AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Showing posts with label international women's day. Show all posts

Saturday, March 23, 2019

March Is Women’s History Month-Honor Communist Leader Rosa Luxemburg- The Rose Of The Revolution

From The Pages Of "Women And Revolution"-"Feminism vs. Marxism: Origins of the Conflict"-From "Women and Revolution," 1974

Markin comment on the modern Women’s Liberation movement and Marxism:

There are plenty of villains, political villains, including this writer responsible for the “sectoralization” of the radical movement in the late 1960’s-early 1970s, a condition that essentially continues to this day in attenuated form (attenuated due to the smallness of the radical element in any of the so-called sectors). Sectoralization, for those unfamiliar with the term was the notion that blacks, gays, women, workers, students, whatever could only organize among their own kind, exclusively and uncritically by others, and that these sectors would somehow magically transpose their sometimes adversarial positions on revolution day. Never, in other words.

The villain part, at least in regard to the women’s liberation movement, was that many of the criticisms made in the name of feminist separation were correct, especially around rampant male chauvinism in the movement, not excluding PL/SDS or other SDS factions. Of course, most of those making these pungent criticisms eventually had not problem working with males, and comfortably found their way into the good offices of the Democratic Party. Nevertheless, as the article correctly points out, the nuclear bourgeois family (ma, pa, kids, and dog or cat, or some variation on that theme) today in America, is the central obstacle to true women’s liberation (socialization of housework, collective responsibility for childcare, greater access to higher levels in the workplace, etc.). As stated what is necessary is to recognize that victory in the class struggle by the working class will, of necessity have to address the myriad problems connected with the special oppression of women (black and other oppressed groups as well). Let’s get to it.
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Workers Vanguard No. 982
10 June 2011

Feminism vs. Marxism: Origins of the Conflict

From Women and Revolution, 1974

(Young Spartacus pages)
We reprint below an article with minor corrections from the Spring 1974 issue of Women and Revolution (No. 5), which was the journal of the Spartacist League Central Committee Commission for Work Among Women from 1973 until 1996.
Contrary to an opinion still subscribed to in certain circles, modern feminism did not emerge full-grown from the fertile womb of the New Left, but is in fact an ideological offspring of the utopian egalitarianism of the early nineteenth century, which was in turn a product of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. It is noteworthy that the most original theorist of utopian socialism, Charles Fourier, was also the first advocate of women’s liberation through the replacement of the nuclear family by collective child rearing. Since utopian socialism (including its solution to the problem of the oppression of women) represented the ideals of the bourgeois-democratic revolution breaking through the barriers of private property, it was historically progressive. However, with the genesis of Marxism and the recognition that an egalitarian society can emerge only out of the rule of the working class, feminism (like other forms of utopian egalitarianism) lost its progressive aspect and became an ideology of the left wing of liberal individualism, a position which it continues to occupy to this day.

Women in the Bourgeois-Democratic Vision

Without question, the most important bourgeois-democratic work on women’s liberation was Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman written in 1792. Wollstonecraft was part of a circle of English radical democrats which included William Blake, Tom Paine and William Godwin, whose political lives came to be dominated by the French Revolution. A year before she wrote her classic on sexual equality, Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Man, a polemic against Edmund Burke’s counterrevolutionary writings. A few years after, she was to attempt a history of the French Revolution.

While informed and imbued with moral outrage as a result of her own experiences as an unmarried, middle-class woman (she worked as a school teacher and governess), Vindication is essentially an extension of the principles of the Enlightenment and French Revolution to women. The first chapter, entitled “Rights and Duties of Mankind,” sets the theoretical framework. Vindication rests heavily on analogies between the basis for the equality of women and general social equality.

For a contemporary reader, Vindication seems a highly unbalanced work. While the description of the role of women continues to be relevant, Wollstonecraft’s solutions appear pallid. Her main programmatic demand, to which she devotes the concluding chapter, is uniform education for girls and boys. Even when she wrote Vindication this was only a moderately radical proposal. In fact in the very year that Vindication was written, a similar educational program was proposed in the French Assembly. Yet generations after the establishment of coeducation and the even more radical reform of women’s suffrage, Wollstonecraft’s depiction of women’s role in society continues to ring true.

Although Wollstonecraft was one of the most radical political activists of her day (shortly after writing her classic on women’s rights, she crossed the Channel to take part in the revolutionary French government), Vindication has an unexpectedly moralizing and personalist character. Like many feminists of our day, she appeals to men to recognize the full humanity of women and to women to stop being sex objects and develop themselves. And there is the same conviction that if only men and women would really believe in these ideals and behave accordingly, then women would achieve equality.

The emphasis on individual relationships is not peculiar to Wollstonecraft, but arises from the inherent contradiction within the bourgeois-democratic approach to women’s oppression. Wollstonecraft accepted the nuclear family as the central institution of society and argued for sexual equality within that framework.

By accepting the basic role of women as mothers, Wollstonecraft accepted a division of labor in which women were necessarily economically dependent on their husbands. Therefore, women’s equality was essentially dependent on how the marriage partners treated one another. In good part, Vindication is an argument that parents and particularly fathers should raise their daughters more like their sons in order to bring out their true potential. But if fathers reject education for their daughters, there is no other recourse. Here we have the limits both of bourgeois democracy and of Wollstonecraft’s vision.

Charles Fourier and the Abolition of the Family

The status of women in the nineteenth century represented the most acute and manifest expression of the contradiction between capitalist society and its own ideals. It was this contradiction that gave birth to utopian socialism. Early in the nineteenth century it became apparent to those still committed to the ideals of the French Revolution that liberty, equality and fraternity were not compatible with private property in a competitive market economy. As the most incisive of the pioneer socialists, Charles Fourier, put it:

“Philosophy was right to vaunt liberty; it is the foremost desire of all creatures. But philosophy forgot that in civilized society liberty is illusory if the common people lack wealth. When the wage-earning classes are poor, their independence is as fragile as a house without foundations. The free man who lacks wealth immediately sinks back under the yoke of the rich.”

—Beecher and Bienvenu (Eds.), The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier

And when Fourier applied the same critical concepts to the status of women, he reached equally radical, anti-bourgeois conclusions. The importance that Fourier attributed to the condition of women is well known:

“Social progress and changes of period are brought about by virtue of the progress of women toward liberty, and social retrogression occurs as a result of a diminution in the liberty of women…. In summary, the extension of the privileges of women is the fundamental cause of all social progress.”

—Ibid.

What is of decisive importance about Fourier’s concern for women’s oppression is that he put forth a program for the total reconstruction of society that would end the historic division of labor between men and women. In Fourier’s projected socialist community, children were raised collectively with no particular relation to their biological parents, men and women performed the same work and total sexual liberty was encouraged. (He regarded heterosexual monogamy as the extension of bourgeois property concepts to the sexual sphere.)

Fourier’s intense hostility to the patriarchal family in good part derived from his realization that it was inherently sexually repressive. In this he anticipated much of radical Freudianism. For example, he observed, “There are still many parents who allow their unmarried daughters to suffer and die for want of sexual satisfaction” (Ibid.).

Despite the fantastic nature of his projected socialist communities or “phalanxes,” Fourier’s program contained the rational core for the reorganization of society needed to liberate women. He was uniquely responsible for making the demand for the liberation of women through the abolition of the nuclear family an integral part of the socialist program which the young Marx and Engels inherited. Engels was more than willing (for example, in Socialism, Utopian and Scientific) to pay homage to the primary author of the socialist program for women’s liberation.

Utopian Egalitarianism and Women’s Liberation

While not giving the woman question the centrality it had in Fourierism, the two other major currents of early nineteenth-century socialism, Owenism and Saint-Simonism, were also unambiguously committed to sexual equality and opposed to legally enforced monogamy. The political life of the early nineteenth century was characterized by the complete interpenetration of the struggle for women’s liberation and the general struggle for an egalitarian society. Those women advocating women’s rights (no less than the men who did so) did not view this question as distinct from, much less counterposed to, the general movement for a rational social order. Those women who championed sexual equality were either socialists or radical democrats whose activity on behalf of women’s rights occupied only a fraction of their political lives. The most radical women advocates of sexual equality—the Americans Frances Wright and Margaret Fuller and the Frenchwoman Flora Tristan—all conform to this political profile.

Frances Wright began her political career as a liberal reformer with a tract in favor of the abolition of slavery. She was won to socialism by Robert Dale Owen, Robert Owen’s son, who immigrated to the U.S. to become its most important radical socialist in the 1820-30’s. Wright established an Owenite commune in Tennessee modeled on the famous one at New Harmony, Indiana. In 1828-29, she and Robert Dale Owen edited the Free Enquirer, a newspaper associated with the New York Workingman’s Party which championed universal suffrage, free public education, “free love” and birth control.

