Because Luxemburg did not believe that capitalism could be reformed without revolution, she is rightly infamous as a revolutionary to this day. Eduard Bernstein, her opponent in the SPD, had proposed in his book The Preconditions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy (1899) a non-revolutionary overcoming of the profit principle by peaceful, reformist means. Luxemburg firmly rejected this departure from the Marxist assumption that revolution was unavoidable if humanity was not to relapse into barbarism. Instead, she argued for reformist day-to-day politics oriented towards the requirements of a revolutionary perspective.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzK-ASNw09Y

Luxemburg’s book Reform or Revolution? (1899) is still significant for addressing the problems we face today. In it, she avoided the trap into which a strict opposition between reform and revolution inevitably leads. It was precisely this discussion, however, that—even before her murder—was to split the socialist workers’ movement. One current sought to overcome the dominance of profit-oriented interests with reformist methods. Another strove for the same goal with revolutionary methods. This splitting of forces critical of capitalism into two main streams and many small rivulets created a vast “socialist delta”. None of these rivers reached the free sea of socialism—neither that of the communists calling for revolution nor that of the heirs of Eduard Bernstein. This failure of socialist policy opened a space for fascism and, in the 1970s, for neoliberalism, which continues to shape the economy and society of the world to this day.

Luxemburg hoped to introduce a renewed economy through a combination of reform and revolution, although for her revolution was not synonymous with the use of violence:

“In the bourgeois revolutions, bloodshed, terror and political murder were indispensable weapons in the hands of the rising classes.—The proletarian revolution does not need terror to meet its goals. It hates and abhors the murder of human beings. It does not need these means of struggle because it fights not individuals but institutions, because it does not enter the arena with naive illusions whose disappointment it must avenge with blood.”[1]

For Luxemburg, revolutionary violence was at best acceptable as counter-violence—when the ruling class broke the principles of law and resorted to violence. Terror, by contrast, was rejected by Luxemburg, and especially individual terror, since it only legitimized more state oppression. Instead, she agreed with the early West European socialist movement, which had seen in a combination of political education, organization, and mass struggle the methods to liberate society from the profit principle:

“It is not the use of physical force, but the revolutionary determination of the masses not to shrink, if necessary, from the extreme consequences of their strike action, and to make all sacrifices, that gives this action such irresistible force that it is often capable of leading the struggle to notable victories in a short time.”[2]

For Luxemburg, revolutions grew out of class struggle. Marx’s expectation—expressed in 1848 and at least half abandoned by Friedrich Engels in 1895—that a revolution would open the door to socialism without further ado was no longer shared by Luxemburg, at the latest after the defeated Russian revolution of 1905/06. She understood that every revolution suffers a setback after the inevitable flagging of the forces driving it. However, the further the revolution is driven to the left, the smaller the setback, up to a—temporary, because not permanently viable—dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the central point in Luxemburg’s understanding of revolution.

From then on, Luxemburg understood revolutions as long-term, repeatedly interrupted processes—as cycles, not individual events. A socialist revolution could not be “accomplished within 24 hours”, but would rather shape a long period of history.

Against the backdrop of today’s protest movements, not least the climate protests, Luxemburg’s reflections on the interaction of reform and revolution assume greater relevance.

Footnotes

1. Rosa Luxemburg, “Was will der Spartakusbund?”, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, Berlin, 1974 [December 1918], p. 443.
2. Rosa Luxemburg, “Das belgische Experiment”, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, Berlin, 1973, p. 204.

Immanuel Kant’s postulate that the freedom of the individual is bounded by the freedom of others was the starting point for Luxemburg's understanding of freedom. Freedom held merely as a privilege was not freedom, but only remaining in a golden cage. For Luxemburg, social changes could take place most quickly in complete freedom, especially in revolutions. Changes become irreversible when the losing side capitulates only after it has exhausted all its capacities and perishes in complete freedom.

