Rosa Luxemburg Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy

[BobKKKindle$]

Here's the text.

I want to start a study group on this text, because I haven't read it before, and it presents a different way to understand the role of the revolutionary party that maintains some of the core features of Lenin's conception, but also places emphasis on the need to adjust our organizational strategies to local conditions and uphold democratic decision-making. Here is a short description of Rosa Luxemburg's life and an overview of her debates within the SPD over the relationship between revolution and reforms, taken from Socialist Worker:

Moving from reform to workers’ revolution

Beatrice Leal opens our new series on the great revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg with the debate in the German socialist movement before the First World War

Rosa Luxemburg was a unique thinker and fighter. She was born in Russian-occupied Poland in 1871. When she was 16 she joined a revolutionary party and within a few years was one of its leaders.

Rosa got involved with politics at school, demonstrating for the right to speak Polish. When she left school she was told she couldn’t have a medal she’d won because of her rebellious attitude towards authorities.

As well as being unique personally, the problems she faced as an activist meant that what she wrote about was different from other revolutionaries of her time.

It was illegal to be a socialist in Russia. There were no unions and no parliamentary democracy.

So whatever problems they had, the Russian Bolshevik Party didn’t have to argue against many in the working class who were in favour of reforming the system gradually. It seemed obvious that it either had to be put up with or overthrown.

But Luxemburg had in 1898 moved to Germany, where anti-socialist laws had been repealed, the SPD socialist party had grown steadily for years, there was a trade union movement and a parliament with left MPs.

There also hadn’t been any wars or economic crises in Europe for 20 years, and it seemed that perhaps capitalism was settling down.

When she arrived in Germany, a row was brewing in the SPD. Eduard Bernstein, one of the party’s leaders, had published a book challenging the idea that a crisis of capitalism could lead to revolution.

He argued that instead activists should focus on reforms that can be won here and now, saying “the final goal is nothing. The movement is everything.”

His theories have been repeated many times since. Whenever a few years go by without a crisis, it is announced that there will be peace and prosperity and that ideas of overthrowing capitalism are obsolete.

Bernstein also thought that growing prosperity meant workers were becoming more middle class, making revolution impossible.

Again, plenty of people since have tried to tell us that, “We are all middle class now.”

But here was a respected socialist saying it, someone who had worked with Frederick Engels and claimed to stand in the tradition of him and Karl Marx.
The party was divided, with influential people on both sides. Luxemburg was one of the fiercest on the revolutionary side, and the youngest.

She wrote the pamphlet Reform or Revolution in 1900 to put the debate to a wider audience, saying that theoretical knowledge shouldn’t be “the privilege of a handful of ‘academics’ in the party”.

She argued that Europe could not stay peaceful for long. Economic crises are not capitalism going wrong, but are an integral part of the system.

However inconvenient crises are for individual capitalists – not to mention workers – the system needs them to solve the problem of growing production but limited markets.

Finding new markets by colonising other countries had delayed the problem, but it wouldn’t work forever.

Also, there was the threat of war as the European powers fought for control of the colonies. Luxemburg predicted that sooner or later there would be a war in Europe.

She wasn’t against campaigning for reforms or standing in elections. While this debate was going on she also did a meeting tour for the SPD in an election campaign.

But she argued that however many reforms are won by unions or parliamentary parties, if the state is still controlled by the ruling class, we are no nearer socialism.

She argued that reforms can only impose limits on exploitation. She wrote, “They have not, however, the power to suppress exploitation itself, not even gradually.”

Luxemburg wrote that to change society we need to take on the whole system, instead of seeing an individual boss or politician as the problem.

But the only way to understand that process is to start by fighting the boss or the politician. Campaigns for reforms are important because as well as winning immediate gains, they teach revolutionary consciousness.

By focusing solely on winning reforms, rather than fighting for more fundamental change, even the best socialists can end up compromising with the system.

