Editorial
The Worker introduces a regularly appearing series of articles dedicated to appreciating proletarian revolutionaries throughout history. In the lead up to March 8th, International Working Women’s Day, we will focus on women revolutionaries in order to learn from their teachings as Communists.
This month the comrades in Germany celebrated Lenin, Luxemburg, and Liebknecht, culminating in their annual combative march named after the three great revolutionaries. The comrades were attacked by the police for defending the cause of the Palestinian people. The comrades resisted the police and continued the march. We have therefore chosen to commemorate comrade Luxemburg for our first article in the series leading up to International Working Women’s Day.
Comrade Rosa Luxemburg, born in Poland to a Jewish family, was a leading revolutionary in the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania SDKPiL), the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), a founding leader of the Spartacus Group, and a founding leader of the Communist Party of Germany. In addition to being a great proletarian revolutionary, Comrade Luxemburg was a doctor of law and political economy and a journalist.
As an SPD leader, Luxemburg fought the rise of revisionism in the Party from an orthodox Marxist position against the distortions of Eduard Bernstein. According to the Bernstein-led revisionists, Marxism’s insistence on the universality of revolutionary violence had become outdated—they claimed that capitalism would peacefully evolve into socialism, and that the role of social democracy was to focus only on parliamentary work. Bernstein was swindling the workers by proclaiming himself the true heir of Marxism, passing off his removal of its revolutionary content as justified on the basis of new conditions. Luxemburg put the matter before the workers like this:
“Today he who wants to pass as a socialist, and at the same time would declare war on Marxist doctrine, the most stupendous product of the human mind of this century, must begin with involuntary esteem for Marx. He must begin by acknowledging himself to be his disciple, by seeking in Marx’s own teachings, the points of support for an attack on the latter, while he represents this attack as a further development of Marxist doctrine. On this account, we must, unconcerned by its outer forms, pick out the sheathed kernel of Bernstein’s theory. This is a matter of urgent necessity for the broad layers of the industrial proletariat in our party.”
Luxemburg warned the workers of the methods of revisionism: that of denying the crisis of capitalism and placing an over emphasis on capitalism’s ability to adapt. She confronted Bernstein’s theory that socialism can come about through mere reforms due to this adaptability. She confronted the revisionists on the conception of the bourgeois state, insisting that the state itself is strengthened by reforms and bourgeois democracy, which create a wall between capitalist and socialist society and that “Only the hammer blow of revolution, that is to say, the conquest of political power by the proletariat, can break down this wall” [emphasis original].
She became the biggest defender in Germany of the 1905 Russian revolution and represented the Polish and Russian parties on numerous occasions, defending the use of revolutionary violence. A revolutionary to her core, she could not remain in Germany when the revolution broke out in Poland, returning to Poland to publish the illegal organ of the SDKPiL and carry out clandestine activity before her arrest in 1906. But prison did not stop the heroic proletarian revolutionary—she continued writing for the illegal paper, smuggling her articles out of prison. After her release from custody, she once again went to Germany where she defended the revolution. She took a special interest in the Bolsheviks, who led the Moscow insurrection and general strike. In Germany, she retook her post in the staunch left wing of the SPD and continued battling the revisionist trends.
Comrade Luxemburg was not a feminist. She refused to be attached to what she considered women’s causes. She insisted correctly that the emancipation of women was only possible through socialist revolution, hence she focused on the question of proletarian struggles. She did not write explicitly on the women’s question, although this task would be taken up by her comrades Zetkin and Bebel. In her personal relations she relentlessly encouraged her women comrades to see themselves as their own political agents and to overcome the often domineering influence of their husbands. She was doing her part to cultivate women revolutionary leaders in her own likeness.
By 1910, Luxemburg began leading the attack in Germany against Karl Kautsky and the rise of social-chauvinism. Comrade Luxemburg’s leadership in this process was of critical importance. She was one of a few leaders to come out on opposition to the imperialist world war. She declared that the German party was a stinking corpse in 1914. This declaration is a red flag which still waves to this day.
Luxemburg along with her comrades formed the Spartacus group and vigorously opposed the SPD’s support for the imperialist war. They fought for the workers to declare a general strike against the war. Her revolutionary activities against the war would land her in prison yet again, and she would only be released a few days before the armistice declaration in 1918. In the same month, the SPD assumed power over postwar Germany.
By the end of 1918, the revolutionaries in opposition to the war and the SPD-led republic constituted the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) which was led by Liebknecht and Luxemburg. The KPD boycotted the elections and prepared for insurrection, and the Bolsheviks began arming the revolutionary forces against the phony socialist government. On New Years Eve at the founding congress of the KPD, Luxemburg declared that “We must begin by undermining the Ebert-Scheidemann government, by destroying its foundations through a revolutionary mass struggle on the part of the proletariat.” And: “What is now incumbent upon us is that we should deliberately concentrate all the forces of the proletariat for an attack upon the very foundations of capitalist society.”
