A question about Luxemburgism...

[Nanatsu Yoru]

Aside from the rejection of Lenin and the idea of democracy rooted in worker's councils, what else is Luxemburgism? Is it a complete breaking from Leninism or is it in some ways similar?

Well maybe more than a question. Thanks in advance!

[NecroCommie]

It is in many ways similar, and even strongly pro-Lenin during that time, but differences exist. Because of my knowledge on the subject is mostly historical, I will give historical examples.
- Left-communists (which Luxemburg can be considered) were against peace with the capitalist powers during the russian civil war. Needless to say, Leninists were in favour of this.
-Left communists judged deeply the persecution of dissidents in the civil war russia, whereas Leninists saw it as a tactic of civil war.
-As a minor subject, left communists were against the self-determination of nations, as they claimed it supported nationalism.

Although similarities also exist, one of them being the support for a centralized party.

[Magón]

Where's Amphictyonis when you need her?

[graymouser]

I'm not sure there ever was a coherent "Luxemburgism." There have been trends in non-Leninist Marxism that have sort of identified with Luxemburg, and also tendencies within Trotskyism (particularly Tony Cliff's Socialist Review Group went through a period of strong orientation toward Red Rosa before Cliff became a born-again Leninist on party questions), but as I see it there has never been a distinct Luxemburgist politics in the same sense that we can talk of Trotskyism or Leninism.

[penguinfoot]

Aside from the rejection of Lenin

She didn't reject Lenin, if you read Organizational Questions then you might get that impression, but only if you totally ignore the context in which that specific text was written, namely Luxemburg's ongoing struggle against the national-chauvinism and adventurism of the PPS in Poland, the PPS being the main rival to social democracy and a party that was carrying out terrorist attacks due to there not being a viable social basis for its main policy of supporting independence for Poland, but the reality is that both she and Lenin supported a highly centralized party whose role was, in both their opinions, key for a successful revolution - if there is a meaningful difference between them as far as the relationship between the party and mass movement is concerned, it is that, whilst they both recognized that the revolutionary process involves a dialectal interaction of objective and subjective forces, Lenin believed that the subjective force in the form of the revolutionary party was decisive. By this I mean that Lenin regarded the party as the organization whose role it is to win the main body of the class over to social democracy and to lead the class in the struggles that will allow for the overthrow of the bourgeois state and private property, such that the role of the party is to make and prepare the revolution, without which the class will be more or less limited to struggles in defense of its immediate interests, and workers will only be able to become politically conscious on an individual basis. Luxemburg, on the other hand, was more insistent that the party needs to take the actual activity of the class as the starting-point for its tactics and strategy, due to it only being in and through the activity of the class as a whole that the party can grow and develop, and that the unconscious always comes before the conscious, by which she meant that it is possible for large numbers of workers to enter into political struggle and become politically conscious under the force of events and their own struggles, without the leadership role of the party, and that the role of the party is not to create or carry out the revolution as such, but to identify and clarify those tendencies within the already-existing activity of the class that are objectively revolutionary and which, once clarified and guided, can enable the overthrow of the existing order. In this sense, she viewed the objective as the decisive factor in the revolutionary process, in that she did not believe it was possible for the party to determine the form and extent of class struggle.


Left-communists (which Luxemburg can be considered)

Not really, she supported parliamentary participation, broke from the SPD only very late, and her critique of trade unions was never fully developed. On those three counts, she can't be considered a Left Communist, which is not surprising, because Left Communism itself was only in embryo at the time of her death.

[Devrim]

Left-communists (which Luxemburg can be considered)
Not really, she supported parliamentary participation, broke from the SPD only very late, and her critique of trade unions was never fully developed. On those three counts, she can't be considered a Left Communist, which is not surprising, because Left Communism itself was only in embryo at the time of her death.

Luxemborg clealry wasn't a left communist though some of her work has been influential amongst left communist, most particularly on the national question, but also her economic work.

If anything Luxemborg belonged to the centre of the German party, and not the left.

Devrim

[Die Rote Fahne]

A couple of things:

Luxembourg did not necesarily believe in councils as the only route of a democratic governence.

She did not believe in the Bolshevik style of party centralization, she was opposed to a vanguard but saw a party as something that could lead a revolution, but not fully control or have authoritarian powers. She saw the Bolsheviks authoritarianism as something that would lead to sectarianism which led to totalitarianism.

Luxembourg, in some respects, can be considered a left communist, but she cannot always be considered one.

Lastly, no it cannot be a break from leninism, as leninism is a different branch of marxist theory.

Sorry if this is over-simplified.

[penguinfoot]

Luxemborg clealry wasn't a left communist though some of her work has been influential amongst left communist, most particularly on the national question, but also her economic work.

