Rosa Luxemburg’s Bolshevism

John Marot

The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg
Volume IV, Political Writings
On Revolution 1906-1909
Edited by Peter Hudis and Sandra Reom
Translated by Jacob Blumenfeld, Nicholas Gray, Henry Holland,
Zachary King, Manuela Kolke and Joseph Muller
Verso, 2024, 576 pages, $39.95 paperback.

THE TITLE OF this review will strike many on the left as a baleful characterization of Luxemburg’s politics. Does the reviewer not know that in her famous 1904 essay Organizational Questions in Russian Social Democracy Luxemburg (and the Mensheviks) denounced Lenin and the Bolsheviks for adopting Blanquist organizational principles, where a dictatorial party lords over a working class, directing it toward socialism, thereby violating Marx and Engels’ injunction that the emancipation of the working class must be the task of the working class?

Now, in the aftermath of the 1905 Russian Revolution, Luxemburg reversed her position.

Luxemburg recollected:

“There were perhaps traces of [Blanquism] in the organizational plan comrade Lenin put forward in 1902 but that belongs in the past, the distant past, since we live quickly, at a dizzying pace. These errors were corrected by life itself and it does not do to fear they may be repeated.” (172)

“Life itself” — the 1905 Russian Revolution — had shown, at least to Luxemburg’s satisfaction, that the Bolsheviks were not trying to organize the liberation of the working class behind workers’ backs but active in the working-class movement and striving to give it political leadership. On this fundamental (if banal) score, the Bolsheviks were orthodox Social Democrats, little different than their counterparts in the West.

The Nationalities Question

Luxemburg disagreed with the RSDLP’s position favoring the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, Poland in particular. “Independently of anybody’s conscious will…capitalist development links our country and Russia together into one capitalist state.” This development rendered “utopian” the program of independence for “capitalist Poland,” and thus laid the material basis for the Polish proletariat to “struggle jointly with the Russian proletariat for shared freedom.” (189)

Russian workers and Polish workers were class brothers, requiring Polish Social Democrats to oppose aspirations for national independence voiced by the liberal bourgeois opposition as these aspirations ran counter to their common interests as proletarians. In sharp even strident polemics with opponents in the Polish revolutionary movement, she developed a host of arguments in favor of her position.

A Parliamentary Road to Bourgeois-Democracy in Tsarist Russia?

In the West, participation in electoral campaigns — parliamentarism — was a matter of course for all Social Democrats, its “Erfurtian” premises central to social democracy achieving power and effecting a transition to socialism, as Kautsky repeatedly explained. Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky were on the same page, rejecting non-participation as sectarian abstentionism worthy only of anarchists.

But in Tsarist Russia the question of parliamentary politics, and of its relationship to the tsarist autocracy and the workers’ movement, assumed an entirely different aspect for Mensheviks and Bolsheviks respectively.

The Mensheviks were first to argue that the 1905 Revolution had run its course. But Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks doggedly held throughout 1906 that the revolution was still on the upswing. It was not until 1907 that Luxemburg and Lenin belatedly concluded that the revolution was over — for now — and that one had to adopt political tactics appropriate to the new conditions.

Fundamentally at issue at this juncture was the question of the RSDLP’s attitude to the Duma, the newly created Russian parliament. It was the burning political question of the day and Luxemburg contributed “Lessons of the Three Dumas” (1908) and “Revolutionary Hangover” (1909) to the intra-Russian social democratic debate.

The Mensheviks reasoned that the Duma, established in 1906, was a genuine parliament like those in the West. Though possessing comparatively few powers, its formation nonetheless had breached the walls of the autocracy, laying the institutional basis toward a fully empowered parliament, ideally embodied by the English Parliament.

Indeed, in 1893 and again in 1911, Kautsky himself noted with keen satisfaction how the English working class:

“… is already capable of influencing domestic politics in its favor in and through parliament, and, with giant steps, the day is approaching when the almighty English parliament will be a tool of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”(1)

This view was an ideological stock-in-trade for Second International Marxists.

The Duma was therefore the first step toward a European-style constitutional state, simultaneously laying the basis for Russian social democrats to adopt fully the politics and organizational methods of the SPD systematically laid out by Karl Kautsky in the Class Struggle, his 1892 conspectus on the Erfurt Program.

The Bolsheviks countered that the Russian parliament was not a genuine parliament at all, but an arm of the Tsarist autocracy. In the West parliament had achieved political power and ran — or could be made to run, the state — or so every Social Democrat thought, following Kautsky.

