Rosa Luxemburg’s war against cynicism

Sean Larson reviews the newest volume in The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, focused on her political writings on revolution in the period 1910–1919, edited by Paul Le Blanc and Helen C. Scott.

 

“The greatest commitment must be tied fast to our great aims and tasks, and every single person among the masses has to understand that what’s at stake are tasks for which one may not only suffer hunger for months on end, but for which one can, if necessary, give one’s life.” —Rosa Luxemburg

Reading Rosa Luxemburg at the height of her powers is like bearing witness to a prophet at work, filled to the brim with a crackling energy, as she illuminates the path to liberation by the light of her searing words.

Luxemburg remains to this day a symbol of international socialist resistance and revolutionary fervor. She is a towering figure within the tradition of socialism from below and uncompromising democracy. A Polish, Jewish, and disabled woman who was active in the Russian, Polish, and German revolutionary movements her whole life, she staked out a reputation for herself and a path forward for the international socialist movement through the most important debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

During that time, Marxism as an ideology found its fullest expression in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). For the German workers’ movement, socialist theory provided a thread that held together myriad clubs, co-ops, unions, and party institutions, and helped to ground their activity in a vision of the future socialist society.

After Friedrich Engels died, the chief theoretician articulating Marxism for the SPD was Karl Kautsky, who viewed the role of the socialist party as primarily educational and organizational. For Kautsky, Marxism supported the class struggle by spreading the knowledge of the capitalist system and promoting the economic and political organizations of the working class. As long as European capitalism continued to grow and didn’t fall into economic or political crises, this strategy was sufficient to maintain a thriving social democratic movement in Germany.

But while the German SPD plodded forward, a storm was brewing in the east. In 1905, a wave of mass political strikes spread across Russia and Poland, creating the first workers’ political councils, or “soviets.” Strike activity in Germany began to rise in the wake of this outbreak, plunging the SPD into internal debate over strategy and the road to socialism.

While Kautsky became increasingly unable to bridge the contradiction between the old educational and organizational methods and the new realities of German capitalism, Rosa Luxemburg began to formulate a dynamic range of theory and strategy that drew on Karl Marx’s own insights to meet the new historical moment of capitalist crisis, colonialism, and mass working-class struggle.

While Luxemburg had already penned several classic polemics upholding a revolutionary approach to the class struggle by 1910, it was from this year, when Kautsky capitulated to the reformist wing of the party, until the end of her life nine years later that Luxemburg took on full responsibility for articulating the revolutionary politics of Marxism in the German socialist movement. Now, thanks to editors Paul Le Blanc and Helen C. Scott, the key political writings from this period are available together for the first time in English in The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg Volume V: Political Writings 3, On Revolution 1910–1919. (Although there is more than enough to dig into here, not all of Luxemburg’s political writings from 1910 to 1919 are in this volume. As the editorial foreword clarifies, “The political writings are further divided into different themes: “On Revolution,” “Debates on Revolutionary Strategy and Organization,” “The National Question,” “Colonial Policy and Imperialism,” and “On Literature.” Volume 3 (published 2019) contains writings on revolution to the end of 1905; Volume 4 (published 2021) covers material from 1906 to 1909. The present volume spans 1910–19, including Luxemburg’s writings on the Russian Revolution of 1917 and German Revolution of 1918–19.”)

It is impossible to cover the immense breadth of Luxemburg’s thought across a decade of political turmoil in a single review. This volume contains many surprises and touches upon complicated subjects, including Luxemburg’s views on internationalism and self-determination, as well as her assessments of the Russian Revolution as it was developing. In this review, however, I will cover some key thematic areas that preoccupied Luxemburg throughout these years, and which are central not only to Luxemburg’s time, but also to our own. These are the themes of working-class self-activity, the dynamics of mass movements and the role of leadership within them, and the indispensability of idealism to the class struggle.

