Rosa Luxembourg and Left-Communsim

[Bostana]

Comrades, can you give me a little background information on Rosa Luxemburg. Like her history what makes her theories separate from other tendencies etc, etc. I heard understand a few things on her like she was a major figure in left communism.
I also have a question concerning all left communists really, are you completely anti-Bolshevist or only at certain points?

Thanks :)

EDIT: I understand she wasn't a left-comm. But I heard she did have a profound influence on it when the tendency started

[Os Cangaceiros]

She wasn't a left communist, although I think that certain left communists have been influenced by some pieces of her thought (or are just inspired by her life & death).

My understanding is that she was pro-Bolshevik, although also critical of certain aspects of Bolshevik policy.

[Bostana]

I understand she wasn't a left-communist, but she did have a major affect on the group when it was later formed, correct?

[La Guaneña]

I understand she wasn't a left-communist, but she did have a major affect on the group when it was later formed, correct?

Well, I wouldn't even put left communists in only one "group", as the term speaks of the Pannekoek-inspired council communists, as well as the closer to Lenin Bordigists.

[Blake's Baby]

OK: 'Left Communism' as it's generally understood does not include Council Communists.

Some people on RevLeft think that Council Communists are the same as Left Communists - the 'Orthodox Marxism' crowd think that Left Communists = Council Communists because both Left Comms and Council Comms see the workers' councils as being the vehicle for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The SPGB crowd think that Pannekoek was a Leninists (and therefore Council Comms = Left Comms = Leninists) because he wanted the insurrectionary overthrow of the state in Germany.

but Council Communism developed out of German/Dutch Left Communism, and to be a Council Communist involves rejecting certain positions intrinsic to Left Communism.

There are two main Left Comm currents: the German-Dutch Left, particularly around the KAPD, who were not Council Communists; and the Italian Left, around the Abstentionist Fraction of the Italian Socialist Party (of which Bordiga was one of the leading members).

Both the KAPD and the Abstentionist Fraction (which formed the PCI) represented the majorities of their respective parties, but both were manouevred out on the orders of the Bolsheviks after 1919 - the left were expelled from the KPD and formed the KAPD, the Abstentionist Fraction lost the leadership of the PCI to Gramsci.

Luxemburg was never a Left Comm, as the groups that evolved into Left Communism only did so after her death. If she'd survived she might have even been opposed to the emergence of the Left Comm groups - who knows? However she's had a profound influence on all the groups of the Communist Left, particulrly in terms of economics (the ICC officially holds to version of Luxemburg's economic theories) and in terms of internationalism (all Left Comm groups - except some of the Bordigists - hold to a 'Luxemburgist' internationalism).

Luxemburg, and modern Left Comms, are pro-Bolshevik, in that we see the revolution in Russia as being a proletarian revolution (unlike the Council communists who see it as a bourgeois revolution) carried out with the intervention of a proletarian party (unlike the Council Communists who see the Bolsheviks as a bourgeois party).

But we criticise what we see as the errors of the Bolsheviks (as Rosa did too). The point is not 'Bolsheviks - good or bad?' but 'what can we learn from the revolution in Russia and its degeneration?'

[subcp]

Luxemburg wrote a critique of the schema of Marx's Capital; Luxemburg put forward that in real existing capitalism, and not a 'pure' capitalism (composed of only proletarians and bourgeoisie), enlarged reproduction requires pre-capitalist markets, a third party buyer, to absorb the overaccumulation of the central capitalist nations. One strand of decadence theory borrows from Luxemburg's Accumulation of Capital and related texts that the world market had become saturated; that the tendency to overaccumulation resulted in the world being divided up by imperialist powers (central capitalist nations) who had built the world market, which meant no more conquest of new markets- only further exploitation of existing markets.

