Macnair: Luxemburg's [heroic] life and her [sectarian] legacy

[Die Neue Zeit]

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/927/her-life-and-her-legacy



Mike Macnair asks whether the modern ‘new left’ use of Luxemburg is part of the problem rather than the solution

Rosa Luxemburg was a heroine and martyr of the workers’ movement: a leader of the left in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD); imprisoned for her political activities in Germany in 1904 and Poland in 1906; a standard-bearer of anti-war socialism from 1914; imprisoned once again in 1915 and again 1916-18; a founder of the German Communist Party; and finally murdered by the SPD’s far-right allies in the aftermath of the failed uprising in Berlin in 1919.

In the ‘official’ communist movement and fully ‘orthodox’ Trotskyism, Luxemburg was remembered this way - as a fighter, heroine and martyr. But she was also thought of as a defender of flatly erroneous views: ‘spontaneism’ on the questions of the party, its organisation and leadership; an ultra-left (and perhaps Lassallean ‘one reactionary mass’) view of the peasantry and the agrarian question; a view of the national question which was ultra-left sectarian or even “imperialist-economist” (Lenin’s tag); and, perhaps related, a fundamentally mistaken understanding of Marx’s ‘reproduction schemes’ in Volume 2 of Capital, which produced a radically misconceived theory of imperialism.

For the ‘new left’ which emerged after 1956, the Stalinist campaign against ‘Luxemburgism’ in the later 1920s and 1930s made Luxemburg’s actual ideas more attractive. She combined impeccably revolutionary credentials with criticisms of Bolshevism: in her 1904 ‘Organisational questions of Russian social democracy’ and in her 1918 draft The Russian Revolution (published after her death by Paul Levi on his road back to the SPD). These could make her appear as foreseeing Stalinism. For the ‘new left’ she could thus be combined with the young Lukács of History and class consciousness, with the young Gramsci, with ‘left’ and ‘council’ communist critics of the Comintern (Pannekoek, Korsch and so on).

In particular, emphasis could be placed on her 1906 work attempting to make the SPD learn lessons from the 1905 Russian Revolution, The mass strike, the political party and the trade unions, and on her, and Anton Pannekoek’s, polemics with Kautsky in 1910-12 over ‘mass action’ versus parliamentarism and the ‘strategy of attrition’. This debate could be read as offering a critique of the policy of the western mass ‘official communist’ parties, which had evolved (through force of circumstances in the cold war, rather than explicit choices) into something rather like Kautsky’s ‘strategy of attrition’.

In the 1960s-70s Luxemburg’s ideas could also be idiosyncratically combined with elements of Maoism in western ‘soft Maoism’ or ‘Mao-spontaneism.’ In this context her theory of imperialism could re-attain respectability, and it continues to have some influence: for example on David Harvey’s The new imperialism (Oxford 2003).

If ‘orthodox Trotskyism’ had common ground with ‘official’ communism on the ‘Luxemburg question’, a substantial part of the Trotskyist movement engaged with, and eventually became more or less part of, the ‘new left’. The International Socialists, forerunners of the British Socialist Workers Party, in the 1960s came close to identifying themselves as ‘Luxemburgists’. Both factions of the Unified Secretariat of the Fourth International identified to some extent with Luxemburg: the US SWP, centre of the Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency, in 1970 published Mary- Alice Waters’ edited collection Rosa Luxemburg speaks; Ernest Mandel, one of the leaders of the European-led International Majority Tendency, in 1971 offered a substantial article on ‘Rosa Luxemburg and German social democracy’ in Quatrième Internationale.

By these routes a certain reading of Luxemburg has become the common inheritance of the modern far left: she is the woman who diagnosed what was really wrong with the SPD and the Second International, before Lenin or Trotsky understood the problem. Her polemic against Eduard Bernstein, Social reform or revolution (1900), is still recommended reading for the left, where the contributions of Parvus, Kautsky and Plekhanov to this debate are left to specialist historians; and the polemical jabs of Belfort Bax round the question of imperialism, which forced Bernstein’s views into the open, are almost written out of left accounts of the history. The mass strike, similarly, remains on the far left’s reading lists.

Luxemburg is commonly rolled together with Lenin and Trotsky among the ‘classical Marxists’ or ‘Second International left’, as she is by British SWP-tradition authors like Dave Renton and John Rees, and by Platypus authors; or with Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and the young Gramsci, as in Paul Le Blanc’s 1996 collection From Marx to Gramsci. The effect is, perhaps paradoxically, to assimilate these other authors to Luxemburg’s and Pannekoek’s arguments in 1906 and 1910-12, as interpreted after Luxemburg’s death by Lukács and Korsch.

This may be true for the young Gramsci, and perhaps for the Trotsky of 1904, but it is certainly not true for Lenin or the later Trotsky. Lenin’s, and Trotsky’s, definite non-acceptance of these arguments in 1910-12 is a matter of record. This tends to be treated by supporters of the view of a unified ‘Second International left’ either as a mistake due to the failure of Lenin and Trotsky to break openly with Kautsky until 1914, or as a manoeuvre in the complex internal struggles of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party. Lenin’s sharp polemic against the real inheritors of the 1910-12 Luxemburg-Pannekoek line (including Pannekoek himself) in Leftwing communism, an infantile disorder (1920) is ‘out of the picture’.

SDKPiL sect

The modern far left’s ‘Luxemburg narrative’ contains an important silence. Luxemburg was not only a leftwing activist in the SPD. She was also one of the co-founders and central leaders - along with her partner of a good many years, Leo Jogiches (aka Tyszka), and with Julian Marchlewski (Karski) and Adolf Warszawski (Warski) - of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland. In 1899 this merged with the Union of Workers of Lithuania to become the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), bringing Felix Dzerzhinsky into the central leadership.

The SDKPiL was a plain bureaucratic-centralist sect. Mandel’s article at least admitted that Luxemburg “had simultaneously fought against Lenin’s ‘ultra-centralism’, whilst tolerating Leo Jogisches’ iron regime in her own underground Polish Workers Party”. But it was not just a matter of ‘tolerating’ Jogiches: it was Luxemburg who argued after 1906 for SDKPiL organisational control of illegal trade unions, a policy which destroyed SDKPiL political influence in the emergent unions.