Margaret Fuller, whose Women in the Nineteenth Century was the most influential women’s rights work of her generation, was a product of New England Transcendentalism and had edited a journal with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Like Wollstonecraft, Margaret Fuller approached the woman question from the standpoint of religious radicalism (the equality of souls).

Fuller was associated with the Transcendentalist commune, Brook Farm, about the time it was transformed into a Fourierist community or “phalanx,” the year before she wrote her classic on women’s equality. Shortly after that she went to Europe and became involved in the democratic nationalist movements that were a mainspring in the revolutions of 1848. In that momentous year, she went to Italy to run a hospital for Guiseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy movement.

The most important woman socialist of the pre-1848 era was Flora Tristan. She began her revolutionary career with a tract in favor of legalized divorce, which had been outlawed in France following the reaction of 1815. (As a young woman Tristan had left her husband, an act which resulted in social ostracism and continual hardship throughout her life.) Her work on divorce led to a correspondence with the aging Fourier and a commitment to socialism. Among the most cosmopolitan of socialists, Tristan had crisscrossed the Channel playing an active role in both the Owenite and Chartist movements. Summing up her political situation in a letter to Victor Considerant, leader of the Fourierist movement after the master’s death, she wrote: “Almost the entire world is against me, men because I am demanding the emancipation of women, the propertied classes because I am demanding the emancipation of the wage earners” (Goldsmith, Seven Women Against the World).

In the 1840’s the ancient French craft unions, the compagnons, were transforming themselves into modern trade unions. This process produced an embryonic revolutionary socialist labor movement whose main leaders were Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Auguste Blanqui and Etienne Cabet. Flora Tristan was part of this nascent proletarian socialist movement. Her The Workers Union, written in 1843, was the most advanced statement of proletarian socialism up to its day. Its central theme was the need for an international workers’ organization. (Marx met Tristan while he was in Paris and was undoubtedly influenced by her work.) The concluding passage of The Workers Union affirms: “Union is power if we unite on the social and political field, on the ground of equal rights for both sexes, if we organize labor, we shall win welfare for all.”

The Workers Union devotes a section to the problems of women and its concluding passage indicates the integral role that sexual equality had in Tristan’s concept of socialism: “We have resolved to include in our Charter woman’s sacred and inalienable rights. We desire that men should give to their wives and mothers the liberty and absolute equality which they enjoy themselves.”

Flora Tristan died of typhoid in 1844 at the age of 41. Had she survived the catastrophe of 1848 and remained politically active, the history of European socialism might well have been different, for she was free of the residual Jacobinism of Blanqui and the artisan philistinism of Proudhon.

Contemporary feminists and bourgeois historians tend to label all early nineteenth-century female advocates of sexual equality feminists. This is a wholly illegitimate analysis—a projection of current categories back into a time when they are meaningless. As a delimited movement and distinctive ideology feminism did not exist in the early nineteenth century. Virtually all the advocates of full sexual equality considered this an integral part of the movement for a generally free and egalitarian society rooted in Enlightenment principles and carrying forward the American and particularly the French Revolutions. The American Owenite Frances Wright was no more a feminist than the English Owenite William Thompson, who wrote An appeal of one half the Human Race, Women, against the pretentions of the other Half, Men, to keep them in Civil and Domestic Slavery. Flora Tristan was no more a feminist than was Fourier.

In the 1840’s, a Transcendentalist radical like Margaret Fuller, a nationalist democrat like Guiseppe Mazzini and a socialist working-class organizer like Etienne Cabet could consider themselves part of a common political movement whose program was encapsulated in the slogan, “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.” In its most radical expression, this movement looked forward to a single, total revolution which would simultaneously establish democracy, eliminate classes, achieve equality for women and end national oppression.

This vision was defeated on the barricades in 1848. And with that defeat, the component elements of early nineteenth-century radicalism (liberal democracy and socialism, trade unionism, women’s equality and national liberation) separated and began to compete and conflict with one another. After 1848, it seemed that bourgeois society would continue for some time and that the interests of the oppressed, be they workers, women or nations, would have to be realized within its framework. Feminism (like trade unionism and national liberation) emerged as a delimited movement with its own constituency, ideology and organization only after the great catastrophe of 1848 had temporarily dispelled the vision of a fundamentally new social order.

Marx Against Utopian Egalitarianism

It is sometimes written that Fourier regarded socialism more as a means of overcoming women’s oppression than class oppression. This is a post-Marx way of looking at politics and not how Fourier would have viewed it. He would have said that he projected a society which would satisfy human needs and that the most striking thing about it was the radical change in the role of women. As opposed to the materialist view that different political movements represent the interests of different classes, utopian socialism shared the rational idealistic conception of political motivation characteristic of the Enlightenment—i.e., that different political movements reflect different conceptions of the best possible social organization. The idealism of early socialism was probably inevitable since it was produced by those revolutionary bourgeois democrats who maintained their principles after the actual bourgeoisie had abandoned revolutionary democracy. The social base of early socialism was those petty-bourgeois radicals who had gone beyond the interests and real historic possibilities of their class. This was most true of German “True Socialism” which, in a nation with virtually no industrial workers and a conservative, traditionalist petty bourgeoisie, was purely a literary movement. It was least true of English Owenism, which had intersected the embryonic labor movement while retaining a large element of liberal philanthropism.

By the 1840’s a working-class movement had arisen in France, Belgium and England which was attracted to socialist ideas and organization. However, the relationship of the new-fledged socialist workers’ organizations to the older socialist currents, as well as to liberal democracy and the political expressions of women’s rights and national liberation, remained confused in all existing socialist theories. It was Marx who cut the Gordian knot and provided a coherent, realistic analysis of the social basis for the socialist movement within bourgeois society.

Marx asserted that the working class was the social group which would play the primary and distinctive role in establishing socialism. This was so because the working class was that social group whose interests and condition were most in harmony with a collectivist economy or, conversely, which had the least stake in the capitalist mode of production.

Marx’s appreciation of the role of the proletariat was not deduced from German philosophy, but was the result of his experience in France in the 1840’s. Socialism had manifestly polarized French society along class lines, the main base for socialism being the industrial working class, the propertied classes being implacably hostile and the petty bourgeoisie vacillating, often seeking a utopian third road.

For Marx the predominance of intellectuals in the early socialist movement was not proof that the socialist movement could be based on universal reason. Rather it was necessarily a phenomenon partly reflecting the contradictions of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and partly anticipating the new alignment of class forces: “A portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat and in particular, a portion of bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole” (Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto).

The propertied, educated classes could not be won to socialism on the basis of rational and democratic ideals even though objectively those ideals could only be realized under socialism. Along the same lines, women of the privileged class and the ruling stratum of oppressed nationalities cannot in general be won to socialism even though objectively sexual equality and national liberation can only be realized under socialism.

Closely related to the question of the class basis of the socialist movement is the question of the material conditions under which socialism can be established. Reflecting on pre-Marxist socialism in his later years, Engels quipped that the utopians believed that the reason socialism hadn’t been established before was that nobody had ever thought of it. That Engels’ witticism was only a slight exaggeration is shown by the importance of communal experiments in the early socialist movement, indicating a belief that socialism could be established under any and all conditions if a group really wanted it. The primacy of voluntarism for the early socialists again reflected the fact that their thinking was rooted in eighteenth-century, individualistic idealism which, in turn, derived from Protestantism, an earlier bourgeois ideology.

In sharp and deliberate contrast to the utopians, Marx asserted that inequality and oppression were necessary consequences of economic scarcity and attempts to eliminate them through communal escapism or political coercion were bound to fail:

“…this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historic, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced....” [emphasis in original]

—Karl Marx, The German Ideology

Marx’s assertion that inequality and oppression are historically necessary and can be overcome only through the total development of society, centering on the raising of the productive forces, represents his most fundamental break with progressive bourgeois ideology. Therefore, to this day, these concepts are the most unpalatable aspects of Marxism for those attracted to socialism from a liberal humanist outlook:

“...although at first the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of human individuals and even classes, in the end it breaks through this contradiction and coincides with the development of the individual; the higher level of individuality is thus only achieved by a historical process in which individuals are sacrificed....”

—Karl Marx, Theories of
Surplus Value

“...it is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real means,...slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and...in general people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. ‘Liberation’ is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce, agriculture, the conditions of intercourse....”

—Karl Marx, The German Ideology

It is evident that “women” can replace “individuals” and “classes” in these passages without doing damage to their meaning, since Marx regarded women’s oppression as a necessary aspect of that stage in human development associated with class society.

Marx’s programmatic differences with the utopians were encapsulated in the concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” which he regarded as one of his few original, important contributions to socialist theory. The dictatorship of the proletariat is that period after the overthrow of the capitalist state when the working class administers society in order to create the economic and cultural conditions for socialism.

During the dictatorship of the proletariat, the restoration of capitalism remains a possibility. This is not primarily due to the machinations of die-hard reactionaries but arises rather out of the conflicts and tensions generated by the continuation of global economic scarcity.

