A Martyr for Socialism

 “Rosa Luxemburg – the Incendiary Spark,” by Michael Lowy, 2024

This is an excellent look at the political activities of Rosa Luxemburg, concentrating on her ideas as they relate to historical events.  Lowy, though not explicitly, tries to make a case that there is a ‘Luxemburgist’ perspective.  Because of the complex intertwining of errors and brilliance in her thought, that prospect seems difficult. But many of her ideas are now routine among Marxists.

Luxemburg was formed by the tumultuous experiences of the increasingly bureaucratized Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), a deep understanding of colonialism and the First World War, the Bolshevik victory in 1917 Russia and the revolutionary wave in Germany which involved the 1919 Spartacus League insurrection.  She was executed by the Freicorps on orders of the SPD government for her role in that insurrection, which involved strikes, the formation of workers’ councils and a Bavarian Soviet.     

Lowy highlights the important contributions or highlights she made to Marxist theory and practice. 

    1. “Primitive accumulation” by capital continues to this day.

    2. “Primitive communism’ and indigenous struggle can aid any struggle for modern communism, linking two periods of history.

    3. Opposition to ‘socialism from above.’

    4. An outlook of ‘socialist democracy’ as essential to the dictatorship of the proletariat, not the dictatorship of a party, a revolutionary elite, a central committee or a leader.

    5. The most important idea she first clearly promulgated, based on Engels and the Communist Manifesto, is that socialism is not inevitable.  This was expressed in the Junius Pamphlet in 1915 as ‘socialism or barbarism.’  One aspect of barbarism is a world war.  Lowy said this was “a true turn in the history of Marxist thought.”

6. Marxism is a theory of praxis – practice, consciousness, organization and action.  No ‘crisis’ or automatic process can create a social revolution.

7. Revolutionary consciousness comes out of the proletariat’s experience.

8. The mass strike is a transitional method.

9. “Parliamentary cretinism” – in other words an exclusive strategy of winning a majority in Congress - will lead to pure reformism.

10.     She supported workers councils as opposed to the ‘democracy’ of a bourgeois parliament. The former are far more democratic.

11.     A completely hostile attitude towards nationalism and militarism, along with colonialism and imperialism, support of which she saw as ‘social patriotism.’ 

12.     She supported the Bolshevik revolution and Lenin and Trotsky's leadership.

Luxemburg had problems with the Bolsheviks however, as she opposed both the ‘right of self-determination of nations’ and ‘land to the tiller.’  This hints at a somewhat ultra-left tack, ignoring the support of the peasants or national minorities in the success of any revolution. Lowy points out that she even ignored the anti-Semitism question, though she was born Jewish.  She also opposed the dispersal of the out-of-date Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks at first, but later came to understand that soviets were a better democratic answer. 

Luxemburg’s main beef with Lenin was that she intuited that the Leninist form of a party could become a dictatorship in itself. That is what actually happened after the ruin of the Civil War and the isolation of the revolution.  This is similar to the young Trotsky’s opinion until he joined the Bolshevik party.  Against Stalin, he eventually called for a ‘workers’ democracy’ that would block counter-revolutionary and bourgeois political forces but allow all proletarian, peasant and radical forces.  

Luxemburg supported, after the revolution, ‘general elections, freedom of the press and assembly, a free exchange of opinions’ as her form of workers’ rule, otherwise “only the bureaucracy remains the active element.”  She had seen this in the German SPD in a pre-revolutionary form.     

Luxemburg’s idea of ‘spontaneity’ is that organizations would form in the context of the struggle.  However in actual practice the Spartacus League was a mini-Bolshevik Party, born out of the SPD’s long history.  The Spartacists did not call for a Constituent Assembly or bourgeois-democratic rights, and even she recognized the difficulty in Russia in 1918 of doing this.  Obviously class organization, the historical conjuncture, democracy and proletarian spontaneity are intertwined.

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Against Colonialism

Luxemburg paid special attention to the old agrarian communist patterns that still existed around the world or in history that she knew about – Incan communism in Peru; the German ‘mark,’ the Russian ‘mir,’ American Indian communal villages, Algerian collectives, African ‘kabyls’ / kebelles and Hindu communes. She called this ‘the natural economy,’ ‘ancient economic organization’ and ‘communist village communities.’  The German SPD instead said that colonialism helped ‘create jobs.’  Where have we heard this before?  She shares this attitude towards indigenous collectivity with Marxist thinkers like Mariátegui in Peru. She saw colonialism and imperialism as crushing any of these forms through private property and military force, dispossessing the indigenous from land, animals and water, trying to turn them into workers, slaves or migrants. 