The 1906 split in the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) separated Józef Piłsudski’s pure-nationalist terrorist ‘Frak’ and drove the other wing, the mass movement-oriented PPS-Left, to the left. Luxemburg wrote the polemics using the agreed ultimatistic line on behalf of the SDKPiL executive, demanding from the PPS-Left complete acceptance of the SDKPiL’s anti-nationalism before any unity - even trade union unity - would be possible.

The SDKPiL split in 1911 when the leadership expelled critics who dissented on these two issues and aligned with the Bolsheviks on all-Russian issues. The primary charge was holding an unauthorised Warsaw inter-district conference to elect an equally unauthorised local leadership. The leadership proceeded to bring factitious charges of theft against Karl Radek, which Luxemburg had to drag into the SPD to get Radek expelled from that party.

In the end the two wings of the SDKPiL, and the PPS-Left, did unite in 1918 to form the Polish Communist Party; but if the SDKPiL supplied some famous leaders, it was the PPS-Left which supplied much of the cadre and base.

Why is this an “important silence”? The importance of the issue is that the modern far left has created many such sects: precisely “two, three, many SDKPiLs”. In a certain sense, overcoming this problem is the fundamental issue of our time.

And Luxemburg?

The question this poses is how far Luxemburg’s ideas on working class strategy may be connected to her and her co-thinkers’ sectarian practice in the Polish workers’ movement.

I should say at once that I do not have a clear and unambiguous answer to this question. I have argued previously that the ‘general strike strategy’, even in the form of the more fluid analysis of Luxemburg’s The mass strike, attempted to dodge the problem of political authority, and hence, in the conditions of revolutionary crisis which it addressed, failed to answer the urgent need of the masses for some governmental solution to the crisis. This weakness, however, does not in itself imply sect formation.

There is, also, a historical correlation between syndicalism and direct actionism and sectism: beginning with Bakunin’s ‘invisible dictatorship’, also visible pre- 1914 in Anglo-Saxon DeLeonism, and in the 1920s in the ‘left’ and ‘council’ communists after their splits from Comintern, as well as in the modern far left. I have argued before that this correlation reflects a real connection, albeit what can best be called a ‘law of tendency’, rather than a strict logical entailment. That is, that the concept of revolution involved promotes a party practice of a kind which drives towards a high level of central control, which in turn forces differences to lead to splits. Was the sect character of the SDKPiL an instance of this dynamic?

I am not in the least inclined to go back on these judgments, that the ‘mass strike’ or ‘direct action’ orientation does not represent a viable strategic alternative for the working class to the class-collaborationist reformism of most of the mass workers’ parties and trade unions; and that the same ‘mass strike’ or ‘direct action’ orientation in the modern far left works as part of a self-reinforcing dynamic of sectarianism and bureaucratic centralism.

However, I pose these issues in relation to Luxemburg as questions rather than answers. The question is how far the modern far left’s version of Luxemburg as an icon of its own ‘revolutionary Marxism’ involves not only airbrushing out the SDKPiL, but also an oversimplification of Luxemburg’s ideas about the party and the revolution.

Her academic social-scientist biographer, Peter Nettl, argued that Luxemburg from 1898, when she moved to Germany, led in effect a double life, holding her activities in the Polish leadership and in the SPD completely separate. For Nettl this assisted in structuring what would otherwise be a confusing biography, as he treats German matters and Polish and Russian matters separately. It can, however, hardly be true. The SDKP-SDKPiL sought to build in Russian Poland an imitator in broad terms of the SPD - as Lars Lih has put it of the Iskra group project in Russia, an “Erfurtian” party. Conversely, though Luxemburg avoided holding a formal position in the SDKPiL leadership, her interlocutors in the German SPD cadre cannot have been unaware of her involvement in Polish and Russian affairs, since she had first become prominent in the international through her heretical position on the Polish question, wrote on Poland for Neue Zeit and other periodicals, and continued to raise Polish matters in the SPD and international down to the Radek case in 1912 and the issue of attempts to reunify of the Russian RSDLP in 1914.

The SPD had survived illegality in the 1880s and built itself through the line that it was a revolutionary party, but not one which set out to make an immediate revolution. Rather, capitalism itself was heading for a general breakdown, Zusammenbruch or Kladderadatsch; up until this happened, the party’s task was simply to build the organised workers’ movement as the strongest possible force in society; when it happened, the SPD and the workers’ movement more generally would be there to pick up the pieces and reshape them in a way which gave political power to the working class.

Luxemburg’s initial intervention in the SPD’s internal debates, Reform or revolution, was precisely a defence of this line, even if the reflections in chapter 8 on the “conquest of political power” depart to some extent from the pattern of the Zusammenbruch concept by rejecting the idea that attempts of the working class to take power could be ‘premature’. In The accumulation of capital she was still defending the Zusammenbruch, if moving into the territory of linking the tendencies to breakdown to the rise of imperialism.

The mass strike was not just about teaching the Germans Russian lessons about what would happen in a real revolutionary crisis, but also carried with it the message: Zusammenbruch is coming closer, and you need to be prepared for it.

I make these points to emphasise the extent to which Luxemburg’s polemics as well as her actual German activities (writing for the SPD press, speaking at meetings, electoral campaigning) took the SPD, its existence as an enormous mass movement and its underlying strategic line for granted.

There are two possible interpretations of this statement. The first is a positive one: that we should read Luxemburg’s polemics before 1914 as limited critiques of the SPD’s current tactics on the basis of an assessment that revolutionary crisis was coming nearer, which accepted a common universe of discourse, rather than - as post-1919 users often have - as global, or cosmos-level, critiques of the SPD.

The second would be a negative one: it would be that Luxemburg wrote in the way she did because she took the SPD for granted and did not understand how the strategy related to what was objectively involved in building a mass party. This negative reading would make Luxemburg more like Trotsky, who similarly ‘freelanced’ in the pre-1914 period, and admitted after 1917 that he had never before 1917 understood the party question. There is some support for this negative view in the 1904 Organisational questions of Russian social democracy - and in the history of the SDKPiL.

