Rosa, Spark of Revolution

William Smaldone

Rosa Luxemburg: The Incendiary Spark
Essays by Michael Löwy
Edited by Paul Le Blanc with a foreword by Helen C. Scott.
Translated by Dan La Botz, Paul Le Blanc, and Lynne Sunderland
Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2024, $19.95 paperback.

DURING THE FIRST two decades of the 20th century, Rosa Luxemburg was one of European socialism’s most trenchant Marxist thinkers and controversial political activists. Born in 1871 in Zamosc, a small town in Congress Poland, she was raised in Warsaw in a Reform Jewish family of modest means.

Growing up in a household that opposed the Tsarist regime and supported the education of girls, Rosa became a precocious student fluent in Polish, Russian, German and (later on) French. She joined Poland’s budding illegal socialist movement at the age of 16, and eventually fled to Zurich, Switzerland, which had one of the few European universities enrolling women.

After taking courses in a wide range of fields including philosophy, zoology, history and mathematics, she earned a Ph.D. in economics with a dissertation on “The Industrial Development of Poland” in 1897. From there she moved to Berlin, where she became a major figure in the German and Polish social democratic movements.

Her contributions to Marxist theory and her radical political views made her a lightning rod in international socialist politics until her murder at the hands of counter-revolutionary soldiers during the German Revolution of 1918-1919.

Given Luxemburg’s background and, as we will see, her commitment to international socialist revolution, it is fitting then that Michael Löwy has produced this outstanding collection of essays on her thought and politics. Born in 1938 to Austrian-Jewish immigrant parents in São Paulo, Brazil, Löwy also became active in the socialist movement as a teenager.

At age 16 his first encounter with Luxemburg’s writings resulted in “a passion” for her life and work that transformed him into a lifelong “Luxemburgist.” After earning a degree in the social sciences at the University of São Paulo in 1960, he completed his Ph.D. thesis on “The Young Marx’s Theory of Revolution” at the University of Paris in 1964, where he worked with Marxist philosopher and cultural sociologist Lucien Goldmann, also an admirer of Luxemburg.

Löwy’s interests are deeply interdisciplinary and transnational. His books treat such subjects as Marxist theory, cultural sociology, revolution and ideology. He has published studies of the ideas of Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Che Guevara, Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka, among others.

While working as a professor at the University of Paris and as the Research Director in social sciences at the French National Center of Scientific Research, Löwy also remained engaged with the socialist politics of his native country as well as those of France.*

Exploring Luxemburg

Written over the course of several decades, the 10 essays collected here are not intended to provide a comprehensive overview of Luxemburg’s life and work. Instead, they aim to examine “certain aspects of Luxemburg’s beliefs, whether known, unknown, or poorly understood,” and to look at them with fresh eyes. (xi)

Löwy is convinced that Luxemburg’s contributions to our understanding of history, political philosophy, and Marxist epistemology, are unique, of lasting value, and indispensable to the revival of Marxism in our time. The book is not a hagiography, however, and Löwy interprets Luxemburg’s writings, especially in the sphere of economics and on the national question, with a critical eye.

While three of Lowy’s essays examine how specific thinkers, such as Trotsky, Lukacs and the Romanian philosopher and historian Georges Haupt, engaged with Luxemburg’s theoretical and practical work, the remainder focus on specific topics including her concept of “Socialism or Barbarism;” the “philosophy of praxis” in her thought; revolution and socialist transformation; internationalism; and the relationships of revolution to freedom, Western imperialism to primitive communism, and ideology to knowledge.

As Helen Scott notes, the contributions that Löwy clearly considers a part of Luxemburg’s lasting legacy are her systematic critiques of imperialism and militarism, her unique and powerful analysis of the process of capital accumulation, her commitment to democracy as a fundamental element of the transition to socialism, her view of the mass strike as a revolutionary tool of the workers, her dialectical view of the bourgeois state, and her grasp of revolution as a process. (ix)

Lowy’s essay on Luxemburg’s conception of “Socialism or Barbarism” provides a broad point of departure for the entire collection. For many socialists of her era, the assumption that the economic contradictions of capitalism, identified by Marx, would lead inevitably to socialist revolution stood in contrast to Marx’s clear dictum that the emancipation of the working classes could only be achieved through the actions of workers themselves.