This economic scarcity is caused not only by inadequate physical means of production. Even more importantly it derives from the inadequate and extremely uneven cultural level inherited from capitalism. Socialist superabundance presupposes an enormous raising of the cultural level of mankind. The “average” person under socialism would have the knowledge and capacity of several learned professions in contemporary society.

However, in the period immediately following the revolution, the administration of production will necessarily be largely limited to that elite trained in bourgeois society, since training their replacements will take time. Therefore, skilled specialists such as the director of an airport, chief of surgery in a hospital or head of a nuclear power station will have to be drawn from the educated, privileged classes of the old capitalist society. Although in a qualitatively diminished way, the dictatorship of the proletariat will continue to exhibit economic inequality, a hierarchic division of labor and those aspects of social oppression rooted in the cultural level inherited from bourgeois society (e.g., racist attitudes will not disappear the day after the revolution).

These general principles concerning the dictatorship of the proletariat likewise apply to the woman question. To the extent that it rests on the cultural level inherited from capitalism, certain aspects of sexual inequality and oppression will continue well into the dictatorship of the proletariat. The population cannot be totally re-educated nor can a psychological pattern instilled in men and women from infancy be fully eliminated or reversed.

The rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a necessary transition period to socialism is the central justification for utopian egalitarianism (including radical or “socialist” feminism) in the era of Marxism.

The Battle over Protective Labor Legislation

Feminism was one of the three major extensions of utopian egalitarianism into the post-1848 era, the other two being anarchism and artisan cooperativism (Proudhonism). In fact, during the later nineteenth century radical feminism and anarchism heavily interpenetrated one another both as regards their position on the woman question and in personnel. The decisive element in common among feminism, anarchism and cooperativism was a commitment to a level of social equality and individual freedom impossible to attain not only under capitalism, but in the period following its overthrow. At a general ideological level, feminism was bourgeois individualism in conflict with the realities and limits of bourgeois society.

During their lifetimes, Marx and Engels had two notable conflicts with organized feminism—continual clashes in the context of the struggle for protective labor legislation and a short faction fight in the American section of the First International. While the question of protective labor legislation covered a great deal of ground at many levels of concreteness, the central difference between the Marxists and feminists over this issue was also the central difference between Marxism and utopian egalitarianism—i.e., the question of the primacy of the material well-being of the masses and the historical interests of the socialist movement vis-à-vis formal equality within bourgeois society.

The feminist opposition to protective labor legislation argued and continues to argue that it would mean legal inequality in the status of women and that it was partly motivated by paternalistic, male-chauvinist prejudices. Marx and Engels recognized these facts but maintained that the physical well-being of working women and the interests of the entire class in reducing the intensity of exploitation more than offset this formal and ideological inequality. Writing to Gertrud Guillaume-Schack, a German feminist who later became an anarchist, Engels stated his case:

“That the working woman needs special protection against capitalist exploitation because of her special physiological functions seems obvious to me. The English women who championed the formal right of members of their sex to permit themselves to be as thoroughly exploited by the capitalists as the men are mostly, directly or indirectly, interested in the capitalist exploitation of both sexes. I admit I am more interested in the health of the future generation than in the absolute formal equality of the sexes in the last years of the capitalist mode of production. It is my conviction that real equality of women and men can come true only when exploitation of either by capital has been abolished and private housework has been transformed into a public industry.”

—Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Letter to Guillaume-Schack of 5 July 1885

Thus Engels recognized in feminism the false consciousness of the privileged classes of women who believe that since they themselves are oppressed only as women, sexual inequality is the only significant form of oppression.

Guillaume-Schack’s conversion to anarchism was not accidental, for the anarchists also opposed protective labor legislation for women as an inconsistent, inegalitarian reform. Writing a polemic against the Italian anarchists in the early 1870’s, Marx ridiculed the “logic” that one “must not take the trouble to obtain legal prohibition of the employment of girls under 10 in factories because a stop is not thereby put to the exploitation of boys under 10”—that this was a “compromise which damages the purity of eternal principles” (quoted in Hal Draper, International Socialism, July-August 1970).

Woodhull versus Sorge in the First International

Because of the catch-all nature of the First International, the Marxist tendency had to wage major internal factional struggles against the most characteristic left currents in the various countries (e.g., trade-union reformism in Britain, Proudhon’s cooperativism in France, Lasalle’s state socialism in Germany and anarchism in Eastern and Southern Europe). It is therefore highly symptomatic that the major factional struggle within the American section centered around feminism, a variant of petty-bourgeois radicalism. In the most general sense, the importance of the Woodhull tendency reflected the greater political weight of the American liberal middle class relative to the proletariat than in European class alignments. Historically petty-bourgeois moralism has been more influential in American socialism than in virtually any other country. This was particularly pronounced in the period after the Civil War when abolitionism served as the model for native American radicalism.

The relative political backwardness of the American working class is rooted primarily in the process of its development through successive waves of immigration from different countries. This created such intense ethnic divisions that it impeded even elementary trade-union organization. In addition, many of the immigrant workers who came from peasant backgrounds were imbued with strong religious, racial and sexual prejudices and a generally low cultural level which impeded class—much less socialist—consciousness. In general the discontent of American workers was channeled by the petty bourgeoisie of the various ethnic groups into the struggle for their own place in the parliamentary-state apparatus.

The American working class’s lack of strong organization, its ethnic electoral politics and relatively backward social attitudes created a political climate in which “enlightened middle-class socialism” was bound to flourish. Not least important in this respect was the fact that the liberal middle classes were Protestant while the industrial working class was heavily Roman Catholic. Indeed, an important aspect of the Woodhull/Sorge fight was over an orientation toward Irish Catholic workers.

Victoria Woodhull was the best-known (more accurately notorious) “free love” advocate of her day, ambitious and with a gift for political showmanship. Seeing that the First International was becoming fashionable, she organized her own section of it (Section 12) along with remnants of the New Democracy, a middle-class, electoral-reformist organization, led by Samuel Foot Andrews, a former abolitionist. The Woodhullites thus entered the First International as a radical liberal faction, with an emphasis on women’s rights and an electoralist strategy.

Section 12 rapidly retranslated the principles of the First International into the language of American liberal democracy. Needless to say, it came out for total organizational federalism with each section free to pursue its own activities and line within the general principles of the International. Section 12’s political line and organizational activities (its official paper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, preached spiritualism among other things) quickly brought it into conflict within the Marxist tendency, led by the German veteran of the 1848 Revolution, Friedrich Sorge. Section 12 was able to cause much factional trouble, not only in the U.S. but abroad, because its radical liberalism fed into the growing anarchist, electoral-reformist and federalist currents in the International. The Woodhullites were part of a rotten bloc which coalesced against the Marxist leadership of the First International in 1871-72. Woodhull enjoyed a short stay in the anarchist International in 1873 on her way to becoming a wealthy eccentric.

The immediate issue of the faction fight was the priority of women’s rights, notably suffrage, over labor issues particularly the eight-hour day. That for the Woodhullites what was involved was not a matter of programmatic emphasis, but a counterposition to proletarian socialism was made explicit after the split with Sorge: “The extension of equal citizenship to women, the world over, must precede any general change in the subsisting relation of capital and labor” [emphasis in original] (Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, 18 November 1871).

After splitting with the Sorge wing, while still claiming loyalty to the First International, Section 12 organized the Equal Rights Party in order to run Woodhull for president in 1872. The program was straight left-liberalism without any proletarian thrust. It called for “...a truly republican government which shall not only recognize but guarantee equal political and social rights to men and women, and which shall secure equal opportunities of education for all children” (Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, 20 April 1872).

The general political principles of the Woodhullites were clearly expressed in their appeal to the General Council of the First International against the Sorge wing:

“It [the object of the International] involves, first, the Political Equality and Social Freedom of men and women alike.... Social Freedom means absolute immunity from the impertinent intrusion in all affairs of exclusively personal concernment, such as religious belief, sexual relations, habits of dress, etc.” [emphasis in original]

—Documents of the First International, The General Council; Minutes 1871-72

This appeal was answered by a resolution written by Marx, which suspended Section 12. After cataloguing the organizational abuses and rotten politics, Marx concluded by reasserting the central difference between democratic egalitarianism and proletarian socialism—namely, that the end to all forms of oppression must run through the victory of the working class over capitalism. Marx called attention to past International documents:

“…relating to ‘sectarian sections’ or ‘separatist bodies pretending to accomplish special missions’ distinct from the common aim of the Association [First International], viz. to emancipate the mass of labour from its ‘economical subjection to the monopolizer of the means of labour’ which lies at the bottom of servitude in all its forms, of social misery, mental degradation and political dependence.”

—Ibid.