But in Russia the Tsarist state ran a powerless parliament. Only a bourgeois-democratic revolution could overthrow that state, “smashing” the Russian pseudo-parliament along the way. Luxemburg agreed:

“A parliamentary system that has not overthrown the [Tsarist] government, that has not achieved political power through revolution, not only cannot defeat the old power, not only cannot hold its own as an instrument of opposition but can and must become an instrument of counter-revolution.” (386)

Thus, Luxemburg opposed the Menshevik idea of using the Duma and the ballot box as a steppingstone toward a bourgeois-democratic order. A “counterrevolutionary club” (438) could not be used to push for more democracy, let alone socialism. In the absence of a bourgeois-democratic state, the Duma was but a “fig leaf of absolutism.” (385)

The Menshevik-touted parliamentary road to bourgeois-democracy was a utopia “comparable more or less to the attempt to build a house by starting with the roof and “‘working your way down to the foundations.’” (381)

But to abstain from electoral contests to the Duma was no solution, as some ‘left’ Bolsheviks, many Socialist Revolutionaries, and others, mainly anarchists, held, Luxemburg continued.

The RSDLP had to use the Duma as a tribune from which to denounce Tsarism and to explain that only a working-class organized-and-led bourgeois-democratic revolution could sweep away the autocracy, together with the Duma, and set up a bourgeois-democratic state with a genuine parliament.

Only after the bourgeois-democratic revolution could Russian social democrats, like their counterparts in the West, use parliament, supplemented by extra-parliamentary action, if necessary, to reform the (now) bourgeois democratic state in a socialist direction.

With an absolute social-democratic majority in the legislature, feasible only where suffrage was universal, equal and direct, it would become possible for a peaceful, socialist revolution by parliamentary means, supplemented — again, if necessary — by mass strikes and street demonstrations should the bourgeoisie unlawfully defy the people’s will.

Only after the bourgeois-democratic revolution had abolished “Russian conditions” could Kautskyism be “adapted” to the new, now “Erfurtian” conditions of political struggle and not (as Lars Lih has imagined) before that revolution, in what the Bolsheviks believed were “non-Erfurtian” political conditions.(2)

Party, Soviet, and Class

A party may embrace a few hundred thousand activists — a revolution involves millions and tens of millions. Until 1917, revolutionary Marxists understood extra-parliamentary action — the mass strike — the way Luxemburg did: as the “mode of motion of the proletarian mass, the form of manifestation of proletarian struggle within the revolution.” (222)

However, in none of their writings does the self-movement of the working class appear to endow itself with a mass institutional form of its own, arising outside the Social Democratic party.  This is the Soviet.

In the 1905 Revolution mass strikes and mass demonstrations — the “street” — created key elements of a new state form, the Soviet.  But no one in Social Democracy, Luxemburg included, recognized this to develop a new theory of the state.

Instead, Luxemburg and all revolutionary Marxists argued that social democratic parties faced a Herculean task: achieving direct organizational and political supremacy in the working class to lead it to victory. The daunting challenge lay in the party “seizing and utilizing the boundless field of action” that revolution opened “for gigantic class struggles.” (313)

In fact, the 1905 Revolution proved too ‘boundless’ to fit into any party-political form, requiring the mediation of a non-party organization, representing all workers, through which the party could perform its vanguard role.

Whatever their theory on this question, in 1905 all parties in the workers’ movement had to compete in the St. Petersburg Soviet for leadership of the working class. A non-party organ, the Soviet represented the proletariat, regardless of political tendency. It was democratically elected.

Since all workers recognized its authority, no party could lead the working class to victory unless it had the authority of the Soviet behind it. The party could not do it all and, what is more, it did not have to.

Lenin would spell this out in his State and Revolution (1918) where the soviet takes front and center, and the parties present their program of action before the assembly, vying democratically for political leadership of the class.

The “Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry” — and then what?

Luxemburg agreed with Lenin’s partisans that only the working class could lead the bourgeois-democratic revolution. To look to the liberal bourgeois opposition instead, whether inside or outside the Duma, as the Mensheviks were doing, was a non-starter.  Here, the “proletariat could only play the role of stirrup, helping the bourgeoisie take the reins over the ruins of absolutism.” (377)

Luxemburg, like the Bolsheviks, anticipated that in the next round of the revolution the RSDLP-led proletariat, with the support of the peasantry, would overthrow Tsardom, vanquish counter-revolutionary bourgeois-democrats, organized in the Kadet Party, and set up a provisional revolutionary government. Lenin called it the “revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.”

But if the workers and peasants were provisionally in charge in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, why not make that government permanent and build socialism going forward, as Trotsky was arguing?  Why not use that power instead of giving it up?

