Rosa Luxemburg

Her Life and Legacy

J. Shulman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137349811
• eBook ISBN: 9781137343321
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Collection with new contributions to the debate from New Politics concerning the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg. Publishing Stephen Eric Bronner's essay 'Red Dreams and the New Millennium' along with the numerous responses to the piece, a new introduction, and an interview with Bronner stimulates the discussion around Luxemburg's legacy.

CHAPTER 1

Red Dreams and the New Millennium: Notes on the Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg*

Stephen Eric Bronner

Rosa Luxemburg always seemed larger than life. An intellectual and a social activist, possessed of enormous charisma, she exacted tremendous loyalty from her friends and often a grudging admiration from her enemies. She struggled both as a woman and a Jew in the socialist labor movement and died a martyr’s death at the hands of the Freikorps during the Spartacus Revolt of 1919. Her letters published following these events, and the castigation of her legacy during the “bolshevization” of the German Communist Party during the 1920s, provide abundant evidence of her courage, her sensitivity, and her humanism. None of this, however, gives her any particular salience for the present. Luxemburg disliked turning personal issues into political ones. She would probably have noted that there were many less heralded men and women—just as sensitive and just as brave—who died just as tragically. Luxemburg would have said: “Look to my work.”

Especially in our neoliberal culture, however, her form of political commitment is as unfashionable as the values she held dear. Luxemburg was consistent in criticizing a strategy based purely on the quest for economic reform and unwavering in her contempt for authoritarianism. She was a Marxist with a romantic vision of revolution and an economistic belief in the ultimate “breakdown” of capitalism. She remains the most important representative of a libertarian socialist tradition inspired by internationalism, economic justice, and a radical belief in democracy.

Appropriating her legacy, however, involves more than regurgitating the old slogans or finding the appropriate citations from her pamphlets and speeches. Luxemburg knew things had changed from the time of Marx, and she worried publicly over the “stagnation of Marxism”: the outmoded claims about political events inherited by the party regulars, including the independence of Poland, no less than the unresolved questions about the workings of capitalism. Since her death, even more profound changes have taken place. And what is good for the goose is good for the gander. The same critical method Luxemburg employed against Marx must now be turned against what appears inadequate about her own views. It is indeed a matter of freeing her thinking from an outmoded teleology and drawing the political consequences. Perhaps the following will offer some steps in the right direction.

* * *

Luxemburg was no slave of Marx. But she too believed that capitalism would create its own gravediggers. And if she liked to quote the famous line from Engels that the future hinged on the choice between “socialism or barbarism,” no less than most of her contemporaries, she felt confident about which would ultimately prove victorious. Everything about her politics derived from her dialectical understanding of capitalism and the revolutionary mission of the proletariat. Indeed, from the very beginning, she intuited that the political power of capital rested on the degree of organizational and ideological disunity among workers.

Luxemburg’s concern with internationalism followed from this insight and her dissertation written at the University of Zurich, The Industrial Development of Poland (1898), already provided the outline for her distinctive critique of “national self-determination.” Polish independence had been a demand of the Left for generations. In this work, however, Luxemburg argued that Polish independence would only slow the progress of capitalist development and thus the growth of the proletariat within the (Russian) empire as a whole. Unqualified support for Polish nationalism would privilege symbolism over the need for a constitutional republic to replace the imperial regime. The arguments of Marx and his followers, she maintained, were actually anti-Marxist and self-defeating.

Luxemburg saw any endorsement of nationalism as a breach of proletarian principle. Her work highlighted the way this ideology strengthens capitalism by dividing workers, justifies the wars in which they will fight, and inhibits their ability to deal with what she correctly considered an international economic system. She would develop these themes further in her major economic work: The Accumulation of Capital (1913). It, too, would prove critical of views taken for granted in the labor movement. Marx had claimed that capitalism is based on investment and without it the system will collapse. Given his insistence that production always outstrips demand, however, no logical reason exists why capitalists should continue to invest and reinvest. Something within the very structure of capitalism must, Luxemburg reasoned, allow for the consumption of its surplus and thereby offer an incentive for ongoing investment. Imperialism was her answer.

