The myth of “Luxemburgism”

Submitted by Anon on 26 September, 2008 - 10:02 Author: Leon Trotsky

Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish revolutionary (1871-1919) who spent much of her active life in Germany, is one of the great figures of the revolutionary Marxist tradition. This article by Leon Trotsky, written in June 1935, sets the record straight about Luxemburg’s real contribution

In the 1930s, long after her death, she received an unasked-for gift: the coining of the term “Luxemburgism” to describe a particular form of socialist politics, supposedly counterposed to “Leninism”.

In fact Luxemburg was a close comrade of Lenin on the left wing of the international socialist movement for decades; a passionate supporter of the Russian Revolution of October 1917; and someone who fought hard to build a Bolshevik-type party in Poland, and in Germany in the midst of the revolution of 1918-19.

In 1904 she wrote a criticism of a pamphlet of Lenin's on internal disputes in the Russian movement. (Lenin replied by saying that Luxemburg’s generalities were right, but she had misunderstood the particular situation in Russia). In 1918, in jail, she wrote a criticism of some of the policies of the Bolsheviks after the revolution. (She chose not to publish that manuscript; her political stances between her release from jail on 8 November 1918 and her murder by right-wingers under the wing of Social Democracy on 15 January 1919 suggest that she had concluded that many of the criticisms were mistaken).

On the basis of those two fragments from Luxemburg's rich body of socialist writing, the myth of “Luxemburgism” was erected. It has been influential since the 1960s, too; it was the mainstay of the Independent Labour Party (then a sizeable left force) until the 1960s, and of IS (forerunner of the SWP) in the 1960s, until 1968.

This article by Leon Trotsky, originally titled “Rosa Luxemburg and the Fourth International”, and written in June 1935, sets the record straight about Luxemburg’s real contribution.



Efforts are now being made in France and elsewhere to construct a so-called Luxemburgism as an entrenchment for the left centrists against the Bolshevik-Leninists. This question may acquire a considerable significance. It may perhaps be necessary to devote a more extensive article in the near future to real and alleged Luxemburgism. I wish to touch here only upon the essential features of the question.

We have more than once taken up the cudgels of Rosa Luxemburg against the impudent and stupid misrepresentations of Stalin and his bureaucracy. And we shall continue to do so. In doing so we are not prompted by any sentimental considerations, but by demands of historical-materialist criticism. Our defense of Rosa Luxemburg is not, however, unconditional. The weak sides of Rosa Luxemburg’s teachings have been laid bare both theoretically and practically.

The SAP people and kindred elements (see, for example, the dilettante intellectual “proletarian cultural”: French Spartacus, the periodical of the socialist students appearing in Belgium, and oftentimes also the Belgian Action Socialiste, etc.) make use only of the weak sides and the inadequacies which were by no means decisive in Rosa; they generalise and exaggerate the weaknesses to the utmost and build up a thoroughly absurd system on that basis. The paradox consist in this, that in their latest turn the Stalinists, too, without acknowledging or even understanding it, come close in theory to the caricatured negative sides of Luxemburgism, to say nothing of the traditional centrists and left centrists in the social democratic camp.

There is no gainsaying that Rosa Luxemburg impassionately counterposed the spontaneity of mass actions to the “victory-crowned” conservative policy of the German social democracy especially after the Revolution of 1905. This counterposition had a thoroughly revolutionary and progressive character. At a much earlier date than Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg grasped the retarding character of the ossified party and trade-union apparatus and began a struggle against it. Inasmuch as she counted upon the inevitable accentuation of class conflicts, she always predicted the certainty of the independent elemental appearance of the masses against the will and against the line of march of officialdom.

In these broad historical outlines, Rosa was proved right. For the Revolution of 1918 was “spontaneous”, that is, it was accomplished by the masses against all the provisions and all the precautions of the party officialdom. On the other hand, the whole of Germany’s subsequent history amply showed that spontaneity alone is far from enough for success; Hitler’s regime is a weighty argument against the panacea of spontaneity.