Luxemburg was ahead of most left-wing politicians in realizing that it is the freedom of dissenters that makes emancipatory politics possible in the first place:

“Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for members of a party—however numerous they may be—is not freedom. Freedom is always the freedom of those who think differently. Not because of the fanaticism of ‘justice’, but because all that is invigorating, wholesome, and purifying in political liberty hangs upon this being, and its effect fails when ‘liberty’ becomes a privilege.”[1]

To strive for emancipation by anti-emancipatory means and methods, i.e. the Leninist concept of politics, would have meant abandoning Luxemburg’s political approach. Oppression cannot be abolished by oppression.

Luxemburg distinguished between political and social freedoms. Political freedoms began with the freedom of property, without which a capitalist market economy is not viable. This freedom had been the central goal of the formerly revolutionary bourgeoisie and had offered a first protection against the arbitrary power of the state, secured by the rule of law. With the political and revolutionary establishment of these protections, a door was opened that had never been intended: the door to a grassroots struggle for political freedoms—beginning with personal integrity; freedom of opinion, expression, and the press; the right to vote, along with protections for those who lose elections; freedom of assembly; freedom of association; the privacy of correspondence; the inviolability of the home; and the privacy of telephone communications. Only these political freedoms made it possible to secure a protected space where socialist ideas could be debated with minimal risk.

Today, these rights form part of the inviolable core of the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany (Articles 1 and 20). For Rosa Luxemburg, they had always been non-negotiable.

For her, socialism was nothing other than the supplementation of political freedoms with social freedom from exploitation and all forms of dependence. (The “socialism” practiced by the Bolsheviks represented the opposite. This is why they saw Luxemburg as being so dangerous.)

It was clear to Luxemburg that only by resolving contradictions could the “rest of society” become aware of its own oppression and exploitation and thus free itself from its own domination. Paul Levi, one of her partners, put it this way after her assassination:

“She knew how to conduct the struggle as struggle, the war as war, the civil war as civil war. But she could only imagine the civil war as a free play of forces in which even the bourgeoisie would not be banished to the cellars by the police, because only in an open struggle of the masses could they grow, could they realize the greatness and gravity of their struggle. She did not want the destruction of the bourgeoisie through dismal terrorism, through the monotonous business of execution, any more than the hunter wants to destroy the predators in his forest. The fight with the latter is meant to make the game stronger and larger. For her, the destruction of the bourgeoisie, which she indeed wanted, was the result of the social reorganization that the revolution signifies.”[2]

Luxemburg was deeply convinced that everything artificial, all conditions created “from above”, lead to the dictatorship of a minority and thus to a reign of terror. The history of socialism in the twentieth century confirmed this in a bloody manner.

Footnotes

1. Rosa Luxemburg, “Zur russischen Revolution”, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, Berlin, 1974, p. 359.
2. Paul Levi, Introduction to “Die Russische Revolution. Eine kritische Würdigung. Aus dem Nachlass von Rosa Luxemburg’” Ohne einen Tropfen Lakaienblut. Schriften, Reden, Briefe, edited by Jörn Schütrumpf, vol. 1: Spartakus: Abschied ohne Ankunft, Berlin, 2020 [1921/22], p. 1035.

The constant growth of new markets is written into the DNA of capitalist societies; those which fail to find markets are doomed to collapse. Luxemburg recognized that the global South—at that time still not capitalist—is indispensable for the capitalist mode of production, both as an export market and as a source of raw materials. However, its “integration into the world market” does not work without expropriations, which cause the destruction of traditional communities, often by military force. With this theory, Luxemburg had uncovered not only the secret of colonialism, but also of imperialist wars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uacxlEtVLU

In order to analyse capitalist surplus value production, Marx had decided to work with a simplified model. He presupposed a society consisting only of capitalists and wage workers, i.e. a society that never really existed—a fact that Marx himself emphasized again and again. But only under these “laboratory conditions” was it possible for him to uncover important fundamental relationships within this mode of production. He was able to show how surplus value is created and how it is not consumed but fed into production (accumulated) so as to produce even more commodities and make even more profit. Any capitalist who refused to play this game would sooner or later be outcompeted.