While the Marxist case against the Woodhullites centered on their electoralism, middle-class orientation and quackery, the role of “free love” in the socialist movement had a definite significance in the fight. While including personal sexual freedom in their program, the Marxists insisted on a cautious approach to this question when dealing with more backward sections of the working class. By flaunting a sexually “liberated” life-style, the Woodhullites would have created a nearly impenetrable barrier to winning over conventional and religious workers. One of the main charges that Sorge brought against Section 12 at the Hague Conference in 1872 was that its activities had made it much more difficult for the International to reach the strategically placed Irish Catholic workers.

The historic relevance of the Woodhull/Sorge faction fight is that it demonstrated, in a rather pure way, the basis of feminism in classic bourgeois-democratic principles, particularly individualism. It further demonstrated that feminist currents tend to be absorbed into liberal reformism or anarchistic petty-bourgeois radicalism, both of which invariably unite against revolutionary proletarian socialism.

Friday, March 22, 2019

March Is Women’s History Month-Honor Communist Leader Rosa Luxemburg- The Rose Of The Revolution

Click on the headline to link to the Rosa Luxemburg Internet Archives.

March Is Women’s History Month

Markin comment:

Usually I place the name of the martyred Polish communist revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg, in her correct place of honor along with Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin and German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht when we of the leftist international working class movement honor our historic leaders each January. This year I have decided to, additionally, honor the Rose of the Revolution during Women’s History Month because, although in life she never fought on any woman-limited basis in the class struggle, right this minute we are in need, desperate need of models for today’s women and men to look to. Can there be any better choice? To ask the question is to give the answer. All honor to the memory of the Rose of the Revolution- Rosa Luxemburg.
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*In Honor Of Rosa Luxemburg- The Rose Of The Revolution- LENIN AND ROSA LUXEMBURG By Max Shachtman

Markin comment:

This is from the days when old Max Shachtman knew how to "speak" Marxism. A couple of years later, when it mattered, mattered a lot, when the defense of the Soviet Union was on the line he lost his tongue.

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From Issue no.3, of the Marxist Discussion journal What Next? By kind permission of the editor Bob Pitt, 24 Georgiana St, London, NW1 0EA, email wh@tnext.freeserve.co.uk.

LENIN AND ROSA LUXEMBURG
Max ShachtmanFrom The New International, May 1938

Two legends have been created about the relationship between the views of Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. Despite their antagonistic origins and aims, they supplement each other in effect. Neither one of the myth-makers approaches the extremely interesting and instructive subject from an objective historical standpoint. Consequently, the analysis made by each of them reduces itself to an instrument of factional politics which is, in both cases, the politics of reaction.

One school of thought, if such a term is permissible here, is headed by the faculty of Stalinist falsification. It covers up its reactionary objectives by posing as critics of Luxemburg and proponents of Lenin. A discussion of its arguments is rendered impossible by the very nature of its position, which formally prohibits both argument and discussion. Its scientific value is summarised in a few sentences from the papal bull issued by Stalin in 1932 in connection with the luckless Slutsky’s study on Lenin’s incorrect appraisal of Kautsky and Luxemburg: ‘You wish to enter into discussion against this Trotskyist thesis of Slutsky’s? But what is there to discuss in this? Is it not plain that Slutsky is simply slandering Lenin, slandering the Bolsheviks? Slander must be branded, not transformed into a subject for discussion.’ The Stalinists have the Catholics’ attitude toward their dogmas: they assume what is to be proved; their arbitrary conclusions are presented as their premises; their statement of the problem is at the same time their answer – and it brooks no discussion. ‘Bolshevism’ is absolutely and at all points and stages irreconcilable with ‘Luxemburgism’ because of the original sin of the latter in disputing the ‘organisational principles’ of the former.

The other school of thought is less authoritarian in tone and form, but just as rigid in unhistorical dogma; and if, unlike the Stalinists, it is not wholly composed of turncoats from revolutionary Marxism, it has a substantial sprinkling of them. Their objectives are covered-up by posing as critics of Lenin and defenders of Luxemburg. They include anachronistic philosophers of ultra-leftism and express-train travellers fleeing from the pestilence of Stalinism to the plague of Social Democracy. Bolshevism, they argue, is definitely bankrupt. The horrors of Stalinism are the logical and inevitable outcome of Lenin’s Centralism’, or – as it is put by a recent critic, Liston Oak, who seeks the ‘inner flaws of Bolshevism’ – of Lenin’s ’totalitarianism’. Luxemburg, on the other hand, stressed the democratic side of the movement, the struggle, the goal. Hence, ‘Luxemburgism’ is absolutely irreconcilable with ‘Bolshevism’ because of the original sin of the former in imposing its Jacobin, or bourgeois, or super-centralist, or totalitarian ‘organisational principles’.

The use of quotation marks around the terms employed is justified and necessary, for at least in nine cases out of ten the airy analysts have only the vaguest and most twisted idea of what the disputes between Luxemburg and Lenin really were. In just as many cases they have revealed a cavalier indisposition to acquaint themselves with the historical documents and the actual writings of the two great thinkers. A brief survey will disclose, I believe, the superficiality of the arguments which, especially since the obvious putrescence of Stalinism, have gained a certain currency in the radical movement.

Nothing but. misunderstanding can result from a failure to bear in mind the fact that Lenin and Luxemburg worked, fought and developed their ideas in two distinctly different movements, operating within no less different countries, at radically different stages of development; consequently, in countries and movements where the problems of the working class were posed in quite different forms. It is the absence of this concrete and historical approach to the disputes between Lenin, of the Social-Democratic Labour Party of Russia, and Luxemburg, of the Social-Democratic Party of Germany, that so surely brings most critics to grief.

The ‘organisational dispute’ between Lenin and Luxemburg did not originate in the former’s insistence on a break with Kautsky and the centrists before the war. When Stalin thunders against anyone ‘who can doubt that the Bolsheviks brought about a split with their own opportunists and centrist-conciliators long before the imperialist war (1904-12) without at the same time pursuing a policy of rupture, a policy of split with the opportunists and centrists of the Second International’ – he is simply substituting ukase for historical fact.

The truth is that Rosa Luxemburg reached a clear estimate of Kautsky and broke with his self-styled ‘Marxian centre’, long before Lenin did. For many years after the turn of the century, Kautsky’s prestige among all the factions of the Russian movement was unparalleled. The Menshevik Abramovich does not exaggerate when he writes that

’A West-European can hardly imagine the enormous authority which the leaders of the German Social Democracy, the Liebknechts, the Bebels, the Singers, enjoyed in Russia. Among these leaders, Karl Kautsky occupied quite a special place ... serving for all the Russian Marxists and Social Democrats as the highest authority in all the theoretical and tactical questions of scientific socialism and the labour movement. In every disputed question, in every newly-arisen problem, the first thought always was: What would Kautsky say about this? How would Kautsky have decided this question?’

Lenin’s much-disputed What is to be Done? held up, as is known, the German Social Democracy and its leader, Bebel, as models for the Russian movement. When Kautsky wrote his famous article, after the 1905 revolution in Russia, on the Slavs and the world revolution, in which, Zinoviev writes, under Luxemburg’s influence, he advanced substantially the Bolshevik conception, Lenin was highly elated. ‘Where and when,’ he wrote in July 1905, in a polemic against Parvus, ‘have I characterised the revolutionism of Bebel and Kautsky as “opportunism”? Where and when have I presumed to call into existence in the international Social Democracy a special tendency which was not identical with the tendency of Bebel and Kautsky.’ A year and a half later, Lenin wrote that ‘the vanguard of the Russian working class knows Karl Kautsky for some time now as its writer’. and a month later, in January 1907, he described Kautsky as ‘the leader of the German revolutionary Social Democrats’. In August 1908, Lenin cited Kautsky as his authority on the question of war and militarism as against Gustave Hervé, and as late as February 1914, he invoked him again as a Marxian authority in his dispute with Rosa Luxemburg on the national question. Finally, in one of his last pre-war articles, in April 1914, Wherein the German Labour Movement Should Not Be Imitated, speaking of the ’undoubted sickness’ of the German Social Democracy, he referred exclusively to the trade union leaders (specifically to Karl Legien) and the parliamentary spokesmen, but did not even mention Kautsky and the centrists, much less raise the question of the left wing (also unmentioned) splitting with them.

It is this pre-war attitude of Lenin towards the German centre – against which Luxemburg had been conducting a sharp frontal attack is early as 1910 – that explains the vehemence and the significant terminology of Lenin’s strictures against Kautsky immediately after the war broke out, for example, his letter to Shlyapnikov on 27 October 1914, in which he says: ‘I now despise and hate Kautsky more than all the rest.... R. Luxemburg was right, she long ago understood that Kautsky had the highly-developed “servility of a theoretician”...’

In sum, the fact is that by the very nature of her milieu and her work before the war, Rosa Luxemburg had arrived at a clearer and more correct appreciation of the German Social Democracy and the various currents within it than had Lenin. To a great extent, this determined and explained her polemic against Lenin on what appeared to be the ‘organisational questions’ of the Russian movement.