I've always found that her conception of the party as historical product has something in common with many Left-Communist analyses.


she was opposed to a vanguard

Luxemburg certainly believed that there were differences of consciousness within the working class, and also believed that the party should be based on the most politically advanced workers. She described social democracy in Organizational Questions as "the “self-centralism” of the advanced sectors of the proletariat". In these senses, she was not opposed to a vanguard, whatever that means.


She saw the Bolsheviks authoritarianism as something that would lead to sectarianism which led to totalitarianism.

Luxemburg couldn't have believed that sectarianism would lead to totalitarianism, because totalitarianism is a specific kind of analysis that she couldn't have been familiar with, rather than just being a catch-all term for all societies or organizations that involve the suppression of minority views, in that, as a concept, it was only fully developed by Arendt in 1950s, the word itself having been used widely only from the 1930s onwards.


Lastly, no it cannot be a break from leninism, as leninism is a different branch of marxist theory.

I don't think that Luxemburg would have accepted that "Leninism" is valid as a concept, not least because Lenin didn't either.

[Blackscare]

I don't think that Luxemburg would have accepted that "Leninism" is valid as a concept, not least because Lenin didn't either.

I think the point being made was that you can't split from something you were never united with.

[devoration1]

Her economic theory regarding the saturation of markets (as opposed to or in conjunction with the theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall) is another strongly associated point. Opposition to 'national liberation' and 'the right of nations to self-determination'.

There are 2 international 'Luxemburgist' organizations (I've heard one may be defunct now though), and a number of groups or tendencies associate themselves with 'Luxemburgism'. In general this phenomenon seems to me a healthy desire to find value in the history of the Marxist movement- a move away from 'Marxism-Leninism' and searching for a non-authoritarian theoretician (a non-Lenin Lenin).


Luxemborg clealry wasn't a left communist though some of her work has been influential amongst left communist, most particularly on the national question, but also her economic work.

If anything Luxemborg belonged to the centre of the German party, and not the left.


Yes. We shouldn't forget that the 'Communist Left' was a specific phenomenon- the left-wing of the Third International that was expelled or resigned from the Comintern (especially the Italian and German/Dutch). So Luxemburg couldn't have been a 'left communist' as she was murdered before there was a Comintern- though her influence was very strong in what became the German left fraction.

[Leo]

Not really, she supported parliamentary participation.Her latest position was that it wasn't the main issue of the hour - she considered the main issue to be the overthrow of the parliamentary regime at the hands of the Soviets.


broke from the SPD only very lateActually, the argument here is broke from the USPD only very late, that is in late 1918. The Abstentionist Communist Fraction around Bordiga in the Italian Socialist Party proclaimed themselves to be the party as late as mid 1921, almost two years after the Biennio Rosso was over. I don't think this is a defining point of the communist left.


and her critique of trade unions was never fully developed. While she never argued for not being in the trade-unions, she called for their destruction. This is actually a position within the communist left, in fact a more radical one than what some of the remnants of Bordigism are arguing for. It is indeed true that her position on this was never fully developed.


If anything Luxemborg belonged to the centre of the German party, and not the left.I am not sure whether I actually agree here. If we consider the Laufenberg-Wolffheim tendency to be the right, which they clearly were, and the Levi-Zetkin and co. to be the center, it is quite clear that on many points Luxemburg eventually stood closer to the left than to center, if not arguing for the positions of the left directly, not in in Germany but internationally as well. The national-question, the union question, the question of the importance of proletarian political power as opposed to party dictatorship, the question of land and the peasantry, the question of Brest-Litovsk are all good examples. Even on the parliamentary question where it could be argued that she stood closer to the center than to the left, we was far from seeing the issues in the same way the center did: In an intervention at the fourth congress of the KPD, in April 1920, Clara Zetkin claimed that Rosa Luxemburg, in her last letter to Zetkin, had written that the foundation congress had been mistaken in not making the acceptance of participation in the elections a condition for membership in the new party. There is no need to doubt the sincerity of Clara Zetkin in making this claim. The capacity to read what other people really write, and not what you would want or expect them to, is probably rarer than is generally assumed. The letter of Luxemburg to Zetkin, dated January 11, 1919, was later published. What Rosa Luxemburg wrote is as follows: "But above all, as far as the question of the non participation in the elections is concerned: You enormously overestimate the importance of this decision. There were no ‘Rühlists" present, Rühle was not a leader at the Conference. Our ‘defeat' was only the triumph of a somewhat childish, immature, unswerving radicalism (...) We all decided unanimously not to make of this casus a cabinet question, not to take it tragically. In reality, the question of the National Assembly will be pushed right into the background by the stormy developments, and when things proceed as they are doing, it appears questionable enough if the elections to the National Assembly will even take place" (http://en.internationalism.org/node/2626#_ftnref24).

All this being said, I do think that Luxemburg can't be called a left communist, simply because the communist left had not really came into existence in Germany in her time or afterwards. Which direction she would have gone to, no one will ever know, unfortunately.