Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor American Communist Leader James P.Cannon

Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits-


Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices. This year we pay special honor to American Communist party founder and later Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon, Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and German Left Communist Karl Korsch.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
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From Young Spartacus, September, 1974

James P. Cannon
1890-1974

The death of veteran communist James P. Cannon on 21 August brought to an end a long life of dedicated service to the working class. While still a teenager Cannon joined the Industrial Workers of the World as a revolutionary syndicalist. Later he entered the Socialist Party and took his place in the revolutionary wing of the social democracy. Under the impact of the Russian Revolution Cannon was among those who formed the Communist Party, and during the difficult years of reaction in the 1920's led the International Labor Defense.

With the Stalinist degeneration of the Communist International Cannon came forward as one of the principal defenders of the Leninist program and was expelled from the CP in 1928 for Trotskyism. Cannon built the Trotskyist party in this country and tempered its cadres above all through his principled programmatic intransigence, for which Trotsky paid him tribute. For revolutionary opposition to imperialist war Cannon and the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party were the first to be jailed under the Smith Act.

After the post-war upsurge Cannon had to struggle to preserve the party and its cadres from the demoralizing isolation of the long McCarthy era and from the influence of the growing revisionism of Pablo in the Fourth International. Cannon and the SWP, however, withdrew from an international fight against Pabloism. Cannon's tragic political degenera¬tion was part of the final succumbing of the SWP to this revisionism in the early 1960's.
For years the SWP has trampled upon the revolutionary program and heritage that for so many decades in so many struggles had been defended by Cannon.

It is with revulsion that we watch the Kautskys of the SWP today shamelessly recall the revolutionary achievements of Cannon in order to kick off a fund-raising jamboree for building this reformist party.
The birth of the Spartacist League in the struggle against revisionism in the SWP is a process that Cannon once understood well: the cadres of the revolutionary party of the future must and will come from those who remain steadfast to the principles of proletarian socialism. With this sense of revolutionary continuity, we firmly assert our rightful heritage to the traditions of Cannonism and our determination to rebuild the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution.
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From the American Left History blog, dated December 10, 2007.

The Making Of An American Communist Leader- The Early Days Of James P. Cannon


BOOK REVIEW

JAMES P. CANNON AND THE ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY LEFT, 1890-1928, BRIAN PALMER, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS, 2007

I have reviewed many of the writings of the American revolutionary James P. Cannon elsewhere in this space. This review should serve as an interim evaluation of this excellent biography of the premier Communist leader to come out of that movement in the 20th century. As such it is long overdue and, as pointed out below timely. I have read through this book once but want to read it again before making a full evaluation. I also want to dig more deeply into the incredible number of footnotes, perhaps more than the average reader may comprehend, the author has provided. More later. Kudos to Professor Palmer.


If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand some of the past mistakes of our history and want to know some of the problems that confronted the early American Communist Party and some of the key personalities, including James Cannon, who formed that party this book is for you.

At the beginning of the 21st century after the demise of the Soviet Union and the apparent `death of communism' it may seem fantastic and utopian to today’s militants that early in the 20th century many anarchist, socialist, syndicalist and other working class militants of this country coalesced to form an American Communist Party. For the most part, these militants honestly did so in order to organize an American Socialist Revolution patterned on and influenced by the Russian October Revolution of 1917. James P. Cannon represents one of the important individuals and faction leaders in that effort and was in the thick of the battle as a central leader of the Party in this period. Whatever his political mistakes at the time, or later, one could certainly use such a militant leader today. His mistakes were the mistakes of a man looking for a revolutionary path.

For those not familiar with this period a helpful introduction and copious footnotes by the author give an analysis of the important fights that occurred inside the party. That overview highlights some of the now more obscure personalities, where they stood on the issues and insights into the significance of the crucial early fights in the party. These include questions which are still relevant today; a legal vs. an underground party; the proper attitude toward parliamentary politics; support to third party bourgeois candidates; trade union policy; class war defense as well as how to rein in the intense internal struggle of the various factions for organizational control of the party. This makes it somewhat easier for those not well versed in the intricacies of the political disputes which wracked the early American party to understand how these questions tended to pull it in on itself. In many ways, given the undisputed rise of American imperialism in the immediate aftermath of World War I, this is a story of the `dog days' of the party. Unfortunately, that rise combined with the international ramifications of the internal dispute in the Russian Communist Party and in the Communist International shipwrecked the party as a revolutionary party toward the end of this period.

As an addition to the historical record of this period this book is a very good companion to the two-volume set by Theodore Draper - The Roots of American Communism and Soviet Russia and American Communism- the definitive study on the early history of the American Communist Party. I have, as is the nature of the case, dwelt here on Cannon’s development as a Communist in the early days of that party. When I update this review I will discuss his formative years in Kansas, his father’s tutelage in his development as a socialist, his self-education in the rough and tumble of socialist and IWW (Wobblies) politics and some details of his personal life as they affected his political development. For now, if you want to know what it was like in the 'hothouse' (some would say loony bin) in the early days this is the book for you. Hopefully the author will continue this biography further to the later more decisive events that finished Cannon’s education as a communist leader.

* Turning Swords Into Plowshares Ain’t What It Used To Be- The October 17, 2009 “Anti-War” Rally In Boston- A Report And Commentary

Click on title to link to "The Boston Globe", October 18, 2009, article by Jeannie Nuss, "Demonstrators in the pink in Copley Square".

Markin comment:

The above link to the “The Boston Globe” article on Boston’s Saturday October 17, 2009 antiwar rally, sponsored by the United For Justice and Peace coalition and those other organizations that adhere to that operation’s “party line”, basically tells it all concerning the sorry state of affairs of the “peace” movement here in Boston. I note that the reporter is being, perhaps, a little generous with her crowd estimate. But that is neither here nor there, except to note that I attended one of the first (if not the first) anti- Afghan war demonstrations in Boston at that same locale in mid-October 2001 and we had almost the same size crowd, a few hundred.

The difference? First off, that 2001 demonstration was held in the wake of the criminal actions at the World Trade Center when “red hot” American-style patriotism was the order of the day and anti-imperialist opposition to ANY American military action was considered tantamount to treason by the vast majority of the citizenry, including from some people that I was very surprised to see on the other side defending George Bush’s actions. In short, that day was no “picnic in the park”, and I freely admit that although I have been in any number of street demonstrations over my long political career that day was one of the few I was afraid to be on the streets of America (even though our group set itself up, like in the old days, in a self-defense mode). In contrast, the October 17th 2009 demonstration took place on a day when, according to many polls, most Americans are sick and tired, or are getting sick and tired of propping up the Afghan government and want to pull out. No one bothered us but very few passers-by stopped to see what was going on.