Either way, the modern ‘new left’ use of Luxemburg seems likely to be a part of the far left’s problems, not of any possible solution.

[Positivist]

It really doesn't make sense when Leninists identify with Luxembourg. Though supportive of eachother, they were extremely critical of one anothers policies. This article is pretty much spot on in its assessment of her work. Not taking away from her heroism or contributions, but the support she gets can be overarching at times.

[cynicles]

This isn't the paper of that anti-immigration party in Britain is it?

[Zeus the Moose]

This isn't the paper of that anti-immigration party in Britain is it?

No. IIRC that group was either the Communist Party of Britain (http://www.communist-party.org.uk/) or the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (http://www.workers.org.uk/); I remember there being discussion over which group it was but don't remember what the resolution was on that point (though I think it's the CPB(ML).) The group Macnair is a member of is officially called the Communist Party of Great Britain- Provisional Central Committee (CPGB-PCC).

[Ostrinski]

Good article.

That bit about her role in the SDKPiL was interesting, I did not know that.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Good article.

That bit about her role in the SDKPiL was interesting, I did not know that.

For us comrades emphasizing revolutionary strategy, this unfortunately is Rosa Luxemburg's sad, sad legacy that we need to drill hard lessons on time and again.

[Per Levy]

Good article.

That bit about her role in the SDKPiL was interesting, I did not know that.

take the article with a grain of salt tough. i mean macnair and dnz are kautsky worshippers and need to shit on luxemburg because she was critical of kautsky before his betrayal of 1914. the sad thing about all the bans on here is that many knowledgle members were banned that could have some good critiques on the article, put things in perspective and so on, but oh well they are gone and dnz has a free reign now.

[Ostrinski]

DNZ is the man, I'll have you know

[Ostrinski]

Though I do wish some of those old members were still around, I enjoy reading their old polemics with DNZ.

[Positivist]

take the article with a grain of salt tough. i mean macnair and dnz are kautsky worshippers and need to shit on luxemburg because she was critical of kautsky before his betrayal of 1914. the sad thing about all the bans on here is that many knowledgle members were banned that could have some good critiques on the article, put things in perspective and so on, but oh well they are gone and dnz has a free reign now.

Is the historical references in the article inaccurate? That Luxembourg pursued different policies within the German SPD and the polish SDKiLP is certainly important considering how critical she was of Lenin and Kautsky's policies because they strayed from her ideological standard, yet when she thought that similar measures were neccessary it was ok. Its hypocritical, and very much sectarian. Its the living application of "Do as I say, not as I do." She was a hero and a martyr and yes a genius, but she misunderstood what it meant to build a mass party movement, and in the case of her criticisms of Lenin, a workers state.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Though I do wish some of those old members were still around, I enjoy reading their old polemics with DNZ.

IIRC, the ultra-lefts didn't have much in the way of polemics with me. The only polemics some of them had were when they were comrades, but when those select few became more critical, their ad hominems and sarcasm meters exposed the rapidly diminishing value of their criticisms.

It's quite telling that none of them discussed the SDKPiL critically here in older, more diplomatic threads like this: Rosa Luxemburg: sectarian? (http://www.revleft.com/vb/rosa-luxemburg-sectariani-t92161/index.html)


Is the historical references in the article inaccurate? That Luxembourg pursued different policies within the German SPD and the polish SDKiLP is certainly important considering how critical she was of Lenin and Kautsky's policies because they strayed from her ideological standard, yet when she thought that similar measures were neccessary it was ok. Its hypocritical, and very much sectarian. Its the living application of "Do as I say, not as I do." She was a hero and a martyr and yes a genius, but she misunderstood what it meant to build a mass party movement, and in the case of her criticisms of Lenin, a workers state.

Actually, given this damning article, Rosa Luxemburg, as opposed to Kautsky the Marxist, is not even an example of "Do as I say." Her mass strike line was critiqued by comrade Macnair above and in his book. Given the correlation between this and multiple sectarian practices, it's nigh impossible to "Do as I say, not as I do."

[Drosophila]

take the article with a grain of salt tough. i mean macnair and dnz are kautsky worshippers and need to shit on luxemburg because she was critical of kautsky before his betrayal of 1914. the sad thing about all the bans on here is that many knowledgle members were banned that could have some good critiques on the article, put things in perspective and so on, but oh well they are gone and dnz has a free reign now.

No one's "shitting on" Luxemburg. It's just a critique.

And I'm not so sure about those banned members. Most of them were just stuck-up noisemakers who flamed everything that questioned their own questionable politics.

[cynicles]

No. IIRC that group was either the Communist Party of Britain (http://www.communist-party.org.uk/) or the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (http://www.workers.org.uk/); I remember there being discussion over which group it was but don't remember what the resolution was on that point (though I think it's the CPB(ML).) The group Macnair is a member of is officially called the Communist Party of Great Britain- Provisional Central Committee (CPGB-PCC).

We really need to do an overhaul of the political party naming convention, we should just give them bar codes or something.

[Die Neue Zeit]

We really need to do an overhaul of the political party naming convention, we should just give them bar codes or something.

Light-heartedly, the CPB could be called the "Britain's/British Road to Socialism" group, while the CPGB-ML could be called the Harpal Brar group. We're talking about the Weekly Worker group here.

[Grenzer]

take the article with a grain of salt tough. i mean macnair and dnz are kautsky worshippers and need to shit on luxemburg because she was critical of kautsky before his betrayal of 1914. the sad thing about all the bans on here is that many knowledgle members were banned that could have some good critiques on the article, put things in perspective and so on, but oh well they are gone and dnz has a free reign now.

This is really just ignorant slander.

If you had ever bothered to read any of DNZ's posts, you'd realize he has a critical stance towards Kautsky, and an outright dismissive one towards him after 1910. You could of course hold the view that people are incapable of changing politically, and that because he became a reformist that he must have always been one; but this is not a serious view, nor would Marx and Engels agree. Take Eduard Bersntein: he is reviled, and with good reason; yet he was not always a reformist and was once applauded by both Marx and Engels. Could it be that he was so good at hiding his reformism that Marx and Engels failed to notice, or was it that he simply changed? It's a rhetorical question.

