The Ideas of Rosa Luxemburg:

The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle of the left for political change. Most important events, from the October Revolution to the rise of Hitler, from the Cuban missile crisis to the fall of the Berlin wall, can only be explained in terms of the conflict between socialism and its conservative opponents.

This conflict was meant to have ended with the collapse of the USSR. The traditional parties of the left abandoned any thought of transforming society: capitalism was the only game in town. But it was never likely that this consensus would remain in place forever.

A brief glance at the planet will remind us that most of the problems identified by the early socialist movement are still to be solved. While the opening years of the new millennium have been dominated by the clash between rival fundamentalisms of the radical right, with their own ambitious projects of social transformation, new progressive forces have also been organising themselves.

This new left has plenty of ideas and energy. But if it is going to avoid the failures of the last century, it will have to work out exactly what went wrong. Should the left seek to tame capitalism, or to abolish it? If they opt for the latter course, what strategy should they adopt? What balance should be struck between parliamentary politics and grass-roots activism? How can the strength of conservative opposition be overcome?

If we say that we want to replace capitalism with socialism, what do we mean by the latter? How can we ensure that socialism does not degenerate into Soviet- style authoritarianism? Any radical movement that hopes to win mass support will need to have convincing answers to all of these questions, and more besides.

The Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg may prove to be one of its most valuable guides. A century ago, Luxemburg anticipated most of the problems that would arise when the socialist movement had the chance to put its programme into practice.

Despite her fame as an activist, Luxemburg’s ideas were largely ignored by the left, whether communist or social democratic. Today’s generation of radicals would do well to correct this omission, and learn from one of the most brilliant thinkers the socialist tradition has ever produced.

Luxemburg was born in Poland in 1871, the daughter of a middle- class Jewish family. As a child, her academic record was strikingly accomplished; she attended a prestigious private school, one of very few Jewish students to do so.

Her interest in politics also developed at an early age. While still a teenager, she made contact with the socialist underground. Her journey towards revolutionary politics was typical of many Jews in the Tsarist empire whose revulsion against official anti-semitism drove them to identify with broader movements for social emancipation.

As the Tsarist authorities cracked down on the revolutionaries, Luxemburg was warned that her own arrest was imminent, and at the age of eighteen she fled the country. Once safely abroad, she first made her way to Switzerland, a popular destination for political exiles.

But she was drawn inexorably towards Germany, the heart of the European labour movement. The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was the flagship of the European left. At a time when other socialist parties were taking their first halting steps forward, the SPD regularly won millions of votes in election to the Reichstag, and its trade union allies organised millions of German workers.

Luxemburg moved to Germany, where her striking literary gifts quickly earned her a prominent place in the party press. She soon became a hate figure for the SPD’s opponents. Her political views were considered particularly odious in view of her gender and foreign nationality.

Although open political activity was possible in Germany, it remained an authoritarian, militaristic state, where ultimate power rested with the monarchy. As the years went on, her willingness to acknowledge this reality came more and more to distinguish Luxemburg from her erstwhile comrades in the SPD leadership.

The first battle of a new political era erupted in 1905, as the Tsarist regime was rocked to its foundations by revolution. When troops fired on a peaceful demonstration in St Petersburg, killing 2,000 people, a wave of strikes and mutinies swept across the Empire.

Luxemburg was eager to return to Poland and play her role in the movement; she crossed the border in December and quickly assumed a leading position. Luxemburg’s enemies in the German conservative press did whatever they could to assist her capture by the authorities.

In March 1906, she was arrested and quickly identified. But she was released in June, having been held in foul conditions, after threats of retaliation by the revolutionary movement if she was harmed.

By the time Luxemburg left Poland, the revolution was clearly on the retreat, and Tsarism once more ascendant for the time being. Having returned to Germany, Luxemburg sought to apply the lessons of the Russian revolution, believing that it showed the possibility of a more radical course for the movement.

The SPD already contained a vocal tendency arguing for the abandonment of its traditional goals. Eduard Bernstein, the most prominent spokesman of this “revisionist” tendency, insisted that social democracy should concentrate on gradual reforms. He argued that capitalism had overcome the economic crises of its early phase and could be depended upon to grow steadily for the indefinite future.

Against this view, Luxemburg insisted that crises were an inevitable feature of the system, without which it could not survive: “crises are not “derangements” in the usual sense of the word. They are “derangements” without which capitalist economy could not develop at all ...crises are an organic manifestation inseparable from capitalist economy ... their cessation – not temporary cessation, but their total disappearance in the world market – would not lead to the further development of capitalist economy. It would destroy capitalism.”

Subsequent experience has confirmed that Luxemburg was far more realistic than Bernstein. A fresh version of his cheery thesis became popular in the years after the Second World War, as the lengthy boom banished memories of the Great Depression. But this boom had run its course by the mid-seventies, and the global recession that followed was to trigger a sustained assault on the welfare programmes that left-wing governments had instituted after 1945.