A creative and active socialism from below

In Luxemburg’s time, as today, the commonsense mode of political activity involved the masses of people electing representatives to a parliament and delegating responsibility for the future of society to that body. The social democratic movement was originally distinguished by a fundamental rejection of such “bourgeois” parliamentarism, because it recognized that any attempt to implement a socialist political vision could not be brought in from above, no matter how radical the representatives. Luxemburg was particularly attuned to this distinction between politics from above versus politics from below, a contrast that only grew in importance as the SPD’s methods increasingly approximated those of the bourgeois parties in parliament.

Above all, Luxemburg was disgusted with the political framework held by her former SPD comrades, which in theory and practice held that the masses of ordinary workers were supposed to “function as a pedestal for a dozen politicians … without any of [their] own politics” or “at most to form only the chorus, accompanying the great deeds of the representatives of the Reichstag with a ‘supporting’ melody.”

For Luxemburg, such a framework merely replicated the capitalist way of doing politics. There was another world to be built:

The essence of socialist society lies in the fact that the great working mass of the people will cease to be a mass that is governed. Rather, the entirety of political and economic life will involve the activity of the people, animated by conscious and free self-determination.

The emphasis on recentering the mass of the population as the agents of socialist politics was not only a moral insistence, but a strategic imperative. If the aim of the socialist movement is not merely a change of figureheads at the top of the government, but a rearrangement of the way people can secure what they need and flourish across society, then we have to upend the very arrangements that force us to work for bosses on a firm-by-firm level. “Down below, where each employer faces his wage slaves,” Luxemburg declared at the founding congress of the new Communist Party of Germany, “is where we must tear the rulers’ means of authority away from them, step by step, and take them into our own hands.”

Socialism is a mass project, irreducible to the actions of a select few. The socialist revolution, for Luxemburg, aims to “transform the very land and soil of society,” and its mass character therefore reflects “that we have to seize political power not from above, but rather from below.” Only by putting power into the hands of ordinary working people would the constant crises and miseries of capitalism be ended.

Attempts to circumvent this necessity for mass activity would bring the socialist project to ruin, whether it was reformist parliamentarians doing it or the Russian revolutionaries at the head of the newborn soviet state. Luxemburg consistently and forcefully placed all responsibility for the difficult decisions of the Bolsheviks that sometimes curtailed democracy on the failures of the German SPD. But her private notes and criticisms of the Russian revolution contained in this volume provide interesting insight into her thinking on these critical debates.

Against what she perceived as the mistakes—under duress—of the Russian revolutionaries, she reaffirmed the fundamental principle that, although capitalism may be dismantled through decree from on high, “by its very nature, socialism cannot be imposed.” A socialist society is not the enactment of a pre-arranged plan by a great thinker. It is rather “terra incognita. A thousand problems. Experience alone is capable of making corrections and opening up new paths. Only uninhibited, effervescent life fashions a thousand new forms and improvisations, contains creative power, and corrects all mistakes.”

Today, the phrase “socialism from below,” although formally an accurate description of a heroic political tradition and emancipatory framework, could be interpreted as a mere analytic lens on the world around us. Among the many revolutionaries of this tradition, it is Luxemburg whose life and work consistently brought this political worldview to life as the self-activity of the working-class. Through her writings, one can feel the animating spirit of the mass strike move from city to city, unleashing previously untapped reservoirs of collective energy and awakening in each and every worker a sense of personal responsibility for the future of the world.

Revolutionary socialism was therefore not an identity or a correct school of thought, but a practice, a deed. Even more so than a framework of “socialism from below,” Luxemburg’s perspective may best be captured by her repeated use of the terms working-class “self-activity” (selbsttätigkeit) and “self-reliance” (selbstständigkeit).

People brought up under capitalism will to some extent necessarily see the world and themselves through the muddy lenses of capitalist ideologies—racism, individualism, toxic masculinity, nationalism, and so on. While reading and formal education can help to break down some of these patterns and ideologies, ultimately our antisocial worldviews can only be cast off when they are replaced by new ones based in collective solidarity and forged through collective action.

Especially during the revolutionary period in Germany, Luxemburg emphasized this difference in approach:

We have advanced beyond the days when the watchword was to ‘educate the proletariat in a socialist way,’ though the Marxists of the Kautsky school still seem to be living in those days.” Instead, “they will be educated through their deeds.