As for "shitting all over Rosa Luxemburg", if anything, that's something we need to be doing more often. Make no mistake, her martyrdom is something that should be respected; but politically, her strategic orientation is a dead end. This was a view that was also shared by Lenin, who delivered a massive broadside to her politically after the publication of the Accumulation of Capital, particularly on the political implications of the demise of capitalism being "inevitable". However, this usually goes unnoticed or ignored by the modern self-styled followers of Lenin, who have more or less ditched his views in favor of the circle-sect politics of Luxemburg. Most of the non-anarchist radical left have become "unconscious Luxemburgists" so to speak. As a result, it's extremely unsurprising that no left groups are capable of becoming anything more than irrelevant sects, meeting with the same fate of the SDKPiL. Although most leftists do not share her hypocritical views vis-à-vis the National Question, the have powered her tragic mistakes in regards to strategic orientation.

[cb9's_unity]

Admittedly I'm very very under-qualified to be entering this debate. However I'll air some of my opinions anyways.

When I read discussions like these I wonder what concrete steps forward they will help us take. Debate over the national question, for example, seems to be overly abstract. The question shouldn't be whether a nation has the 'right' to self-determination, but what specific political groups promote moving towards or away from revolutionary conditions. Writings from Luxemburg or Lenin in the early 20th century should be at the periphery of the debate, not the center (I realize this is the history sub-forum, but the article itself is about the writers modern significance).

The little I have read of Luxemburg is miles ahead of the modern revolutionary left in terms of anti-sectarianism. 'The Russian Revolution' starts and ends with an emphatic defense of the Bolsheviks. Modern revolutionaries should appreciate that. Whatever differences existed between Lenin and Luxemburg were always second to their solidarity.

Basically, I have no problem analyzing historical figures deeply. What I question is turning this historical figures into ever lasting historical tendencies. What is the point of trying to identify a Luxemburgism today? To me tracing tendencies throughout history by person and not the material conditions they reacted to is un-Marxist. We should be asking if the historical debate between communists has centered around the actual material conditions they faced or the writings of dead heroes. Defining yourself in terms of long dead theorists seems to me a sign of a dead theory. Instead we should be defining ourselves in terms of how to immediately act towards creating more revolutionary conditions. Lenin and Luxemburg may gives us clues on how to act, but they are not more important than the actions themselves.

I realize my analysis is a bit amateurish, but sometimes the way debate and analysis is framed in the modern left bugs me.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

This is really just ignorant slander.

If you had ever bothered to read any of DNZ's posts, you'd realize he has a critical stance towards Kautsky, and an outright dismissive one towards him after 1910. You could of course hold the view that people are incapable of changing politically, and that because he became a reformist that he must have always been one; but this is not a serious view, nor would Marx and Engels agree. Take Eduard Bersntein: he is reviled, and with good reason; yet he was not always a reformist and was once applauded by both Marx and Engels. Could it be that he was so good at hiding his reformism that Marx and Engels failed to notice, or was it that he simply changed? It's a rhetorical question.

As for "shitting all over Rosa Luxemburg", if anything, that's something we need to be doing more often. Make no mistake, her martyrdom is something that should be respected; but politically, her strategic orientation is a dead end. This was a view that was also shared by Lenin, who delivered a massive broadside to her politically after the publication of the Accumulation of Capital, particularly on the political implications of the demise of capitalism being "inevitable". However, this usually goes unnoticed or ignored by the modern self-styled followers of Lenin, who have more or less ditched his views in favor of the circle-sect politics of Luxemburg. Most of the non-anarchist radical left have become "unconscious Luxemburgists" so to speak. As a result, it's extremely unsurprising that no left groups are capable of becoming anything more than irrelevant sects, meeting with the same fate of the SDKPiL. Although most leftists do not share her hypocritical views vis-à-vis the National Question, the have powered her tragic mistakes in regards to strategic orientation.

I'm not getting (yet) into a discussion on Luxemburg herself nor the criticism of her in this post, but I do have one point:

are not the various left sects dominated by the programmes of Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism? I'd say that, if there were a political dead-end that the left-sects cling onto, it's those ideologies rather than Luxemburg's political philosophy.

[cynicles]

Honestly I'd say they all contributed to sectarianism, I agree that rosa contributed but I hardly think she's some untouched pinnacle for criticism.

[Die Neue Zeit]

are not the various left sects dominated by the programmes of Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism? I'd say that, if there were a political dead-end that the left-sects cling onto, it's those ideologies rather than Luxemburg's political philosophy.

Comrades here don't point to the "ideologies" as the problem, but rather the strategic lines. Today's groups share the strategic line of the SDKPiL.

[citizen of industry]

Comrades here don't point to the "ideologies" as the problem, but rather the strategic lines. Today's groups share the strategic line of the SDKPiL.

Well, Hilferding, Kautsky, Adler, et al. were going for liquidation of the soviets and a "democratic" government with the bourgeoisie. Luxemburg and Liebknecht wanted a dictatorship of the soviets. If that's "sectarianism," so be it. I think I'm finally getting your hatred of t-t-t-traaade unionism and r-r-r-reeevolution.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Comrade Macnair is referring in his article to the strategic line of the Second International left, to which the Bolsheviks did not belong, as it was applied before WWI. Before then, the Marxist Center eschewed both "democratic" bourgeois government and fetishes of limited soviet experiences.

[A Marxist Historian]

This is really just ignorant slander.

If you had ever bothered to read any of DNZ's posts, you'd realize he has a critical stance towards Kautsky, and an outright dismissive one towards him after 1910. You could of course hold the view that people are incapable of changing politically, and that because he became a reformist that he must have always been one; but this is not a serious view, nor would Marx and Engels agree. Take Eduard Bersntein: he is reviled, and with good reason; yet he was not always a reformist and was once applauded by both Marx and Engels. Could it be that he was so good at hiding his reformism that Marx and Engels failed to notice, or was it that he simply changed? It's a rhetorical question.