Part and parcel of our dilemma, and here I mean those of us committed to anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist politics is also summed up by the “Globe” article. One interviewee, representative of the political perspective of the crowd I assure you, but also representative of the whole frame of reference of the parliamentary “peace” movement is a posture of waiting on…..Obama -to do the right thing. After all he got a “peace” prize, right? Overwhelmingly this crowd had a positive view on Obama (very few posters, if any, were directed at him as imperial commander-in-chief, unlike the well-deserved bashing old ‘W’ took), had, in many cases, voted for him and at worst, saw him being guided by “evil counselors”, or some such theory. They are waiting on Obama’s good offices to bring peace. But I tell you, as I told them, the look of American Afghan policy, despite the recent Joe Biden “opposition” fluff, is the peace of the graveyard. That means troop escalation, if not immediately in light of the Afghan election farce, then soon. So just to keep the right perspective here, a perspective that is different from the futile activity at the rally, I once again urge one and all to fight under this slogan. Obama –Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan (And Iraq Too).

*From The Archives -Obama-Immediate Uncondtional Withdrawal From Afghanistan- Gearing Up For The Fall Anti-War Season-An October 7 Anti-War Action

Click on title to link to site that has in the past covered the opposition to the Bush/Obama Afghan War policies. This site is linked for informational purposes only.

Below is information, recently received by e-mail, pertaining to some upcoming Fall 2009 actions planned by forces sympathetic to various United For Justice With Peace (UJP)organizations. I am passing it on for informational purposes only. I do not, make that definitely do not, agree with UJPs premises, slogans or strategy. The only agreement I have at this point is on the need to take to the streets to oppose the Obama war policies, including this latest round of escalations in troop numbers (as well as the projections of Afghan Commander General McCrystal for more troops). The time to give Obama a pass on his war policies is long over. Forward.


Peace NO War Network
http://www.PeaceNOWar.net
War is not the answer, for only love can conquer hate
Not in our Name! And another world is possible!

http://www.PeaceNoWar.net
e-mail: Info@PeaceNoWar.net
Tel: (213)403-0131

Please Join PeaceNoWar Listserv, send e-mail to: peacenowar-subscribe@lists.riseup.net


End the War in Afghanistan and Pakistan!
Change ≠ War!



President Barack Obama was elected on a platform of CHANGE and with hopes for diplomacy, not war! As the war in Iraq winds down, more troops have been sent to Afghanistan. Some in the Pentagon are calling for more!

Now, 54% of the people believe the Afghanistan war is a mistake. The peace movement is challenged to organize the hope for CHANGE into a movement to end the war in Afghanistan as one of the big steps towards addressing the crisis in our communities.

Our best interests and the interests of the Afghanistan people lie in the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. forces. With every bomb dropped and every civilian and military death, we are no closer to helping the Afghan people and the region to grapple with their problems. In fact, the U.S. presence is the biggest obstacle to doing so.


On October 7, the beginning of the 9th year of occupation and war in Afghanistan, we must mobilize nationwide a call for diplomacy, not war. Change ≠ War!

United For Peace and Justice is calling on the grassroots movements for peace and economic and social justice to gather in their cities and towns on October 7 for action, dialog, and reflection on the 8 years of death and dying in Afghanistan and now in Pakistan.

United For Peace and Justice is calling on its member groups across the country to initiate local actions or educational events in your community on October 7:

Teach-Ins on the costs, human and economic, of the occupation and war in Afghanistan and impact on the region.

Vigils, pickets and delegations to Congressional offices, as well as faxes, emails and calls.

Rallies, demonstrations, vigils and marches to bring the peace and justice message into the streets.

House parties to raise money for Afghanistan relief or other aid to the Afghan people.

Creative actions to highlight the devastating effects of the Drone air strikes.
In the month of October, many activities are being planned here and around the world. On October 5, a coalition led by the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance (NCNR) will have a procession to the White House, deliver a petition and hold a non-violent direct action in Washington, DC. It is urgent that we also bring our message to Washington and we hope you will join this initiative.

The Iraq Moratorium has called for local actions on October 17 to mark the 40th anniversary of the Vietnam War Moratorium. The Iraq Moratorium says, "Over 2 million people participated in thousands of communities [during the Vietnam War] and brought the anti-war movement into the political mainstream of American society. The lessons from that event in 1969 can help us strengthen the antiwar movement today."

*From The Archives -As We Enter Year 3 Of The Anniversary Of WWI-From The Pen Of V.I. Lenin In 1914- "Dead Chauvinism And Living Socialism"

Click on title to link to V.I. Lenin's 1914 article "Dead Chauvinism And Living Socialism"

*From The Archives-POPULAR FRONT POLITICS AND THE IRAQ ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT

Click on title to link to Karl Marx's 1850, yes that is not a misprint the question has been with us for a long time, 1850 "Address Of The Central Committee Of The Communist League" which deals with the popular fronts of his day in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848.

COMMENTARY

DOWN WITH THE WAR! DOWN WITH THE WAR BUDGET!

Radicals and revolutionaries, including Marxist revolutionaries, have been struggling with the implications of popular front politics at least since the European Revolutions of 1848. At that time, due more to the question of political immaturity and inexperience, left-wing working class militants and their allies tried to line up with, and in most cases in subordination to, their national bourgeoisies in the fights for the demands of the classic bourgeois revolutions. And for their troubles these same ‘allies’ suppressed these militants and their demands once the situation became too ‘hot’ and the various capitalist parties made their peace with the old regimes. One of the great lessons that Karl Marx (and his co-thinker Frederich Engels) derived from that turn of events was an understanding that an essential ingredient to successful socialist revolution was the need for independent working class organization and action and a political break with the capitalist parties.

Of course, as latter working class history has made painfully clear that seemingly elemental task has been easier said than done. Since Marx's time time endless numbers of ‘socialist’ politicians and ‘vanguard’ political organizations have broken their teeth on denying the truth of his assertions. One need only think of the classic Popular Fronts in Spain and France the 1930’s and Chile in the 1970’s created explicitly by leftwing forces to act as brakes on developing revolutionary situations to know that such a strategy means political death for the revolution and the physical destruction of revolutionary cadre for decades.


What gives? What do those historic events have to do with today’s opposition to the war in Iraq? Simple, while not all popular fronts are created equal they all serve the same ends. As a primer one should know that the popular front is a left-wing political strategy where its advocates call on all ‘progressive’ forces and people of ‘good will’ including capitalist parties and politicians to unite around some ‘good old cause’. Well, what is wrong with that? On democratic issues such as the right to vote or opposition to government snooping and in political defense cases not a thing. Except we call that a united front. Why? Because depending on the case the fight is a limited one, the time is short and there is no political reason not to gain the support of as many people as possible. No, the popular front is a very different animal. It is a conscious strategy on the part of some left-wing forces to limit the aims of any particular fight to those acceptable to the capitalist parties.

