John Molyneux Archive | ETOL Main Page
From Irish Marxist Review, Vol. 10 No. 29, April 2021, pp. 92–95.
Copyright © Irish Marxist Review.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume III, Political Writings 1. On Revolution 1897–1905.
Edited by Peter Hudis, Axel Fair-Schulz, and William A. Pelz
Verso, 2019, £70/€80
It was impossible to read even a few pages of this marvellous book without falling in love with the magnificent Rosa Luxemburg all over again. It is a collection of Luxemburg’s journalism mainly devoted to reports from, and analyses of, the revolution in Russia (and Poland) in 1905.
She is the most superb writer who stands in the annals of revolutionary journalism alongside Marat, Trotsky, and Marx himself. What makes her writing so wonderful is not just its stylistic brilliance – though her style is brilliant – but the extraordinary spirit, simultaneously deeply humanitarian and irreconcilably revolutionary, that suffuses every line. What shines through, above all, is her profound commitment to, and faith in, the international working class.
Quite often socialist journalism, for reasons that are both understandable and forgivable, has a rather wooden character, either with facts shoehorned into a pre-established, mechanical political schema or a mere narrative of events with the ‘correct’ political conclusion tacked on at the end. But Luxemburg is the opposite of this. To every ‘event’ and new development she responds with a personal passion, be it sadness, sympathy, or elation, but the emotion is always fused with clear-headed Marxist analysis of the situation which arises out of her grasp of the dialectics of the class struggle. The best way to demonstrate this is simply by quotation, but we are spoilt for choice and it would be easy to fill the whole review with quotes. Anyway, here are some excerpts:
A nightmarish feeling is steadily taking possession of Russia’s ruling clique, a feeling that one is moving across the crater of a rumbling volcano, that although the pulsating crust has not yet been blown open, this terrible eruption could happen any second now. The rumour that the Tsar is considering fleeing proves resilient. Apparently his yacht lies at anchor ready to sail, its steam engine ticking over, ready to bring the foremost of the accused to safety, if catastrophe should break out. The situation in all centres of the revolution has intensified since yesterday. The strike has become even more general and the bitterness is boiling ever hotter ...
The railroad workers strike has stretched out beyond the European rail network to take in the large Asian lines. Employees on the TransBaikal Railroad and on the Central Asian Railroad have joined their European brothers’ strike movement! Proof indeed of the all-encompassing manner in which the idea of revolutionary struggle has taken hold of the masses. [p. 242]
From the tsarist empire, the telegraph brings news that yesterday the tsar signed a manifesto offering the prospect of a new constitution ... According to assurances by correspondents working for the privately owned bourgeois press. the population of the tsarist empire broke out into loud rejoicing and shed bright tears of joy in response to these magnanimous promises made by the supposedly beloved Father of his People to his ‘loyal subjects’ (that phrase ‘loyal subjects’ was actually used in Bloody Nicholas’s manifesto!).
Thus far, what has come from the blood smeared hands of the absolutist Angel of Death [Nicholas II] is not freedom but mere promises, not yet any deeds but only words. There are no grounds at hand for rejoicing or for trumpeting fanfares of victory. In all previous revolutions, in fact, the road from the liberal words to liberal deeds has always passed over mountains of corpses, through further battles and terrible sacrifices – with the final outcome always remaining in doubt. [p. 256]
Four main political points stand out from the book as a whole.
The first is simply the level of violence and repression which is a constant feature of all the events and struggles Luxemburg is reporting on. From the original Bloody Sunday on 22 January 1905, when the Tsar’s troops opened fire on a peaceful demonstration of St Petersburg workers, led by Father Gapon, killing hundreds, through massacres in Warsaw and Lodz (in Russian-occupied Poland), to regular anti-Jewish pogroms, to countless street battles between workers and the authorities, usually with fatalities, (‘Meanwhile in Lodz today the Cossacks killed six’ [p. 302]), the brutality is relentless. Again and again Rosa reacts with a combination of sadness, dismay, fierce indignation, hardheaded analysis, and indomitable commitment to the revolution.
Her martyrdom in 1919, at the hands of the proto-fascist Freikorps, at the behest of the new Social Democrat government, was the culmination of many years living with imminent threats to her liberty and life.
