Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from a talk delivered by Rida Vaquas to the Historical Materialism Conference in London in November 2024, where Volume Five of the Rosa Luxemburg Complete Works was launched.
In 1967, the Marxist CLR James gave a talk in Canada. He opened with “In 1914, the world broke down.” As a boy at school, he learned of three massacres – the death tolls never exceeding a few thousand. Now, in the world after World War One: “unless you kill about a million people you can’t even make the front page.” The story of Luxemburg’s contributions in this volume, no. 5 of the Complete Works, is a story about confronting that moral apocalypse – and it was experienced as nothing other than an apocalypse. On 4 August, the day the SPD voted for war credits, Luxemburg reported to Luise Kautsky that she felt close to suicide. She understated it. Her collaborator Hugo Eberlein, later murdered in the Stalinist purges, hurried to her flat after the vote in the Reichstag. To him, Luxemburg said “I will put a bullet in my head. That will be the best protest against the betrayal of the party, and maybe it will bring the working masses back to their senses.” On 4 August 1914, socialism as a living tradition, as understood and upheld by millions of people in Germany and elsewhere, disintegrated. The vote for war was qualitatively different to the debates and divisions preceding it – even if particular policies boded ill, such as the voting for a wealth tax in connection with a military spending bill in 1913. By voting for war, German Social Democrats chose to end the world as they knew it. They might not have known it at the time. Even as late as 1915, the SPD Prussian Landtag deputy Heinrich Ströbel would speak of temporary “errors and confusions” but it became clearer with each day of the war – a gulf had opened.
Luxemburg’s work in this volume is best understood as a creative and singularly intelligent response to the end of the world: an attempt to preserve the very best virtues of the socialist tradition against a war that threatened to devour them. She said as much on 17 September 1914, protesting the papers of the party majority rebuking foreign parties for raising doubts about Social Democracy’s course: “But for workers of all nations, there are the laws of higher class morals, the Social Democratic ethos, that should not fall mute even under the fiercest thunder of guns… We ought not forget that, despite the once full coffers and large numbers of our organisations, without the Internationale we are morally nothing as socialists.” In small things, and in big things, Luxemburg thought comrades had an obligation to comport themselves to the principles established over the course of the last half a century. For most Social Democrats, class morals went out the window, breaking against the hard laws of necessity. For Luxemburg, they did not.
People who like to think of themselves as socialists sometimes dismiss the relevance of Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, even Trotsky to our times. These people, they say, lived in revolutionary situations, revolutionary times. How can we apply the lessons of a revolution to our times, where such a prospect seems so far away? Surely our situation calls for different measures, different tactics, and perhaps even different principles. Our red lines, it’s suggested, cannot be the same as our predecessors. The fact that this volume starts with the debates in 1910 and 1911, and ends with the last writings before her death, in the middle of the German Revolution, is, I think, a response to that question in itself. No one becomes a revolutionary when the moment requires it. Rosa Luxemburg could act in the revolution as she did precisely because she had decades of training and education behind her in ‘non-revolutionary situations’: that she outlined her revolutionary outlook at every political opportunity she had. Whether it was on a point about German tariff policy, a strike in Silesia or a worker’s death in Berlin: she raised the final goal, the abolition of exploitation of person by person.
It is easy to forget, since the Russian Revolution came only three years after it, that when the first voices were raised against the war in the socialist movement, they did so with no expectation of success: and any expectations they did have were swiftly diminished. Shortly after the vote for war, Luxemburg sent 300 telegrams to local officials who might be against the war for an urgent conference. Clara Zetkin was the only one to reply. As late as 1915, Alexander Helphand, or Parvus, visited Lenin in Switzerland, ready to bombard him with ways to turn the war into a revolutionary opportunity. Lenin, distrustful of Helphand, replied by telling him about his dreams of a socialist journal. Even in January 1917 Lenin confided in his friends that he might not live to see “the decisive battles of the coming revolution”. The struggle against the war, on socialist principles, had to be waged by a conscious minority at grave risk to themselves, before any unrest started.