For those who do not believe the import of such distinctions let me give one example. Take a simple slogan like –STOP THE WAR. In the build-up to the Iraq War that did not have a bad sound, if not particularly poliitcally sophisticated. Big burly former football linebackers and pacifist little old ladies in tennis shoes could agree to that. However, until early 2006 this was still the central slogan of the anti-war movement. The more appropriate IMMEDIATE, UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL OF ALL UNITED STATES AND ALLIED TROOPS FROM IRAQ did not get official sanction until that time. Why? Because those big burly football players and gentile old ladies did not want to go that far? Hell, no. The real reason was no ‘respectable’ capitalist politician, except maybe Congressman Kucinich on a good day, was making that call. And that is the rub. The case of the various umbrella anti-war coalitions such as the ANSWER Coalition and United For Peace and Justice here in America (and elsewhere as this is decidedly an international phenomena) are classic examples of a non-parliamentary popular front. Any thoughtful militant who wonders why the anti-war movement here is spinning its wheels can look to that conscious strategy on the part of the current anti-war leaderships as the root cause of the dilemma.

I have noted above, at least twice, the fact that the popular front strategy is a conscious one on the part of those ‘progressives’ who pursue it. And for those who do not want to make a revolution or are just serious about 'pressure' politics on the face of it that policy makes sense. The capitalist parties and their politicians have no need, except as electoral cannon fodder, to seek an on-going bloc with non-parliamentary leftwing forces. One should note that it has only been this year (2007) that even minor league Democratic politicians have gotten on the platforms at anti-war events. No, this is strictly a strategy pursued by 'get rich quick' artists of the left who pursue this course in order to be at one with the ‘masses’ or not get ‘isolated’ from the political consciousness of the masses. That at the end of the day the wily (and in some case not so wily, take John Kerry in 2004, for example) capitalist politicians reap the rewards of this political treachery seems not to have occurred to these same artists. The next battleground on the fight against the popular front will be on the upcoming war budget. It will not be pretty. However, those are the central slogans for the immediate future. You will definitely see the limits of popular front politics on that one. DOWN WITH THE WAR, DOWN WITH THE WAR BUDGET, BREAK WITH THE CAPITALIST PARTIES.

*In Honor Of May Day-Our Anthem- "The Internationale"

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of our international working class anthem ,"The Internationale".

As is always appropriate on international working class holidays and days of remembrance here is the song most closely associated with that movement “The Internationale” in English, French and German. I will not vouch for the closeness of the translations but certainly of the spirit. Workers Of The World Unite!

The Internationale [variant words in square brackets]

Arise ye workers [starvelings] from your slumbers
Arise ye prisoners of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant.
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We'll change henceforth [forthwith] the old tradition [conditions]
And spurn the dust to win the prize.

So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.

No more deluded by reaction
On tyrants only we'll make war
The soldiers too will take strike action
They'll break ranks and fight no more
And if those cannibals keep trying
To sacrifice us to their pride
They soon shall hear the bullets flying
We'll shoot the generals on our own side.

No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear
E'er the thieves will out with their booty [give up their booty]
And give to all a happier lot.
Each [those] at the forge must do their duty
And we'll strike while the iron is hot.




________________________________________

L'Internationale

Debout les damnés de la terre
Debout les forçats de la faim
La raison tonne en son cratère
C'est l'éruption de la fin
Du passe faisons table rase
Foules, esclaves, debout, debout
Le monde va changer de base
Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout

C'est la lutte finale
Groupons-nous, et demain (bis)
L'Internationale
Sera le genre humain

Il n'est pas de sauveurs suprêmes
Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun
Producteurs, sauvons-nous nous-mêmes
Décrétons le salut commun
Pour que le voleur rende gorge
Pour tirer l'esprit du cachot
Soufflons nous-mêmes notre forge
Battons le fer quand il est chaud

L'état comprime et la loi triche
L'impôt saigne le malheureux
Nul devoir ne s'impose au riche
Le droit du pauvre est un mot creux
C'est assez, languir en tutelle
L'égalité veut d'autres lois
Pas de droits sans devoirs dit-elle
Egaux, pas de devoirs sans droits

Hideux dans leur apothéose
Les rois de la mine et du rail
Ont-ils jamais fait autre chose
Que dévaliser le travail
Dans les coffres-forts de la bande
Ce qu'il a crée s'est fondu
En décrétant qu'on le lui rende
Le peuple ne veut que son dû.

Les rois nous saoulaient de fumées
Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans
Appliquons la grève aux armées
Crosse en l'air, et rompons les rangs
S'ils s'obstinent, ces cannibales
A faire de nous des héros
Ils sauront bientôt que nos balles
Sont pour nos propres généraux

Ouvriers, paysans, nous sommes
Le grand parti des travailleurs
La terre n'appartient qu'aux hommes
L'oisif ira loger ailleurs
Combien, de nos chairs se repaissent
Mais si les corbeaux, les vautours
Un de ces matins disparaissent
Le soleil brillera toujours.


________________________________________

Die Internationale

Wacht auf, Verdammte dieser Erde,
die stets man noch zum Hungern zwingt!
Das Recht wie Glut im Kraterherde
nun mit Macht zum Durchbruch dringt.
Reinen Tisch macht mit dem Bedranger!
Heer der Sklaven, wache auf!
Ein nichts zu sein, tragt es nicht langer
Alles zu werden, stromt zuhauf!

Volker, hort die Signale!
Auf, zum letzten Gefecht!
Die Internationale
Erkampft das Menschenrecht

Es rettet uns kein hoh'res Wesen
kein Gott, kein Kaiser, noch Tribun
Uns aus dem Elend zu erlosen
konnen wir nur selber tun!
Leeres Wort: des armen Rechte,
Leeres Wort: des Reichen Pflicht!
Unmundigt nennt man uns Knechte,
duldet die Schmach langer nicht!

In Stadt und Land, ihr Arbeitsleute,
wir sind die starkste Partei'n
Die Mussigganger schiebt beiseite!
Diese Welt muss unser sein;
Unser Blut sei nicht mehr der Raben
und der machtigen Geier Frass!
Erst wenn wir sie vertrieben haben
dann scheint die Sonn' ohn' Unterlass!

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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Those Who Honor Lenin, Luxemburg, And Liebknecht Are Kindred Spirits- From The Pen Of Rosa Luxemburg- A Guest Commentary

Click on the title to link to a Workers Vanguard article, dated January 29, 2010, honoring the 3 L's and a polemic from the pen of Rosa Luxemburg, the "Rose Of The Revolution", on the course of, and in defense of, the Russian Revolution then in full bloom.

