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| Luxemburg and Liebknecht |
Luxemburg was a champion of the "radical left-wing" within the German Social Democratic Party and the Second International prior to World War One. In the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1905, she wrote her major text on the Mass Strike, in which she emphasised and defended the direct action of the rank and file workers against the organisational bureaucratisation, and consequent conservatism and inertia of the party and the trade unions. During WW1, she was one of the few open opponents of the party's and the trade unions' policy of support for the war effort of their ruling class. She strongly supported the anti-war internationalists. Her "radical left" tendency was then quite small, given the huge pressures from the state and the party apparatus in the context of the war. In late 1918, Luxemburg and Liebknecht had been released from prison, and threw themselves headlong into the storm of the German revolution. The revolution had begun without them. They organised themselves within the SPD, calling themselves the "Spartacus League". A number of people and groups "claim" her and her work. Numerous tendencies try to say "she's ours". There exists many differences between the Socialist Party and Luxemburg. She puts forward certain points of view with which we do not agree. For example, we hold that Luxemburg lays too much emphasis on the decline of capitalism and its collapse. so we make no claim to her but there is nevertheless shared positions between ourselves and her such as her attitude to reforms that the struggle for reforms cannot alter the slave position of the working class, "social reforms can only offer an empty promise, the logical consequence of such a programme must necessarily be disillusionment”. However Luxemburg was still tied to the SPD's reform policy and did not fully appreciate the danger, in terms of attracting non-socialist support and becoming its prisoner, of a socialist party advocating reforms.
Rosa Luxemburg died too early to see the poisoned fruits of Bolshevism yet there was already sufficient evidence of its policies for her to assume a critical position. A Leninist must of necessity take a position opposed to Luxemburg; he is her theoretical opponent. The Luxemburg position opposes Leninism, and therefore no one who appeals for authority to Lenin can at the same time lay claim to Rosa Luxemburg.
On the question of national self-determination and separatist tendencies into the midst of the revolutionary struggle Rosa Luxemburg states: "The Bolsheviks have supplied the ideology which has masked the campaign of counter-revolution; they have strengthened the position of the bourgeoisie and weakened that of the proletariat" She held fast to her conclusion that "the famous 'right of self-determination of nations' is nothing but empty petty-bourgeois phraseology and humbug." Thousands and thousands of workers' corpses are testimony of the correctness of Rosa Luxemburg's view. On the question of nationalism she made an important contribution to socialist theory.
Luxemburg’s conception of the democratic self-organisation of the working class was an alternative to the Leninist notion of a vanguard of professional revolutionaries, separate from the working class and itself guided by a centralized body of experienced leaders. Only organizations that are democratic and give the power to make decisions to the workers themselves can help to organize a new society in which all decisions are made democratically, and power is in the hands of the many, not the few. She concluded that electoral activity was necessary. "We wish to be prepared for all possibilities, including the utilising of the National Assembly for revolutionary purposes should the Assembly ever come into being." Luxemburg rejected the notion of democracy in the bourgeois tradition–a passive populace choosing from a limited offering of competing elites. For her, democracy, real democracy, was active involvement of the masses in all aspects of society’s operation.
"Kautsky...opts for democracy and more specifically for bourgeois democracy, placing it as the alternative to the socialist subversion. Lenin and Trotsky, on the contrary, adopt a dictatorship in opposition to democracy and, as a consequence for the dictatorship of a reduced group of people, in other words, a dictatorship according to the bourgeois model. It is the opposition of two poles, both pretty far from the authentic socialist politic. Socialist democracy begins together with the demolition of class domain and the construction of socialism. It starts in the exact moment when the socialist party gains power; being this, nothing else but the dictatorship of the proletariat. Yes, yes: dictatorship! But this dictatorship consists in the system of democracy application, not in its abolition…".
In 1918 she refers again to the conditions for the construction of the socialist democracy, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and would say:
"…This dictatorship must be accomplished by the whole class and not by a minority of leaders in the name of the class, it is worth saying, it must go after the active participation of the masses, be under their direct influence...."
The role of a socialist party for Luxemburg is to provide a vehicle for the expression of the interests of the class itself. Luxemburg uses the expression
of the party “speaking for” the class in the sense of communicating the actions of the class, not as the active part in determining those actions. She sees the party as a vehicle for communicating different experiences and coordinating action of the class in general. The socialist party starts as a minority party with the goal of becoming a majority party and then merging with the class as a whole. The concept of a vanguard has no place in Luxemburg:
" ...the understanding by the mass of its tasks and instruments is an indispensable condition for socialist revolutionary action – just as formerly the ignorance of the mass was an indispensable condition for the revolutionary action of the ruling classes. As a result, the difference between “leaders” and the “majority trotting along behind” is abolished (in the socialist movement). The relation between the mass and the leaders is destroyed. The only function left to the supposed “guides” of the social-democracy is that of explaining to the mass the historic mission of the latter...Nevertheless such is and such will be the dominant tendency of the socialist movement: the abolition of the relation of “leaders” and “led” ..."
The socialist party, for Rosa Luxemburg, was to be neither a substitute for the working masses nor a electoral machine using the common people as passive ballot-fodder. It was to be a creative and evolving interaction between the party and the working class.
Tony Cliff of the Socialist Workers Party wrote "Rosa Luxemburg`s conception of the structure of the revolutionary organisation — that they should be built from below up, on a consistently democratic basis — fits the needs of the workers` movement in the advanced countries much more closely than Lenin`s conception of 1902–4 which was copied and given an added bureaucratic twist by Stalinists the world over." A conception far removed indeed from the internal structure of the SWP, a hierarchical Leninist organisation which is dominated by a self-perpetuating Central Committee and which prides itself on ruthlessly banning all internal factions and organised dissension. For as Rosa Luxemburg wrote in Leninism or Marxism?: “Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee” and “The working class demands the right to make its mistakes and learn the dialectic of history”
In a 1907 article the Socialist Standard provides an account of Luxemburg's court statement when she was found guilty and imprisoned for inciting a riot, a charge she denied. The article's closing paragraph read "Well done, “red Rosa”; you have grandly expressed the sentiments of the class-conscious workers of the world and may you live to see the Social Revolution accomplished!" Sadly that was not to be. Rosa Luxemburg was murdered, along with her comrade-in-arms Karl Leibknecht, on January 15 1919. Her head was smashed in and her corpse dumped.
To Karl Liebknecht and
Rosa Luxemburg
By Maximilian Cohen
They slew you in their beastly rage,
Because you dared the struggle wage
With tyrants and with traitors too
The traitors feared and so they sleiv.
Deluded knaves! Your lifeless tongues
More potent now in martyr songs
Will trumpet forth the truth until ,
The very earth will rock and thrill;
And thrones and states will crash and fall
And labor triumphs over all.
So comrades, sleep your work is done;
Sleep on! The battle will be won.
From the Revolutionary Age, Feb. 1,1919
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