In Luxemburg’s view, Marx leaves open the question of the source of the money needed so that the mass of commodities derived from production as it expands can also be valorized, or, in other words, can be bought by the consumer at a price that ensures the realization of surplus value for the seller. Yet this condition must be met if the capital invested in commodities is to be transformed into more capital, and thus if accumulation and growth are to be possible.

This is where Luxemburg stepped in. She assumed that in a society consisting only of capitalists and wage workers, an expansion of sales would be impossible. However, she did not reject Marx for this reason, but took up his insights and started off on the road back from abstraction to reality. Here she came across a third area: non-capitalist sales markets. Her insight:

“Capitalist production, as genuine mass production, is dependent on buyers from peasant and handicraft spheres of production in the old countries as well as on consumers from all other countries, and at the same time, in technical terms, it absolutely cannot get along without the products of those other countries and social strata (no matter whether the products be means of subsistence or means of production).Thus, from the very beginning, an exchange relationship necessarily had to develop between capitalist production and its noncapitalist milieu, and in this relationship capital found it possible to realize its own surplus value in shiny pieces of gold for the purpose of further capitalization as well as to provide itself with all sorts of commodities necessary for the expansion of its own production, and in addition, to obtain ever-new recruits to the proletarianized workforce.” [1]

Luxemburg developed this view in epic detail in her 1913 work The Accumulation of Capital. But her book is only partially successful. For long stretches, the first 200 pages read like a self-assessment. The seven historical chapters at the end of the volume are quite different—they are world literature.

It was only in another work, which became known as the Anti-Critique, that she arrived at her decisive point:

“In lands across the seas its first action is the subjugation and ruination of the traditional communal system, the world-historical act marking capitalism’s birth, and that has been an accompanying feature of the accumulation of capital ever since. By bringing ruin to the primitive subsistence economy and peasant-patriarchal relations in those otherlands, European capitalism opens the door for commodity exchange and commodity production, transforms the local inhabitants into customers for capitalist goods, and at the same time powerfully accelerates its own rate of accumulation by the direct and massive plundering of the natural treasures and stored-up riches of the subjugated populations. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, going hand in hand with the methods described above, there has occurred the export of accumulated capital from Europe to noncapitalist lands in other parts of the world. And there European capital finds, on a new field, on the fragmented ruins of the indigenous forms of production, a new circle of customers for its commodities and, along with that, more extensive possibilities for accumulation. Thus capitalism expands more and more, thanks to its exchange operations with noncapitalist countries and social strata, and in the process it accumulates at their expense. However, at the same time, step by step, it strips them bare and subjects them to oppression, so as to ultimately replace them with itself." [2]

Luxemburg wrote the Anti-Critique in 1915, when she was serving a one-year prison sentence for proven anti-militarism in the “women’s prison” in Berlin's Barnimstrasse. Since no one dared print anything by the outcast Luxemburg at the time, the book was not published until 1921 by the Frankes publishing house in Leipzig, two years after its author’s assassination.

On the consequences of the capitalist mode of production, Luxemburg wrote: “But the more capitalist countries there are that take part in this chase after other regions as sources of accumulation, the fewer remaining noncapitalist regions there are, the fewer areas still open to the worldwide expansion of capital, and thus the more embittered becomes the competitive battle between different groups of capital for these regions as sources of accumulation, and thus the battle campaigns or other expeditions on the world arena become more and more transformed into a chain of economic and political catastrophes: worldwide economic crises, wars, and revolutions.” [3]

Luxemburg understood the subjugation of non-capitalist modes of production to the logic of capital exploitation as a once-only process, but subsequent developments have shown that in reality it involves an ever-deeper penetration of all social relations. Luxemburg's idea that the progressive capitalization of the world would reach an economic limit was thus too simplistic.