As for "shitting all over Rosa Luxemburg", if anything, that's something we need to be doing more often. Make no mistake, her martyrdom is something that should be respected; but politically, her strategic orientation is a dead end. This was a view that was also shared by Lenin, who delivered a massive broadside to her politically after the publication of the Accumulation of Capital, particularly on the political implications of the demise of capitalism being "inevitable". However, this usually goes unnoticed or ignored by the modern self-styled followers of Lenin, who have more or less ditched his views in favor of the circle-sect politics of Luxemburg. Most of the non-anarchist radical left have become "unconscious Luxemburgists" so to speak. As a result, it's extremely unsurprising that no left groups are capable of becoming anything more than irrelevant sects, meeting with the same fate of the SDKPiL. Although most leftists do not share her hypocritical views vis-à-vis the National Question, the have powered her tragic mistakes in regards to strategic orientation.

Uh uh, no crapping on Rosa please. I agree with Trotsky on that one. Lotsa lil' Zinovievites like Ruth Fischer, who were committing mistakes worse than any she ever committed, were burnishing their "Leninism" in the '20s by elevating every mistake she committed to the stratosphere. For them, it was for the purpose of glorifying Stalin and/or Zinoviev, for MacNair it does seem to me to be for the purpose, if not of glorifying "the renegade Kautsky," at least to rehabilitating Kautsky and Kautskyism pre-renegacy, reviving the old bad Kautskyite notion of "a party of the whole class," which Leninism is fundamentally opposed to.

Despite her errors which MacNair harps on, she has the glory of having recognized long before Lenin or Trotsky that Kautsky, the "pope" of the Second International, was not a revolutionary and not a model to follow.

And, in her last year, she was in fact moving rapidly towards Lenin's ideas on many questions, and had largely repudiated the unfortunate ideas in the most famous "Luxemburgist" statement, her criticisms of the Bolshevik Revolution published by her epigone Paul Levi after her death, without her permission. Her assassination meant that we can never know whether or not she would have made it all the way.

Now, the heritage of Paul Levi, who like our modern day Kautskyites though with a different line of argument tried to revive the idea of a "party of the whole class," ending up rejoining German Social Democracy, that is a legacy worth unearthing so we can all crap on it.

BTW, although Rosa was wrong about self-determination in general, her opposition to Polish independence in the particular context of pre-WWI Poland was probably correct.

-M.H.-

[Peoples' War]

I'm no "Luxembourgist", whatever that's supposed to be, but it seems to me that the Kautskyites of this website have a particular hatred of Rosa. It's based on a lot of the time, factually incorrect information and views. This "Macnair" has taught me nothing, other than, I can write an article with sourcing a lot of third-party sources, and referencing the subject themselves only once, and not even to back up anything of substance.

I haven't read a large amount of her work, only "The Russian Revolution", and I do know that her critique of the Bolshevik revolution was done based on the German and Tsarist press, and hearsay while she was imprisoned. Not only that, she had not intended to publish the work after she was released form prison had seen the facts and reneged the majority of her critiques, which were critiques of strategy and policy, not theory.

One thing I have read, was Tony Cliff's piece on her. Which I suggest to be read by anyone interested in Luxembourg, whether or not you are a fan of Cliff in general.

Basically, I've learned nothing form this article, or from the poor (more like non-existent) analyses of the article by the "Revolutionary Marxists" aka Katuskyites. DNZ continues to ignore that Luxembourg has written a response to Kautsky' critique of "The Mass Strike", which, according to a few comrades I know, tears Kautsky a new one.

Although I had intended on reading Gramsci, Bordiga and others, I think I will focus on Luxembourg first off, out of spite and hatred of Kautskyism.

[Die Neue Zeit]

For them, it was for the purpose of glorifying Stalin and/or Zinoviev, for MacNair it does seem to me to be for the purpose, if not of glorifying "the renegade Kautsky," at least to rehabilitating Kautsky and Kautskyism pre-renegacy, reviving the old bad Kautskyite notion of "a party of the whole class," which Leninism is fundamentally opposed to.

Your criticism is a strawman, which says that even non-class-strugglist tendencies would be part of the "party of the whole class." We are for a party of worker-class-strugglists, not necessarily those who are r-r-r-r-revolutionary activists.

We are for a worker-class movement:

http://books.google.ca/books?id=8AVUvEUsdCgC&pg=PA69&lpg=PA69&dq=lars+lih+worker+adjective+%22working+class%22&source=bl&ots=5j4tdoBOZo&sig=xJgdVQ1S6gPbi9RrUNtCiO58mzM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=RBM5UJmnFeP1igKN44DgDw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=lars%20lih%20worker%20adjective%20%22working%20c lass%22&f=false

That implies that reform coalitionists and other class-collaborationists, as well as apolitical or anti-political r-r-r-r-revolutionists, are excluded.


Despite her errors which MacNair harps on, she has the glory of having recognized long before Lenin or Trotsky that Kautsky, the "pope" of the Second International, was not a revolutionary and not a model to follow.

We propose revolutionary strategy before a revolutionary period, knowing what an actual revolutionary period for the working class is like (The Road to Power). Luxemburg can only be credited for criticizing Kautsky's lack of commitment to what comrade Macnair calls the "revolutionary gambit," something necessary during revolutionary periods for the working class. We are "shitting on Luxemburg" for, like Trotskyism, having it so wrong on strategy before a revolutionary period.

[Peoples' War]

Luxemburg and Lenin: by Jimmie Higgins



Of late there has been a tendency among the writers of the weekend review fringe, to love up to safely dead revolutionaries – particularly those whose lives can be described as failures. One noted this first in the reviews of Deutscher’s trilogy on Trotsky. Deutscher’s work received deserved acclaim as a major work of biography. Trotsky was venerated as a great literary stylist, his superhuman struggles against personal and political adversity applauded. He was contrasted with Stalin, as a civilised and humane man. But his politics – received that amused contempt normally reserved for the enthusiasms of the very young. Cultured and civilised Trotsky might be, but he was clearly no match for the uncultured and uncivilised Stalin. The whole of Trotsky’s brilliant and penetrating analysis went for nothing. He was abstracted from the real situation in which his ideological struggles took place and, as a utopian dreamer, contrasted with the brutal but necessary Realpolitik of Stalinism.