By January 4th of 1919 the workers took strike actions and by January 5th they seized control of the SPD newspapers, which had served as an apparatus for counter-revolution. By January 7th the Party-led Revolutionary Committee called the workers to a general strike and the overthrow of the Ebert government. 500,000 workers took to the streets of Berlin answering the Communists’ call.
In regard to the January uprising, the comrades at the magazine of the German proletariat titled Klassenstandpunkt (Class Position) remark that: “The Communist Party of Germany was only founded on January 1, 1919 by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. And even then, in the January struggles that broke out shortly afterwards, it was still far too young a force that still had to fight for recognition from the working class. The Bolsheviks’ fight for a clandestine party in Russia had not yet found resonance in Germany and so legalism was still a widespread phenomenon.”
The comrades would also write that: “At this moment, when the fight for the reconstitution of the Communist Party of Germany is on the agenda, it is not followers that we need, nor anti-party anarchists (like Max Hoelz), but the people who recognize the necessity of the class and understand the historical moment.”
“The example we need is that of Rosa Luxemburg. Rosa Luxemburg was an eagle. It was flawed, but in one aspect it did what the revolution needed. Rosa formed our party on the right basis at the moment when it was necessary. She met the need of the class at the right moment. It wasn’t perfect, but it was what had to be done.”
And in this right moment it was comrade Luxemburg who told the workers “Act! Act! Courageously, resolutely, consistently—that is the ‘accursed’ duty and obligation of the revolutionary chairmen and the sincerely socialist party leaders. Disarm the counter-revolution, arm the masses, occupy all positions of power. Act quickly! The revolution obliges. Its hours count as months, its days as years, in world history. Let the organs of the revolution be aware of their high obligations!”
In response to the uprising, the Social Democrat-led government flooded Berlin with armed right wing forces to put down the just rebellion of the workers and hunt for their Communist leaders. They captured Liebknecht and Luxemburg on January 15th. The imperialist dogs of Social Democracy had long been baying for the blood of the Communist leaders, and the blood which would follow will never come off the hands of all social democrats. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were tortured and killed. Their blood not only stains the filthy followers of social democracy forever, but it also dyes our flag the brightest red—and the comrades rise with it, to never fall. Luxemburg will forever be a symbol of Communist heroism.
Lenin spoke of the comrades’ deaths:
“Today the bourgeoisie and the social-traitors are jubilating in Berlin—they have succeeded in murdering Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Ebert and Scheidemann, who for four years led the workers to the slaughter for the sake of depredation, have now assumed the role of butchers of the proletarian leaders. The example of the German revolution proves that ‘democracy’ is only a camouflage for bourgeois robbery and the most savage violence. Death to the butchers!”
It would be the Great Lenin who would provide the best analysis of the mistakes and merits of a titan like Luxemburg, while the heirs of social democracy today have the nerve to commemorate her only by clinging to her mistaken attacks against Bolshevism.
Lenin wrote that “Rosa Luxemburg was mistaken on the question of the independence of Poland; she was mistaken in 1903 in her appraisal of Menshevism; she was mistaken on the theory of the accumulation of capital; she was mistaken in July 1914, when, together with Plekhanov, Vandervelde, Kautsky and others, she advocated unity between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks; she was mistaken in what she wrote in prison in 1918 (she corrected most of these mistakes at the end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919 after she was released). But in spite of her mistakes she was—and remains for us—an eagle. And not only will Communists all over the world cherish her memory, but her biography and her complete works (the publication of which the German Communists are inordinately delaying, which can only be partly excused by the tremendous losses they are suffering in their severe struggle) will serve as useful manuals for training many generations of Communists all over the world. ‘Since August 4, 1914, German Social-Democracy has been a stinking corpse’—this statement will make Rosa Luxemburg’s name famous in the history of the international working class movement. And, of course, in the backyard of the working-class movement, among the dung heaps, hens like Paul Levi, Scheidemann, Kautsky and all that fraternity will cackle over the mistakes committed by the great Communist. To every man his own.”
What Lenin said is true. The correct assessment of the works of the comrade have proven to train generations of Communists, who today faced brutal attacks by the German police in commemorating her at the Lenin-Liebkneicht-Luxemburg march, they presented all the courage and audacity of the great revolutionaries, while overcoming the mistaken views on the national question presented by Luxemburg; they earned the hatred of the class enemy for chanting forbidden solidarity with the resistance of the Palestinian people. Their work continues the great efforts to reconstitute the Communist Party of Germany which was founded by our immortal eagle, comrade Rosa Luxemburg.