Luxemburg’s theory that struggle for reforms can develop into a fight to change society altogether was proved right a few years later, in the 1905 Russian Revolution.

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=14080

The text itself is split into two sections, so I suggest that we take each section in turn, reading, and then discussing before we move on to the next section.

If you are interested, please make your interest known in this thread =)

[Bilan]

Here's the text.
Be sure to link it next time.

Anyway, I'm in.

[Tower of Bebel]

I'll read it "under the title Organizational Questions of Social Democracy as part of the 1970 Pathfinder Press compilation Rosa Luxemburg Speaks."

[BobKKKindle$]

be sure to link it next time

That was intended as a test to see if people know what the MIA is and can locate the Luxemburg section

Anyway, I'll probably post a notice in the theory forum as well because I find that people don't tend to look at this forum unless they know there's a study group already going on. I read through the first section of the text the other day and it really is short and highly readable, but I think it's still best to tackle the sections in turn, and to allow some reading time, so people can study it in detail, do some background reading if they like, and gather some thoughts.

It's the 10th today by my watch, so I suggest we begin discussing the first section on the 17th - I was going to suggest the 15th or 16th but Ill be traveling on both those dates, hope there are no objections.

[Tower of Bebel]

A piece of context taken from "Rosa luxemburg speaks":

Rosa Luxemburg was born and grew up in what was a that time Russian Poland, and the fate of the party she helped to found and lead, the Social Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania, was always intertwined with that of the Russian Social Democratic Party. As a result, she remained deeply interested throughout her life in what was happening in Russia itself and in the Russian social democratic movement. Even her opponents in Germany considered her the party's authority on Poland as well as Russia. As the representative of the SDKPiL to the Second International, she was frequently involved in the debates between and about the different factions of Russian Social Democracy.

She never aligned herself unreservedly with either the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks. Most basicly she stood for unity within the RSDRP. As the following article shows she disagreed with the kind of party the Bolsheviks were trying to build. But after the "dres rehearsal" Revolution of 1905-06 she was in substantial agreement with the Bolsheviks on their analysis of the revolution, and the way they had responded to the revolutionary upheaval, while she had great contempt for the theoretical and practical errors made by the Mensehviks. From that time forward she generally sided with the Bolsheviks, although she had sharp disagreements with Lenin over the Bolshevik policy of supporting national aspirations of oppressed minorities within the czarist empire. She also continued to disagree strongly with the Bolshevik policy of building a disciplined faction of professional revolutionists and their willingness, when necessary, to split the RSDRP.

The moral pressure of unity at all costs was very strong in the Second International, and it was not untill the Bolsheviks had proved the correctness of their methods by leading the successful Russian Revolution that they were given credit for being anything but incorrigible, destructive factionalists.
"Organizational questions of the Russian Social Democracy" was written in 1904 and published simultaneously in Neue Zeit and in Iskra, the central organ of the RSDRP, then controlled by the Mensheviks. It is Rosa Luxemburg's reply to Lenin's work What Is To Be Done? written before the second (1903) congress of the RSDRP, and to this pamphlet, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, an analysis of the proceedings of the 1903 congress.

Two representatives of the SDKPiL attended the first part of the 1903 congress, although they left before the debate on the statutes of the RSDRP and the voting which split the party between Bolsheviks (majority) and Mensheviks (minority). The representatives of the SDKPiL had been instructed by their own congress held several days prior to the Russian congress to try and negotiate Polish affiliation to the RSDRP.

The main problem to be negotiated was the question of how much autonomy the SDKPiL would have within the RSDRP. Although the SDKPiL leaders they were opposed to the principle of a federated party of completely autonomous organizations, the conditions they demanded before they would join the RSDRP in effect came close to the concept of federation. They demanded that they maintain their own organization and control structure intact, and were reluctant to allow the central committee of the RSDRP - on which of course they would be represented - to become the ultimate governing body of the Polish party. During the negotiations at the congress itself, Rosa Luxemburg even instructed the SDKPiL representatives that she would be unwilling to allow a representative of the RSDRP to sit on the central committee of the SDKPiL! However, she had already determined to quash the unity move by that time, and such a position may have been designed purely to hasten the end of the negotations.