Again, in the case of Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary, one detected the same nostalgia for a dead revolutionary hero in reviews which, apart from a notably illiterate attack in the Sunday Times, universally acclaimed the work.
Now it is the turn of Rosa Luxemburg. Her life contains all the elements to titillate palates jaded by long draughts of corrosive fellow-travelling. She was personally courageous; her love life was intense but unsatisfactory; she was physically handicapped; she spent time in prison – a lot of time – and perhaps best of all she died in a particularly brutal way at the hands of Freikorps thugs. Add to this her slightly hysterical (for my taste) attachment to the beauties of nature and the result is the perfect ikon with which to salve the unquiet liberal conscience.

At one point in his book [1] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/higgins/1966/xx/luxlen.htm#n1), Mr Nettl comments on the strange position occupied by Rosa Luxemburg in the socialist pantheon. There is certainly a weird coalition of worshippers at her shrine. The Social Democrats claim her as their own on the basis of her polemics against the Bolsheviks, while the Stalinists revered her for her violent and cogently argued repudiation of the social democratic position. Nettl notes this phenomenon but suggests it is due to the timing of her death which occurred before she could have time to take sides in the controversies which rocked the Communist movement in the twenties and thirties. Later in the book, Nettl suggests that, had she lived, she would have had to fill her declining years by writing memoirs as a pensioner of some learned American foundation (à la Ruth Fischer) or to have lived out her days in what he (Nettl) imagines to have been the sterility of dispossessed revolutionary groups (à la Trotsky). This seems to assume a completely static view of history and the relationship between individuals and the revolutionary movement. It is true that except in very few instances one can point to an individual as the central factor in a revolutionary situation, and in the twentieth century probably only Lenin and Luxemburg have actually personified historical necessity. The conjunction of Lenin, the Bolshevik party and the Russian workers were the essential ingredients for the successful October revolution. On a number of occasions Trotsky wrote of the key role Lenin played in 1917. In the sense that nobody else among the Bolsheviks (certainly not Trotsky) had the prestige to alter the course of the party and set it firmly on the road to the seizure of power, then Trotsky is unquestionably right. The dialectical relationship between the three elements in the Russian revolution is demonstrated most clearly by Trotsky when he says:
... Lenin... did not fall from the skies. He personified the revolutionary traditions of the working class. For Lenin’s slogans to find their way to the masses there had to exist cadres even though numerically small at the beginning; there had to exist the confidence based on the entire experience of the past... The role and responsibility of the leadership in a revolutionary epoch is colossal. [2] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/higgins/1966/xx/luxlen.htm#n2)

In the case of Luxemburg, the picture is less clear, if only because the importance of her role has been muddied by the apologists of German Communism and Social Democracy. Nevertheless it is to my mind virtually certain that the failure of 1919 would have had a totally different aftermath had she lived. It is impossible to imagine a German Communist party with Rosa Luxemburg at its head bowing to the dictates of a Zinoviev-directed Comintern or accepting the Stalin policy of “Socialism in One Country.” with the accession of the Independent Social Democrats to the KPD in October 1920, the building of a mass revolutionary party became a possibility; a possibility that Rosa would not have missed. The tragedy of 1919 would not have been repeated in the farce of 1924. The idiocy of the ’third period’ is unthinkable in terms of a Luxemburgist party. To consider the possibility of a successful German revolution is to rewrite subsequent world history. No Nazis; no Stalinism; no world war and the real chance for the international socialism so dear to Luxemburg’s heart. The Social Democratic leaders who connived at the assassination of Liebknecht and Luxemburg have more to answer for than complicity in murder.

It is inevitable that in any study of Luxemburg , her theoretical and political contribution will be contrasted with that of Lenin. Although perhaps less inevitable, it is unfortunately the case that most commentators come down squarely on the side of the super Marxist democrat, Luxemburg, against the wily Asiatic tyrant, Lenin, as if they represented separate incompatible poles. It cannot be denied that there were deep and passionately-argued differences between them. But were the differences of a fundamental character? Is it not true that the polemics concerned questions of revolutionary strategy and the potentialities for socialist activity, given the actual facts of capitalism at the time? In either case the argument was conducted from different vantage points based on dissimilar traditions and requirements. The debate was hard fought on a whole series of questions (imperialism, the nature of the party, the mass strike and later the form and content of the Russian revolution). At no time however was the argument conducted with the degree of intensity that characterised the debates with Bernstein and Kautsky. The debate with Lenin was conducted within the context of a shared revolutionary objective while the struggles against Revisionism and centrism resulted in a definite break. For example, in the polemic against What is to be done?, Luxemburg insists upon the free activity of the revolutionary class in the splendid formulation,

... Historically the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee. [3] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/higgins/1966/xx/luxlen.htm#n3)
In this she cannot be faulted if one starts – as she does – from the accomplished fact of the mass German party. For Lenin the situation was quite different. The need in Russia was to build an organisation capable of making the connection between revolutionary theory and the Russian workers, under conditions of Tsarist autocracy. In any case the concept of trade union consciousness as the limit above which workers could not rise was not Lenin’s formulation but an import from German Social Democracy. As Dunayevskaya points out

... there was an element in Lenin’s theory of organisation ... which was specifically Leninist, the conception of what constitutes membership in a Russian Marxist group. Indeed the definition did not only rest on a “phrase,” that he is only a member who puts himself “under the discipline of the local organisation.” The disciplining by the local was crucial to Lenin’s conception that it held primacy over verbal adherence to Marxist theory, propagandising Marxist views, and holding a membership card. Undoubtedly you have something in your head that is at sharp variance with the prevailing Social Democratic conception when you are that stubborn about a “phrase.” [4] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/higgins/1966/xx/luxlen.htm#n4)