This tension between waiting for the economic laws of the system to unfold and actively working for the revolutionary transformation of society cast a long shadow over social democratic politics. It came into especially sharp relief when, in the late 1890s, Edward Bernstein, a leading figure in the German Social Democratic Party (the SPD), asserted that Marx’s basic economic assumptions were wrong, that socialism was a moral, not a scientific imperative, and that the movement should strive for socialism through parliamentary reform, rather than revolution.

As Löwy reminds us, Rosa Luxemburg helped lead the charge against Bernstein’s “revisionist” approach to Marx in her powerful Reform or Revolution (1899), which defends Marx’s analysis of capitalism and argues that the struggle for reforms is inextricably linked to the coming revolution.

But Luxemburg too fell victim to the temptations of “revolutionary fatalism” by asserting repeatedly that the system’s collapse is inevitable, and that proletarian class consciousness is only “the simple intellectual reflection of the growing contradictions of capitalism and of its approaching decline.” (2)

Those contradictions pointed the way to the system’s demise, and it was Social Democracy’s task to drive the process forward through political struggle.

Luxemburg shared this outlook with her political mentor Karl Kautsky, socialism’s leading theorist at the time and a key defender of Marxist “orthodoxy.” Following the Russian Revolution of 1905, however, she and Kautsky parted ways politically due to his focus on parliamentary tactics and opposition to her support for radical actions like the mass strike. She remained wedded, however, to the idea that capitalism’s fall was inevitable.

Stark Alternatives

The outbreak of the First World War and the collapse of the international socialist movement forced Luxemburg to reconsider her conviction that socialism’s coming was “irresistible.” In her famous Junius Pamphlet of 1915 she put forward the argument that there is not one single “direction of development.” (4)

Instead people were faced with alternatives, real choices, and it was the task of the proletariat, led by its party, to decide which road to take, that of socialism or barbarism.

Löwy traces the sources of Luxemburg’s new position back to various places in the works of Marx and Engels. Unlike Bernstein, who saw socialism as a moral choice, Luxemburg still grounded her position in the objective development of capitalism, which, she held had created the possibility of socialism — but only if the class-conscious proletariat makes the choice for socialist revolution.

That subjective decision can only be arrived at via a dialectical process, not some inexorable, evolutionary one envisioned by thinkers like Kautsky. Löwy notes that during the war, Lenin and Trotsky came to similar conclusions. They saw developing class consciousness and the will to action as embedded in the historical process, but they recognized the crucial importance of the subjective factor in making the historical choice.

Thus, in Löwy’s view, despite earlier differences with Lenin on a variety of issues, such as the role of centralism in the party and the party’s relationship to the masses, during the war there was a clear convergence between them on the need for the proletariat, under the leadership of a new International, to intervene in the struggle against imperialism and for socialism.

Many of the key issues raised in Löwy’s opening chapter, e.g. on the need for revolutionary action, on the subjective factor, and on the proletariat’s historical choice recur in the essays that follow.

Focusing on Luxemburg’s “philosophy of praxis,” Löwy again notes the fatalism in her understanding of capitalist economic development, for example in her major work The Accumulation of Capital (1911); but here he stresses how, at the same time, she put forward a “revolutionary pedagogy of action” in which the proletariat, through its experience in class struggle, achieves the political consciousness required for its self-emancipation.

In contract to Lenin’s position, which held that workers could only achieve revolutionary consciousness through the educational work of an organized political vanguard, she held that it was the result of a dialectical process of subjective development in which “practical experience” took center stage.

Luxemburg recognized the importance of theory and of political education, which she actually undertook with great alacrity, but Löwy shows how the experience of the Revolution of 1905 and especially the role of the mass strike in that struggle, shaped her thinking on the development of proletarian consciousness.

While the party and trade unions certainly were essential in providing political leadership to drive such actions forward, it was the practical and active consciousness of the workers, gained through experience, that was at the heart of the process of the revolutionary struggle. (Löwy’s emphasis, 16)

Revolution and Democracy

This perspective was also at the core of her analysis of the Bolshevik revolution. In The Russian Revolution, written in 1918 while she was in prison but not published until 1922, three years after her murder, she praised Lenin and Trotsky for daring to make the revolution, but also criticized a number of their policies, for example on the land and national questions.