Luxemburg’s analyses influenced subsequent Third World discourse and the women’s movement of the 1970s. At the beginning of the 2000s, David Harvey showed how “accumulation through expropriation”—also the subtitle of his most important book, The New Imperialism (2003), in its German edition—now extends to public goods in the form of the privatization of public services, health and education, the cultural sector and other areas. Today, accumulation is also discussed in terms of “domestic colonies”, “land grabbing”, the household as a cost-free site of commodity production, and underpaid care work.

Luxemburg’s idea of the limits of progressive capitalization reappears, as Isabel Loureiro has pointed out, in ecological discourse: “The current model of ‘accumulation by expropriation’ is linked, among other issues, to agricultural problems that are not sustainable: the expansion of monocultures, the use of pesticides, soil degradation, deforestation, the destruction of biodiversity, the waste of water resources, the pollution of water sources, the threat to food security, and the increase in food prices.” Capital, according to Loureiro, cannot accumulate forever. However, this is “not because the entire world will eventually be fully capitalized—so capitalism will find its logical and historical limit, as in Luxemburg—but because of the natural limits of our planet.”[4]

Footnotes

1. Rosa Luxemburg, “Die Akkumulation des Kapitals oder Was die Epigonen aus der Marxschen Theorie gemacht haben. Eine Antikritik”, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5, Berlin, 1975 [1915/1921], p. 429. English translation: “The Accumulation of Capital, Or, What the Epigones Have Made Out of Marx’s Theory—An Anti-Critique”, The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, vol. 2, edited by Peter Hudis and Paul Le Blanc, London, 2015.
2.  Luxemburg, “Die Akkumulation des Kapitals”, p. 429f. English translation: “The Accumulation of Capital—An Anti-Critique”, The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, vol. 2.
3. Luxemburg, “Die Akkumulation des Kapitals”, p. 430. English translation: “The Accumulation of Capital—An Anti-Critique”, The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, vol. 2.
4. Isabel Loureiro, “Die Aktualität von Rosa Luxemburgs ‘Akkumulation des Kapitals’ in Lateinamerika”, Jahrbuch für Forschungen zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, 2013, vol. 2, p. 121.

The growth machine of capitalism is running with fewer impediments than ever — and not only in China and India. Capitalism without growth is unthinkable, but so is unlimited growth on a finite planet. Nevertheless, previous alternatives to the destruction of nature and the subordination of human life to the accumulation of capital have been discredited: The socialist states of the twentieth century did not bring freedom, nor were they characterized by careful treatment of nature and the environment. However, today’s manifold crisis of capitalism calls for the search for other alternatives. A new discussion about a socialism in the twenty-first century has begun. It is able to pick up where Luxemburg left off, striving for a lively, contradictory and in every respect democratic socialism. She saw “the most ruthless revolutionary energy and the most generous humanity” as the “true breath of socialism”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-TOGQ8WI10

Luxemburg thought of socialism as a combination of political and social freedoms. This immediately brought her into conflict with Lenin and Trotsky, the leaders of the Bolsheviks who had seized power in Russia in October 1917 and abolished political freedoms. Luxemburg wrote in September 1918, "We always distinguished the social core from the political form of bourgeois democracy—always revealed the bitter core of social inequality and unfreedom beneath the sweet shell of formal equality and freedom—not in order to reject the shell, but to incite the working class not to be content with just the shell and instead to seize political power in order to fill it with new social content." [1]

Luxemburg’s greatest fear was that the Bolsheviks’ practice of government would rob the socialist idea of its most important meaning: of becoming an alternative to oppression, exploitation and degradation. Because socialism could not be introduced through a back door, it was impossible to unleash it within the graveyard peace of a dictatorship, even a “left-wing” one. Socialism had to be desired by a majority and therefore needed to reach the largest possible public. Its attractiveness could develop only in public debate. In revolutions, for Luxemburg, it was not the “revolutionary parties” but only the masses who could transform society in the direction of socialism. Democracy formed the basis for this, and there was no alternative. For Luxemburg, socialism could not be decreed, if only because socialism required freedom as a prerequisite. This freedom could never come from above, but had to be desired from below.