With this in mind it becomes clear that Lenin’s conception not only involved traffic from the socialist intelligentsia to the workers but a two-way exchange which submitted the intellectuals to the discipline of work in concert with active proletarians. Further light is shed on this controversy when we recall the interesting fact that Luxemburg’s reply to What is to be Done? was originally published in Neue Zeit(the SPD theoretical journal) and only later translated into Russian for publication in Iskra. It would seem that Rosa was fighting here on two fronts. The bureaucratisation of the SPD was moving on apace. The victory over revisionist theory had not resulted in a victory over revisionist practice. In Luxemburg’s opinion the prescription for the German movement was not more direction from the centre but a releasing of revolutionary potential from the encumbrance of parliamentary manoeuvring and trade union economism. In many ways this argument between Lenin and Luxemburg is perhaps the most important for the socialist movement today. One of the tragedies of current revolutionary politics is the pathetic fervour with which many people cling to the particular organisational principles Lenin laid down in 1903. However appropriate they may have been in the Russia of the time there is no doubt that today they require drastic modification (as Lenin modified them in 1905 and again in 1917). In the British labour movement there is no shortage of leaderships and alternative leaderships all in search of a movement to lead. The problem is not to assume leadership of the working class (although I am prepared to offer a fine shade of odds against any of the current pretenders), but to put forward those ideas with analytical justification that will bring the existing movement into collision with the fabric of capitalist society. In this process the leadership and the revolutionary party will be formed. For the British labour movement in the mid-1960’s, Luxemburg is, on this question a better guide than the Lenin of What is to Be Done?

If one pursues the investigation of the Lenin/Luxemburg controversies into the argument over the mass strike and the vexed question of spontaneity again one finds that those differences were rooted in the differences in objective conditions facing the two protagonists in their separate fields of activity. The dialectic of combined and uneven development in Russia meant the subordination of tens of thousands of first generation peasants to the inhuman discipline of large scale capitalist manufacture. The frequent resort to mass protest is, in some ways, an expression of the backwardness of Russian workers in terms of direct political consciousness and their ability, under the conditions, of Tsarism to give any meaning to a constitutional political protest. The Bolsheviks then did not need to emphasise the necessity for, nor the inevitability of, the mass strike – it was there on the ground. The problem in Russia was to canalise this spontaneous movement into socialist objectives. The German Left had quite the reverse problem. Their task was to set in motion the working class in conflict with society through the agency of the mass strike and the mass party. The German need was to revoke their parliamentary proxy while the Russians needed a revolutionary leadership. But the last words on the alleged irreconcilability between the ideas of Lenin and Luxemburg should come from two people who were opposed with equal fervour to both revolutionaries. The Menshevik Theodore Dan, in his history of the Russian movement said that Polish Social Democracy

... shared in its essentials the organisational principles of Lenin against which Rosa Luxemburg had polemicized at the birth of Bolshevism; it also applied these principles in the practice of its own party ...
Kautsky her bitter enemy, wrote in 1922

It does not even occur to me today to deny that in the course of the war Rosa drew steadily closed to the communist world of thought, so that it is quite correct when Radek says that “with Rosa Luxemburg there died the greatest and most profound theoretical head of communism”.

A problem that has bedevilled every genuine socialist tendency has been its relationship to the mass reformist party. Since 1914 the problem has been simplified in that the immutably reformist (in essence, reactionary) nature of Social Democracy has been abundantly and all too frequently displayed. But this realisation of the nature of Social Democracy has not been accompanied by the elucidation of a satisfactory tactic for work within, upon and about the mass parties. The solutions put forward are all, in their way, unsatisfactory in application if not in theory. They range from outright rejection, with the formation of a “pure” revolutionary party (RCP etc.); through open-ended organisations which nestle their roots in the compost of the reformist parties (SLL at various times); to those tendencies which are frequently indistinguishable from the mulch allowing themselves no more indulgence than the production of little journals. In all these examples, the inclination is to defend the tactic to the point where it becomes a principle, leaving no room for effective manoeuvre. Without giving way to mystical delusions about embryonic revolutionary parties, it should be possible for a small but flexible organisation to change the emphasis of its tactics to come into mutually fruitful contacts with workers. A combination of all three tactics can in no way be precluded if a changing situation demands a quick and audacious response.

The reason for this last somewhat discursive paragraph is not just to make a fairly obvious point but also to consider the problem of the pre-1914 German Left and what chance for success it might have had if it had been more effectively organised into a disciplined faction. It is a commonplace that Lenin’s definitive break (in an organisational sense) with the Mensheviks enabled the Bolsheviks to forge an organisation capable of taking power. Again, the roots of Polish Communism were established when Luxemburg and Jogiches broke from the PPS to form the SDKP in 1893. The PPS, they decided, was hopelessly out of tune with socialist objectives, an estimation that Rosa repeated in 1911 (if not earlier in regard to the SPD. Far earlier than Lenin, she had weighed Kautsky and found him short in the balance. It is at least arguable that at this stage (1911/12) the formation of a disciplined Left Opposition was in order. As Nettl shows (p.459), Luxemburg made no such attempt. The argument in support of Luxemburg follows something along these lines. The relationship of forces as between the Left and the SPD machine was horribly weighted against the Left. It is further suggested, to move into sharp opposition would have cut the Marxists off from the organised SPD working class, in a party which made a fetish of unity.

Ever since then (1875) Social Democracy had looked on any policy that might lead to a split not merely as a political error but as ultimate infamy – with the same moralistic fervour associated, say, with murder. [5] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/higgins/1966/xx/luxlen.htm#n5)

There is some weight to be accorded these arguments. But, is it necessarily true that a principled opposition with a clear programme will always cut itself off from the workers in an active mass party? Surely the reverse is frequently the case. A party with a verbally radical programme and an active membership obviously cannot be assaulted frontally through its entrenched machine but at the margins where its verbal radicalism is put to the test of rank-and-file scrutiny. The post-1917 experience of the French and German Communist parties with their massive gains from Social Democracy is a case in point and much less significant but closer to home is recent experience in the Young Socialists. An opposition can in this sense operate on the mass party from without and within. That difficulties exist, is really beside the point; it is precisely in the formulation of an organisational and programmatic opposition that the necessary interaction between the revolutionaries takes place. An organisation in pre-war Germany that proceeded on this basis would have been appealing to workers over the heads of the SPD leadership with a programme that was more in accord with the workers’ situation. To disseminate and popularise such a programme there would have been no immediate need for a large following, but insofar as the programme is fought for and accepted, the growth of the opposition is assured. Brandler estimated that in 1915 the Gruppe Internationale (later Spartacusbund) had 4,000 loosely organised adherents. If this organisation had been formed earlier it is reasonable to suppose that the 4,000 could have been much larger, the anti-war propaganda more effective and by 1918 there might have been a fully-fledged Communist Party on the ground in many ways more capable than the Bolsheviks in Russia. The question, like all such historical “ifs”, is an open one, but it illustrates that perhaps Rosa, like many Marxists before and too many since, displayed a tactical rigidity not entirely consonant with the revolutionary task she set herself.