Workers Vanguard No. 951
29 January 2010

For the Communism of Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht

In January we commemorate the “Three L’s”: Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, who died on 21 January 1924, and revolutionary Marxist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who were assassinated on 15 January 1919 in Germany by the reactionary Freikorps. This was done as part of the suppression of the Spartakist uprising by the Social Democratic government of Friedrich Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann and Gustav Noske. We reprint below an appreciation of Luxemburg excerpted from Max Shachtman’s “Under the Banner of Marxism,” which was written in response to the resignation of Ernest Erber and originally published in Volume IV, Number 1 of the internal bulletins of the Workers Party in 1949.

Shachtman joined the American Communist Party in the early 1920s. Along with James P. Cannon and Martin Abern, he was expelled in 1928 for fighting for the Bolshevik-Leninist line of Leon Trotsky against the Stalinist degeneration of the international Communist movement. For a decade he was, with Cannon, a leader of the American Trotskyist movement as well as a key leader in the International Left Opposition. However, following an intense faction fight in the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, Shachtman, along with Abern and James Burnham, broke from Trotskyism in 1940, refusing to defend the Soviet degenerated workers state in World War II. Shortly thereafter, he developed the position that the USSR was a new exploitative form of class society, “bureaucratic collectivism.” (For more on this fight, see Trotsky’s In Defense of Marxism and Cannon’s The Struggle for a Proletarian Party.)

Following this split, Shachtman formed the Workers Party, which was a rightward-moving centrist party that existed from 1940 to 1949, when it changed its name to the Independent Socialist League. Under the intense pressure of U.S. imperialism’s anti-Soviet Cold War, Shachtman came to see Stalinism as a greater danger than “democratic” imperialism. He ended his days as an open supporter of U.S. imperialism and a member of the Democratic Party, backing the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the vicious, losing imperialist war against the Vietnamese social revolution.

Shachtman’s 1949 reply to Erber (who went on to become an urban planner in Northern New Jersey) represented the last time he tried to defend revolutionary Marxism against a classical Menshevik. In resigning from the Workers Party, Erber, using stock-in-trade social-democratic arguments to justify support for one’s “own” bourgeoisie, denounced the Bolshevik Revolution and counterposed Luxemburg to Lenin, portraying her as a defender of classless “democracy.” Many self-styled leftists continue to do likewise, distorting Luxemburg’s 1918 criticisms of the Bolsheviks, which she never published in her lifetime and which were based on the very partial information to which she had access while imprisoned for her revolutionary struggle against the First World War. Using previously untranslated articles from the German Communist journal Rote Fahne written by Luxemburg near the end of her life, Shachtman demonstrated her support to the Russian Revolution and how she and Lenin stood shoulder to shoulder in the fight for socialist revolution.

* * *

Contrast Erber and every word he writes with the critical appraisal of the Bolsheviks written in prison by Rosa Luxemburg, who is invoked against revolutionary socialism nowadays by every turncoat and backslider who wouldn’t reach up to her soles if he stood on tiptoes:

“That the Bolsheviks have based their policy entirely upon the world proletarian revolution is the clearest proof of their political farsightedness and firmness of principle and of the bold scope of their policies.”

You will never see that quoted from the turncoats who have drafted Luxemburg into the crusade against Bolshevism against her will. Nor will you see this quoted:

“The party of Lenin was the only one which grasped the mandate and duty of a truly revolutionary party and which, by the slogan—‘All power in the hands of the proletariat and peasantry’—insured the continued development of the revolution....

“Moreover, the Bolsheviks immediately set as the aim of this seizure of power a complete, far-reaching revolutionary program: not the safeguarding of bourgeois democracy, but a dictatorship of the proletariat for the purpose of realizing socialism. Thereby they won for themselves the imperishable historic distinction of having for the first time proclaimed the final aim of socialism as the direct program of practical politics.”

We can see now how much right Erber has to drag Rosa Luxemburg into court as a fellow-detractor of the Bolsheviks, how much right he has to mention her views in the same breath with his own. Fortunately, Luxemburg is not a defenseless corpse. She left a rich political testament to assure her name from being bandied about by soiled lips. Read this, directed right at the heart of Erber:

“The real situation in which the Russian Revolution found itself, narrowed down in a few months to the alternative: victory of the counterrevolution or dictatorship of the proletariat—Kaledin or Lenin. Such was the objective situation, just as it quickly presents itself in every revolution after the first intoxication is over, and as it presented itself in Russia as a result of the concrete, burning questions of peace and land, for which there was no solution within the framework of bourgeois revolution.”

Not much room here, not so much as a crevice, for Erber’s “alternative,” is there? Not much room here for his “capitalist economic relations.” This is a revolutionist writing—not an idol-worshipper of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, but still a revolutionist, a tireless, defiant, unflinching champion of the proletariat in the class struggle.

“In this, the Russian Revolution has but confirmed the basic lesson of every great revolution, the law of its being, which decrees: either the revolution must advance at a rapid, stormy and resolute tempo, break down all barriers with an iron hand and place its goals ever farther ahead, or it is quite soon thrown backward behind its feeble point of departure and suppressed by counterrevolution. To stand still, to mark time on one spot, to be contented with the first goal it happens to reach, is never possible in revolution. And he who tries to apply the home-made wisdom derived from parliamentary battles between frogs and mice to the field of revolutionary tactics only shows thereby that the very psychology and laws of existence of revolution are alien to him and that all historical experience is to him a book sealed with seven seals.”

Read it over again, especially that wonderfully priceless last sentence. And then tell us if it is not directed straight at Erber, word for word and line for line! It is much too exactly fitting to be quoted only once! “And he who tries to apply the home-made wisdom derived from parliamentary battles between frogs and mice to the field of revolutionary tactics only shows thereby that the very psychology and laws of existence of revolution are alien to him and that all historical experience is to him a book sealed with seven seals.” If ever Erber gets up enough of what he lacks to look into a mirror, there is a ready-made one for him. If anyone thinks he can improve on this stinging answer to Erber and his home-made wisdom, to his Grand Coalitions between frogs and mice, he is just wasting good time.

“Still, didn’t Rosa criticize the Bolsheviks for dispersing the Constituent Assembly?” No, she did not. She criticized them for not calling for elections to a new Constituent; she criticized them for the arguments they made to justify the dispersal. But in the first place, her criticism has next to nothing in common with that of the latter-day anti-Bolsheviks (or, for that matter, of the anti-Bolsheviks of the time). And in the second place, she was wrong, just as she was wrong in her criticism of the Bolshevik position on the “national question” and of the Bolshevik course in the “agrarian question.” And in the third place, what she wrote in prison, on the basis of “fragmentary information” (as the editor of the American edition of her prison notes admits), was not her last word on the question. Before her cruel death, she altered her position on the basis of her own experiences, on the basis of the living realities of the German revolution. Lenin’s State and Revolution was checked twice—first in the Russian Revolution and then in the German revolution! We will give the reader an idea of what she wrote before her death so that he may see why our present “champions” of Luxemburg never find time, space or inclination to quote her to the end.