New markets and cheap resources, the prospect of modernizing precapitalist territories both within the nation-state and abroad, seemed to provide the safety valve for capitalism. She indeed viewed the existence of such territories as the condition for the survival of capitalism. Should they ever become capitalist in their own right, which the dynamics of economic production guaranteed, then the international system would suffer an immediate “breakdown.” But that remained for the future. In the meantime, spurred by their own self-interest, capitalist states would have no other choice than to compete with one another frantically for a steadily diminishing set of colonies. Militarism and nationalism subsequently become intrinsic elements of imperialist strategies generated by capitalism: war is built into the system and incapable of reform. Thus, Luxemburg called for revolution.

* * *

No less than most Social Democrats of her generation, Luxemburg longed for a republic. Such was, in fact, the way in which the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was generally understood in the decades between the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871 and the triumph of the Bolsheviks in 1917. The European labor movement prior to the First World War functioned on a continent still dominated by monarchies and the commitment to a republic was the political dividing line between Right and Left. Conservative programs everywhere called for authoritarian institutions and restraints on “the masses.” Social Democracy alone provided the alternative vision. Insisting that the working class would expand with the expansion of capitalism, assuming that its parties embodied the proletarian class interest, it only made sense to call for the creation of political institutions in which the labor movement could organize freely and ultimately rule as the majority. Therein lies the connection between Marxism and republicanism.

Luxemburg was a romantic, but never fully a utopian: the new socialist society was always identified with a certain institutional arrangement for the practice of politics. Her critique of “revisionism” in Reform or Revolution (1900), which made her famous throughout the labor movement, was far less based upon contempt for reform tout court than on her contention that an unqualified “economism” undermined the revolutionary commitment necessary for instituting a republic. Luxemburg herself supported “revisionists” in various electoral campaigns and fought for numerous reforms including the 40-hour week. She did not reject reform out of hand, but only insisted that it should be employed to whet the appetite of the masses for more radical political demands. Luxemburg was no different than Kautsky or Lenin or most other members of the socialist Left regarding the connection between reform and revolution. She was unique only in her understanding of what was necessary to bring the revolution about and the radical democratic purpose it should serve. This was what she sought to articulate in The Mass Strike, the Party, and the Trade Unions (1906).

The Russian Revolution of 1905, what Trotsky called the “dress rehearsal” for 1917, was the pamphlet’s inspiration. A series of spontaneous strikes beginning in Baku in 1902 gradually engulfed the Russian Empire. These seemingly spontaneous actions were, of course, indirectly influenced by years of underground party activity. Luxemburg extrapolated from these events in order to develop her general political theory. She believed that the party should now preoccupy itself less with immediate organizational interests than with forming the perquisite consciousness required for the political struggle. Thus, committed radicals should foster a certain “creative tension” between party and base in order to mitigate the bureaucratic tendencies of the former and the adventurist experiments of the latter.

This tension was exemplified, according to Luxemburg, in the mass strike. Here is the core of her notion regarding the “self-administration” of the working class. Deriving from a tradition reaching back over the Paris Commune to Rousseau, she understood democracy not merely in terms of securing civil liberties, but also inherently demanding its practical exercise. Socialism must therefore logically involve the extension of democracy rather than its constriction. The purpose of the labor movement was not merely the introduction of reformist legislation, but the creation of an institutional arrangement wherein workers might administer their own affairs without alienation or the impediments of bureaucracy. Her beautiful letters, written amid the factory takeovers in Warsaw during 1905, evidence her enthusiasm for the burgeoning “soviet” or “council” movement and the introduction of democracy into everyday life.