The incident that provoked the decision to break off unity moves (a decision that was apparently made by Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches without consultation with the rest of the party, and which made them the center of significant criticism for a while) was the publication in the July Iskra of an article by Lenin on the right of nations to self-determination. The article contained nothing startlingly new. It was simply an elaboration of the basic RSDRP position which was incorporated into the statutes to be voted on by the congress (paragraph 7), and against which the Polish party had not raised strenuous objections. They had made it clear that they did not agree with the basic position, but felt that it was stated in such a way that they could live with it.

However, Lenin's article, which placed stronger emphasis on the right of self-determination than had previous articles in Iskra written by Martov, was totally unacceptable to Rosa Luxemburg. She immediatly instructed the SDKPiL representatives to break off negotations if they could not win agreement from the congress to change paragraph 7 on the statutes and repudiate the interpretation given by Lenin in his article. When the SDKPiL representatives were informed that the congress intended to confirm paragraph 7 along with Lenin's interpretation, they left a declaration of their position and departed.

It was not until the Fourth Congress of the RSDRP, following the 1905-06 Revoltion, that unity moves were reopened and the SDKPiL affiliated to the RSDRP at that time.

[BobKKKindle$]

Thank you Rakunin. Tony Cliff wrote a good biography of Rosa Luxemburg in which he also focuses on her contributions to Marxist theory, in addition to her experiences as a revolutionary, including her conception of the party, her ideas on the relationship between social revolution and the mass strike, the reasons behind her decision to stay inside the SPD, as well as her analysis on the national question, and how this analysis differed from that of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The entire biography is available here but the chapter that links to our text is entitled Party and Class, here. I think one of the best things about this chapter is how Cliff shows that both Lenin's and Luxemburg's ideas on the party were rooted in the conditions in which they operated as political activists, and in particular the challenges they faced when they debated with other party members on organizational questions. This is definitely something we'll be discussing, so I really recommend this chapter.

[BobKKKindle$]

It's a bit late, but I still want to do this, so let's begin. I think the first thing that we can say about this text is that the date it was written (1904) is very important, because at the beginning of the 20th century the European left was full of debates about how Marxists should go about organizing themselves, and the relationship between spontaneity and organized leadership. This text was explicitly written in response to Lenin's What is to be Done?, itself written in response to the revisionist section of the Marxist movement, which argued that there was no longer a need for an uncompromising struggle against the bourgeois state or detailed theoretical debate within the movement because changes in the way capitalism operated, as well the achievement of universal suffrage (i.e. changes to the political superstructure), meant that Marxists could realize their goals through reforms within the framework of the capitalist system, instead of having to pursue the overthrow of capitalism, and the construction of a socialist society in its place, as Marx had advocated. This viewpoint was argued most strongly by Bernstein, who, in stressing the struggle for reforms, argued that "the movement is everything, the goal is nothing”. What is to be Done? and Rosa Luxemburg's response can only be understood in this broader context, because Lenin himself admitted that his support for centralism, and stress on the role of intellectuals and their task of injecting socialist ideas into the working class was a case of him "bending the stick" in order to get his point across.

[Tower of Bebel]

It's a long quote, but I think it provides some useful information (Lenin and the vanguard party). Lenin indeed bent the stick, while Luxemburg, like she used to do, wrote an article not only useful for the Russian proletariat, but also for the German proletariat that was confronted with a growing revisionist, bourgeois trend within the workers' movement (something which didn't really exist in Russia at that time). The differences between Lenin and Luxemburg in theory seem to be huge, but are essentially minor. However, their practical differences were growing since Luxemburg found herself in a much worse situation to build a genuine revolutionary organization.