The mass strike debates, in the years after 1905, and in particular between 1910 and 1911, are not removed from the story that takes place after 1914. They were, in themselves, a form of schooling – a way of clarifying thought, and a way of disseminating that thought to the widest layer of people: so that when the world collapsed, when everything stopped making sense, there were resources at hand to act. For Luxemburg and her cothinkers, to discuss the mass strike for suffrage, or to prevent a war, was to help make it possible when it was necessary. The clear differences opening up in the German party after the 1905 Russian revolution, and the large-scale strikes across Europe, were, in a very real sense, a battle for the soul of Social Democracy. It is in the aftermath of the 1905 revolutions in Russia, after all, that Kautsky suggests that he and Rosa Luxemburg began to part ways. The debates within the German party, and the International more broadly, and the variety of ways in which thousands of workers participated in socialist politics, constituted a tradition for Rosa Luxemburg – one that could only be kept alive by consistent engagement. When Luxemburg defends Karl Liebknecht following his arrest after May Day 1916 in this volume, she says: “what did Liebknecht do? He only did what the resolutions of the international congresses, what the program, the Party Congress decisions, the principles, and the traditions obligate all socialists to do.”
The first generation of leaders of the Communist Party, almost entirely wiped out by the Freikorps by the end of 1919, Jogiches, Liebknecht, Mehring, did not come out of the ether in the chaos of the war. They were trained in the Social Democratic tradition and brought their understandings gained from political experience within that tradition. And we can see that in their actions immediately as the uprising breaks out in November. Leo Jogiches, in a true demonstration of his personality, upon being freed from prison “in the name of the revolutionary proletariat”, immediately says “how could you waste time freeing me, I assume there’s much more important work to be done!” But the first thing Luxemburg and Jogiches do when freed from prison is attempt to take over the offices of a local paper, and once that’s successful, they search for a printer they can afford, Jogiches being a veteran haggler. This is an important detail: the first thing they are doing to rally the Left in Germany is creating the apparatus of a party. Luxemburg, incidentally, wanted to recreate the SPD press in miniature, with specific papers for women, children and soldiers, although she was dissuaded from this as it was evidently impossible.
I bring out this detail because it matters: In attempting to act as a revolutionary in a revolutionary situation, Luxemburg and her comrades had to turn to the question of a party. What’s contained in this volume is a serious reckoning with what it means to be a revolutionary party – in the demise of an International that proved to be anything but. In 1918, in the ‘Fragments on the International and Its History’, Luxemburg attempts to make an account of what she sees as the Second Period of Socialism, from the fall of the Commune to the outbreak of the World War One, in which she sums up the contradiction in Social Democracy: “The cleft in the entity of the workers’ movem[ent]: theory, revolutionary; practice, purely bourgeois. That’s why possibility in the party for both extreme revol[utionaries] and for purely bourg[eois] elements (revisionists).” Bebel, she suggests, papered over this contradiction and conserved the two extremes in one boat. This was, in part, an accounting of her own role in Social Democracy. When she arrived from Switzerland, she was feted for defending party orthodoxy against attempted revisions in the theory. Kautsky recognised her as “having made no small contribution to revolutionary thought winning out”. But insofar as Social Democracy was salvaged from losing its revolutionary end goal, she herself preserved the contradiction that kept it together. When Luxemburg and others sought to make the practice of the party consistent with the theory, especially in the wake of 1905, they were rebuffed. They could point to party congress resolutions until the cows came home, but the party would maintain a parliamentarist practice, in which collaboration with bourgeois parties, even voting for particular budgets as the South Germans did, would be disavowed rhetorically but face little consequence.