The German workers, a year after the Bolshevik Revolution, overturned the Hohenzollern monarchy and, just as spontaneously as did the Russians before them, they formed their Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils (“Räte,” Soviets). The German Mensheviks—Scheidemann, Noske and Ebert—feared and hated the Councils just as much as did their Russian counterparts. They championed the National Assembly (German counterpart of the Russian Constituent) instead, calculating thereby to smash the Councils and the struggle for socialism. Haase and Kautsky, the centrists of the Independent Socialists, oscillated between the Councils and the Assembly. What position did Rosa Luxemburg take, what position did the Spartacus League and its organ, Die Rote Fahne, take? Here once more was the problem of workers’ democracy versus bourgeois democracy, the democratic republic of the Councils versus the bourgeois republic, dictatorship of the proletariat organized in the Councils versus the National Assembly—not in Russia but in Germany, not in 1917 but a year later, not while Rosa was in Breslau prison but after her release.

Here is Rosa Luxemburg in Die Rote Fahne of November 29, 1918, writing on the leaders of the Independents:

“Their actual mission as partner in the firm of Scheidemann-Ebert is: to mystify its clear and unambiguous character as defense guard of bourgeois class domination by means of a system of equivocation and cowardliness.

“This role of Haase and colleagues finds its most classical expression in their attitude toward the most important slogan of the day: toward the National Assembly.

“Only two standpoints are possible in this question, as in all others. Either you want the National Assembly as a means of swindling the proletariat out of its power, to paralyze its class energy, to dissolve its socialist goal into thin air. Or else you want to place all the power into the hands of the proletariat, to unfold the revolution that has begun into a tremendous class struggle for the socialist social order, and toward this end, to establish the political rule of the great mass of the toilers, the dictatorship of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils. For or against socialism, against or for the National Assembly; there is no third way.”

On December 1st, Luxemburg spoke on the situation at a meeting of the Spartacus League in the hall of the Teachers’ Union. At the end of the meeting, a resolution was adopted setting forth her views and giving approval to them:

“The public people’s meeting held on December 1st in the Hall of the Teachers’ Union on Alexander Street declares its agreement with the exposition of Comrade Luxemburg. It considers the convocation of the National Assembly to be a means of strengthening the counterrevolution and to cheat the proletarian revolution of its socialist aims. It demands the transfer of all power to the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, whose first duty it is to drive out of the government the traitors to the working class and to socialism, Scheidemann-Ebert and colleagues, to arm the toiling people for the protection of the revolution, and to take the most energetic and thoroughgoing measures for the socialization of society.”

In her first editorial in Die Rote Fahne of November 18, she writes under the title, “The Beginning”:

“The Revolution has begun.... From the goal of the revolution follows clearly its path, from its task follows the method. All power into the hands of the masses, into the hands of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, protection of the work of the revolution from its lurking foes: this is the guiding line for all the measures of the revolutionary government….

“(But) What is the present revolutionary government (i.e., Scheidemann & Co.) doing?

“It calmly continues to leave the state as an administrative organism from top to bottom in the hands of yesterday’s guards of Hohenzollern absolutism and tomorrow’s tools of the counterrevolution.

“It is convoking the Constituent Assembly, and therewith it is creating a bourgeois counterweight against the Workers’ and Peasants’ representation, therewith switching the revolution on to the rails of the bourgeois revolution, conjuring away the socialist goals of the revolution.”

[Shachtman mistakenly attributed the following quote to the article, “The Beginning.” It is actually from “The National Assembly” in the 20 November 1918 issue of Die Rote Fahne—ed.]

“From the Deutsche Tageszeitung, the Vossische, and the Vorwärts to the Freiheit of the Independents, from Reventlow, Erzberger, Scheidemann to Haase and Kautsky, there sounds the unanimous call for the National Assembly and an equally unanimous outcry of fear of the idea: Power into the hands of the working class. The ‘people’ as a whole, the ‘nation’ as a whole, should be summoned to decide on the further fate of the revolution by majority decision.

“With the open and concealed agents of the ruling class, this slogan is natural. With keepers of the capitalist class barriers, we discuss neither in the National Assembly nor about the National Assembly....

“Without the conscious will and the conscious act of the majority of the proletariat—no socialism. To sharpen this consciousness, to steel this will, to organize this act, a class organ is necessary, the national parliament of the proletarians of town and country.

“The convocation of such a workers’ representation in place of the traditional National Assembly of the bourgeois revolutions is already, by itself, an act of the class struggle, a break with the historical past of bourgeois society, a powerful means of arousing the proletarian popular masses, a first open, blunt declaration of war against capitalism.

“No evasions, no ambiguities—the die must be cast. Parliamentary cretinism was yesterday a weakness, is today an equivocation, will tomorrow be a betrayal of socialism.”

It is a pity that there is not space in which to quote far more extensively from the highly remarkable articles she wrote in the last few weeks of her life, before she was murdered by those whose “parliamentary cretinism” became the direct betrayal of socialism—by those for whom Erber has now become a shameful apologist by “showing” that the defeat of the revolution in Germany was as much the responsibility of the masses as it was of the Scheidemanns and Noskes! The articles as a whole show the veritable strides that Luxemburg took away from her prison criticism and toward a policy which was in no important respect different from the one pursued by the Bolsheviks toward the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois democrats, toward the Mensheviks and other “socialist opponents,” toward the Constituent Assembly and the Soviets. With these articles of hers in print, to mention her today as an enemy of the Bolsheviks, as a critic of their attitude toward bourgeois democracy and the Constituent is excusable only on the grounds of inexcusable ignorance.

The course of the German Revolution, life, the lessons of the struggle—these left us the heritage of a Rosa Luxemburg who was, in every essential, the inseparable comrade-in-arms of the leaders of the Russian Revolution. To claim that this firm solidarity did not exist, is simply an outrage to her memory. What is worse, it shows that nothing has been learned of the lessons of the Russian Revolution and nothing of the lessons of the German Revolution—the two great efforts of the proletariat to test in practice what is, in the long run, the question of life and death for us: the state and revolution. And on this question, with Lenin and with Luxemburg, the real Luxemburg—we remain under the banner of Marxism.

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.
********
*From The Pen Of Rosa Luxemburg- On The 1902 Martinique Volcano- A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to a Workers Vanguard entry, dated February 26, 2010, from Rosa Luxemburg concerning the then imperialist powers response to an earlier natural disaster on Martinique, in light of the current natural disaster that wreaked havoc in Haiti.

Markin comment:

I will always, and happily read anything, any time, and from any source that was written by Rosa Luxemburg- the Rose of the Revolution. Especially when, as here, it hits the nail on the head about the imperialists' crocodile tears over some natural disaster.