The beginning of the century marked the publication of two of Lenin’s most audacious and stirring works, One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward, and its forerunner, What Is to be Done? The Russian movement was then in no way comparable to the West-European, especially the German. It was composed of isolated groups and sections in Russia, more or less autonomous, pursuing policies at odds with each other and only remotely influenced by its great revolutionary Marxists abroad – Plekhanov, Lenin, Martov, Potresov, Trotsky and others. Moreover, the so-called ‘Economist’ tendency was predominant it laid the greatest stress on the element of spontaneity in the labour struggle and underrated the element of conscious leadership.

Lenin’s What is to be Done? was a merciless criticism of ‘Economism’, which he identified with ‘pure-and-simple trade unionism’, with khovstism (i.e., the policy of ragging at the tail of events, or of the masses), with opportunism. Social Democracy, he argued, is not a mere outgrowth of the spontaneous economic struggles of the proletariat, nor is it the passive servant of the workers; it is the union of the labour movement with revolutionary socialist theory which must be brought into the working class by the party, for the proletariat, by itself, can only attain a trade-union and not a socialist consciousness. In view of the dispersion of the movement in Russia, its primitive and localistic complexion, an all-Russian national party and newspaper had to be created immediately to infuse the labour movement with a socialist, political consciousness and unite it in a revolutionary struggle against Tsarism. The artificers of the party, in contrast with the desultory agitators of the time, would be the professional revolutionists, intellectuals and educated workers devoting all their time and energy to revolutionary activity and functioning within an extremely centralised party organisation. The effective political leadership was to be the editorial board of the central organ, edited by the exiles abroad, and it would have the power to organise or reorganise party branches inside Russia, admit or reject members, and even appoint their local committees and other directing organs. ‘I differ with the Mensheviks in this respect,’ wrote Lenin in 1904:

‘The basic idea of comrade Martov ... is precisely a false “democratism”, the idea of the construction of the party from the bottom to the top. My idea, on the contrary, is “bureaucratic” in the sense that the party should be constructed from above down to the bottom, from the congress to the individual party organisations.’

It should be borne in mind that, despite subsequent reconsideration, all the leaders of the Iskra tendency in the Russian movement warmly supported Lenin against the Economists. ‘Twice in succession,’ wrote A.N. Potresov, later Lenin’s furious enemy, ‘have I read through the booklet from beginning to end and can only congratulate its author. The general impression is an excellent one – in spite of the obvious haste, noted by the author himself, in which the work was written.’ At the famous London Congress in 1903, Plekhanov spoke up in Lenin’s defence: ‘Lenin did not write a treatise on the philosophy of history, but a polemical article against the Economists, who said: We must wait until we see where the working class itself will come, without the help of the revolutionary bacillus.’ And again: ‘If you eliminate the bacillus, then there remains only an unconscious mass, into which consciousness must be brought from without. If you had wanted to be right against Lenin, and if you had read through his whole book attentively, then you would have seen that this is just what he said.’

It was only after the deepening of the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks (Plekhanov included) that the latter launched their sharp attacks on Lenin’s polemical exaggeration – that is what it was – of the dominant role of the intellectuals as professional revolutionists, organisers and leaders of the party, and of the relationship between spontaneity and the element of socialist consciousness which can only be introduced into the labour movement from without. Lenin’s defence of the ideas be expressed in 1902 and 1904 on these questions and on centralism, is highly significant for an understanding of the concrete conditions under which they were advanced and the concrete aim they pursued.

In The Fruits of Demagogy, an article written in March 1905 by the Bolshevik V. Vorovsky (read and revised by Lenin), the author quotes Plekhanov’s above cited praise of Lenin’s What is to be Done? and adds:

’These words define perfectly correctly the sense and significance of the Lenin brochure, and if Plekhanov now says that he was not in agreement, from the very beginning, with its theoretical principles, it only proves how correctly he was able to judge the real significance of the brochure at a time when there was no necessity of inventing “differences of opinion in principle” with Lenin. In actuality. What is to be Done? was a polemical brochure (which was entirely dedicated to the criticism of the khvostist wing in the then Social Democracy, to a characterisation and a refutation of the specific errors of this wing). It would be ridiculous if Lenin, in a brochure which dealt with the “burning questions of our movement” were to demonstrate that the evolution of ideas, especially of scientific socialism, has proceeded and proceeds in close historical connection with the evolution of the productive forces (in close connection with the growth of the labour movement in general). For him it was important to establish the fact that, nowhere has the working class yet worked itself up independently to a socialist ideology, that this ideology (the doctrine of scientific socialism) was always brought in by the Social Democracy ...’

In 1903, at the Second Congress itself, Lenin had pointed out that the Economists bent the staff towards the one side. In order to straighten it out again, it had to ‘be bent towards the other side and that is what I did’, and almost two years later, in the draft of a resolution written for the Third Congress, he emphasised the non-universality of his organisational. views by writing that ‘under free political conditions our party can and will be built up entirely upon the principle of electability. Under absolutism, this is unrealisable for all the thousands of workers who belong to the party.’ Again, in the period of the 1905 revolution, he showed how changes in conditions determined a change in his views:

’At the Third Congress I expressed the wish that in the party committees there should be two intellectuals for every eight workers. How obsolete is this wish’ Now it would be desirable that in the new party organisations, for every intellectual belonging to the Social Democracy there should he a few hundred Social-Democratic workers.’

Perhaps the best summary of the significance of the views he set forth at the beginning of the century is given by Lenin himself in the foreword to the collection, Twelve Years, which he wrote in September 1907:

’The basic mistake of those who polemicise against What is to be Done? today, is that they tear this work completely out of the context of a definite historical milieu, a definite, now already long-past period of development of our party ... To speak at present about the fact that Iskra (in the years 1901 and 1902!) exaggerated the idea of the organisation of professional revolutionists, is the same as if somebody had reproached the Japanese, after the Russo-Japanese war, for exaggerating the Russian military power before the war, for exaggerated concern over the struggle against this power. The Japanese had to exert all forces against a possible maximum of Russian forces in order to attain the victory. Unfortunately. many judge from the outside, without seeing that today the idea of the organisation of professional revolutionists has already attained a complete victory. This victory, however, would have been impossible if, in its time, this idea had not been pushed into the foreground, if it had not been preached in an “exaggerated” manner to people who stood like obstacles in the way of its realisation ... What is to be Done? polemically corrected Economism, and it is false to consider the contents of the brochure outside of its connection with this task.’

The ideas contained in What is to be Done?, which should still be read by revolutionists everywhere – and it can be read with the greatest profit – cannot, therefore, be understood without bearing in mind the specific conditions and problems of the Russian movement of the time. That is why Lenin, in answer to a proposal to translate his brochure for the non-Russian parties, told Max Levien in 1921: ‘That is not desirable; the translation must at least be issued with good commentaries, which would have to be written by a Russian comrade very well acquainted with the history of the Communist Party of Russia, in order to avoid false application.’

Just as Lenin’s views must be considered against the background of the situation in Russia, so must Luxemburg’s polemic against them he viewed against the background of the situation in Germany. In her famous review in 1904 of Lenin’s One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward (an extension of the views of What is to be Done?), Luxemburg’s position was decisively coloured by the realities of the German movement. Where Lenin stressed ultra-centralism, Luxemburg stressed democracy and organisational flexibility. Where Lenin emphasised the dominant role of the professional revolutionist, Luxemburg countered with emphasis on the mass movement and its elemental upsurge.

Why? Because these various forces played clearly different roles in Russia and in Germany. The professional revolutionists whom Luxemburg encountered in Germany were not as in Russia, the radical instruments for gathering together loose and scattered local organisations, uniting them into one national party imbued with a firm Marxian ideology and freed from the opportunistic conceptions of pure and-simple trade unionism. Quite the contrary. In Germany, the ‘professionals’ were the careerists, the conservative trade union bureaucrats, the lords of the ossifying party machine, the reformist parliamentarians, the whole crew who finally succeeded in disembowelling the movement. An enormous conservative power, they weighed down like a mountain upon the militant-minded rank and file. They were the canal through which the poison of reformisin seeped into the masses. They acted as a brake upon the class actions of the workers, and not as a spur. In Russia the movement was loose and ineffectual, based on circles, as Lenin said, ‘almost always resting upon the personal friendship of a small number of persons’. In Germany, the movement was tightly organised, conservatively disciplined, routinised, and dominated by a semi-reformist, centralist leadership. These concrete circumstances led Luxemburg to the view that only an appeal to the masses, only their elemental militant movement could break through the conservative wall of the party and trade-union apparatus. The ‘centralism’ of Lenin forged a party that proved able to lead the Russian masses to a victorious revolution; the ‘centralism’ that Luxemburg saw growing in the German Social Democracy became a conservative force and ended in a series of catastrophes for the proletariat. This is what she feared when she wrote against Lenin in 1904:

‘... the role of the Social-Democratic leadership becomes one of an essentially conservative character, in that it leads to working out empirically to its ultimate conclusions the new experience acquired in the struggle and soon to converting it into a bulwark against a further innovation in the grand style. The present tactic of the German Social Democracy, for example, is generally admired for its remarkable manifoldness, flexibility and at the same time certainty. Such qualities simply mean, however, that our party has adapted itself wonderfully in its daily struggle to the present parliamentary basis, down to the smallest detail, that it knows how to exploit the whole field of battle offered by parliamentarism and to master it in accordance with given principles. At the same time, this specific formulation of tactics already serves so much to conceal the further horizon that one notes a strong inclination to perpetuate that tactic and to regard the parliamentary tactic as the Social-Democratic tactic for all time.’