At the centre of her political approach, Luxemburg placed the choice that Marx had, in smaller circles, repeatedly posed: between “socialism or barbarism”. If humanity did not find an escape from the dominance of profit, the human species would irredeemably fall into barbarism. After two world wars, the failure of state socialism and the increasingly visible susceptibility of the capitalist mode of production to disruption, Luxemburg’s basic ideas—to create both political and social freedom, to think society and nature together—can be used to develop a basic outline of an alternative society.

“It is the historical task of the proletariat, when it comes to power, to create a socialist democracy in place of bourgeois democracy, not to abolish all democracy. Socialist democracy, however, does not only begin in the promised land, once the substructure of the socialist economy has been created, like a ready-made Christmas present for well-behaved people who in the meantime had faithfully supported a handful of socialist dictators.” ^[2]

Footnotes

1. Rosa Luxemburg, “Zur russischen Revolution”, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, Berlin, 1974 [September/October 1918], p. 363.
2. Luxemburg, “Zur russischen Revolution”, p. 363.

For Luxemburg, emancipation was the goal of the human species and not just one of its sexes. Following Marx, she demanded the “overthrow of all conditions in which man is a degraded, a subjugated, an abandoned, a despicable being”. At the same time, she hated looking at problems one-sidedly. For Luxemburg, the prerequisite for emancipation was education. She did not see this one-dimensionally either. Learning had a dual character: the acquisition of human culture in the broadest sense, and self-actualization in communal action. For both, positive and (even more so) negative experiences were indispensable.

For Luxemburg, emancipation was not reduced to the emancipation of women:

“Scientific socialism teaches us women that we can attain full human liberation only within a socialist order through the abolition of private property in the means of production. It thereby makes it our duty at every hour to work for this noble ideal, which is the historically determined goal of the workers’ movement. To the proletarians, for their part, scientific socialism declares that they cannot achieve their goal without the conscious, active support of the broadest ranks of women. There are facts upon facts that confirm this. The rapid and powerful growth of women’s professional work forces those who work for wages or salaries to respect and win female companions in their struggle for dignified living conditions.” [1]

For Luxemburg, emancipation was not a one-off act of liberation, let alone a proclamation, but a constant confrontation—with oneself and with all facets of society and nature. This presupposed education and lifelong learning. Only through constant learning and educational experiences could personal and social emancipation and change be brought about.

Luxemburg behaved accordingly when she taught: she encouraged self-empowerment. She did the same when she lectured on political economy.

“By asking questions, by repeatedly asking and probing, she extracted from the class whatever knowledge it had of what needed to be ascertained. By questioning, she let the answer resonate and let us hear for ourselves where and how it sounded hollow. By questioning, she probed arguments and let us see for ourselves whether they were crooked or straight. By questioning, she forced us beyond the realization of our own errors towards the discovery of robust solutions of our own.” [2]

or Luxemburg, however, learning was not limited to education. Beyond this, emancipation required knowledge, derived from experience, of one’s own strengths and equally of one’s weaknesses. Experience could not be gained without purposeful action, even if this was sometimes very painful. Experiences were all the more productive the more collectively they were made and processed. With this view, Luxemburg turned every party executive in the world against her. After all, they always believe they know what is best for their followers:

“The bold acrobat overlooks the fact that the only subject to whom this role of guide has now fallen is the mass ‘I’ of the working class, which stubbornly insists on being allowed to make its own mistakes and to learn historical dialectics for itself. In the end, since we are speaking among ourselves, let us be frank: missteps made by a truly revolutionary working-class movement are immeasurably more fruitful and historically valuable than the infallibility of the very best ‘Central Committee’.” [3]