Workers Vanguard No. 953
26 February 2010

On 1902 Martinique Volcano by Rosa Luxemburg

(From the Archives of Marxism)

The following article by revolutionary Marxist leader Rosa Luxemburg was written shortly after a massive volcanic eruption in May 1902 that killed some 40,000 people on the Caribbean island of Martinique, which remains to this day a colony of French imperialism. The article, which originally appeared in the Social Democratic paper Leipziger Volkszeitung (15 May 1902), appears here as translated in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (Monthly Review Press [2004]). It conveys the hypocrisy of the European Great Powers, with the blood of millions on their hands, rushing to the aid of Martinique.

Throughout the article Luxemburg refers to various wars and revolutions. These include the Opium Wars of Western intervention into China in the mid 19th century; the Paris Commune of 1871, in which the proletariat briefly governed the city before being crushed by the French army with the support of German forces, with over 20,000 slaughtered; and the Boer Wars of 1880-81 and 1899-1902, when the British imperialists brutally crushed independent Afrikaner states in southern Africa that in turn lorded it over the black African masses. Other such references are explained by brackets in the text.

* * *

Mountains of smoking ruins, heaps of mangled corpses, a steaming, smoking sea of fire wherever you turn, mud and ashes—that is all that remains of the flourishing little city which perched on the rocky slope of the volcano like a fluttering swallow. For some time the angry giant had been heard to rumble and rage against this human presumption, the blind self-conceit of the two-legged dwarfs. Great-hearted even in his wrath, a true giant, he warned the reckless creatures that crawled at his feet. He smoked, spewed out fiery clouds, in his bosom there was seething and boiling and explosions like rifle volleys and cannon thunder. But the lords of the earth, those who ordain human destiny, remained with faith unshaken—in their own wisdom.

On [May] 7th, the commission dispatched by the government announced to the anxious people of St. Pierre that all was in order in heaven and on earth. All is in order, no cause for alarm!—as they said on the eve of the Oath of the Tennis Court in the dance-intoxicated halls of Louis XVI, while in the crater of the revolutionary volcano fiery lava was gathering for the fearful eruption. All is in order, peace and quiet everywhere!—as they said in Vienna and Berlin on the eve of the March eruption fifty years ago [the outbreak of the 1848 European revolutions]. The old, long-suffering titan of Martinique paid no heed to the reports of the honorable commission: after the people had been reassured by the governor on the 7th, he erupted in the early hours of the 8th and buried in a few minutes the governor, the commission, the people, houses, streets and ships under the fiery exhalation of his indignant heart.

The work was radically thorough. Forty thousand human lives mowed down, a handful of trembling refugees rescued—the old giant can rumble and bubble in peace, he has shown his might, he has fearfully avenged the slight to his primordial power.

And now in the ruins of the annihilated city on Martinique a new guest arrives, unknown, never seen before—the human being. Not lords and bondsmen, not blacks and whites, not rich and poor, not plantation owners and wage slaves—human beings have appeared on the tiny shattered island, human beings who feel only the pain and see only the disaster, who only want to help and succor. Old Mt. Pelee has worked a miracle! Forgotten are the days of Fashoda [in 1898, Britain and France nearly went to war over a conflict in Fashoda, Sudan], forgotten the conflict over Cuba, forgotten “la Revanche”—the French and the English, the Tsar and the Senate of Washington, Germany and Holland donate money, send telegrams, extend the helping hand. A brotherhood of peoples against nature’s burning hatred, a resurrection of humanism on the ruins of human culture. The price of recalling their humanity was high, but thundering Mt. Pelee had a voice to catch their ear.

France weeps over the tiny island’s forty thousand corpses, and the whole world hastens to dry the tears of the Mother Republic. But how was it then, centuries ago, when France spilled blood in torrents for the Lesser and Greater Antilles? In the sea off the east coast of Africa lies a volcanic island—Madagascar: fifty years ago there we saw the disconsolate Republic who weeps for her lost children today, how she bowed the obstinate native people to her yoke with chains and the sword. No volcano opened its crater there: the mouths of French cannons spewed out death and annihilation; French artillery fire swept thousands of flowering human lives from the face of the earth until a free people lay prostrate on the ground, until the brown queen of the “savages” was dragged off as a trophy to the “City of Light.”

On the Asiatic coast, washed by the waves of the ocean, lie the smiling Philippines. Six years ago we saw the benevolent Yankees, we saw the Washington Senate at work there [a reference to the 1898 Spanish-American War, in which the U.S. took possession of the Philippines and Cuba—the war had taken place four years previously, not six]. Not fire-spewing mountains—there, American rifles mowed down human lives in heaps; the sugar cartel Senate today sends golden dollars to Martinique, thousands upon thousands, to coax life back from the ruins, sent cannon upon cannon, warship upon warship, golden dollars millions upon millions to Cuba, to sow death and devastation.

Yesterday, today—far off in the African south, where only a few years ago a tranquil little people lived by their labor and in peace, there we saw how the English wreak havoc, these same Englishmen who in Martinique save the mother her children and the children their parents: there we saw them stamp on human bodies, on children’s corpses with brutal soldiers boots, wading in pools of blood, death and misery before them and behind.

Ah, and the Russians, the rescuing, helping, weeping Tsar of All the Russians—an old acquaintance! We have seen you on the ramparts of Praga, where warm Polish blood flowed in streams and turned the sky red with its steam [in 1831, the Tsarist army bloodily suppressed a Polish uprising in Praga, a suburb of Warsaw]. But those were the old days. No! Now, only a few weeks ago, we have seen you benevolent Russians on your dusty highways, in ruined Russian villages eye to eye with the ragged, wildly agitated, grumbling mob; gunfire rattled, gasping muzhiks fell to the earth, red peasant blood mingled with the dust of the highway. They must die, they must fall because their bodies doubled up with hunger, because they cried out for bread, for bread!

And we have seen you too, oh Mother Republic, you tear-distiller. It was on May 23 of 1871: the glorious spring sun shone down on Paris; thousands of pale human beings in working clothes stood packed together in the streets, in prison courtyard, body to body and head to head; through loopholes in the walls, mitrailleuses thrust their bloodthirsty muzzles. No volcano erupted, no lava stream poured down. Your cannons, Mother Republic, were turned on the tight-packed crowd, screams of pain rent the air—over twenty thousand corpses covered the pavements of Paris!

And all of you—whether French and English, Russians and Germans, Italians and Americans—we have seen you all together once before in brotherly accord, united in a great league of nations, helping and guiding each other: it was in China. There too you forgot all quarrels among yourselves, there too you made a peace of peoples—for mutual murder and the torch. Ha, how the pigtails fell in rows before your bullets, like a ripe grainfield lashed by the hail! Ha, how the wailing women plunged into the water, their dead in their cold arms, fleeing the tortures of your ardent embraces!