Behind Luxemburg’s Anti-Leninist Polemic

Rosa Luxemburg’s "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy," published in the SPD theoretical journal Neue Zeit and the Menshevik Iskra, is probably the most intrinsically significant of the anti-Lenin polemics following the 1903 split. It stands back from the immediate issues and personal recriminations of the split, and it does not engage in superficial unity mongering. Luxemburg’s differences with Lenin exist both at the level of the problems, tasks and perspectives of the Russian movement and of the organizational nature of social democracy in general. In both the Russian and general cases these differences center on the nature of opportunism and how to combat it.
Their differences over social-democratic opportunism in Russia can be briefly expressed as follows. Before the 1905 Revolution, Lenin saw the main opportunist danger as adaptation to tsarist absolutism; Luxemburg saw it as the subordination of the Russian proletariat to revolutionary bourgeois democracy out of power. For Lenin, a social-democratic opportunist was a dilettante quick to make a personal peace with tsarist society, and perhaps an aspiring trade-union official. For Luxemburg, a social-democratic opportunist was a bourgeois radical demagogue actually striving for governmental power, a Russian version of the French Radical leader Georges Clemenceau, an ex-Blanquist.
For Lenin from 1901 through 1904, and for the Iskra tendency as a whole, the main expression of Russian social-democratic opportunism was Economism, an amalgam of minimalist trade-union agitation, passive adaptation to liberal tsarism, organizational localism and individualistic functioning. Luxemburg was no less opposed to pure-and-simple trade unionism than was Lenin, but evidently did not regard Economism as a serious opportunist current in Russia, as a serious contender for influence over the working class. As for the circle spirit and anarchistic individualism which Lenin took as his main enemy at the organization level, Luxemburg seemed to consider these traits an unavoidable overhead cost at the given stage of the social-democratic movement in Russia. When the socialist proletariat is small, believed Luxemburg, a loose movement of localized propaganda circles is the normal and, in a sense, healthy organizational expression of social democracy:

"How to effect a transition from the type of organization characteristic of the preparatory stage of the socialist movement--usually featured by disconnected local groups and clubs, with propaganda as a principal activity--to the unity of a large, national body, suitable for concerted political action over the entire vast territory ruled by the Russian state? That is the specific problem which the Russian Social Democracy has mulled over for some time.
"Autonomy and isolation are the most pronounced characteristics of the old organizational type. It is, therefore, understandable why the slogan of the persons who want to see an inclusive national organization should be ‘Centralism!’...
"The indispensable conditions for the realization of Social-Democratic centralism are: 1. The existence of a large contingent of workers educated in the political struggle. 2. The possibility for the workers to develop their own political activity through direct influence on public life, in a party press, and public congresses, etc.
"These conditions are not yet fully formed in Russia. The first—a proletarian vanguard, conscious of its class interests and capable of self-direction in political activity—is only now emerging in Russia. All efforts of socialist agitation and organisation should aim to hasten the formation of such a vanguard. The second condition can be had only under a regime of political liberty." [our emphasis]
—Luxemburg, "Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy"

