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NEWS & LETTERS, January-February 2005From the Writings of Raya DunayevskayaLuxemburg as revolutionaryEditor's note The life and legacy of the Polish and German revolutionary and feminist, Rosa Luxemburg, is achieving new attention 1. in light of capital becoming ever more globalized in the 21st century, 2. as evidenced by a recent international conference on Rosa Luxemburg in China, reported in "China as global factory is incubator of future revolt" in this issue, and 3. as reflected in the vigorous international interest in a new volume of writings, THE ROSA LUXEMBURG READER. Also because January is Luxemburg-Liebknecht month, a commemoration marking the murders of those two uncompromising Marxists in 1919, we publish a critical review by Raya Dunayevskaya of a collection of letters edited by Steven Bronner. The review originally appeared in NEWS & LETTERS in August-September 1979, and can be found in THE RAYA DYNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION, 7041. * * * The multi-dimensionality and revolutionary internationalism of Rosa Luxemburg is well set forth in this collection of Rosa Luxemburg letters in the way in which the very first sentence of Bronner’s Introduction leads to Rosa’s statement: "I, too, am a land of boundless possibilities." That first section of "Reflections on Rosa Luxemburg" began with "There is always a tradition of liberation that stands in opposition to the heritage that a given society preserves and propagates." It is this other tradition--revolutionary in the most total sense, that is to say, in its opposition both against capitalism and the reformist deviation within the revolutionary movement--that would have been easier to grasp if the readers had not to confront letters from 1894 to 1919 in one lump sum without a single distinction other than the year’s date at the top of each page. It is true that Professor Bronner’s substantive Introduction situates Luxemburg in the context of her era. But it is only natural that readers turning to THE LETTERS OF ROSA LUXEMBURG would want to hear her in her own words and sense the direction of her thoughts, actions, development before they have reached the 200th page of those letters. ‘HEROISM OF MASSES’ VS. OPPORTUNISM OF LEADERS Because this book needs to be read by ever wider audiences, let me introduce two divisions into these letters to enable readers at once to meet Rosa Luxemburg--Polish, German, Russian, international revolutionary. The first half of the letters could be titled: "'Heroism of Masses’ vs. Opportunism of Leaders"; and the second half: "From Theory and Anti-War Agitation to Prison and Revolution." It is true she used the expression "heroism of the masses" to describe the magnificent actions of the Warsaw workers in the first Russian Revolution, 1905, whereas this collection of letters begins in 1894, with a letter of Luxemburg to her colleague and lover, Leo Jogiches, in which she complains that his letters are wholly devoted to the "CAUSE" and tell her nothing of him personally or of the organizational and factional differences with the Russians. But it is even more true that, from the very start of her break with bourgeois society--when she was only a teenager, yet was already under police surveillance and had to leave Poland for Switzerland, where she met her life-long collaborator Leo Jogiches--"the heroism of the masses" was precisely what won her commitment to the revolutionary movement. She never veered from that for a single moment. However, whereas that 1894 letter from Paris spoke so personally and very nearly "obediently," all one has to do is read the very next set of letters, as she reached Germany in 1898 to see a quite different Luxemburg. Not only does she take issue with Jogiches’ advice, but she reaches such immediate heights theoretically on the most burning question raging in the German Social Democracy--the very first appearance of reformism--that it is her analysis, REFORM OR REVOLUTION, that is the most comprehensive and profound answer to Bernstein. It becomes a standard for all revolutionaries, and has remained so to this day. Not only that, Luxemburg’s letters disclose something still more extensive: the vision of a genius anticipating capitalism’s development into modern imperialism before the word had been "invented." Listen to Luxemburg telling Jogiches about "Shifts in World Politics" ever since Japan’s attack on China, 1895, and Russia’s and England’s attack on Persia and Afghanistan: "From that, the European antagonisms in Africa have received new impulses; there, too, the struggle is breaking out with new force (Fashoda, Delegoa, Madagascar). It’s clear that the dismemberment of Asia and Africa is the final limit beyond which European politics no longer has room to unfold...the European powers will have no choice other than throwing themselves on one another, until the period of the final