And now they have all turned to Martinique, all one heart and one mind again; they help, rescue, dry the tears and curse the havoc-wreaking volcano. Mt. Pelee, great-hearted giant, you can laugh; you can look down in loathing at these benevolent murderers, at these weeping carnivores, at these beasts in Samaritan’s clothing. But a day will come when another volcano lifts its voice of thunder: a volcano that is seething and boiling, whether you need it or not, and will sweep the whole sanctimonious, blood-splattered culture from the face of the earth. And only on its ruins will the nations come together in true humanity, which will know but one deadly foe—blind, dead nature.

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.
********
Honor The Three L's-From The Pen Of Rosa Luxemburg- The Rose of The Revolution-The Old Mole (1917)

Rosa Luxemburg
The Old Mole
(April 1917)

First Published: Spartacus, No.5, May 1917.
Source: Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Political Writings, edited and introduced by Robert Looker.
Translated: (from the German) W.D. Graf.
Transcription/Markup: Ted Crawford/Brian Baggins with special thanks to Robert Looker for help with permissions.
Copyright: Random House, 1972, ISBN/ISSN: 0224005960. Printed with the permission of Random House. Luxemburg Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2004.

The outbreak of the Russian Revolution has broken the stalemate in the historical situation created by the continuation of the world war and the simultaneous failure of the proletarian class struggle. For three years Europe has been like a musty room, almost suffocating those living in it. Now all at once a window has been flung open, a fresh, invigorating gust of air is blowing in, and everyone in the room is breathing deeply and freely of it. In particular the ‘German liberators’ are anxiously watching the theatre of the Russian Revolution. The grudging respect of the German and Austro-Hungarian governments for the ‘cadgers and conspirators’ and the nervous tension with which our ruling classes receive every utterance by Cheidze and by the workers’ and soldiers’ soviet concerning the question of war and peace are now a tangible confirmation of the fact which only yesterday met the uncomprehending opposition of the socialists from the A.G.[1] This was the fact that the way out of the blind alley of the world war led not through diplomatic ‘agreements’ and Wilsonian messages, but solely and exclusively through the revolutionary action of the proletariat. The victors at Tannenberg and Warsaw now tremblingly await their own ‘liberation’ from the choking noose of war by the Russian proletariat, by the ‘mob in the street’!

Of course even with the greatest heroism the proletariat of one single country cannot loosen this noose. The Russian Revolution is growing of its own accord into an international problem. For the peace efforts of the Russian workers bring them into acute conflict not only with their own bourgeoisie, but also with the English, French and Italian bourgeoisie. The rumblings of the bourgeois press in all the Entente countries – The Times, Matin, Corriere della Sera, etc. – show that the capitalists of the West, these stout-hearted champions of ‘democracy’ and of the rights of the ‘small nations’, are watching, with gnashing teeth and hourly mounting rage, the advances made by the proletarian revolution that has checked the glorious era of the undivided rule of imperialism in Europe. The capitalists of the Entente now provide the strongest support for the Russian bourgeoisie against whom the Russian proletariat is revolting in its struggle for peace. In every way – diplomatically, financially, commercially – the Entente capitalists can exert the greatest pressure on Russia, and are surely doing so already. A liberal revolution? A provisional government of the bourgeoisie? How nice! These would be immediately recognized officially and welcomed as a guarantee of Russia’s military fitness, as an obedient instrument of international imperialism. But not one step further! If the Russian Revolution were to show its proletarian essence, if it were to turn logically against war and imperialism, then its cherished allies would bare their teeth and attempt to curb it by all possible means. Thus the socialist proletariat of England, France and Italy has now a bounden duty to raise the banner of revolt against war. Only through vigorous mass action in their own countries, against their own ruling classes, can they avoid openly betraying the Russian revolutionary proletariat, and prevent it bleeding to death in its unequal struggle against not only the Russian bourgeoisie, but also the Western bourgeoisie. The Entente powers’ intervention in the internal affairs of the Russian Revolution, which has already taken place, demands of the workers of these countries, as a matter of honour, that they cover the Russian Revolution by attacking the flank of their own ruling classes in order to compel them to make peace.

And now the German bourgeoisie! Torn between smiling sourly and weeping bitterly, they are watching the actions and growing power of the Russian proletariat. Lulled into habitually regarding its own working masses as merely military and political cannon fodder, the German bourgeoisie might well like to utilize the Russian proletariat to get itself out of the war as soon as possible. The hard-pressed German imperialism, which at this very moment is in extremely difficult straits both in the West and in Asia Minor, and at its wits’ end at home because of food problems, would like to extricate itself from the affair as quickly as possible and with some semblance of decorum in order to repair and arm itself calmly for further wars. Because of its proletarian-socialist tendency to peace, the Russian Revolution is intended to serve this purpose. Thus both German imperialism and the Entente powers are speculating on how they can profit by the revolution, only from opposite sides. The Western powers want to harness the wagon of imperialism to the bourgeois-liberal tendency of the revolution in order to carry on the war until the defeat of the German competitor. German imperialism would like to avail itself of the proletarian tendency of the revolution in order to extricate itself from the imminent threat of military defeat. Well, why not, gentlemen? German Social Democracy has served so excellently in masking your uncontrolled genocide as an ‘act of liberation’ against Russian Tsarism. Why shouldn’t Russian Social Democracy help free the stranded ‘liberators’ from the thorny situation of a war gone awry? The German workers helped wage war when it suited imperialism; the Russian workers are expected to make peace for the same reason.

However, Cheidze is not such an easy man to deal with as Scheidemann.[2] Despite a hasty ‘announcement’ by the Norddeutsche Allgemeine and hurriedly dispatching Scheidemann to Stockholm for ‘negotiations’, they can expect at best a kick in the pants from the Russian socialists of all shades. And as for a hastily managed ‘put-up job’, a separate peace with Russia, concluded at the eleventh hour, which the German ‘liberators’ would so like to see, and which they are hard pressed to make, the matter definitely cannot be arranged. If the Russian proletariat is to see the victory of its peaceful tendency, it must acquire an increasingly decisive overall position in the country, so that its class action grows to colossal proportions in scope, ardour, profundity and radicalism, and so that Social Democracy can either sweep along or cast aside all the still undecided classes who have been duped by bourgeois nationalism. With barely concealed horror, the German ‘liberation’ find themselves face to face with this clearly visible and inevitable, but so formidable, aspect of the peace tendency in Russia. They fear – and with good reason – that the Russian Moor, unlike his German counterpart, having done his work, will not want to ‘go’, and they fear the sparks which could fly from the neighbouring fire on to the East Prussian barns. They readily understand that only the deployment of the most extreme revolutionary energy in a comprehensive class struggle for political power in Russia is capable of effectively carrying through the struggle for peace. But at the same time they long for the good old days of Tsarism, for the ‘centuries-old faithful friendship with their Eastern neighbour’, Romanov absolutism. Tua res agitur! Your interests are at stake! This warning by a Prussian minister against the Russian Revolution endures in the soul of the German ruling classes, and the heroes of the Königsberg Trial[3] are all ‘as magnificent as the day they were born’. It would be expecting too much of the East Prussian police and military State to think it would allow a republic – and a republic freshly constructed and controlled by the revolutionary-socialist proletariat – to exist on its flank. And this East Prussian police spirit is compelled to acknowledge its secret aversion in the open market-place. The German ‘liberators’ today must publicly raise their right hands and swear that they have no intention of throttling the revolution and restoring dear pug-nosed Nicholas on the Tsarist throne! It was the Russian Revolution that forced the German ‘liberators’ to give themselves this resounding slap before the whole world. With this the Russian Revolution suddenly wiped from the slate of history the whole infamous lie which German Social Democracy and the official mythology of German militarism had lived on for three years. This is how the storm of revolution acts to cleanse, to eradicate lies, to sterilize; this is how it suddenly sweeps away with ruthless broom all the dung-heaps of official hypocrisy that have been accumulating since the outbreak of the world war and the silencing of the class struggle in Europe. The Russian Revolution tore away the mask of ‘democracy’ from the face of the Entente bourgeoisie, and from German militarism it tore away the mask of the would-be liberator from Tsarist despotism.

