Luxemburg’s lessons and the roots of Stalinism

I thank Helen Scott and Paul Le Blanc for their intervention. It is an opportunity for me to clarify my stance, address my critics’ concerns, while once again setting matters in a broader historical perspective.

Early in 1922 Trotsky wrote:

In the course of these last few years, all of us have had to clear up many things in our own minds and to learn a great deal under the direct blows of events. Rosa Luxemburg accomplished this ideological work more slowly than others because she had to observe events from the side lines, from the pits of German prisons.

My essay was about just what, exactly, Luxemburg learned from the German Revolution, from the moment she was freed from prison on November 9, to her heinous murder on January 15,1919, a 64-day period in which she quickly accomplished much ‘ideological work–work that implicitly brought her closer to Bolshevism.

In a comparative study of her writings on the Russian Revolution in the summer of 1918, on the one hand, and her unknown (to the Anglophone world) writings on German Revolution, appearing six months later, on the other–I tracked the evolution in Luxemburg’s thinking.  I showed how Luxemburg developed her views on the relationship between socialism, revolution and democracy, decisively breaking with Kautskyism and the parliamentary road to socialism under a bourgeois-democratic state, in favor of a transition to socialism under the aegis of a workers’ state, represented in Russia by the soviet or, in Germany, by workers’ councils–a workers’ state in embryonic form.

But Le Blanc and Scott apparently think my argument is not worthy of consideration since they say nothing about it. If that is the case, then Luxemburg’s On the Russian Revolution, which they copiously cite, remains Luxemburg’s and my critics’ last word on that topic, and the newly translated material, which they do not cite, adds nothing new.

Instead, Scott and Le Blanc veer off-topic, focusing on the first, introductory paragraphs of my piece where I very briefly called into question the traditional interpretation, (ostensibly) drawn from Trotsky’s writings, and which my critics share.  Specifically, I said many on the Left thought Lenin’s partisans–and here is the quote from the editors–“helped create precedents and preconditions for what became known as Stalinism.”  My critics are dismayed because they think I am “attacking” Lenin. Instead they counterpose their position, namely, that

Luxemburg and Lenin were close comrades in the revolutionary Marxist wing of international socialism throughout their politically active lives, including during the period of the Bolshevik revolution.

The editors’ counter-position is a non-sequitur. Maybe I expressed myself clumsily, but I never contested the editors’ mundane truth that Lenin and Luxemburg were “close comrades” fighting for a common cause. On the contrary, I specified, in concrete political terms, just how Luxemburg revised and updated her views. I would even venture to hypothesize this: Had Luxemburg escaped her assassins and found temporary refuge in Moscow, there is little doubt in my mind that Lenin would have immediately parachuted Luxemburg into the Russian Politburo, as he had done with Trotsky.  Indeed, Luxemburg was probably the ideal candidate to assume the presidency of the Third International. Certainly, once freed she would not have limited herself to mere ‘critical support’ for the Bolsheviks, pleadingly voiced ‘from the outside’.

What I did contest in my opening remarks was the conventional interpretation, which Le Blanc and Scott espouse, locating the ‘origins’ of Stalinism in the ostensibly anti-democratic “emergency measures” taken in Lenin’s time, measures that set “precedents and preconditions” promoting the victory of Stalinism, which I identify with forced collectivization and forced industrialization, and not mere political dictatorship to which Stalinism is often reduced. Depending on who you ask, people will posit a proto-Stalinism by mentioning the ruthless repression of the Kronstadt revolt in 1921, or the ban on factions in the same year, or the formation of the Cheka in the summer of 1918, or the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, or the suppression of the Left Revolutionaries, or some other Bolshevik infringement on democracy, understood conventionally as rule of the majority.   But the majority are made up of peasants, not workers. And there’s the rub.

My position, apodictically expressed, is that the embryonic causes of Stalinism lay not in in the emergency measures taken in the pre-NEP period of 1917-1921, but in the major agrarian crisis of 1927-1929 under the NEP.1The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospective: Interventions in Russian and Soviet History Chapter 2. Brill 2013. The aggregate result of  25 million peasant households in NEP Russia defending their class interests by following their ‘rules of reproduction’, to use Robert Brenner’s expression, generated dramatic shortfalls of grain deliveries to the cities, triggering food insecurity for the urban citizenry, and setting the stage for the last, 18-months long, faction fight about how to respond to it. And so, the remnants of the Bolshevik party, now located in Right Opposition and led by Bukharin, emerged to oppose the (now) ex-Bolshevik Stalin’s policy of periodically robbing the peasantry to make up for shortages, thereby undermining the worker-peasant ‘alliance’ (smychka), keystone of the NEP. Though the Right Opposition’s chances of stopping Stalin may have been marginal, its leadership thought it was worth the risk. Luxemburg had anticipated the possibility of this conflict for which there was no historical precedent.

While in prison, she predicted that any “attempted socialist reform of agriculture will be confronted by an adversary consisting of an enormously expanded and powerful mass of property-owning peasantry, which will fight tooth and nail to defend its newly acquired property from any socialist attacks.” (227).

Luxemburg thereby rooted the impossibility of a democratic socialism in the social structure of Russia, with its enormous peasantry, not in the emergency measures. Discussing in 1907 the prospects for socialism, she elaborated the sociological ABCs of Second International Marxism, which remain valid down to this day:

[No] Social Democrat fools himself that the proletariat will remain in power; if it remained, that would lead to the rule of its class ideas, and it would realize socialism. Today, there is not sufficient strength for that since the proletariat constitutes a minority in Russian society. [O]n the day after the proletariat triumphs over the Tsar …power will pass to the proletariat … [and then] into the hands of the government, which may only act to appoint a Constituent Assembly and a legislative body chosen by the entire populace…Social Democrats will not constitute a majority in the Constituent Assembly, only democrats from the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie [will].  We may regret this, but we cannot change it. (Luxemburg, Works, vol 4, p. 173.)

One’s analysis of Stalinism must begin with this ‘regretful’ reality, a contemporaneous reality that could not be transformed democratically so long as the October Revolution remained confined to one country. To begin anywhere else to account for Stalinism is to lose one’s way.

Featured Image credit: PickPik; modified by Tempest.

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