But it is a far cry from the wisdom of these words, uttered in the specific conditions of Luxemburg’s struggle in Germany, to the attempts made by syndicalists and ultra-leftists of all kinds to read into her views a universal formula of rejection of the idea of leadership and centralisation. The fact of the matter is that the opportunistic enemies of Luxemburg, and her closest collaborator, Leo Jogiches (Tyszka), especially in the Polish movement in which she actively participated, made virtually the same attacks upon her ‘organisational principles’ and ‘régime of leadership’ as were levelled against Lenin. During the war, for example, the Spartakusbund was highly centralised and held tightly in the hands of that peerless organiser, Jogiches. The Social Democracy of Poland and Lithuania, which she led, was, if anything, far more highly centralised and far more merciless towards those in its ranks who deviated from the party’s line, than was the Bolshevik party under Lenin. In his history of the Russian movement, the Menshevik Theodore Dan, who did not spare Lenin for his ’organisational régime’, and sought to exploit Luxemburg’s criticism of Lenin for his own ends, nevertheless wrote that the Polish Social Democracy of the time

‘... shared in its essentials the organisational principles of Lenin, against which Rosa Luxemburg had polemised at the birth of Bolshevism; it also applied these principles in the practise of its own party, in which a rigid, bureaucratic centralism prevailed and people like Radek, Zalevsky, Unschlicht and others, who later played a leading role in the Communist Party, were expelled from the party because of their oppositional stand against the party executive.’

‘Bureaucratic centralism’, was (and is) the term generally applied by Dan and Mensheviks of all stripes to Lenin and Luxemburg and all others who seriously sought to build up a purposeful party of proletarian revolution, in contrast to that ‘democratic’ looseness prevalent in the Second International which only served as a cover behind which elements alien to the revolution could make their way to the leadership of the party and, at crucial moments, betray it to the class enemy. The irreconcilable antagonism which the reformists felt towards Lenin and Luxemburg is in sharp and significant contrast to the affinity they now feel towards the Stalinist International, in which full-blooded and genuine bureaucratic centralism has attained its most evil form. It is not difficult to imagine what Rosa Luxemburg would have written about the Stalin regime had she lived in our time; and by the same token it is not difficult to understand the poisonous campaign that the Stalinists have conducted against her for years.

The years of struggle that elapsed since the early polemics in the Russian movement, the experiences that enriched the arsenal of the great revolutionists of the time, and above all the Russian Revolution itself, undoubtedly served to draw the political tendency of Rosa Luxemburg closer to that represented with such genius by Lenin. Had she not been cut down so cruelly in the prime of her intellectual power, there is little doubt in my mind that she would have become one of the greatest figures and champions of the Communist International – not of the horribly twisted caricature that it is today, but as it was in the early years. ‘It does not even occur to me’experiences that enriched the arsenal of the great revolutionists of the time, and above all the Russian Revolution itself, undoubtedly served to draw the political tendency of Rosa Luxemburg closer to that represented with such genius by Lenin. Had she not been cut down so cruelly in the prime of her intellectual power, there is little doubt in my mind that she would have become one of the greatest figures and champions of the Communist International – not of the horribly twisted caricature that it is today, but as it was in the early years. ‘It does not even occur to me’, wrote Karl Kautsky, her bitter foe, in 1921, ‘to deny that in the course of the war Rosa drew steadily closer to the Communist world of thought, so that it is quite correct when Radek says that “with Rosa Luxemburg there died the greatest and most profound theoretical head of Communism”.’

The judgement is a correct one and doubly valid because it comes from a political opponent who knew her views so well. It is worth a thousand times more than all the superficial harpings on the theme of the irreconcilability of Marxism’s greatest teachers in our time.

NOTES
1. So as not to clutter up the text with references, I am including all the works from which I quote in this article, in a single footnote. They are: Lenin, Collected Works [in German], vols.IV, VI, VII, VIII, X, XII. – Luxemburg, Collected Works [in German], vols.III, IV. – Radek, Rosa Luxemburg Karl Licbknecht, Leo Jogiches. – Martov and Dan, Die Geschichte der russischen Sozialdemokratie. – Die Neue Zeit, 1904, 1910. – Protocol No.1, Session of Bolshevisation Commission, ECCI, 1925. – Der Kampf, 1921, 1924. – Lenin Anthology [in Russian], vol.II. – Henriette Roland-Holst, Rosa Luxemburg: Haar Leven en werken. – Stalin, Kaganovich, Postyshev, Questions Concerning the History of Bolshevism.

Thursday, March 21, 2019

March Is Women’s History Month-Honor Communist Leader Rosa Luxemburg- The Rose Of The Revolution

March Is Women’s History Month-Honor Communist Leader Rosa Luxemburg- The Rose Of The Revolution

Click on the headline to link to the Rosa Luxemburg Internet Archives.

March Is Women’s History Month

Markin comment:

Usually I place the name of the martyred Polish communist revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg, in her correct place of honor along with Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin and German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht when we of the leftist international working class movement honor our historic leaders each January. This year I have decided to, additionally, honor the Rose of the Revolution during Women’s History Month because, although in life she never fought on any woman-limited basis in the class struggle, right this minute we are in need, desperate need of models for today’s women and men to look to. Can there be any better choice? To ask the question is to give the answer. All honor to the memory of the Rose of the Revolution- Rosa Luxemburg.
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In Honor of Rosa Luxemburg- The Rose Of The Revolution-"Rosa Luxemburg or Lenin?" by August Thalheimer

Introduction to Rosa Luxemburg or Lenin?
Mike Jones

THE ARTICLE below was first published in the 3 January 1930 issue of Gegen den Strom, It was apparently written both to mark the celebration of the ‘Three Ls’ (Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht) on 15 January 1930 and also to counter crude attacks on Luxemburg by those leaders of the German Communist Party (KPD) who were undertaking the final Stalinisation of the party in the aftermath of the adoption of the Comintern’s ultra-left ‘new line’. By then many of Luxemburg’s associates, who had founded and built up the party, had been expelled and were organised in the KPD (Opposition), whose theoretical weekly Gegen den Strom was. The Luxemburg tradition had come under attack earlier, under the Ruth Fischer-Arkadi Maslow leadership, allies of Zinoviev, who began the so-called ‘Bolshevisation’ of the KPD, uprooting the native democratic structures and adopting one resulting from the Russian experience – almost destroying the party in the process, because of the linked sectarian politics. Luxemburg, Trotsky and Brandler were all compared and denounced as ‘semi-Mensheviks’, etc.

Walter Held’s essay in the last What Next? would seem to stem from that tradition that thought the Bolsheviks had found all the answers. I see that outlook as ahistorical. As August Thalheimer points out, it was not a result of an ‘error’ that Rosa Luxernburg opposed centralism in Germany, but because of the level of capitalist development, the level of class struggle, and the corresponding forms of the labour movement thrown up by the workers themselves. In Russia and Poland, the level of capitalist development and of the class struggle, and the need for secrecy, all meant that the nascent movement was dominated by the intellectuals, with only a few advanced workers prepared to follow them. The organisations they set up were by nature of the Blanquist type. The 1903 dispute over the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party statutes reflects that.

The organisational form adopted by the workers’ organisations expressed the needs of the distinct stage of development. In Germany, Rosa Luxemburg fought the centralism of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), as this was allowing the party to move away from the advanced workers and into class collaboration. For her, the workers’ party, rust be able to respond to the creative deeds of the revolutionary workers, to integrate into its arsenal their new conceptions, and to theorise such novel creations. The top-down centralised party cannot respond to such creative acts. It operates according to schemas drafted by all-powerful Central Committees. Witness the Bolshevik response to the 1905 events.

In accordance with her analysis of capitalist development – as set out in her The Accumulation of Capital – Rosa Luxemburg assumed that, as capitalism developed, its contradictions sharpened. The class struggle would increase accordingly and the working class would gradually radicalise, resulting in the SPI) shedding the petty bourgeois element and becoming the pure workers’ party required, as the radicalised workers began to determine its policy and tactics. For her, it was not the party that brought revolutionary consciousness to the working class, but the workers, becoming conscious through the actual struggles they undertook, who then brought their conceptions into the party. The party then reworks these discoveries into its programme and theory. Luxemburg saw the role of the party as that of raising the existing consciousness of the class, not as arriving from outside and imposing ready-made schemas.