Luxemburg’s belief in the gradual transition from a movement of localized circles to a centralized, unitary party was not only counterposed to Leninism, but logically placed her outside and to the right of the pre-split Iskra tendency as a whole.
The view expressed above is at some variance with Luxemburg’s actual organizational practice in the Polish part of the Russian empire. The Luxemburg/Jogiches Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) was a very small, but highly centralized, propaganda organization. And, unlike Lenin’s Bolsheviks, Luxemburg’s SDKPiL made serious sectarian and ultraleft errors (see "Lenin vs. Luxemburg on the National Question," WV No. 150, 25 March 1977).
Mention of the SDKPiL is a reminder that one cannot simply take "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy" at face value. Though from very different motivations, Luxemburg’s Polish social democracy was just as protective of its organizational autonomy as was the Bund. The SDKPiL sent two observers to the Second RSDRP Congress, where they negotiated for broad autonomy within an all-Russian party. Lenin’s advocacy of a centralized party of all social democrats in the Russian empire challenged, at least in principle, the highly valued organizational perogatives of Luxemburg’s SDKPiL.
Luxemburg looked for Russian social-democratic opportunism in exactly the opposite direction than did Lenin. Luxemburg feared that the Russian social-democratic intelligentsia would give rise to a radical bourgeois party using socialist rhetoric, and thus suppress the development of political class consciousness among the Russian proletariat. With this prognosis, Luxemburg saw in Lenin’s centralism, rather than in Menshevism, the most likely source of opportunism (i.e., adaptation to the bourgeoisie). Lenin’s insistence on the leading role of social democracy in the struggle against absolutism and on the leading role of professional revolutionaries in the party appeared to Luxemburg (and not only to her) as characteristic of a bourgeois radical party.
In fact, it was common in Menshevik circles in this period to accuse the Leninists of being bourgeois radicals in social-democratic clothing. The leading Menshevik, Potresov, for example, likened the Bolsheviks to Clemenceau’s Radicals. Luxemburg saw in Lenin’s "Jacobinism" the unconscious desire of radical bourgeois intellectuals to suppress their working-class base after overthrowing tsarism and coming to power. She advocated a broad, loose social-democratic movement as a curb on radical bourgeois demagogues à la Clemenceau the ex-Blanquist:

"If we assume the viewpoint claimed as his own by Lenin and we fear the influence of intellectuals in the proletarian movement, we can conceive of no greater danger to the Russian party than Lenin’s organizational plan. Nothing will more surely enslave a young labor movement to an intellectual elite hungry for power than this bureaucratic strait jacket....
"Let us not forget that the revolution soon to break in Russia will be a bourgeois and not a proletarian revolution. This modifies radically all the conditions of proletarian struggle. The Russian intellectuals, too, will rapidly become imbued with bourgeois ideology. The Social Democracy is at present the only guide of the Russian proletariat. But on the day after the revolution, we shall see the bourgeoisie, and above all the bourgeois intellectuals, seek to use the masses as a steppingstone to their domination.
"The game of bourgeois demagogues will be made easier if at the present stage, the spontaneous action, initiative, and political sense of the advanced sections of the working class are hindered in their development and restricted by the protectorate of an authoritarian Central Committee." [our emphasis]
–Ibid.

A central premise of Luxemburg’s 1904 anti-Leninist polemic was that tsarist absolutism would soon be replaced by bourgeois democracy ("the revolution soon to break out in Russia will be bourgeois"). That is why she anticipated that radical parliamentarian demagogy would be the principal expression of social-democratic opportunism. The revolution of 1905 proved Luxemburg’s prognosis wrong. The revolution demonstrated that bourgeois liberalism was totally cowardly and impotent. It also demonstrated that social democracy was the only consistently revolutionary-democratic force in the Russian empire.
During the revolution, Luxemburg condemned the Mensheviks for tailing the constitutional monarchists (the Cadets) and moved close to the Bolsheviks. Agreeing with Lenin on the leading role of the proletarian party in the antitsarist revolution, Luxemburg/Jogiches’ SDKPiL formed an alliance with the Bolsheviks in 1906, an alliance which lasted until 1912 and gave Lenin leadership of the formally unitary RSDRP. At the Fifth RSDRP Congress in 1907, Luxemburg defended the narrowness and intransigence of the Bolsheviks, albeit with "soft" reservations:

"You comrades on the right-wing complain bitterly about the narrowness, the intolerance, the tendency toward mechanical conception in the attitudes of the Bolsheviks. And we agree with you.... But do you know what causes these unpleasant tendencies? To anyone familiar with party conditions in other countries, these tendencies are quite well known: it is the typical attitude of one section of Socialism which has to defend the independent class interests of the proletariat against another equally strong section. Rigidity is the form adopted by Social Democracy at one end when the other tends to turn into formless jelly, unable to maintain any consistent course under the pressure of events."
—quoted in J.P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg (1966)