Luxemburg returned to these relationships again and again: a class can only gain experience through struggle, because only in struggle do isolated individuals become a class and thus a political force. She rejected schematic thinking, the idea that struggles could be waged according to a ready-made theory set down in a book. According to Luxemburg, "In the midst of history, in the midst of development, in the midst of struggle, we learn how to struggle."[4]

When the SPD made large gains in the 1912 Reichstag elections and its leadership suggested more than ever that parliamentarism was the only viable path to socialism, it was Luxemburg who dampened the victorious mood. She warned the four million Social Democratic voters to leave the purely parliamentary battlefield: "You have now shown your power, you must learn to use it." [5] Luxemburg would probably have criticized the actions of today's (left-wing) parties. From her point of view, only learning from mistakes and constant confrontation led to the goal, not a self-referential approach defending one’s own position at all costs. She considered the resulting disenfranchisement of the party base and electorate to be the opposite of emancipation.

Footnotes

1. Rosa Luxemburg, “Mehr Sozialismus”, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7/2, Berlin 2017, p. 935.
2. Rosi Wolfstein, 1920, quoted in  Rosa Luxemburg oder: Der Preis der Freiheit, edited by Jörn Schütrumpf, 3rd edn., Berlin, 2018, p. 102.
3. Rosa Luxemburg, “Organisationsfragen der russischen Sozialdemokratie”, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1/2, Berlin, 1970, p. 444.
4. Rosa Luxemburg, “Der politische Massenstreik und die Gewerkschaften. Rede am 1. Oktober 1910 in Hagen in der außerordentlichen Mitgliederversammlung des Deutschen Metallarbeiter-Verbandes”, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Berlin, 1972, p. 465.
5. Rosa Luxemburg, “Unser Wahlsieg und seine Lehren. Rede am 1. März 1912 in Bremen”, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, Berlin, 1973, p. 132 f.

For Rosa Luxemburg, war was almost unavoidable in the imperialist stage of capitalist modernity. Even so, this did not stop her from fighting against the threat of war—even at the cost of imprisonment. She opposed violence and war not only as a humanist, for moral reasons, but also as a revolutionary. Marx had written in the 1860s that “violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one; it is itself an economic force.”^[1] His alter ego, the military specialist Friedrich Engels, had narrowed this statement in the 1890s. He declared military force in a socialist-proletarian revolution, above all the barricade, to be obsolete: given the advances in weapons technology, the revolutionary camp would be inevitably defeated in any military confrontation. Open violence, even civil war, would lead to ruin, at least in the states west of Russia. In the future, he argued, revolution would no longer be achieved by small groups launching sudden attacks, as in the 18th and 19th centuries, but through civilian superiority.

Rosa Luxemburg believed that the revolutionary camp could achieve this civilian superiority most effectively through political mass strike, which she had seen firsthand during the Russian Revolution of 1905/06. In this strike, the proletariat would gain awareness of its own power, freeing itself from the intellectual domination of bourgeois society, and then—in a second step—gradually undermine the ruling order’s ability to resist, including the state and the church. Violence: yes, bloodshed: no. The era in which civil wars could be won was simply over. This strategy would not be tested until decades later, beginning in 1980 with the Polish trade union Solidarność and ending with the collapse of European state socialism. Yet the actors did not know much about Rosa Luxemburg; some even believed they were fighting her – posthumously – as a precursor of state socialism. In any case, sooner or later, any system based on oppression will collapse.

This was not the only reason why the ruling elites of the major powers longed for war on the eve of the First World War—a development that the economist Rosa Luxemburg had understood well before the turn of the century:

“The development of the global economy and the intensification and generalization of competition on the world market have made militarism and navalism the tools of world politics, shaping both the external and internal life of the great powers.”^[2]

According to Luxemburg, the dominant political course was leading straight toward war, and only informed, determined masses could prevent catastrophe. It was partly for this reason that she wrote The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to the Economic Explanation of Imperialism in 1913. To keep the capitalist mode of production functioning, more and more regions outside the world market would have to be conquered and drawn into the capitalist system. As each expansion reduced the number of such regions, competition among the major powers intensified to the point that war became increasingly likely.