Most importantly she opposed their suppression of democratic liberties such as freedom of the press, of association, and of assembly, without which she believed “the rule of the broad masses of the people is entirely unthinkable.” (20)

Luxemburg recognized the enormous challenges of the transition to socialism, and it was precisely because of their scale and complexity that maximum political freedom was necessary for the masses, rather than some central committee, to gain the practical experience necessary to build the new society. Her views on the German Revolution were fully consistent with this outlook. Rejecting the tutelage of party intellectuals like Kautsky, she insisted that “the workers will learn in the school of action.” (22)

Thus for Löwy, Luxemburg’s conception of socialism was both revolutionary and democratic and stood in “irreconcilable opposition to capitalism and imperialism” while grounded in the self-emancipatory praxis of the workers. He extends this analysis in chapters titled “The Hammer Blow of Revolution” and “Revolution and Freedom.”

In the former, Löwy outlines Luxemburg’s ideas of about the democratic limits of the capitalist “class state,” which even in its democratic parliamentary form remained first and foremost an instrument of class rule.

She believed that parliament was an important arena of class struggle, which along with other forms of struggle would promote the development of proletarian class consciousness, but she resisted the “parliamentary cretinism” of party leaders who suffered from the illusion that parliament “is the central axis of social life and the motive force of world history.” (31)

The already limited democracy of the class-bound parliamentary state was further undermined by militarism and colonialism, both of which fueled a “savage” process of capital accumulation on an ongoing basis.

In contrast to Bernstein’s vision of a reformist road to socialism, Luxemburg argues that the only way to break down the walls between class-based bourgeois democracy and socialist democracy is via the “hammer blow of revolution” which certainly would take many forms, including violence.

Although she did not elaborate any particular formula for making a successful revolution, she was certain that only a radical break could open the road to a socialist, and truly democratic, order.

In discussing Luxemburg’s ideas concerning revolution and freedom, Löwy returns to her analysis of the Russian Revolution. He makes clear her fervent support of the Bolshevik’s willingness to act and that she saw their seizure of power not as a Putsch in the tradition of Blanqui, but as a reflection of mass support for their program.

Indeed, she argues that the Bolsheviks had salvaged the honor of international socialism, which had disgraced itself in 1914. Yet her criticisms were also sharp. By distributing land to the peasants, she believed the Bolsheviks undercut the future socialization of agriculture. Moreover, in the name of internationalism, she rejected the Bolshevik principle on the self-determination of nations.

Löwy finds her positions unpersuasive.  Noting that Bolshevik survival depended on peasant support and that denying the right of self-determination contradicted her own stress on the centrality of democracy in the revolutionary process, he gives these views short shrift.

But on the key issue of freedom, Löwy believes Luxemburg is especially prescient. Not only does she view the suppression of democratic liberties as contrary to the principles of socialist democracy and the needs of the revolution, but by excluding popular participation in decision-making the Bolsheviks opened the door to the domination of the bureaucracy.

While she understood that the revolution faced many enemies and that no revolutionary process could be unblemished, she urged the Bolsheviks not to make a virtue of necessity. For her, the proletarian revolution’s aim should be a “class dictatorship” “on the basis of the most active, unlimited participation of the mass of the people, of unlimited democracy.” (49)

In my view, Löwy could have devoted more space to this issue. One of the vexing questions of the Russian Revolutions of 1917, as well as the “socialist” revolutions that followed in Europe and around the world, has been the determination of who rules in the new society and through what institutions.

If one sees soviets of workers’ and peasants’ deputies as the institutions of revolutionary democracy, then one must define these groups and then decide what is the status of all the non-workers and peasants.

If one supports “unlimited participation of the mass of the people” does the latter mean “everyone” or “everyone except…?” Who falls into these categories? And if, after “expropriating the capitalists,” one denies equal rights to large swathes of former property holders, would that not bode ill for civil war and the construction of socialism?

Rosa Luxemburg did not live to fully engage these issues, but her assertions about the centrality of democracy put them on the agenda. They remain important issues for socialists today.

Rosa’s Internationalism

Another interesting issue in Löwy’s collection is Luxemburg’s analysis of Western imperialism and its relation to primitive communism. Here he explores both her well-known work The Accumulation of Capital, and her incomplete and less familiar Introduction to Political Economy, which appeared in 1925.

According to Löwy, the very substantial attention Luxemburg devotes to primitive communist societies and their dissolution has two main goals: first, to shake up and destroy “the old notion of the eternal nature of private property,” and second, to use primitive communism “as a precious historical reference point’ for criticizing capitalism.

She does not view these non-capitalist societies uncritically, but as Löwy summarizes, aims to “find and ‘save’ everything in the primitive past that may prefigure modern socialism, at least up to a point.” (54-55)

She accomplishes this by ranging far and wide in her critique of European colonialism, its role in the accumulation process, and its impacts on its victims.

