From The Marxist Archives -In Honor Of The 75th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International-
Workers Vanguard No. 951
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29 January 2010
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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.
**********