Luxemburg was far ahead of her time with these ideas, but they also left her isolated—few were willing to listen. Two years into the world war, she summarized the situation bluntly:

“Reduced to its objective historical meaning, the present world war as is, a whole, a struggle among fully developed capitalist powers for world domination, for the exploitation of the last remnants of non-capitalist areas on the planet.”^[3]

For the working class, the world war was catastrophic:

“The goal of its journey—its liberation—depends on whether the proletariat learns from its own mistakes. Self-criticism—relentless, harsh, penetrating self-criticism—is the air and the light of the proletarian movement. The collapse of the socialist proletariat in the present world war is unprecedented; it is a disaster for humanity. Socialism would only be lost if the international proletariat failed to grasp the depth of this fall and refused to learn from it.”^[4]

Her assessment proved correct.

By the time this war—beginning in 1937 in Asia and in 1939 in Europe—continued under the name “Second World War,” Rosa Luxemburg had long been dead, murdered by German military officers who had had ample time during the First World War to perfect the craft of killing.

Footnotes

---

1. Marx: Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Erster Band [Capital, Vol. I], in: ibid., Friedrich Engels: Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW), Vol. 23, Berlin 1956 ff., p. 779.
2. Rosa Luxemburg: Sozialreform oder Revolution? [1899], Berlin 1970, p. 425.
3. Rosa Luxemburg: Die Krise der Sozialdemokratie (Junius brochure), in: ibid.: Collected Works, vol. 4, Berlin 1974, p. 153.
4. ibid., p. 53

There have long been attempts to place Rosa Luxemburg alongside Lenin. Yet doing so requires ignoring her actual positions, for only a few months into Bolshevik rule she wrote, quite unambiguously:

“The practice of socialism demands a profound intellectual transformation of the masses, who have been degraded by centuries of bourgeois class domination: social instincts instead of selfish ones, mass initiative instead of inertia, idealism capable of enduring all suffering, and so on. No one knows this better, depicts it more vividly, or repeats it more insistently than Lenin. But he is entirely mistaken in the methods he uses. Decrees, the dictatorial authority of factory overseers, draconian punishments, a reign of terror—these are all merely palliative measures. The only path to renewal is the school of public life itself: unrestricted, broad democracy and public opinion. It is precisely the reign of terror that demoralizes. [...] It is not the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the dictatorship of a handful of politicians—dictatorship in the bourgeois sense.”^[1]

At the 1907 International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg did stand together on one issue: they were able to gain broad support from the congress for an amendment to the otherwise lukewarm declaration on the policy to be pursued by socialist and social democratic parties in the event of war:

“If war should nevertheless break out, it is our duty to strive for its rapid termination and to use all our strength to exploit the economic and political crisis caused by the war to rouse the people and thereby accelerate the elimination of capitalist class rule.”^[2]

Having grown up under Tsarist Russia, Lenin did not distinguish between the rule of a class, i.e., a class dictatorship, and the various forms of government through which it may be exercised, including democracy. Instead, Lenin conflated class rule and form of government, thus failing to understand the central point of Marx's conception of the state: establishing and maintaining class domination is the goal, the form of government is the means to achieve it. Lenin failed to grasp that class rule can be exercised not only through dictatorship, but also through democracy.