In other words, only by standing up for each other and taking risks together can we learn to rely on each other. Only by collective action can we habituate ourselves away from individualist solutions that ultimately undermine all our wellbeing, and instead opt consistently for trusting that others will fight for us when we fight for them. It is not simply class consciousness that is needed but class confidence.

Revolutionary leadership and the dynamics of mass movements

Rosa Luxemburg was committed unswervingly to mass, democratic action as a strategic course. But perhaps contrary to the artificial dichotomies in which later-day scholars entombed revolutionary debates, Luxemburg consistently emphasized the indispensable role of a resolute and interventionist leadership in the struggles of the working-class, especially mass actions.

As she famously put it in The Mass Strike, the entire purpose of the Social Democratic Party during a period of upheaval was to

give the cue for, and the direction to, the fight; to so regulate the tactics of the political struggle in its every phase and at its every moment that the entire sum of the available power of the proletariat which is already released and active, will find expression in the battle array of the party; to see that the tactics of the social democrats are decided according to their resoluteness and acuteness and that they never fall below the level demanded by the actual relations of forces, but rather rise above it—that is the most important task of the directing body in a period of mass strikes.

Her writings from 1910 to 1919 expand immensely on this thread of thinking, deepening and concretizing both her analysis of the fluid dynamics of mass movements and her perspective on the role of initiative within them. “Large mass movements have their psychology and their laws that serious leaders must reckon with,” she maintained, and the laws and psychology of movements applied no less to the upsurges of a mass strike than to full-fledged revolution.

Contrary to the slow and incremental pace of socialist reforms building toward working-class consciousness and coherence, Luxemburg outlined a tempestuous path, punctuated by volcanic eruptions in mass activity. During these periods of ideological and political ferment (think of the uprising for Black Lives in summer 2020 or the student encampments for Palestine in 2024), “months can achieve things as regards political education and maturity, which full prior decades were not able to impart.” That is why socialist strategy must be oriented toward preparing for such historical events by building the confidence among the masses in themselves and the ability of the socialists among them to actively lead struggle.

Such a focus on leadership may at first appear at odds with Luxemburg’s famous emphasis on democracy and socialism from below. But there will always be politicians loyal to capitalism who are willing to step in and mislead a mass social movement back into containable channels when a radically open situation arises. There is no such thing as a vacuum of power. (For more on this with regard to the global movements of recent years, see Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.) Social or political crises provide openings that are inevitably contested, but resolving them in favor of more control and self-reliance among workers cannot happen unless that outcome is fought for in an organized way.

Democracy, for Luxemburg, was no static reflection of majority public opinion at a given time, but rather a living relationship that pulsed with tension and changed dramatically in different circumstances. As she succinctly put it:

The actual dialectic of revolutions, however, turns this wisdom of parliamentary moles on its head: the path runs not from the formation of a majority to revolutionary tactics, but rather in the opposite direction—from revolutionary tactics to the formation of a majority. Only a party that understands how to lead—how to drive things forward—gains support in the midst of the storm.

Leadership in a movement, in Luxemburg’s eyes, was not a “governance” over ordinary people, but rather a shared plot against capitalism: it is not declared, but learned, tested, and developed. She recognized that mass strikes and revolutions represent deep changes in collective activity and therefore changes in ourselves and our relationships with one another. It is through these changes and the contestation among organized forces that a mass collective will can be formed. However,

No force can artificially maintain expressions of the will of the masses in the political struggle at the same level long term, nor can such expressions be restrained within the same form. They have to well up, come to a head, and take on new, more effective forms. Mass action, once sparked, must move forward. And in the given moment, should the leading party fail in its resolve to supply the mass with the demands it needs, then a certain disappointment inevitably comes over that mass, its verve vanishes, and the action collapses in on itself.

We know this risk of demoralization all too well in twenty-first century, late-stage neoliberalism. It is here, on the psychology of mass movements, that this volume of Luxemburg’s collective works offers particularly rich insights.