But this new enthusiasm never fully supplanted her original goal. Luxemburg intuited that only a republic could guarantee the maintenance of civil liberties. Genuine democracy is not simply equivalent with the will of the majority, she realized, but also with the ability to protect the minority. Her famous line from “The Russian Revolution” (1918) was not (merely) an aperçu. There is a sense in which her entire political project rested on the belief that “freedom is only and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.” Luxemburg foresaw how the Communist suppression of bourgeois democracy in 1917 would unleash a dynamic of terror ultimately paralyzing the soviets and undermining public life in the nation as a whole. Even in 1919, while the Spartacus Revolt was brewing in Germany, Luxemburg vacillated between her traditional commitment to a republic and the new popularity of workers’ councils. Only when she was outvoted would she completely identify with the “soviet republic” (Raterepublik) and the policy of her less sober followers’ intent on emulating the events in Russia.

The Russian Revolution indeed inspired revolutions all over Europe and the formation of Communist parties around the world. Luxemburg was skeptical about the plans for a Communist International. She was fearful about its domination by the fledgling Soviet Union and the identification of socialism with its national interests. Neither authoritarianism nor nationalism was understood by her as some historical “deviation” demanded by the present, which the dialectic would set right in the future. She instead considered both as infringements upon that future. In the same vein, neither the party nor the revolution should serve as an end unto itself. It was the freedom of working people with which Rosa Luxemburg was concerned. This ultimately made her a rebel in both major camps of the labor movement. It is also what makes her salient for the present.

* * *

Rosa Luxemburg lived during what has appropriately been called the “golden age of Marxism.” The years between 1889 and 1914 witnessed a growing labor movement with a thriving public sphere whose political parties were everywhere making ever-greater claims to power. It was a time when each could see the socialist future appearing as present. That time is over. Marxism can no longer be construed as a “science”; the industrial proletariat is on the wane; and the labor movement is obviously no longer what it once was.

“Actually existing socialism” had its chance and little from history suggests that workers’ councils can either deal with a complex economy or guarantee civil liberties. New utopian speculations, moreover, cannot compensate for the lack of any serious alternative to the liberal republican state. The institutional goal of the revolution initially sought by Luxemburg has, in short, been realized. Presenting socialism as the other, the emancipated society, no longer makes sense. It is necessary to approach the matter in a different way.

Modern capitalism is no longer the system described by Charles Dickens. Its liberal state has been used to improve the economic lives of workers, foster participation, and provide the realistic hope for a redress of basic grievances. Luxemburg was wrong: the choice is not between socialism and barbarism. Not only has history shown that the two are not mutually exclusive, it has also shown there is much room in between. The issue is no longer “capitalism” in the abstract, or the future erection of “socialism,” but the pressing need for a response to neoliberal elites intent upon rolling back the gains made by the labor movement in the name of market imperatives.

Or putting it another way: the contemporary problem is not the prevalent commitment to reform, which concerned Rosa Luxemburg, but the lack of such a commitment. Revolution is no longer the issue in the Western democracies and, in turn, this has general implications for the meaning of socialism under modern conditions: whatever else the term might imply, it must initially be understood as a practice intent upon mitigating the whip of the market through the state and abolishing the exercise of arbitrary power by the state.

Such an economic and political enterprise is now, furthermore, predicated on little more than an ethical commitment. Teleology, if not ideology, has lost its allure. Capitalism can survive and, more importantly, most people believe it will. But, ironically, there is a sense in which the very success of neoliberalism may attest to the validity of Luxemburg’s claim that the fight for economic reform is a “labor of Sisyphus.” Without an articulated alternative and a meaningful form of revolutionary agency, it is still necessary to roll the rock of reform back up the hill. This cannot be left in the hands of Social Democratic, or ex-Communist parties, intoxicated by neoliberalism and the unprincipled compromises associated with the “third way” or what is now being called “progressive governance.” Indeed, without forgetting the institutional arrangements in which real politics takes place, those with a more radical commitment to social justice must now increasingly seek new forms of alliance between workers and members of the new social movements.