She also rejected Bernstein’s claim that capitalism could be steadily reformed out of existence: “people who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal ... the suppression of the abuses of capitalism instead of the suppression of capitalism itself.”

Luxemburg believed that whatever improvements could be won by adopting such a strategy would be inadequate and precarious: she was unwilling to accept the limitations on social change imposed by the needs of the capitalist system.

This did not mean abandoning the struggle for short-term goals: “between social reforms and revolution there exists for the social democracy an indissoluble tie. The struggle for reforms is its means, the social revolution, its aim.” But the purpose of reforms should be to pave the way for an alternative society. This was also the formal position of the SPD, whose leading theoreticians rejected Bernstein’s arguments. But Luxemburg questioned whether the party was capable of translating this perspective into reality.

The SPD leadership put its faith in a cautious, electoral strategy. They concentrated on building up support from one election to the next, hoping to take power in a smooth, painless transition.

Unlike her anarchist contemporaries, Luxemburg did not reject the need for electoral agitation: she described it as “one of the most powerful and indispensable means of carrying on the class struggle.” But she warned that reliance on parliamentary strength alone could be suicidal: “as soon as democracy shows the tendency to negate its class character and become transformed into an instrument of the real interests of the population, the democratic forms are sacrificed by the bourgeoisie and by its state representatives.”

The experience of socialist governments over the past century has tended to confirm this view. When moderate left-wing administrations have come to power, the business elite has usually preferred to sit things out and wait until a more congenial government is returned to office, in the meantime using its considerable economic power and cultural influence to nudge the incumbents in a more conservative direction.

But whenever radical reformers have been elected, they have typically been met with brutal repression. The fate of the Allende government in Chile is a striking example.

Luxemburg believed that such opposition could be overcome, but only if socialists were willing and able to mobilise their supporters outside the normal channels of parliamentary politics. Inspired by their prominent place in the Russian revolution, she argued that the SPD should use mass political strikes in its struggle against the monarchy. This was strongly opposed by the trade union leadership. Luxemburg regarded such caution and hesitancy as self- defeating.

In a warning that proved strikingly prescient for the German labour movement, she predicted that “if social democracy were to accept the opportunist standpoint, renounce the use of violence, and pledge the working class never to diverge from the path of bourgeois legalism, then its whole parliamentary and other activity would sooner or later collapse miserably and leave the field to the untrammelled dominance of reactionary violence.” This was exactly what came to pass in 1933, when Hitler came to power.

But there was another reason why socialism could not simply be introduced by government legislation: the very nature of socialism itself excluded this possibility. As Luxemburg later wrote while discussing the October revolution in Russia:

“Far from being a sum of ready-made prescriptions which have only to be applied, the practical realisation of socialism as an economic, social and juridical system is something which lies completely hidden in the mists of the future ... socialism by its very nature cannot be decreed or introduced by proclamation ... the whole mass of the people must take part in it.”

Luxemburg’s point has lost none of its urgency. In recent decades, traditional left-wing parties have been challenged by the emergence of movements (feminist, ecological, anti- racist) unwilling to accept that the task of changing society should be left to professional politicians. They have been unable to channel these radical energies effectively, because to do so would mean abandoning their traditional concept of politics in favour of a more “Luxemburgist” view.

In 1968, Tony Benn warned the British Labour Party: “It would be foolish to assume that people will be satisfied, for much longer, with a system which confines their national political role to the marking of a ballot paper with a single cross every five years ... beyond parliamentary democracy as we know it we shall have to find a new popular democracy to replace it.” Unless the left can answer the need for a more participatory form of democracy, and encourage its own supporters to play an active role in the job of transforming society, it’s hard to imagine that any radical project will be able to overcome the obstacles in its path.

While the first Russian revolution had raised the possibility of radical change, there were also darker clouds on the horizon. Luxemburg foresaw the impending cataclysm of war, and argued passionately that it could only be averted by challenging the capitalist system itself: “Militarism in both its forms – as war and as armed peace – is a legitimate child, a logical result of capitalism, which can only be overcome with the destruction of capitalism.”

If war did break out, Luxemburg and her comrades hoped that the international working- class movement would mobilise its strength to oppose the slaughter. But when the day finally came, in August 1914, most socialist parties followed the example of the SPD and lined up in support of their own national governments.

This collapse was a shattering blow to the European labour movement. Neither the SPD nor its sister parties in France and Britain were willing to risk illegality by opposing the war; they preferred the benefits of collaboration, even if that meant swallowing official lies and urging their own supporters to sign up as cannon fodder for the trenches.

Luxemburg had seen the rot taking hold in the SPD before most socialists of her generation; she had long been aware that many in its leadership valued the preservation of the party organisation more highly than they valued its principles. But she was still horrified by their defection to the imperialist camp.