In this way, Löwy concludes, she confronts capitalist industrial society with humanity’s communitarian past and forces us to think about other ways of viewing the past and present.  Her effort “breaks with linear evolutionism, positivist ‘progressivism,’ and all banally ‘modernizing’ interpretations of Marxism that prevailed in her day.” (61)

Luxemburg’s critique of imperialism was also inextricable from her internationalism. According to Löwy, the source of her deep commitment to the Socialist International rather than any “fatherland” was her rootedness in the tradition described by Isaac Deutscher as “the non-Jewish Jew.”

These were “brilliant intellectuals” who included such figures as Heinrich Heine, Marx and Trotsky, “who transcended what they saw as the too-narrow boundaries of Judaism” and, as revolutionaries, “lived and thought beyond national boundaries and dreamed of internationalism.” (63)

Luxemburg paid little attention to the situation of Jewish communities. She rejected the “separatism” of the Jewish Bund, as well as the “social patriotism” of Zionism, and she underestimated the power of antisemitism despite the many attacks on her.

Her skepticism about national self-determination, as in the case of Poland, was largely based on economic arguments but also on her view that nations were basically a “cultural” phenomenon for which “cultural autonomy” was a solution to nationalist demands. (66) Löwy’s aim here is not to revisit her views on self-determination, but instead to look at the “positive side of her perspective,” which consists of her contributions to the “Marxist conception of proletarian internationalism” and her resistance to national chauvinism.

Drawing on Lukacs, Löwy argues that Luxemburg approached internationalism from the perspective of “totality,” meaning that she looks at all social and political questions from the perspective of the interests of the international working class. She does this by going “beyond Eurocentrism” and viewing the universal proletariat in a global sense.

By way of illustration, Löwy traces Luxemburg’s studies of colonialism over many years from Martinique to North and South America, China and Africa. Again he focuses on her analysis of the destruction of non-capitalist societies and on the relations between capital accumulation, militarism, and war.

Unsurprisingly, her interest was far more than academic, and her relentless campaigning against German national chauvinism and militarism ultimately led to her arrest and subsequent imprisonment during the war.

She was also sharply critical of her comrades in the SPD who supported the government war effort or hesitated to resist. Ultimately, she and her comrades in the revolutionary Spartacus League stood for a new international, one that would promote the international class struggle and international workers’ solidarity.

Interestingly, to avoid the failings of its predecessor, she believed that the new international should be highly centralized and disciplined. This view, Löwy notes with irony, stood in marked contrast to her criticisms of Lenin’s view of the party in 1904.

Luxemburg’s Lasting Influence

In the latter half of his book, Löwy revisits the major issues discussed above in essays that examine the ways in which Georges Haupt, Leon Trotsky, and Georg Lukacs interpret Luxemburg’s work. Although sometimes repetitious, these chapters provide interesting insights, especially considering the rather different perspective each figure had on Luxemburg’s life. Haupt, for example, was a scholar specializing in the Second International who had moved in 1958 from Ceausescu’s Stalinist regime in Romania to France. Trotsky had known Luxemburg largely from afar before the war and, though their criticisms of Lenin had much in common, he later noted that he may have “never properly appreciated her.” (92)

Once in exile, though, he “rediscovered” Luxemburg as he drew on her work in his struggle against Stalin’s new bureaucratic order. Meanwhile Georg Lukacs, a Hungarian intellectual, developed evolving views on Luxemburg’s theoretical and practical ideas in the context of war, revolution, and defeat.

The ably translated and edited essays in this work are succinctly and lucidly written. They can be read individually or as a whole and would be useful for students or study groups. One lacuna in the work, however, is that Löwy does not really address Luxemburg’s activities in the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania.

Most scholars have long focused on her career in Germany and drawn on widely available German language sources, but much new Polish-language material has recently come to light and is being translated as part of the Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, edited by Peter Hudis.

It will take a long time to appear, but some historians, such as Eric Blanc in his recent study of revolutionary social democracy in the Russian Empire, have already noted that Luxemburg’s politics in the Polish context were much more “Leninist” than had previously been recognized.

Löwy did not have access to this material when many of these essays were written and when the collection was first published in French in 2018. The essays will have to be read in a new light as the new material appears.

*On Löwy’s career and reception in the U.S., see Alan Wald, “Missives for the Future? Michael Löwy’s Close Encounters with the U.S. Left,” Historical Materialism 31, 1(2023): 159-190.

January-February 2025, ATC 234