the time of Liebknecht’s trial and his subsequent imprisonment there were large demonstrations and several strikes for his liberation. In September 1916 the first of the Spartakus Letters appeared and the Gruppe Internationale became known as the Spartakusbund. All the leading Spartakists were jailed and a number of their supporters in the trade unions were drafted to the front.
Small secret committees were formed, particularly among the sailors, and in March 1917, after a naval mutiny, two sailors were condemned to death and hundreds to long prison sentences.In the factories, trade union officials set up an underground organisation, the Betriebsobleute (shop stewards committees). The ceaseless propaganda of Luxemburg and Liebknecht was having its effect and the impact of the Russian revolution was nowhere felt more strongly than in Germany.The ingredients for the German revolution of 1918/19 were coming to the boil.
IN FEBRUARY 1918 the Petrograd Soviet elected Karl Liebknecht as an honorary member, the symbol of German resistance. Through Joffe and Bukharin at the Russian Embassy in Berlin, a deal of revolutionary propaganda was funnelled into Germany to add to the already swelling examples of the homegrown variety. Unrest at home and difficulties at the front were causing dissension in the higher echelons of imperial power. A measure of the unease felt by the General Staff is seen in the poster that General von Groner caused to be prominently displayed in Berlin: ‘Only a bastard would strike when Hindenburg calls for guns’. From then on he was known in the factories as ‘Groner the Bastard’. As a last despairing gesture the Naval High Command attempted to mount an offensive. On the eve of the sailing of the battle fleet (October 29, 1918) the Kiel sailors mutinied. Within days the mutiny spread to other ports and army regiments followed suit.
In Kiel, Hamburg and Bremen, demonstrating soldiers and sailors were joined by thousands of striking workers. On November 7 the uprising was general in all the major towns. As the result of mass pressure, Liebknecht had been released in October. Making his way to Berlin he made contact with the clandestine shop stewards committees. Two meetings of the committees rejected by small majorities Liebknecht’s call for an uprising on November 2 and November 8. But the indecision of the shop stewards was being overtaken by the spontaneous rising itself.At a mass meeting on November 9 held in the grounds of the Imperial Palace, Liebknecht, standing under an improvised red flag (made from an imperial blanket) declared for the German Socialist Republic and world revolution. The right wing of the SPD who had been toying with the with the continuation of the monarchy under the Crown Prince were thrown into disarray by the speed of events.
Caught in the midst of negotiating a caretaker government with Prince Max of Baden they were forced to declare for the republic and set up a provisional government with six Social Democratic ‘People’s Commissars’. Mortally frightened of the revolutionary fervour in the streets, Ebert, the head of the government, hastened to make an accommodation with the army to quell the disorder.On the streets of Berlin newspaper offices were taken over, the Prussian police chief relinquished his office without a murmur to a Leftwing Social Democrat.All over Germany, state governments were handing over the reins of office to the Social Democrats. Strong points (government buildings, newspaper offices, etc) were temporarily seized and the shop stewards’ committees represented an increasingly substantial alternative focus of power. The government recognised that unless they moved swiftly they would go the same way as Kerensky in Russia the year before. The army was called in. Consisting of contingents of officers and NCOS and any reactionary filth that could be mustered from the remnants of the imperial army, the Reichswehr represented the needs of Prussian Junkerdom, the industrialists and a section of the middle class against the spectre or social revolution. On December 5 a mob of 2000 cavalry sergeants marched through Berlin calling for Ebert to assume dictatorial powers and for ‘Death to Liebknecht and Luxemburg’ and ‘Death to the Jews’. To the working class as a whole the reactionary plotting of the Social Democratic leaders was completely unknown. For them the SPD still represented the party of Wilhelm Liebknecht and Bebel, the uncompromising opponents of capitalism. At the first National Congress of the Workers and Soldiers Councils on December 16, the great majority of the delegates were trade union officials and party functionaries. The debates of the congress were frequently interrupted by delegations from the 250,000 demonstrators outside the hall, calling for the transfer of power to the Workers and Soldiers Councils. But the congress reaffirmed its support for the Ebert government. On December 30 the German Communist Party (KPD) was formed. Luxemburg, who had been released from prison in November, attempted to hold back the excessive enthusiasm of some of the delegates. She held that despite the disorders and intermittent street fighting, the masses were still too firmly wedded to the SPD for them to follow the newly formed KPD. The revolution was being slowly buried under the weight of war weariness and the Reichswehr. Liebknecht and Luxemburg, foolishly disregarding the danger, stayed in the homes of party workers. On January 15, 1919 they were arrested, taken to a hotel, beaten with rifle butts and shot. Luxemburg’s body was tossed into the Landswehr canal. The Freikorps thugs who murdered Rosa and Karl at the instigation of Ebert and Noske were the direct forerunners of the Nazis who in 1933 smashed the remnants SPD.
Last updated on 26 October 2020