Justice is a river with many tributaries. Most women and gays, minorities and environmentalists, have a stake in protecting the gains made by labor in the past as surely as labor has a stake in furthering many of their concerns in the future. The mass demonstrations contesting the inequalities and devastation generated by global capitalism, which began in 1999 in Seattle and triggered other mass demonstrations elsewhere, provide a case in point: they not only exerted real pressure on the Democratic Party, and momentarily united competing groups in a spirit of internationalism, but also raised precisely those calls for international labor standards and environmental protection repressed in the mainstream discourse.

The genuinely progressive response to globalization still requires formulation. But nothing so demeans the internationalist spirit cherished by Rosa Luxemburg like the current insistence of some leftists upon the primacy of ethnic aspirations or national sovereignty over the international obligations of states to the planetary community. The proletarian internationals of the past have collapsed. The only institutions capable of furthering internationalism are now intertwined with capitalist interests and they tend to privilege strong states over their weaker brethren. But I think Luxemburg would have realized that the choice between furthering relatively progressive ends through imperfect institutions and simply opposing their empowerment is no choice at all. She was never fooled into believing that insistence upon national sovereignty would align her with the masses of the formerly colonized world rather than the corrupt elites who still rule them in the most brutal fashion.

Luxemburg may not have anticipated the rise of national liberation movements. She was surely mistaken in believing that the First World War had put an end to purely national conflicts and she ignored questions concerning the right to resist invasion. But there was a way in which she understood nationalism far better than her opponents. Luxemburg realized that nationalism, like authoritarianism, has its own dynamic and that it cannot simply be manipulated for socialist purposes or for the prospect of economic gain. Instead of relying upon historical “laws,” or dialectical sophistry, Luxemburg always correctly insisted on establishing a plausible relation between means and ends.

Diseases like cholera, dysentery, and AIDS are ravaging continents. Entire species are disappearing, global warming is taking place, pollution is intensifying, garbage is littering the planet. All this while a global society is taking shape in which wealth and resources are evermore inequitably distributed, political power is evermore surely devolving into the hands of transnational corporations, and petty ideologues are evermore confidently whipping up atavistic passions with the most barbaric consequences. The nation-state is incapable of dealing with most of these developments, and the usual invocations of national sovereignty, or the disclaimer on any form of international intervention under any circumstances, are simply an abdication of responsibility.

No less than Machiavelli and Kant, in this vein, Luxemburg would have agreed with the dictum: “He who wills the end also wills the means thereto.” Either planetary issues of this sort will have the possibility of being dealt with in the international arena through existing international institutions with the powers of sanctioning transgressors or they will assuredly not be dealt with at all. Human rights and new forms of transnational welfare policy constitute the only concrete prospects for a livab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction  Reintroducing Red Rosa
• Chapter 1 Red Dreams and the New Millennium: Notes on the Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg
• Chapter 2 A Critical Reply to Stephen Eric Bronner
• Chapter 3 A Second Reply to Stephen Eric Bronner
• Chapter 4 Rosa Redux: A Reply to David Camfield and Alan Johnson
• Chapter 5 Why Should We Care What Rosa Luxemburg Thought?
• Chapter 6 Socialist Metaphysics and Luxemburg’s Legacy
• Chapter 7 Rosa Redux Ad Absurdum
• Chapter 8 Moving On: New Replies to New Critics
• Chapter 9  Between Gospel and Church: Resisting the Canonization of Rosa Luxemburg
• Chapter 10 Where Do We Go from Here? Rosa Luxemburg and the Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
• Chapter 11 Contra Bronner on Luxemburg and Working-Class Revolution
• Appendix  Reflections on Red Rosa: An Interview with Stephen Eric Bronner
• Notes on Contributors
• Index