But Rosa Luxemburg’s activity in the years before 1914 did not amount to providing revolutionary window dressing for bourgeois practice, and it would be demeaning to say that participation in over a decade of debates of German Social Democracy was in vain, or fruitless. By participating in the debates of the largest organised workers’ movement, avowedly socialist, she spoke to even tens of thousands of workers across the county, raising the political level of the movement: heightening the range of possibilities for action by talking about, by insisting they were questions worth discussing. One of the early pieces by Luxemburg in this volume is a discussion of the mass strike to metal workers in 1910, at the extraordinary congress of their union. She talked for one and a half hours, charting the history of the mass strike in the decade since 1900 – its transformation from an anarchist panacea to a political weapon deployed for the conquest of political rights. There is a purpose to this and she makes it clear. For her “every single person among the masses has to understand” that what’s at stake is a cause so great that they should be prepared to give their life for it. It turned out, to her horror, that many more could be coerced into giving up their lives for the German Reich than for their fellow workers. Her writing about revolution after 1914 is an attempt to answer this question: why did the Social Democratic tradition – with its theoretical force, its principles affirmed time and again, and its strength in numbers and in idealism – fail to rise to the challenge it was made for?
In 1918, she came closest to the analysis of Kautsky when she suggested that rejecting war credits, in itself, would be illogical from the point of view of Social Democracy. You could not reject the war in the Reichstag without calling for resistance ‘all down the line’. But if you were in a position to call resistance ‘all down the line’, you should have been able to prevent the outbreak of war altogether. Kautsky had a pessimistic spin on this, if the proletariat was too weak to prevent war, it was not strong enough to overthrow the government to end it. Luxemburg, in 1918, if not in 1914, recognised this was internally logical. The difference was that she thought it was a choice deliberately made – not imposed by the external conditions, but by the reluctance of Social Democracy to take its own theory seriously – or to be true to their words. The choice in 1914 was imperialist world war or proletarian revolution. That the latter course did not appear as a meaningful option to German Social Democracy was not a question of statistics – of organised vs unorganised workers, the party’s funds – nor was it a question of a general mood at the time. There were hundreds of thousands of workers turning up to anti-war demonstrations organised by the party even as late as the last weekend of July. It was a consequence of the political decisions they had made before the war, decisions which altered the character of the party to the point that they rendered revolution off the table.
Why was revolution on the table for Luxemburg? She had no less a mind for statistics than Kautsky – her doctoral dissertation about the industrial development of Poland remains a crucial text in the literature. Luxemburg often justified her optimism by faith in the laws of historical development. These are often misunderstood, and derided, as suggesting the essentially teleological perspective of Marxism, in which victory is handed down to the working class by the world spirit when the conditions are opportune. But when she speaks about history, it’s clear that she means something very different. In the ‘Founding Congress of the Communist Party’ she says: “socialism will become a historical necessity, which we can experience today in the most exact meaning of the word. Socialism has become a necessity, not merely because the proletariat is no longer willing to live under the conditions that the capitalist classes serve up to them, but also because, if the proletariat does not fulfil its class duties by realizing socialism, then we shall all face ruination together.”
Rosa Luxemburg places a tremendous amount of faith on idealism in the masses. In her speeches about the mass strike at the beginning of this volume; she insists it is idealism that provides the resources for a mass strike, not ready money. In “What does the Spartacus League Want” in December 1918, she says the moral foundations of the socialist society are “the highest idealism in the interest of the whole, the most rigorous self-discipline, and the true civic sense of the masses.” Rosa Luxemburg saw no reason why every single worker could not develop those qualities. To her, the necessity of overthrowing capitalism was as clear as daylight and she had faith that others would be able to see it as clearly as her too. Luxemburg knew all too well that nothing was guaranteed, that history is a moral choice made by people, who always maintain freedom of action, and who can often fail. What is “necessary” is not an objective inevitability; there is not a time where all the historical conditions fall into place for a perfect revolution. There is only the patient work of building up consciousness of the goal, of underlining the necessity of action, and of learning how to struggle through active engagement in struggle.
We are living in the ruination after the failure of the revolutions. We are living in a great massacre, from Palestine to Sudan to Ukraine. We are living in a catastrophic age, in which there’s no emergency brake. It will keep on going, perhaps for many years after this, even if everyone here committed to attempting to overthrow capitalism tomorrow. Luxemburg does not give us a recipe for success, but she gives us strategies to consider, and characteristics that we need to build among ourselves. But what we can learn from Luxemburg are the virtues of hope and courage in the most hopeless situations. And we can learn how those virtues are to be cultivated, in the daily struggles waged by a party united by a particular goal.