crisis sets in within politics..." The letter was dated January 9, 1899! (p. 72). THEORY, PRISON, REVOLUTION Naturally, no book review, much less subheadings, can do justice to the multiplicity of topics and years (1894–1919) covered in THE LETTERS OF ROSA LUXEMBURG; the first subheading made no such claim. It did, I hope, help point a direction, both as to the objective situation and the subjective developments in Luxemburg’s life. She no sooner set foot in Germany than she began the fight against reformism. Her "German period" ended long before World War I broke out and revealed the betrayal of the German Social Democracy. Ever since the first Russian Revolution, 1905–06, when Luxemburg was still close to Karl Kautsky, she began to "speak Russian" as she described the "heroism of the masses": "in all factories, committees, elected by the workers, have arisen ‘on their own,’ which decide on all matters relating to working conditions . . . the organization advances indefatigably. In spite of martial law... the work is being carried out just as if political freedom were already a reality" (pp. 114-115). By 1910 she broke completely with Kautsky. As she generalized her experience into the analysis of THE MASS STRIKE, THE PARTY, AND THE TRADE UNIONS and worked to apply it in Germany, Karl Kautsky’s abstract revolutionism and his "theory of attrition" horrified her. She sensed his opportunism which would lead to betrayals. She called it "the servility of the theoretician" back in 1910. Just as her total break with Kautsky, four full years before the outbreak of war, long before anyone else, Lenin included, sensed any defect in the then most outstanding revolutionary, so her anti-war agitation in 1913 led the Kaiser to cite her "for treason" before there was actual war. Prof. Bronner has caught the character of Rosa Luxemburg as prisoner beautifully: "It is easy to forget how drab and debilitating prison life can actually be. Rosa Luxemburg’s letters serve as a reminder...Rosa Luxemburg reacts against the drudgery of prison life...She searches for beauty in the cracks of existence, and in response to the boredom of isolation, she watches insects, feeds her titmice, and observes the manifold diversity of nature." That was very far from all she did in that hellhole. Not only did she continue her leadership, theoretical and political, of the anti-imperialist war, and also produce a minor masterpiece of literary criticism of Korolenko (not to mention the constant flow of magnificent "personal" letters, especially to Mathilde Wurm, when she suddenly calls upon Penthesilea, the queen of the Amazons). No, she is also involved in strict theory, the phenomenal ANTI-CRITIQUE, directed against the critics of her greatest* theoretical work, ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL. They are, in fact, a single work. Unfortunately, as her letter to Hans Diefenbach discloses, her rage was directed not alone against those she called "Marx’s epigones," who took issue with her critique of Volume II of CAPITAL, but even against "the famous first volume of Marx’s KAPITAL, with its profuse rococo ornamentation in the Hegelian style" (p. 185). None of this, however, diverted in any way from what dominated her whole life, in theory or practice, in or out of prison: REVOLUTION. Even in criticism, for example, her praise of the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky "who dared" was unequivocal. Above all, there was the unending preparation for, and finally actual participation in, the German Revolution which finally freed her from prison. Because revolution was her life--or as she expressed it: "The Revolution is magnificent; all else is bilge"--the then-ruling Social Democracy wanted her dead. Where the Kaiser hadn’t succeeded, the Frei-korps was incited to brutally murder her and throw her body into the Landwehr Canal. THE LETTERS OF ROSA LUXEMBURG ends with a letter in which she enclosed the first issue of ROTE FAHNE, organ of Spartacus League, transformed into the Communist Party, and calling for all power to the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils. It was dated January 4, 1919. Within 11 days she was dead. But they could not kill her ideas. Her revolutionary legacy lives on; for no other generation does her life’s work bear as much relevance as for ours. ------------ * The designation "greatest" means it is Luxemburg’s most important theoretical work, not that I agree with it. Elsewhere I have taken issue with it. See my "Analysis of Rosa Luxemburg’s ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL," included as Appendix to STATE-CAPITALISM AND MARX'S HUMANISM.... [Much of that analysis was brought into and developed as chapter 3, "Marx’s and Luxemburg’s Theories of Accumulation of Capital, its Crises and its Inevitable Downfall," in ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION.--Editor.] |
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