Anti-war socialists immediately began organising themselves, laying the foundations for what became the Spartacus League. Luxemburg was an obvious target for the authorities, and was imprisoned in February 1915, remaining in jail with brief interruptions until the war ended.

While in prison, she wrote the “Junius Pamphlet”, a rallying call for opponents of the war in which Luxemburg deployed her eloquence to stunning effect.

Her view of the official pretexts for war was utterly scornful, and has lost none of its relevance: “when and where has there been a war since so-called public opinion has played a role in governmental calculations, in which each and every belligerent party did not, with a heavy heart, draw the sword from its sheath for the single and sole purpose of defending its fatherland and its own righteous cause from the shameful attacks of the enemy?”

But Luxemburg and her comrades continued to believe that the butchery could be stopped, and their seemingly hopeless opposition eventually bore fruit. Her friend Karl Liebknecht had won international renown when he became the first socialist deputy to vote against war credits in the Reichstag. When he was imprisoned in 1916, more than fifty thousand workers went on strike in the factories of Berlin.

However the real impetus came from the east. In February 1917, the Tsarist regime collapsed; by the end of the year, a socialist government had taken power in Petrograd.

Luxemburg acclaimed the Russian revolution from her prison cell: “all the revolutionary honour and capacity which western social democracy lacked were represented by the Bolsheviks. Their October uprising was not only the actual salvation of the Russian revolution; it was also the salvation of the honour of international socialism.”

But, unlike many on the radical left, Luxemburg was not prepared to celebrate the Bolsheviks uncritically. She noted the circumstances under which the Soviet Union had been founded: “under such fatal conditions even the most gigantic idealism and the most storm-tested revolutionary energy are incapable of realising democracy and socialism but only distorted attempts at either.”

But she also perceived the authoritarian tendencies of the Bolshevik leadership, and insisted that socialism would either be democratic, or it would be nothing: “socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of socialist economy are created ... socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism.”

She reminded the Bolsheviks and their admirers that “we have always distinguished the social kernel from the political form of bourgeois democracy ... not in order to reject the latter but to spur the working class into not being satisfied with the shell ... to create a socialist democracy to replace bourgeois democracy -- not to eliminate democracy altogether ... freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party -- however numerous they may be -- is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.”

It is easy to imagine what Luxemburg’s view of subsequent developments in the USSR would have been. Her comment on revolutionary violence should suffice: “a world must be turned upside down. But each tear that flows, when it could have been spared, is an accusation, and he commits a crime who with brutal inadvertency crushes a poor earthworm.”

The collapse of the German armies on the western front precipitated a revolution against the monarchy in November 1918. The old military- bureaucratic elite handed over the reins of power to the SPD leadership, who had proved their reliability during the war.

The party made no attempt to carry out a thorough democratic revolution, allowing the servants of the old regime to retain control over the army and the civil service. The Spartacus League and its allies aimed to push the revolution in a more radical direction.

Although the example of the Bolsheviks encouraged many radicals to expect a quick march to power, Luxemburg warned her comrades in the newly- founded Communist Party of Germany (KPD) that no instant victory could be expected. For the time being, the SPD retained the allegiances of most German workers, and it would be folly to attempt an insurrection without broader support.

But her comrades were more impatient, and allowed themselves to be drawn into a premature clash. After a series of provocations by the authorities, a group of Berlin radicals, including Liebknecht, decided to launch an insurrection. Luxemburg was horrified; on hearing the news, she confronted him furiously: “But Karl, how could you? What about our programme?”

But she joined the doomed uprising nonetheless. It was crushed after a week of fighting in Berlin; Ebert’s government enlisted the help of ultra-right nationalists for the job of repressing their former comrades.

In her last published article, Luxemburg was defiant as ever: “ “Order prevails in Berlin!” You foolish lackeys! Your “order” is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will “rise up again, clashing its weapons,” and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be!”

On January 15th, Luxemburg, along with Liebknecht, was captured by soldiers. Her skull was smashed open with a rifle butt before a shot to the head finished her off. Her body was then dumped in a canal, and not retrieved until the following May. Liebknecht met a similar fate.

The murders haunted the conscience of the Weimar republic, and gave a taste of the horrors to come: many of those responsible were to assume positions of responsibility in the Third Reich.

“Karl and Rosa” became the founding martyrs of the KPD, but Luxemburg’s ideas were considered too hot to handle by the party commissars, and Stalin later decreed that “Luxemburgism” was heretical. It wasn’t until the 1960s that a new generation of leftists rediscovered her memory.

A notable strain in Luxemburg’s thought was her reluctance to leave questions closed, or rely on sacred texts. She regarded Karl Marx as a brilliant thinker, but not as an infallible prophet. So it would be absurd to treat Luxemburg herself with undue reverence. But any radical movement that doesn’t have at least a little “Luxemburgism” in its bloodstream will most likely end up repeating the mistakes of the past.