Nevertheless the question of peace is not quite as simple for the Russian proletariat as it would suit the purposes of Hindenburg and Bethmann to believe. The victory of the revolution, as well as its further tasks, requires more secure backing for the future. The outbreak of the revolution and the commanding position assumed by the proletariat has immediately transformed the imperialist war in Russia into that which the mendacious clap-trap of the ruling classes would have us believe it is in every country: a war of national defence. The beautiful dreams of Constantinople and the ‘national-democratic’ plans for reapportionment, which were to make the world so happy, were thrust back down the throats of Milyukov and his associates by the masses of workers and soldiers, and the slogan of national defence was put into practice. However, the Russian proletariat can end the war and make peace with a clear conscience only when their work – the achievement of the revolution and its continued unhampered progress – has been secured! They, the Russian proletariat, are today the only ones who really have to defend the cause of freedom, progress and democracy. And these things must today be preserved not only against the chicanery, the pressure and the war mania of the Entente bourgeoisie, but tomorrow above all – against the ‘fists’ of the German ‘liberators’. A semi-absolutist police and military state is not a good neighbour for a young republic shaken by internal struggles, and an imperialist soldiery schooled in blind obedience is not a good neighbour for a revolutionary proletariat which is making ready for the most intrepid class struggles of unforeseeable significance and duration.

Already the German occupation of an unfortunate ‘Independent Poland’ is a heavy blow against the Russian Revolution. The operational basis of the revolution is indeed limited when a country which was always one of the most explosive centres of the revolutionary movement, and which in 1905 marched at the head of the Russian Revolution, is completely eliminated and transformed socially into a graveyard, politically into a German barracks. Where then is the guarantee that tomorrow, when peace has been concluded, once German militarism has pried itself loose from the burden of war and resharpened its claws, it will not strike at the Russian proletariat’s flank in order to prevent the German semi-absolutist regime from being shaken?

The strangled ‘assurances’ of yesterday’s heroes of the Königsberg Trial – these are not enough to put our minds at rest. We still remember only too well the example of the Paris Commune. After all, the cat cannot leave the mouse alone. The world war has unleashed such an orgy of reaction in Germany, has revealed such a degree of militaristic omnipotence, has so stripped away the facade of greatness of the German working class as such, and has shown the foundations of so-called ‘political freedom’ in Germany to be so empty and flawed, that the prospects from this point of view have become a tragic and serious problem. The ‘danger of German militarism’ to imperialist England or France is of course humbug, war mythology, the cry of Germany’s rivals. The danger of German militarism to revolutionary, republican Russia, by contrast, is a very real fact. The Russian proletariat would be very careless politicians if they failed to ask themselves whether the German cannon-fodder that allows imperialism to lead it to the slaughterhouse on every battlefield today would not tomorrow obey the command to fight against the Russian Revolution. Of course Scheidemann, Heilmann and Lensche will already have a ‘Marxist’ theory to hand for it, and Legien and Schlicke will prepare a treaty for this slave-trade, all faithful to the patriotic tradition of the German princes who sold their native subjects as cannon-fodder abroad.

There is only one serious guarantee against these natural concerns for the future of the Russian Revolution: the awakening of the German proletariat, the attainment of a position of power by the German ‘workers and soldiers’ in their own country, a revolutionary struggle for peace by the German people. To make peace with Bethmann and Hindenburg would be a hideously difficult and hazardous enterprise with a dubious outcome. With the German ‘workers and soldiers’, peace would be concluded immediately and would rest upon solid foundations.

Thus the question of peace is in reality bound up with the unimpeded, radical development of the Russian Revolution. But the latter is in turn bound up with the parallel revolutionary struggles for peace on the part of the French, English, Italian and, especially, the German proletariat.

Will the international proletariat shift the responsibility for coming to terms with the European bourgeoisie on to the Russian workers’ shoulders, will it surrender this struggle to the imperialist mania of the English, French and Italian bourgeoisie? At the moment this is how the question of peace should really be formulated.

The conflict between the international bourgeoisie and the Russian proletariat thus reveals the dilemma of the last phase of the global situation: either world war to the verge of universal ruin or proletarian revolution – imperialism or socialism.

And here again we are confronted by our old betrayed slogans of revolution and socialism, words which we repeated a thousand times in our propaganda and which we failed to put into practice when, on the outbreak of war, the time came to give substance to them. They again presented themselves to every thinking socialist as the futile genocide dragged on. They presented themselves once more in an obviously negative form as a result of the wretched fiasco of the attempts of bourgeois pacifism at achieving a diplomatic agreement. Today we again see them in a positive light; they have become the substance of the work, the destiny and the future of the Russian Revolution. Despite betrayal, despite the universal failure of the working masses, despite the disintegration of the Socialist International, the great historical law is making headway – like a mountain stream which has been diverted from its course and has plunged into the depths, it now reappears, sparkling and gurgling, in an unexpected place.

Old mole. History, you have done your work well! At this moment the slogan, the warning cry, such as can be raised only in the great period of global change, again resounds through the International and the German proletariat. That slogan is: Imperialism or Socialism! War or Revolution! There is no third way!

Footnotes
[1] The Arbeitergemeinschaft, as the centrist opposition which formed the USPD was then known.

[2] In the original the author refers to the S.P.D. leader as Scheidemännchen, implying that he is an incomplete or little man, or a mannekin.

[3] The trial in 1904 of a number of German Social Democrats charged with assisting in the smuggling of revolutionary literature into Russia

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.