For Lenin, the road to democracy necessarily passed through open dictatorship—in which violence would serve as the “midwife” (Marx) of a society free from oppression and exploitation. Luxemburg, by contrast, argued that proletarian class rule must be realized through democracy:

“Socialist democracy does not begin [...] in the promised land, once the foundations of the socialist economy have been laid, as a ready-made Christmas present for the good people [...]. Socialist democracy begins [...] the moment the socialist party takes power. It is nothing other than the dictatorship of the proletariat.”^[3]

Since the eastern part of Poland remained under Russian Tsarist rule until 1918, Luxemburg sought to unite her Polish party, the SDKPiL, with the deeply divided Russian Social Democracy. From 1906 onward, the SDKPiL became part of the Russian party. At that time, Luxemburg and Lenin’s Bolsheviks still agreed on the inevitability of a future revolution.

After an initial fundamental disagreement with Lenin in 1904^[4], the final break occurred in 1912; Rosa Luxemburg's last sympathies for Lenin were gone. Moreover, unlike Lenin, she never confused socialist politics with the bourgeois pursuit of power. Rosa Luxemburg wanted to win political majorities, Lenin wanted political power. As she put it, he

”had still not been able to free himself from the ‘idea’ of a small circle ruling over the party. Even before the revolution [in Russia in 1905/06], he had destroyed the party's unity in order to defend his organizational ideas, according to which the Central Committee was everything and the party itself was merely its appendage: a soulless mass that moves mechanically at the gesture of a leader, like an army drilling on the parade ground or a choir singing under the conductor's baton. [...] We cannot continue to work with the Leninists…“^[5]

This was one reason why Lenin sought to split Rosa Luxemburg's party, the SDKPiL, which had resumed independent activity in 1912. In 1913, she wrote from Berlin to an editorial office in Copenhagen:

“The ‘reliable source’ from which [they] have obtained their information on the situation of Polish parties is Lenin, the representative of the Russian Social Democratic faction. This faction, which for years has systematically sown division of the workers’ party and ruthless factional warfare in Russia, which has formed a fictitious ‘Central Committee’ recognized by no one, which stubbornly blocks all attempts at unification and has thereby driven the Russian party movement to the brink of ruin—this faction is a highly unreliable and unqualified source of information on Polish party affairs.”^[6]

Leo Jogiches—first Luxemburg’s mentor, then her long-time partner, and until both their deaths in 1919 her closest confidant—shared her political views. In the summer of 1917, amid the Russian Revolution, he observed that

“the Russian revolutionaries had their own methods and views and acted accordingly; the Spartacus Group must indeed support the Russian Revolution, but distance itself from Lenin and his party.”^[7]

However, the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in November 1917 placed both Jogiches and Luxemburg in a difficult position: they understood that Lenin could no longer be ignored and that caution was necessary. Luxemburg therefore avoided anything that might have been seen as undermining Lenin and his supporters in the midst of the revolution. Nevertheless, in her essay „On the Russian Revolution“, written in prison in the fall of 1918, her criticism was so forthright that the text remained banned in the Soviet Union until its collapse.

Footnotes

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1. Rosa Luxemburg: Zur russischen Revolution [1918], in: ibid.: Collected Works, Vol. 4, Berlin 1974, p. 360 ff.
2. International Socialist Congress Stuttgart 1907, August 18 – 24 [Minutes of the Proceedings], Berlin 1907, p. 66.
3. Luxemburg: Zur russischen Revolution, p. 363.
4. Rosa Luxemburg: Organisationsfragen der russischen Sozialdemokratie [1903/04], in: ibid.: Collected Works, Vol. 1/2, Berlin 1970, p. 422 ff.
5. Rosa Luxemburg quoted from Jörn Schütrumpf (ed.): “We cannot continue to work with the Leninists...” or: How Lenin “defeated” Rosa Luxemburg, Berlin 2022, https://www.rosalux.de/publikation/id/49686
6. Rosa Luxemburg to the editors of the "Social-Democrat", October 20, 1913, in: idem, Collected Letters, vol. 6, Berlin 1993, p. 193 (emphasis in the original).
7. Quoted in Elisabeth Benz: Ein halbes Leben für die Revolution. Fritz Rück (1895–1959). Eine politische Biografie, Essen 2014, p. 97.