She formulated the theory of the mass strike (borrowing from Pannekoek's mass action theory) to theorize the real movement of the working-class at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century: Belgium and Russia both saw mass spontaneous strikes in densely populated industrial cities, where a near general strike was in effect due to the size of the spontaneous (un-planned by unions) strike actions that paralyzed regions or nations (the Russian revolution of 1905, where the first soviet took shape, was built on the mass strike)- and she defended this view within the Second International as a possible means that the working-class would carry out its revolution.

So you have the ideas of Luxemburg; and then you have people who either call themselves Luxemburgist or associate her with a 'libertarian Marxism'. She was opposed to the idea of 'the right of nations to self-determination', and polemicized with Lenin and the Bolsheviks over this issue before and after the October revolution. One of the 2 'Luxemburgist' groups that exist today has articles that defend national liberation on their website- a position Luxemburg passionately argued against in her lifetime. So there's the historic Luxemburg and her actual ideas, and those that associate her with a kinder, gentler Marxism because she argued with Lenin in the old days (and take positions not related to Luxemburg's for the most part).

[Alf]

Blake, I think your definition of the communist left is a bit narrow. I would say that council communism is part of the communist left. The problem is that a lot of people reduce the communist left to council communism, partly because they don't know much about the other currents (Italian, Russian, pre-'councilist' German left etc), and partly because the ideas of council communism are generally more acceptable to those who are attracted to anarchism.

[TheEmancipator]

I have a question on Luxembourg too : she seems to advocate "social democracy", what does she mean by this? Is it different to the standard (pseudo-)social democracy we see today or is just an opposition to dictatorship of the proletariat?

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I have a question on Luxembourg too : she seems to advocate "social democracy", what does she mean by this? Is it different to the standard (pseudo-)social democracy we see today or is just an opposition to dictatorship of the proletariat?

Social Democracy 100 years ago was not the social democracy we have seen since WW1.

It was generally understood to be a political application of Marxism. When the SPD in Germany sold out and supported/did not oppose WW1, Social Democracy essentially started to become what it is today.

[newdayrising]

She used the term Social Democracy because at the time that was the common name for the maxist/socialist movement in general. Even the Bolsheviks emerged as a fraction within social democracy. Then they broke away from the second international and those whoe remained in it kept the name while communists became known as communists.

[newdayrising]

The Boss beat me to it, sorry

[Fourth Internationalist]

Marxists need to take back Social Democracy from the capitalists, it's such a much more appealing name than socialism and communism in my opinion.

[Bostana]

Marxists need to take back Social Democracy from the capitalists, it's such a much more appealing name than socialism and communism in my opinion.


Because capitalist dirtied up the name :grin:

[NoOneIsIllegal]

I have a question on Luxembourg too : she seems to advocate "social democracy", what does she mean by this? Is it different to the standard (pseudo-)social democracy we see today or is just an opposition to dictatorship of the proletariat?
The Boss pretty much hit the nail on the head. A lot of Marxist parties and organizations between the 1870s to 1910s actually had Social Democracy in their name. Around the 1890s and the turn of the century terms like Socialist and Labor were being adapted into names more often, and then once the Cominterm was established, brand new Communist parties were formed.
Rosa Luxemburg herself was involved in several parties in her lifetime, but the first two she was apart of was the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, and then the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Social Democracy was a very popular term and generally used synonymously with socialism.

[l'Enfermé]

^Social-Democracy is shorthand for "Socialist Democracy". It wasn't used synonymously with "socialism", it was Socialism.

[Narodnik]

I understood as that in that age they wanted a society that is democratic- that there should be (direct) democracy in the political and the organization.


As far as the name being a more appealing name (in the mainstream) then socialism or communism- I would disagree, with all sorts of oppressors and exploitators (by definition oligarchic) appropriating the word for themselves, "democracy" is nor really that appealing anymore. Direct, radical, participatory or similar adjectives need to be added to the word democracy to make it clear what you're talking about. I'd rather suggest words like horizontalism, autogestion, isocracy (or maybe autonomism and workerism/ operaism, even though they are used for specific movements).