Rosa herself never confined herself to the mere theory of spontaneity, like Parvus, for example, who later bartered his social revolutionary fatalism for the most revolting fatalism. In contrast to Parvus, Rosa Luxemburg exerted herself to educate the revolutionary wing of the proletariat in advance and to bring it together organisationally as far as possible. In Poland, she built up a very rigid independent organisation. The most that can be said is that in her historical-philosophical evaluation of the labour movement, the preparatory selection of the vanguard, in comparison with the mass actions that were to be expected, fell too short with Rosa; whereas Lenin — without consoling himself with the miracles of future actions — took the advanced workers and constantly and tirelessly welded them together into firm nuclei, illegally or legally, in the mass organisations or underground, by means of a sharply defined programme.

Rosa’s theory of spontaneity was a wholesome weapon against the ossified apparatus of reformism. By the fact that it was often directed against Lenin’s work of building up a revolutionary apparatus, it revealed — to be sure, only in embryo — its reactionary features. With Rosa herself this occurred only episodically. She was much too realistic in the revolutionary sense to develop the elements of the theory of spontaneity into a consummate metaphysics. In practice, she herself, as has already been said, undermined this theory at every step.

organising for revolution

After the revolution of November 1918, she began the ardent labor of assembling the proletarian vanguard. Despite her theoretically very weak manuscript of the Soviet Revolution, written in prison but never published by her, Rosa’s subsequent work allows the sure conclusion that, day by day, she was moving closer to Lenin’s theoretically clearly-delineated conception concerning conscious leadership and spontaneity. (It must surely have been this circumstance that prevented her from making public her manuscript against Bolshevik policy which was later so shamefully abused.)

Let us again attempt to apply the conflict between spontaneous mass actions and purposeful organisational work to the present epoch. What a mighty expenditure of strength and selflessness the tolling masses of all the civilised and half-civilised countries have exerted since the world war! Nothing in the previous history of mankind could compare with it. To this extent Rosa Luxemburg was entirely right as against the philistines, the corporal and the blockheads of straight-marching “victory-crowned” bureaucratic conservatism. But it is just the squandering of these immeasurable energies that forms the basis of the great depression in the proletariat and the successful fascist advance.

Without the slightest exaggeration it may be said: the whole world situation is determined by the crisis of the proletarian leadership. The field of the labour movement is today still encumbered with huge remnants of the old bankrupt organisations. After the countless sacrifices and disappointments, the bulk of the European proletariat, at least, has withdrawn into its shell. The decisive lesson which it has drawn, consciously or half-consciously, from the bitter experiences, reads: great actions require a great leadership.

For current affairs, the workers still give their votes to the old organisations. Their votes — but by no means their boundless confidence. On the other hand, after the miserable collapse of the Third International, it is much harder to move them to bestow their confidence upon a new revolutionary organisation. That’s just where the crisis of the proletarian leadership lies.

To sing a monotonous song about indefinite future mass actions in this situation, in contrast to the purposeful selection of the cadres of a new International, means to carry on a thoroughly reactionary work.

The crisis of the proletarian leadership cannot, of course, be overcome by means of an abstract formula. It is a question of an extremely humdrum process. But not of a purely “historical” process, that is, of the objective premises of conscious activity, but of an uninterrupted chain of ideological, political and organisational measures for the purpose of fusing together the best, most conscious elements of the world proletariat beneath a spotless banner, elements whose number and self-confidence must be constantly strengthened, whose connections with wider sections of the proletariat must be developed and deepened – in a word: to restore to the proletariat, under new and highly difficult and onerous conditions, his historical leadership. The latest spontaneity confusionists have just as little right to refer Rosa as for miserable Comintern bureaucrats have to refer to Lenin. Put aside the incidentals which developments have overcome, and we can, with full justification, place our work for the Fourth International under the sign of the “three L’s”, that is, not only under the sign of Lenin, but also of Luxemburg and Liebknecht.

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