Luxemburg’s sociological answer was straightforward and shared by all Second International Marxists: material conditions for building socialism in Russia were absent because the non-socialist peasantry formed the vast majority in the Tsarist Empire, not the working class and sole agent of socialism.

So, while it was possible to organize a democratic revolution to overthrow the Tsarism, it was impossible to reconcile socialism and democracy on purely democratic grounds since 100 million peasants had no interest in moving beyond the bourgeois-democratic revolution toward socialism.

But the political question remained:  What would the RSDLP do with the plebeian dictatorship it led?

Trotsky alone thought the Russian working class would seize power permanently, with the European and world proletariat following suit. If that happened, then building socialism after Tsarism’s destruction would be possible.

Luxemburg, like Lenin, Kautsky, and others, were also sure the victory of the Russian Revolution would greatly impact the social democratic movement in the West but were unsure it could trigger a socialist revolution there.

If there were no internationalization of the Russian Revolution, all bets were off. Luxemburg explained in detail:

“… [N]o Social Democrat fools himself that the proletariat will remain in power; if it remained, that would lead to the rule of its class ideas and it would realize socialism.  Today, there is not sufficient strength for that since the proletariat constitutes a minority in Russian society. [O]n the day after the proletariat triumphs over the Tsar …power will pass to the proletariat because this proletariat occupies every post [in a provisional government], and it will stand guard until power passes into the hands that are legally appointed — that is into the hands of the government, which may only act to appoint a Constituent Assembly and a legislative body chosen by the entire populace …Social Democrats will not constitute a majority in the Constituent Assembly, only democrats from the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie [will]. We may regret this, but we cannot change it.” (173)

In effect, the working class would have to yield power to a democratically elected Constituent Assembly, which would establish a bourgeois-democratic state. There was no alternative, in Luxemburg’s view. The Bolsheviks stuck to this scenario as well — until April 1917, when they jettisoned “Old Bolshevism” in favor Lenin’s April Theses.  “New Bolshevism” solved the problem of democracy, Soviet power, and the Constituent Assembly in an unanticipated way.

Skipping ahead briefly, when the theoretically anticipated Constituent finally met in January 1918, the Bolsheviks were in the minority.

In the Soviet, the Bolsheviks commanded a majority. It decreed the expropriation of the landed gentry, recognized workers’ control in the factories, and called for an end to the imperialist war. The Assembly rejected all three.

The Bolsheviks ignored the Assembly and “formal” democracy because they had the support of the peasants to destroy gentry rule, the support of proletarians to maintain workers’ power at the point of production, and the support of both to stop the war.

In Russia, dispersing the Constituent Assembly in favor of Soviet power was a substantive democratic act catering to the interests of the overwhelming majority, overriding formal democracy i.e., the anti-Soviet, anti-Bolshevik electoral composition of the assembly.

As noted, Luxemburg thought working-class rule in Russia could not be realized so long as workers were in the minority and the democratic peasantry and petty bourgeoisie were in the majority.  In 1917, however, she thought the proletariat could stay in power and build socialism if — and only if — rescued by international revolution. That rescue never came.

Aftermath

In the last 64 days of her life, and considering the German Revolution, unfolding before her eyes, Luxemburg clarified the debate on the relationship between the “ballot box” and the “street,” between parliament and extra-parliamentary action, between the revolutionary soviet road to working-class emancipation, and the reformist parliamentary road, whether in autocracies or in bourgeois democracies. But this is a topic for the next volume of Luxemburg’s political writings.(3)

Notes

1. “Parliamentarism and the Parties in England,” 129; in Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism, Ben Lewis editor and translator, Historical Materialism Book Series, 2019, Leiden: Brill.
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2. Lih, Lars T. 2006, Lenin Rediscovered: “What Is to Be Done?” in Context, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill. Before 1917, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks both thought “Kautskyism” was the way to go in the capitalist West. Lars Lih has documented this and the “Leninists” are mistaken to think Lenin had any fundamental problems with Kautsky’s parliamentary strategy, offering an alternative. This changes in 1917, when Bolshevism breaks with Kautskyism because it cannot bring victory in either “Erfurtian” or “non-Erfurtian” conditions — a break Lih refuses to recognize. International Social Democracy and the Road to Socialism, 1905-1917: The Ballot, the Street and the State, Historical Materialism.
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3. I examine this problematic in “Rosa Luxemburg and the democratic road to socialist revolution,” Tempest https://tempestmag.org/2024/06.
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January-February 2025, ATC 234