{"id":13544,"date":"2024-12-22T22:26:17","date_gmt":"2024-12-23T03:26:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/?p=13544"},"modified":"2024-12-30T22:32:08","modified_gmt":"2024-12-31T03:32:08","slug":"rosa-luxemburgs-war-against-cynicism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2024\/12\/rosa-luxemburgs-war-against-cynicism\/","title":{"rendered":"Rosa Luxemburg\u2019s war against cynicism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sean<\/strong> Larson<\/strong> reviews the newest volume in<\/em> The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, focused on her political writings on revolution in the period 1910\u20131919, edited by Paul Le Blanc and Helen C. Scott.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cT<\/span>he greatest commitment must be tied fast to our great aims and tasks, and every single person among the masses has to understand that what\u2019s 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\u2019s life.\u201d \u2014Rosa Luxemburg<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

During that time, Marxism as an ideology found its fullest expression in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). For the German workers\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t fall into economic or political crises, this strategy was sufficient to maintain a thriving social democratic movement in Germany.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 political councils, or \u201csoviets.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s own insights to meet the new historical moment of capitalist crisis, colonialism, and mass working-class struggle.<\/p>\n

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\u20131919<\/a><\/em>. (Although there is more than enough to dig into here, not all of Luxemburg\u2019s political writings from 1910 to 1919 are in this volume. As the editorial foreword clarifies, \u201cThe political writings are further divided into different themes: \u201cOn Revolution,\u201d \u201cDebates on Revolutionary Strategy and Organization,\u201d \u201cThe National Question,\u201d \u201cColonial Policy and Imperialism,\u201d and \u201cOn Literature.\u201d 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\u201319, including Luxemburg\u2019s writings on the Russian Revolution of 1917 and German Revolution of 1918\u201319.\u201d)<\/p>\n

It is impossible to cover the immense breadth of Luxemburg\u2019s thought across a decade of political turmoil in a single review. This volume contains many surprises and touches upon complicated subjects, including Luxemburg\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

A creative and active socialism from below<\/h4>\n

In Luxemburg\u2019s 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 \u201cbourgeois\u201d parliamentarism, because it recognized that any attempt to implement a socialist<\/em> 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\u2019s methods increasingly approximated those of the bourgeois parties in parliament.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cfunction as a pedestal for a dozen politicians \u2026 without any of [their] own politics\u201d or \u201cat most to form only the chorus, accompanying the great deeds of the representatives of the Reichstag with a \u2018supporting\u2019 melody.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Luxemburg, such a framework merely replicated the capitalist way of doing politics. There was another world to be built:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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. \u201cDown below, where each employer faces his wage slaves,\u201d Luxemburg declared at the founding congress of the new Communist Party of Germany, \u201cis where we must tear the rulers\u2019 means of authority away from them, step by step, and take them into our own hands.\u201d<\/p>\n

Socialism is a mass project, irreducible to the actions of a select few. The socialist revolution, for Luxemburg, aims to \u201ctransform the very land and soil of society,\u201d and its mass character therefore reflects \u201cthat we have to seize political power not from above, but rather from below.\u201d Only by putting power into the hands of ordinary working people would the constant crises and miseries of capitalism be ended.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Against what she perceived as the mistakes\u2014under duress\u2014of the Russian revolutionaries, she reaffirmed the fundamental principle that, although capitalism may be dismantled through decree from on high, \u201cby its very nature<\/em>, socialism cannot<\/em> be imposed.\u201d A socialist society is not the enactment of a pre-arranged plan by a great thinker. It is rather \u201cterra 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.\u201d<\/p>\n