Liberals and social democrats have systematically suppressed reference to Luxemburg’s close alliance with Bolshevism from the revolution of 1905 until 1912 and again from the outbreak of World War I until her assassination during the Spartacus uprising in 1919. They have, however, fully exploited her 1904 polemic in the service of anticommunism. Thus, the widely-circulated Ann Arbor Paperbacks for the Study of Communism and Marxism reprinted "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy" under the slanderous title "Leninism or Marxism?"
No less pernicious have been the efforts of many left-reformists and centrists to portray the Leninist democratic-centralist vanguard party as valid only for backward countries, while solidarizing with Luxemburg’s 1904 anti-Bolshevik position for advanced capitalist countries. We have already noted that this was exactly the position of the reformist-workerist Tony Cliff, before "hard" Leninism became fashionable among radical youth in the late 1960s.
It is to be expected that an outright revisionist like Cliff would solidarize with Luxemburg against Lenin. What is not expected is that an ostensibly orthodox Trotskyist (i.e., Leninist) organization would adopt the "Luxemburgist" line as valid for advanced countries. Yet this is just what the French Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI) does. In an introduction to a popular French edition of What Is To Be Done? OCI leader Jean-Jacques Marie dismisses Lenin’s advocacy of a democratic-centralist vanguard as peculiar to early twentieth-century Russia, and asserts that Luxemburg’s 1904 position is appropriate to an advanced country with a highly developed workers movement.

"The centralist rigidity of What Is To Be Done? is linked to the particular characteristics of the Russian proletariat; that is to say, of a nascent proletariat which had just recently come out of the countryside impregnated with the traits of the Middle Ages, lacking education, crushed by conditions of existence similar to those of the French or English proletariat at the beginning of the nineteenth century....
"The role of the revolutionary intelligentsia as a factor of organization and consciousness, such as Lenin depicted it, is thus proportional to the degree of relative backwardness of a proletariat legally deprived of any form of trade-union or political organization.
"Thus the conflict between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, for example, appears—if you leave aside their personal traits-as the expression of the enormous difference which separated one of the most uneducated proletariats in Europe and the German proletariat, at that time the most powerful and politically most vigorous and mature in the world....
"If the struggle for the socialist revolution is international in essence, its immediate forms and also the means to lead it depend on numerous factors, among them the national conditions in which each party matures."
—introduction to Que Faire? (Paris, 1966)

The viewpoint which J.-J. Marie here attributes to Luxemburg is so diametrically opposed to her actual position it is hard to believe he has ever read "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy." As we have seen, Luxemburg’s opposition to Leninist centralism for Russia was predicated precisely on the underdevelopment of the proletarian movement. In 1904, Luxemburg was a centralizer and disciplinarian in the German party because the revisionist right was formally a minority. And this is explicitly stated in "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy":

"The Social Democracy must enclose the tumult of the non-proletarian protestants against the existing society within the bounds of the revolutionary action of the proletariat....
"This is only possible if the Social Democracy already contains a strong, politically educated proletarian nucleus class conscious enough to be able, as up to now in Germany, to pull along in its tow the declassed and petty-bourgeois elements that join the party. In that case, greater strictness in the application of the principle of centralization and more severe discipline, specifically formulated in party bylaws, may be an effective safeguard against the opportunist danger. That is how the revolutionary socialist movement in France defended itself against the Juaresist confusion. A modification of the constitution of the German Social Democracy in that direction would be a very timely measure." [our emphasis]

Luxemburg’s pressure for greater centralization in the SPD was successful at the radical-dominated 1905 Jena Congress, which adopted a genuinely centralist organizational structure. For the first time the officers of the basic party unit were made responsible to the national executive. Later on, of course, the SPD’s famous centralized apparatus was used to suppress the revolutionary left led by Rosa Luxemburg.
The heart of the differences between Luxemburg and Lenin in 1904 and also later did not center on the degree of centralization, but on the nature of opportunism and how to combat it. The question of centralism and discipline derives its significance only in that context.
Luxemburg’s 1904 anti-Lenin polemic was strongly conditioned by frustration at her essentially hollow victory over Bernsteinian revisionism. Revisionism was formally rejected by the SPD, the opportunists changed their tack and the party political activities continued much the same as before, in the spirit of passive expectancy. Not long after writing "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy," Luxemburg expressed in a letter (14 December 1904) to the Dutch left socialist Henriette Roland-Holst her disillusionment with internal factional struggle in general:

"Opportunism is in any case a swamp plant, which develops rapidly and luxuriously in the stagnant waters of the movement; in a swift running stream it will die of itself. Here in Germany a forward motion is an urgent, burning need! And only the fewest realize it. Some fritter away their energy in petty disputes with the opportunists, others believe that the automatic, mechanical increase in numbers (at elections and in the organizations) is progress in itself!"
—quoted in Carl E. Schorske, German Social Democracy 1905-1917 (1955)

Luxemburg’s belief that an upsurge of militant class struggle would naturally dispel the opportunist forces in the SPD proved very wrong. In 1905 and again in 1910 a rising line of mass agitation against restricted suffrage was effectively suppressed on the initiative of the trade-union bureaucracy. In 1910 the Neue Zeit, under Kautsky’s editorship, even refused to publish Luxemburg’s article advocating a general strike.
In concluding "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy," Luxemburg develops a theory of the inevitability of opportunism and even opportunist phases in a social-democratic party. Attempts to preserve the party against opportunism through internal organizational means will, she contends, only reduce the party to a sect. Herein lies Luxemburg’s fundamental difference with Lenin in 1904 and later:

"It follows that this movement can best advance by tacking betwixt and between the two dangers by which it is constantly threatened. One is the loss of its mass character; the other, the abandonment of its goal. One is the danger of sinking back to the condition of a sect; the other, the danger of becoming a movement of social reform.
"That is why it is illusory, and contrary to historic experience, to hope to fix,once for always, the direction of the revolutionary socialist struggle with the aid of formal means, which are expected to secure the labor movement against all possibilities of opportunist digression.
"Marxist theory offers us a reliable instrument enabling us to recognize and combat typical manifestations of opportunism. But the socialist movement is a mass movement. Its perils are not the insidious machinations of individuals and groups. They arise out of unavoidable social conditions. We cannot secure ourselves in advance against all possibilities of opportunist deviation. Such dangers can be overcome only by the movement itself—certainly with the aid of Marxist theory, but only after the dangers in question have taken tangible form in practice.
"Looked at from this angle, opportunism appears to be a product and an inevitable phase of the historic development of the labor movement."

Due to attempts by semi-syndicalist and ultraleft communist elements (e.g., "council communists") to claim Rosa Luxemburg as one of their own, it is often ignored that her polemic against Lenin on the organizational question was rooted in orthodox social-democratic concepts. The above-quoted passage is ultra-Kautskyan in identifying the social-democratic party with the entire labor movement. From the premise of Kautsky’s "party of the whole class," Luxemburg’s logic is unassailable. Not only is there an opportunist wing of a social-democratic party, but there must be periods in which the influence of this wing is expanding.
From her German vantage point, Luxemburg saw that to form a Leninist party must mean a break with significant working-class tendencies under opportunist leadership and influence. This anti-social-democratic conclusion was blocked from Lenin’s view by the unorganized state of the Russian party. In contrast to Luxemburg, Lenin was not faced with opportunist social-democratic tendencies which enjoyed a mass base. He believed the Mensheviks to be an intellectualist tendency incapable of building a mass workers movement.

[Tower of Bebel]

When Rosa Luxemburg writes:

The indispensable conditions for the realization of social democratic centralism are: (1) The existence of a large contingent of workers educted in the political struggle. (2) The posibility for the workers to develop their own political activity through direct influence on public life, in a party press and public congresses, etc.