In this context, Luxemburg wrote against the Opium War in China, colonialism in Madagascar, the Antilles, India, South-West Africa and the Philippines, proving herself a hard opponent of capital’s expansion.  Her economic analysis led her to conclude that eventually this expansion would reach its limits, severely damaging capital in the process. Is that happening now?

Luxemburg and Her Comrades

In the last parts of the book Lowy discusses Luxemburg’s ideas and those of Georges Haupt, an expert on the Second International; Leon Trotsky and Gyorgy Lukács.  He also compares her outlook to SPD revisionists like Bernstein and Kautsky. Haupt noted, as did Luxemburg, that some struggles for ‘national self-determination’ were ridiculous, yet she combined Poland’s struggle for self-determination with Alsace-Lorraine’s and Bohemia’s as all ‘petit-bourgeois radicalism.’  In her debates inside the SPD, she examined the leadership’s fondness for parliamentism, but also their support of positivism, scientism, rationalism, Darwinist evolutionism and neo-Kantism.    

Lowy compares Luxemburg and Trotsky’s opposition to the two different kinds of Party bureaucratism that they encountered – before and after a revolution.  He also points out that both had premonitions of what could happen to a Leninist Party.  Both were murdered by their political opponents for these insights. Luxemburg proposed the strategy of “the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry” at the 1909 RSDLP convention in London, which was endorsed.  Later Lenin temporarily came up with an odd form of it, “the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.”  Stalin accused Luxemburg of supporting the permanent revolution in 1931, just as Lenin was accused of Trotskyism by Kamenev in April 1917.  Both Luxemburg and Trotsky worked together at times, with Trotsky later defending Luxemburg over Stalin’s lie that she had not broken with Kautsky soon enough. 

Lukács was inspired by Luxemburg in his ‘road to Marx’ according to Lowy. Later he developed differences over the Party issue, and sometimes combined both Leninist and Luxemburg perspectives. He was especially struck by the idea that unlimited capitalist accumulation was impossible.  Both held ideas about the inevitability of socialism based on the line of the SPD, which believed in passively waiting for the fall.  Both later rejected that perspective, acknowledging the role of politics and revolutionary will.  He wrote the introduction to her pamphlet Mass Strikes published in 1906 in Hungarian and discussed her in parts of his book History and Class Consciousness (reviewed below). Much of the discussion revolves around a failed KPD insurrection in March 1921, though Lukács could have said much more about the Budapest and Hungarian Commune of 1919 that he participated in.

Lastly is Lowy’s analysis of Luxemburg’s criticisms of Bernstein and Kautsky.  Bernstein favored ‘ethical socialism’ much like the social-democrats of today.  They believed that there was a firm line between Marxism and the social sciences, as the latter were ‘objective’ while the former is a class ideology.  Neither side wanted to address issues like cosmology or nature – the hard sciences - though Lenin, Marx and Engels had. Luxemburg said nothing on environmentalism, for instance. Kautsky claimed that the “materialist conception of history is in no way linked to the proletariat.” (!)  The social-democratic idea of ‘scientism’ is that science always rises above all ideology or social pressures.  They argued for an abstract morality that had no relation to economics or class society.  They believed in socialism being the end point of an evolution, much like Darwinism as applied to nature.

All of this was not really Marxism, materialism or dialectics, even though they wrapped themselves in that banner. Regarding history, Marx and Luxemburg both recognized that class struggle would be an outmoded form of thinking upon the arrival of communism. But they also applied this to capital’s historicity, taking the long view that it too could end.  After all, as Luxemburg pointed out, the regressive Catholic ‘dark ages’ finally ended too.  Though a new dark ages is also possible, as she made quite clear.

All in all an invigorating read and only 132 pages that will give you a real insight into Luxemburg’s ideas and actions and how they relate to today. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “History and Class Consciousness” (Lukács): “All Power to the Councils!” “Radek,” “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “A Socialist Defector,” “The Brown Plague” (Guerin); “Fighting Fascism” (Zetkin); “Living in the End Times’ (Zizek); “Hothouse Utopia,” “Socialism or Barbarism” (Mésáros); “Red Valkyries” (Ghodsee), “The German Communist Resistance," "An Anthology of the Writings of Jose Carlos Mariategui," "In the Red Corner." 

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / September 30, 2024