For example, the Open Letter of January 1921, where the KPD advanced demands around which a United Front could materialise, came from the Stuttgart Demands, put forward by KPD metalworkers in that area; and they, in turn, originated in a discussion of the Württemberg District Committee of the KPD, at which Brandler and Walcher were present. The point being that Württemberg had been a stronghold of Spartakus, key KPD leaders came from there, and a layer of workers existed who had been schooled in Luxemburg’s understanding of Marxism. Hence the demands came not from the top down, but from that reciprocal relationship between the party and class.

Luxemburg’s struggle, waged over the years within the SPD, meant that she understood that reformism and centrism had deep material roots, that the removal of a few leaders was no solution, that these historical leaders had a following, even if, to a degree, this was based on illusions. No, the 4 August events resulted from a long historical process. Therefore she opposed any break from the SPD until no more could be done (and she was correct to oppose Lenin at Zimmerwald – as was Trotsky), as a small group of intellectuals and a tiny sector of advanced workers would have only separated themselves from the organised workers’ movement by a split, and made difficult the task of influencing those same workers, by participating in and influencing the process whereby they became aware of the need either to take over the old party or to found a new one. For Luxemburg, as for Marx, the emergence of the party does not result from the will of the intellectuals but from the conscious decision of the working class, out of a stage in its development, and out of the class struggle itself. Everything else is sect-building,

Hence it was no ‘error’ of Luxemburg to have neglected to split long before. August Thalheimer’s phrase ‘schoolboy notion’ sums up such a view. That view is still current in some of the sects today. Another one, just as erroneous, is that she should have created a ‘hard faction’ in the SPD. To what end? As long as Luxemburg and her comrades had freedom of speech, could operate freely, could not only publish in but even edit local newspapers, could run local and district SPD organisations, in other words have normal rights as party members – then why set up secret groupings? A current of opinion suffices in such circumstances. Secret groups can only alienate other comrades and cut oneself off from influencing them.

Years later, looking back, Thalheimer wrote: ‘still in 1914-15, we did not exclude the possibility of being able to still raise the flag of revolution within the Social Democracy and cleansing it of opportunist elements. Only gradually did we become convinced that within this old framework there was nothing more to expect, nothing more to gain. One must be clear, however, that inside the Social Democratic Party the severe factional struggles between the Lassalleans and Eisenachers were still fixed in the memory, the idea of a split met with the most difficult obstructions and the most grave hesitations among even the most progressive workers.’

In Chapter 5 of his Rosa Luxemburg biography, Paul Frö1ich evaluates our two protagonists, and although he has been accused of smoothing out the differences, it seem to me that, within the framework of the task he was set, he does face up to them. On the original argument over the type of party (1904), Frölich says that Luxemburg ‘observed in him [Lenin] a dangerous rigidity in argumentation, a certain scholasticism in his political ideas, and a tendency to ignore the living movement of the masses, or even to coerce it into accepting preconceived tactical plans’. But he goes on to say: ‘In any case, when big decisions had to be taken, he demonstrated a tactical elasticity which one would not have suspected from his writings. His associates, however, manifested that conservative inertia, as decried by Rosa Luxemburg.’ Summing up that first difference, Frölich concludes that: ‘Luxemburg underestimated the power of organisation, particularly when the reins of leadership were in the hands of her opponents. She relied all too believingly on the pressure of the revolutionary masses to make any correction in party policy. Lenin’s total political view prior to 1917 shows traces of unmistakeably Blanquist influences and an exaggerated voluntarism, though he quickly overcame it when faced with concrete situations ... it can be said that Rosa concerned herself more with the historical process as a whole and derived her political decisions from it, while Lenin’s eye was more concentrated on the final aim and sought the means to bring it about. For her the decisive element was the mass, for him it was the party, which he wanted to forge into the spearhead of the whole movement.’

Frölich looks at Luxernburg’s approach to the party during the war in Chapter 11, and adequately outlines her reasoning. In Chapter 12, he does the same regarding her attitude in 1917 and the deeds of the Bolsheviks. Thalheimer does not deal with the questions of democracy or the terror, so I’ll restrict myself to a few comments only. In her unfinished brochure on the Russian Revolution, Luxemburg spoke up for ‘the dictatorship of the class, not of a party or of a clique’. She also criticised the Bolsheviks justifying the measures they took, and even theoretising them, when they went counter to the Marxist programme. If we know that these measures were adopted ad hoc because of civil war and counter-revolution, we also know today where they led. Such measures became part and parcel of what passed for Communist theory. It seems to me that Luxemburg was correct here.

In a number of quotes from Luxemburg’s brochure, Frölich sums up how she saw the role of the masses, as opposed to Lenin-Trotsky, and she wrote that: ‘socialist practice demands a total spiritual transformation in the masses’ (‘ganze geistige Umwälzung’ – the untranslatable ‘geistige’ can also mean ‘mental’, ‘intellectual’, etc.), and to me that sums up Luxemburg. For her the downtrodden masses had become conscious of the need to take power and emancipate themselves; that a party based on Marxism was pushing them aside and saying ‘leave things to us’ was incomprehensible. For me she represents more the Marxism of Marx, while Lenin (Trotsky became a Bolshevik and rejected his old criticism) has strong Blanquist traits that surely originate in the Russian populist tradition. A serious debate on these old arguments is welcome, and here I agree with Thalheimer, that one should reject the either/or, thereby constructing false poles, but approach the matters historically, and today with the benefit of much hindsight.

Notes
1. -

2. KPD-Opposition (KPO), 1964, Vol.2, pp.90-1, note 1. Hans Tittel, at that time Political Secretary of the Württemberg District, told Tjaden years later how the Stuttgart Demands came about. (Jakob Walcher was another future leader of the KPD-Opposition: editorial note.)

3. A.Thalheimer, Spartakus und die Weltkrieg, Inprekorr, No.83, 8 July 1924, cited by J. Kaestner, Die politische Theorie August Thalheimers, 1982, p.29.

4. P. Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg, 1972, p.85.

5.

6.

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Rosa Luxemburg or Lenin?
August Thalheimer
ON THE 15 January, the revolutionary working class in Germany celebrates simultaneously Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Lenin. In the imagination and the sentiment of the German revolutionary worker they stand on the same level, as the hitherto greatest champions of the proletarian revolution. Each of them with their own traits, their own achievements, their own revolutionary character, their own role. The name of Lenin shines in the clear lustre of the victor of the first proletarian revolution and its convulsive and infectious impact worldwide. The names of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht are surrounded by the gloomy lustre of the leaders of a revolution that was crushed in its first assault, of the martyrs of the revolutionary struggle, of the most outstandmig symbols of the arduous path of martyrdom and suffering, but also of the unbending fighting spirit of the German working class. If the former personifies the victorious present and true reality of the proletarian revolution, then the latter personify its future, its hope, its intention to break through to the advanced capitalist west. All three are equally dear to the hearts of the revolutionary working class.

Only the minor and ambitious fellows today at work on the shoulders of these giants, in dull ignorance, in order to misrepresent, to pervert and demolish what the others built up, now reserve the right to put the question: ‘Luxemburg or Lenin?’ And they decide it so: Rosa Luxemburg became stuck on the way to Bolshevism (the name Communism is apparently no longer sufficient), at centrism or semi-centrism, so to speak, that she was a – fortunately outmoded – stage towards the height to which these fellows have raised themselves.

It would, however, be just as wrong to counter-pose to this mistake the opposite one, that ‘Luxemburgism’ is the superior revolutionary doctrine to Leninism.

Not Luxemburg or Lenin – but Luxemburg and Lenin. Here it is not a question of an obscure mixture and obliteration of differences, but of recognising the particular role and significance of each of them for the proletarian revolution. Each of them gave the proletarian revolution something the other did not, and could not, give. The reasons can be found in the different historical role of the revolutionary movements in which they were, above all, rooted and which they, above all, influenced.

Firstly, we take the general conception of the proletarian revolution. Out of genuine revolutionary Marxism, both Rosa Luxemburg and also Lenin rescued the general conception of the proletarian dictatorship and the role of revolutionary violence within it. Rosa Luxemburg championed this conception first in the West not only against the revisionism of Bernstein, but also against Kautsky, against the ‘Marxist Centre’ – obviously so named because it tore the revolutionary centre from the Marxist conception of the proletarian revolution, by dispelling the proletarian dictatorship and limiting the revolutionary struggle to the democratic-parliamentary-trade union struggle.