... was she wrong, right or both depending on the context? According to "Lenin and the vanguard party" she was wrong in her assasement of the Russian situation and therefor she was also wrong in her political conclusions. I think this discussion is definately of great importance for Marxism today because nowadays there are relatively low levels of class consciousness and almost no unified Marxist forces. So, regarding the current situation, does Luxemburg have any relevance?

[BobKKKindle$]

I think Luxemburg was definitely mistaken if not completely wrong when she argued that "the obstacles offered to the socialist movement by the absence of democratic liberties are of relatively secondary importance." Lenin consistently justified his understanding of the vanguard party, including the need for centralism, and restricting party membership to only the most advanced and committed members of the proletariat, by pointing to the fact that he and other revolutionaries who were consistent in their desire to overthrow Tsarism and carry out the bourgeois revolution were being forced to operate in conditions that were very different from those in western Europe and other countries that has already undergone bourgeois revolutions - he knew that the Okhrana had infiltrated or was in the process of infiltrating all major organizations, and that revolutionaries were liable to be exiled and have their presses shut down if they were uncovered by the Tsarist state. I think that the relative presence of absence of democratic rights is one of the main factors that revolutionaries have to taken into consideration when they discuss strategic questions, and Luxemburg's failure to acknowledge this was one of her mistakes. I also think that there might be some degree of tension in Luxemburg's argument because immediately after rejecting the view that the lack of democracy and liberty in Tsarist Russia was of any real importance for revolutionaries she goes on to argue that the realization of social-democracy can only occur when workers are able to agitate through the press and regular party congresses (as described in the quote posted by Rakunin above) and that this, in turn, can only take place "under a regime of political liberty". This is problematic firstly because it supposes that a clear distinction can be drawn between the winning of political liberty and the overthrow of capitalism (i.e. Luxemburg is not agreeing with Trotsky's argument that the bourgeoisie in Russia was incapable of carrying out its historic tasks and that these tasks would therefore fall to the proletariat, and be achieved as part of a permanent revolution) but more importantly because it clashes with what she says right at the beginning of the document. Is there a real contradiction here, or am I reading her arguments incorrectly?

[Tower of Bebel]

I think Luxemburg was definitely mistaken if not completely wrong when she argued that "the obstacles offered to the socialist movement by the absence of democratic liberties are of relatively secondary importance." Lenin consistently justified his understanding of the vanguard party, including the need for centralism, and restricting party membership to only the most advanced and committed members of the proletariat, by pointing to the fact that he and other revolutionaries who were consistent in their desire to overthrow Tsarism and carry out the bourgeois revolution were being forced to operate in conditions that were very different from those in western Europe and other countries that has already undergone bourgeois revolutions - he knew that the Okhrana had infiltrated or was in the process of infiltrating all major organizations, and that revolutionaries were liable to be exiled and have their presses shut down if they were uncovered by the Tsarist state. I think that the relative presence of absence of democratic rights is one of the main factors that revolutionaries have to taken into consideration when they discuss strategic questions, and Luxemburg's failure to acknowledge this was one of her mistakes. I also think that there might be some degree of tension in Luxemburg's argument because immediately after rejecting the view that the lack of democracy and liberty in Tsarist Russia was of any real importance for revolutionaries she goes on to argue that the realization of social-democracy can only occur when workers are able to agitate through the press and regular party congresses (as described in the quote posted by Rakunin above) and that this, in turn, can only take place "under a regime of political liberty". This is problematic firstly because it supposes that a clear distinction can be drawn between the winning of political liberty and the overthrow of capitalism (i.e. Luxemburg is not agreeing with Trotsky's argument that the bourgeoisie in Russia was incapable of carrying out its historic tasks and that these tasks would therefore fall to the proletariat, and be achieved as part of a permanent revolution) but more importantly because it clashes with what she says right at the beginning of the document. Is there a real contradiction here, or am I reading her arguments incorrectly?

She wrote that democratic liberties for of "relative secondary" importance, which doesn't mean something like "unnecessary".