The zealotry of Rosa Luxemburg

One thing Rosa Luxemburg did not lack was faith. For a self-declared historical materialist, she is a very explicit idealist when it comes to revolutionary strategy. In almost every article in this volume, she speaks of the “inexhaustible wellspring of idealism,” the “zealous will of the masses,” the “joy in sacrifice that knows no boundaries,” or “steadfast revolutionary energy.”

The emphasis on the intangible qualities of mass fervor emerged from the debates on the mass strike, where Luxemburg deplored the “profit-and-loss calculation” of the SPD leadership and especially of trade union officials who conceptualized socialist strategy exclusively in terms of financial risks.

While these considerations are obviously important, what they miss is an entire subterranean moral and libidinal economy that animates political realities just as much in our own time as in Luxemburg’s. A mass strike in Germany, were it to organically develop from the domestic conjuncture, should not be opposed on merely the grounds of trade union resources. According to Luxemburg, its positive effects could be incalculable: “it would raise immeasurably, in all countries, courage, belief in socialism, self-trust, and willingness to sacrifice among the proletariat.”

Through the devastating defeats, just as through the enervating successes, the class struggle provides not only a political education, but a quasi-spiritual education, in Luxemburg’s judgement. Victory, she wrote, “can only be achieved in a long series of heavy battles, rich in sacrifice.”

To prepare for this, political education is indispensable, “but also the task of education in terms of morals and mores, by appealing to the highest form of idealism, the willingness to sacrifice.” For Luxemburg, bringing the masses onto the political stage means that each and every person has to understand the stakes could be life or death, and that for the abolition of class society, the greatest achievement of human history, that wager is worth it.

Indeed, even if it is informed by a materialist analysis, the socialist wager is ultimately an idealist one: that human beings can one day overcome the narrow interests implanted by capitalist market relations—their “material constraints”—by the force of our collective will. But as we know all too well today, the passions alone will not suffice to carry an upsurge unto victory. We need durable infrastructure, organization, some alternatives that people can rely on when it comes time to defend themselves and create a life as best they can in the here and now.

In her analyses of the ongoing Russian Revolution in April 1917, Luxemburg grappled with this contradiction. The Russian workers “have no organizations, no voter associations, virtually no trade unions, no press,” she wrote, but what they did have was decisive: “fresh fighting spirit, determined will, and boundless readiness to make sacrifices for the ideals of socialism.”

No doubt feeling the intense contrast with her own experience in the German SPD, she called attention to the fact that, despite the insufficiency of idealism without organization, “in all of Russia, the workers are feverishly engaged in creating those organizations, political associations, trade unions, educational institutes, newspapers, the whole apparatus.” A belated effort, to be sure. But perhaps this alternate path to building socialism represented more than what Leon Trotsky called the “privilege of historical backwardness.”

Luxemburg pointed to the implications of these developments in Russia for her own very different context in Germany: “We also have to raise the question here as to whether mass organizations can be retained at all in the long run, if nothing is done to put to the test the masses’ devotion, readiness for sacrifice, and willingness to take risks.” Indeed, “nothing is healthier for the German working class than tumultuous battle.”

Which comes first, the infrastructures of dissent or the burning conviction that building a new society is actually possible with the real people living right now on this earth? No doubt these two factors each provide the conditions of possibility for the other and mutually reinforce one another. But while many Marxists withdraw into the psychological certainties of “hard” materialist analysis, Rosa Luxemburg’s steadfast insistence on the power of collective belief may prove more farsighted and necessary.

Luxemburg maintained, even at times in the face of the impassioned hostility from the masses of workers themselves amid the historic revolution she had prepared for her entire life, that “great things can only be accomplished with enthusiasm.” A commitment to socialism from below requires no less an attentiveness to the spirits that move people. After all, it was Karl Marx himself who stressed that the proletariat “needs its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread.”

Today, our movements would do well to learn from Rosa Luxemburg’s war against cynicism. Anyone hoping to explore the politics of socialism from below, learn more about one of the most enthralling periods of revolutionary history, or restore their faith in the stunningly creative potential of the masses even in dark times should pick up The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg Volume V, and spend some time with the writings of one of the greatest visionaries history has ever known.

Featured Image credit: #luxemburg+rosa; modified by Tempest.

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