The essence of the Marxist Centre, of Kautskyism, took shape in the years in which the struggle of the proletariat for power was felt to be approaching, and it implied that what was only a certain period in the struggle of the German and Western proletariat, the parliamentary and trade union struggle for reforms, was an absolute, the one and only way. Kautskyist thought faltered before the dialectical transformation of the method of struggle for reform into that of the immediate revolutionary struggle. For the whole of Marxism it substituted the fragment, which parliamentary-trade unionist struggle of the German social democracy during the years 1870-1914 embodied. Consequently, when history really posed the question of the proletarian revolution during the imperialist world war, Kautskyism sank back into social –pacifism and vulgar democracy, and vulgar democracy turned into naked counterrevolution.

Bernstein and Kautsky, the ‘siamese Twins’, the poles of the same vulgar democratic and semi-Marxist narrow-mindedness, today logically find themselves together again on the basis of the same conception.

In opposition to them, Rosa Luxemburg rescued the whole, and thereby the true, conception of Marxism, due to the fact that she saw far beyond the German and Western European sector of the proletarian struggle and therefore also in time beyond the purely parliamentary and purely trade union period.

However, she was no more able than Marx and Engels, or anyone else however ingenious, to anticipate out of the depths of the mind, discoveries and creations which only the struggle of the proletarian masses itself was able to accomplish. Bureaucrats of the revolution may imagine that they can replace the creative power of the historical process of the revolution (yet in reality it only results in powerless caricatures). As long as the proletarian revolution had not assumed a real form anywhere, the conception of the proletarian revolution could not go beyond the degree of precision conceived by Marx and Engels from out of the French Commune, i.e. it had to remain standing at a still very general and abstract conception.

An important and decisive step beyond that was first taken by the revolutionary Marxist leader of the working class who stood closest to the Russian revolution of 1905-6 and therefore knew how to fully evaluate its results theoretically. This role fell to Lenin. From the 1905-6 revolution he conceived the idea of the significance of the councils as the embryo of proletarian state power and in connection with the 1917 revolution as the concrete fundamental form of the state of the proletarian dictatorship.

The true creator of this form is the revolutionary working class itself. Lenin’s epoch-making accomplishment consists in recognising the general significance and historical importance of this form faster, more sharply and more profoundly than anyone else, and in having drawn practical-revolutionary conclusions from this perception.

Following a different direction, Lenin concretised the conception, and with that also the plan and strategy, of the proletarian revolution: with regard to the relation between the proletarian, the agrarian-peasant and the national revolution. The powerful experimental field of three Russian revolutions also produced the illustrative material for that. (In Trotsky’s description, in his An Attempt at an Autobiography, all that remains in semi-darkness, which might be agreeable for him, but is harmful for historical knowledge.)

As soon as the German revolution approached in 1918, Rosa Luxeinburg and Karl Lieblenecht, Franz Mehring, Leo Jogiches, and those united with them in the Spartakusbund, at once accepted this conception as their standpoint, and they knew how to use it with complete independence, in a country with substantially different class relations. In a country where the working class did not constitute a small minority of the population as in Russia, but the majority. Where the anti-feudal agrarian revolution had already been completed. Where capitalism had attained its highest level of development. Where the working class had for decades been used to broad mass organisations, etc.

Neither ‘centrists’ nor ‘semi-centrists’, not even mere pupils, not to mention bureaucratic subordinates of a bureaucratic supreme authority of the proletarian revolution, were capable of that task; only independent revolutionary brains could accomplish it. The outcome of these achievements, which continue the work of the Russian revolution on German ground, is the Spartakus Programme, is the Rote Fahne up to the deaths of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

In the bureaucratic regions of the KPD it has become customary to attribute to a subjective ‘error’ on Rosa Luxemburg’s part, that in November 1918 the Spartakusbund was not yet a strong mass party but only a numerically weak tendency in transition to wards a party. According to this conception, she already ‘failed’ to ‘split’ in 1914 or 1915, or even as early as 1903. This schoolboy notion fails to grasp that the conditions for the building of a revolutionary party out of an already existing mass party, which assembles within it the most progressive elements of the working class, are different from those where such a mass party and mass organisations do not yet exist, but where the task is to build the revolutionary core to which the unorganised proletarian masses then adhere. That was, however, the different situation in Russia.

Regarding the national question, Rosa Luxemburg’s consistent struggle in Poland against petty bourgeois nationalism remains a merit not disputed by Lenin. Her theoretical generalisation was mistaken. Lenin correctly accomplished it out of the great Russian experience.

Regarding the agrarian question, too, the different conceptions can be wholly explained by the different conditions. Where feudal or semi-feudal agrarian relations in the countryside still have to be overcome, as in Russia, but also in a series of other countries, the transitional stage in which the generalisation and levelling of the individual peasant holdings is unavoidable. However, on the other hand, the later Russian experience shows that the construction of socialist industry came very quickly into intolerable contradiction with the continued existence of the individual peasant holding, and that socialist industry must be supplemented by large-scale socialist enterprise on the land. Yet it goes without saying that from this general necessity it does not follow that this step can be made at any moment but that certain real preconditions must met. Trotsky erred in this question by ignoring these real preconditions. He erred moreover by not understanding that this transition could only be carried out not against but only together with the great majority of the small and the middle peasants. If it is correct that the transitional stage of the poor peasantry in Russia could not be skipped over, then it is just as true that under different conditions the aim of the large socialist agricultural enterprise can be attained in other shortened stages and in part by other means.

In the proletarian revolution too, indeed quite particularly in it, the historical dialectic makes itself felt, in that the very same method causes transformations in opposite directions depending on the different preconditions and that for the same purposes under different circumstances occasionally contrary means and methods are called for.

Some questions of the revolutionary organisation may serve as an example. In Russia, Lenin posed the question of the strictest revolutionary centralisation at first against the Mensheviks, in a situation where it was a matter of clearly distinguishing between the elements of the proletarian and the bourgeois revolution. The loose form of revolutionary organisation favoured by the Mensheviks was the organisational expression of the dominance of bourgeois-revolutionary intellectual elements, whereas strictest centralisation was the organisational expression of the proletarian revolutionary class character of the movement.

How different to Germany before the war! The sharpest form of organisational centralisation here was represented by the party bureaucracy, more or less corroded by opportunism. The rule of the opportunist tendency expressed itself organisationally by the domination of a strictly centralist, opportunist party apparatus. Against that the task was to appeal to the revolutionary self-activity of the members. In Russia the principle of strict centralisation was bound up with the proletarian-revolutionary tendency, while it was the opposite in Germany, where this was the principle of the opportunist-petty-bourgeois-bureaucratic tendency. The same formal organisational principle in fact combined contradictory contents regarding both the direction and, in the last analysis, class objectives. In Germany, therefore, the first task was to attack the opportunist-reformist-parliamentary centralism, to smash it, in order to create the preconditions for revolutionary centralisation. A classical dialectical course of development: from the opportunist centralisation through its abolition to the revolutionary centralisation.

However, revolutionary centralisation, too, in its turn undergoes anew a dialectical course of development.

That is shown most tangibly in the question of the ‘professional revolutionary’. The ‘professional revolutionary’ is a necessary product and tool of the leadership of the revolutionary organisation that is illegal and is not yet a mass organisation. In the legal Communist mass organisation there is no place for the ‘professional revolutionary’ in this sense. Here, as the movement grows, the ‘professional revolutionary’ too easily changes into the characterless, politically and materially corrupt careerist bureaucrat, for whom the revolutionary movement is a source of a living, of a career, of parliamentary and other posts.

Out of revolutionary centralism the danger of bureaucratic centralism develops anew, on a higher plane, and becomes a hindrance, a fetter on the movement, and against it one must appeal to the revolutionary self-activity of the party ranks. Is this danger present today in the Communist International and its sections? Undoubtedly! Consequently, however, in this question today, too, it is not a matter of Lenin or Luxemburg, but Lenin and Luxemburg. This means that upholding the Leninist principle of revolutionary centralisation today demands a struggle against the bureaucratic, opportunist or ultra-left degeneration of into bureaucratic centralism demands an appeal to the revolutionary self-activity of the membership of the Communist Party in the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg. In this struggle, however, we can also refer to Lenin, who began the struggle against party and state bureaucratism in the victorious Soviet state. These are only some examples for a general lesson that is still suitable for a variety of practical applications.

The party bureaucracy perceives Lenin and Luxemburg as opposed to each other and thereby proves that it has not understood either. We counterpose to the bureaucracy not only the formal but also the spiritual bond of these two great revolutionary champions of the working class and their closest comrades in arms, their mutual supplementary features as revolutionary leaders, as practicians and theoreticians. What unites them, is that they used the very same principle on different levels, situations and spheres of the great totality of the world revolution.

This whole also transcends the greatest individuals. The individual greatness of revolutionary leaders is also subject to the law of the dialectic: it exists only as much as it is not just an individual, but a general thing, as it participates in the greatness of the cause of the proletarian revolution. Where an attempt is made to bring it into play counter to, or independent from it, then the greatest individual talents and gifts shrivel up to a veritable zero, as shown by manifest examples.

[Translated by Mike Jones with assistance from Theodor Bergmann and some additional tinkering by the editor.]

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