It is necessary to conclude a review of this kind with some evaluation of the job performed by the biographer. Mr Nettl has carried out a useful and long overdue service. The research involved has been monumental. Everything available that Luxemburg wrote, or that has been written about her, has been sifted and evaluated. People who knew her and are still living have been interviewed – particularly useful in this respect was the information obtained from Luise Kautsky’s friend, Blumenburg – and as a result a number of interesting and new insights into her life and character are displayed. One complaint that I have is that Jogiches never emerges as anything more than a rather shadowy figure: in a book of 984 pages, one would have hoped for a rather more rounded presentation. As against this one can congratulate Nettl on his perceptive analysis of Kautsky. He shows clearly that this “Pope of Marxism” was in reality a sterile propagator of orthodoxy without reference to the changing world and the necessary practical consequences of a revolutionary ideology, in fact, a classical centrist.

But there are some matters on which Mr Nettl not only goes against the facts but also against much that is implicit in his sown pages. One judgement in particular stands out like a sore thumb:

The great difference between Lenin and Luxemburg was that the former could have taken himself off to the moon and produced exactly the same thought and action from there. Rosa Luxemburg on the other hand needed not only society and Social democracy as the humus for her thought but the specific society if Imperial Germany and particularly the German Social Democracy that had grown with it.

This really is quite grotesque, the reverse of the real situation. In fact a Lenin divorced from the Russian Labour Movement just would not have existed before 1917. While Rosa, had she had the misfortune to be landed on the moon, would have settled down to educate and organise the green cheese against its maggot exploiters. Another cause of some irritation is Nettl’s use, on occasion, of intrusive sociological terms and categories, as in his characterisation of the SDKP leadership as a “peer group.” Nettl suggests:
This Social Democracy of Poland and Lithuania was a group of intellectual peers long before it became a political party. It provided its members with all the attributes o a primary group, an association which all the emigrés lacked – a family, an ideology, a discipline, in short a constant and reliable source of strength ... – in some respects as conspiratorial as Lenin’s Bolsheviks, but outward and open looking in other. The discipline was largely voluntary and was confined to public action; for the rest it left large areas of freedom and choice to the participants, even room for profound intellectual disagreements ... Trotsky with all his friends, admirers and disciples, never had the benefit of a peer group; hence his difficulty in building a following before the revolution and the fragility of his support after 1923 (Nettl p.23).

If by all this he means that the Polish Marxists were an exceptionally talented lot, one can agree – even after 1917 there was a common saying in the Comintern, “The Russian party is the biggest and the Polish party is the best.” But to suggest that the SDKP leadership was qualitatively different from all other revolutionary groups because of this nice accident of togetherness in a “primary group” seems to me to be an error. In fact all revolutionary groups – including the Bolsheviks under Lenin and especially the Left Opposition after 1923 – have similar relationships. Circumstances may vary the degree of conspiracy, but intellectual disagreements always abound both “outward and inward.” One assumes that Nettl has no close acquaintance with the revolutionary movement except as an interested observer. But an academic observer (no matter how well disposed) can scrutinise the collected works from laundry list to magnum opus and still miss the essential flavour of a revolutionary organisation. It would have been better perhaps if someone more in sympathy with Rosa Luxemburg’s politics had written this book (Mr Nettl in his introduction refuses to let his own philosophical cat out of the bag; whatever it is, that cat is no Marxist) but they have not, and probably will not, until the coming Russian, German and Polish revolutions finally frees all the sources for the final evaluation of Rosa Luxemburg.

Of course the life and work of a revolutionary like Luxemburg will mean different things to different people. For the academic mind at its lowest level it will represent thesis fodder of a particularly rich variety. For the professional anti-Communist, careful selection can provide evidence for the impossibility of revolutionary success and if, by chance, the revolution does succeed prove that it’s awful anyway. For the religious Marxist it provides a useful additional banker in the permutation of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, when they make their genuflection. For the revolutionary Marxist, Luxemburg provides an object lesson in the application of the Marxist method to a particular time and place and of an uncompromising revolutionary position regardless of consequence. In this lies her heritage; a heritage of which she would have been justly proud.

For further, more objective, reading on Luxemburg:

http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Back/Wnext7/Thalheim.html

http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1959/rosalux/index.htm

[Die Neue Zeit]

When was that article written, and was it by the same Jimmie Higgins of this board?

[MarxSchmarx]

When was that article written, and was it by the same Jimmie Higgins of this board?

It is from "winter 1966/67"
http://www.marxists.org/archive/higgins/1966/xx/luxlen.htm

According to the marxist internet archive:



Born into a working-class family in Harrow, Jim Higgins joined the Young Communist League at 14 and left school at 16. Two years later he was apprenticed to the Post Office as a telecommunications engineer. After National Service in the early 1950s, he became active in both the Communist Party and the Post Office Engineering Union. He broke with the CP in 1956 following Khrushchev’s “secret speech” and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Higgins read Trotsky voraciously, and joined a small group – Socialist Labour League – and then the Socialist Review Group which became the International Socialists.

By the 1960s he was a POEU branch secretary and was elected to the union’s national executive, but he gave up his union work to become IS’s full-time national secretary in the early 1970s. IS grew rapidly in the later 1960s and early 70s but in a burst of internal quarrels in the period 1973-76 he was forced out of the organisation and then built a new life as a journalist. He remained active as a writer and speaker at left wing meetings up until his death.


Although I don't know if he ever went by "Jimmie"; here's another etymology of that name:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2427632&postcount=14