The second is the way in which, throughout these articles, she develops, quite independently, an analysis of the class dynamics of the revolution which very much parallels those of Lenin and Trotsky. Against the position taken by the Menshevik wing of Russian Social Democracy that the Russian Revolution was to be a rerun of the French Revolution and therefore led by the bourgeois liberals, which also imagined itself to be the ‘orthodox Marxist’ view, she argues from the very outset that ‘contrary to the generally accepted opinion, the Russian revolution of today has the pronounced working-class character of any modern revolution up to now’ [p. 55]. And although she accepts that the immediate outcome of the revolution may only be ‘some miserable [bourgeois-democratic] constitutional arrangement’ [p. 56], which at that stage Lenin thought too, she maintains that ‘the main duty of the conscious proletariat must be to maintain a state of perpetual revolution’ [p. 194] and ‘that the struggle of the proletariat must be at the same time a struggle against absolutism and a class struggle against the bourgeoisie’ [p. 219]. This is a clear anticipation of the theory of permanent revolution later associated with Leon Trotsky, and she even refers to the true task of Social Democracy as being ‘to keep the revolutionary situation going in permanence ’ [p. 49]. [1]
A third thread running through this book is Luxemburg’s assembling, on the basis of daily events in Russia, the building blocks for her 1906 booklet on The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions. It is a surprising fact, but a fact nonetheless, that up to this time the concept of mass or general strikes had played very little role in the thinking of Marxists, who tended to dismiss them as an anarchist fantasy. In contrast, Luxemburg immediately grasps the immense significance of the strikes in Russia. Already on 3 March 1905, she writes, ‘The recent, and still ongoing, general strike in Russia is in its scope and duration the most powerful example of this form of struggle that has ever been seen’ [p. 108]. She understands, a major theme of The Mass Strike, the dynamic interaction of political and economic demands and struggles. ‘Simultaneously this giant movement is played out with every nuance from purely political revolutionary demonstrations to purely economic wage struggles, and yet the basic tone is being set by the political demand for freedom and the demand for the eight hour day, that is to say, the most important socioeconomic demand’ [p. 108]. It should be stressed how path-breaking were Luxemburg’s writings on this issue, and the enduring value they retain.
The fourth major and recurring theme in these articles is the relationship between spontaneity and organisation/leadership. Luxemburg has often been presented as a ‘spontaneist’, i.e. as lauding the virtues of a spontaneous working class in opposition to the role of leadership or the party, and is thus counterposed to Lenin who, it is said, downplayed spontaneity in favour of the party. This collection makes it abundantly clear that this is a caricature of her position (as, by the way, it is of Lenin’s) and that in fact, while insisting that the party cannot simply order or command the struggle of the class from above, she actually saw a dialectical relation between spontaneity from below and political education and leadership. Mass strikes and revolutions begin spontaneously, but to win the leading position in the country where the revolution is going on...that is the task of Social Democracy in revolutionary epochs. Not the beginning but the conclusion is what matters, and to directly affect the outcome of the revolutionary upsurge – that is the only goal that a political party can set for itself. The extent to which this task of the party is successful, however, the extent to which the party rises to the occasion – that depends in the greatest degree on how widely Social Democracy has known how to make its influence felt among the masses in the pre-revolutionary period, the extent to which it was already successful in putting together a solid central core of politically well-trained worker activists with clear goals. [p. 75] [2]
However I must conclude this enthusiastic review on a note of dissent – not with Rosa Luxemburg herself but with the editors. As many others have done before them, they present Luxemburg as representing a fundamentally different strand of Marxism – democratic and libertarian – from the authoritarian Lenin who paved the way for Stalinism. I disagree with this interpretation. [3] Yes, she argued with Lenin about organisation in 1903–04 (as did Trotsky), and was less hands-on than Lenin in party building, leaving it late to break with Social Democracy, but she saw through Kautsky before Lenin did. Yes, she differed from Lenin on the national question (Lenin was right on this) and she made certain criticisms of the Bolsheviks in power – some valid, some not, in my view. But these are the kind of disagreements we should expect among genuine revolutionaries, and the fact is that fundamentally they were united by far more than separated them. That a fortnight before her murder, Rosa was engaged in founding the German Communist Party, as part of the Communist International, testifies to the truth of this judgment.
But of course, this note of dissent in no way detracts from the gratitude we should all feel to these same editors for performing the great service of bringing Luxemburg’s Collected Works to an English-speaking audience.
1. This is a reference to the same phrase used by Marx in 1850, which when quoted by Trotsky in Results and Prospects, led to his theory being known as the Theory of Permanent Revolution.
2. Luxemburg’s formulations here prefigure similar statements by both Lenin and Gramsci.
3. Obviously the full grounds for this difference in interpretation cannot be set out here in a shortish book review. However, I thought the disagreement should at least be flagged up.
John Molyneux Archive | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 2 January 2023