Max Shachtman
Articles from The New International
Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg
Source: The New International: A Monthly Organ of Revolutionary Marxism Vol 4,
No. 5, May, 1938. Pg. 141-144.
Two Legends have been created about the relationship between the views of Lenin
and Rosa Luxemburg. Despite their antagonistic origins and aims, they supplement
each other in effect. Neither one of the myth-makers approaches the extremely
interesting and instructive subject from an objective historical standpoint.
Consequently, the analysis made by each of them reduces itself to an instrument
of factional politics which is, in both cases, the politics of reaction.
One school of thought, if such a term is permissible here, is headed by the
faculty of Stalinist falsification. It covers up its reactionary objectives by
posing as critics of Luxemburg and proponents of Lenin. A discussion of its
arguments is rendered impossible by the very nature of its position, which
formally prohibits both argument and discussion. Its scientific value is
summarized in a few sentences from the papal bull issued by Stalin in 1932 in
connection with the luckless Slutsky's study on Lenin's incorrect appraisal of
Kautsky and Luxemburg: "You wish to enter into discussion against this
Trotskyist thesis of Slutsky's? But what is there to discuss in this? Is it not
plain that Slutsky is simply slandering Lenin, slandering the Bolsheviks?
Slander must be branded, not transformed into a subject for discussion." The
Stalinists have the Catholics' attitude toward their dogmas: they assume what is
to be proved; their arbitrary conclusions are presented as their premises; their
statement of the problem is at the same time their answer -- and it brooks no
discussion. "Bolshevism" is absolutely and at all points and stages
irreconcilable with "Luxemburg-ism" because of the original sin of the latter in
disputing the "organizational principles" of the former.
The other school of thought is less authoritarian in tone and form, but just as
rigid in unhistorical dogma; and if, unlike the Stalinists, it is not wholly
composed of turncoats from revolutionary Marxism, it has a substantial
sprinkling of them. Their objectives are covered up by posing as critics of
Lenin and defenders of Luxemburg. They include anachronistic philosophers of
ultra-leftism and express-train travelers fleeing from the pestilence of
Stalinism to the plague of social-democracy. Bolshevism, they argue, is
definitely bankrupt. The horrors of Stalinism are the logical and inevitable
outcome of Lenin's "supercentralism", or -- as it is put by a recent critic,
Listen Oak, who seeks the "inner flaws of Bolshevism" -- of Lenin's
"totalitarianism". Luxemburg, on the other hand, stressed the democratic side of
the movement, the struggle, the goal. Hence, "Luxemburgism" is absolutely
irreconcilable with "Bolshevism" because of the original sin, of the former in
imposing its Jacobin, or bourgeois, or super-centralist, or totalitarian
"organizational principles".
The use of quotation marks around the terms employed is justified and necessary,
for at least in nine cases out of ten the airy analysts have only the vaguest
and most twisted idea of what the disputes between Luxemburg and Lenin really
were. In just as many cases they have revealed a cavalier indisposition to
acquaint themselves with the historical documents and the actual writings of the
two great thinkers. A brief survey will disclose, I believe, the superficiality
of the arguments which, especially since the obvious putrescence of Stalinism,
have gained a certain currency in the radical movement.
Nothing but misunderstanding can result from a failure to bear in mind the fact
that Lenin and Luxemburg worked, fought and developed their ideas in two
distinctly different movements, operating within no less different countries, at
radically different stages of development; consequently, in countries and
movements where the problems of the working class were posed in quite different
forms. It is the absence of this concrete and historical approach to the
disputes between Lenin, of the Social-Democratic Labor Party of Russia, and
Luxemburg, of the Social-Democratic Party of Germany, that so surely brings most
critics to grief.
The "organizational dispute" between Lenin and Luxemburg did not originate in
the former's insistence on a break with Kautsky and the centrists before the
war. When Stalin thunders against anyone "who call doubt" that the Bolsheviks
brought about "a split with their own opportunists and centrist-conciliators
long before the imperialist war (1904-1912) without at the same time pursuing a
policy of rupture, a policy of split with the opportunists and centrists of the
Second International" -- he is simply substituting ukase for historical fact.
The truth is that Rosa Luxemburg reached a clear estimate of Kautsky and broke
with his self-styled "Marxian center", long before Lenin did. For many years
after the turn of the century, Kautsky's prestige among all the factions of the
Russian movement was unparalleled. The Menshevik Abramovich does not exaggerate
when he writes that:
A West-European can hardly imagine the enormous authority which the leaders of
the German social-democracy, the Liebknechts, the Bebels, the Singers, enjoyed
in Russia. Among these leaders, Karl Kautsky occupied quite a special
place...serving for all the Russian Marxists and social-democrats as the highest
authority in all the theoretical and tactical questions of scientific socialism
and the labor movement. In every disputed question, in every newly-arisen
problem, the first thought always was: What would Kautsky say about this? How
would Kautsky have decided this question?
Lenin's much-disputed What to Do? held up, as is known, the German
social-democracy and its leader, Bebel, as models for the Russian movement. When
Kautsky wrote his famous article, after the 1905 revolution in Russia, on the
Slavs and the world revolution, in which, Zinoviev writes, under Luxemburg's
influence, he advanced substantially the Bolshevik conception, Lenin was highly
elated. "Where and when," he wrote in July 1905, in a polemic against Parvus,
"have I characterized the revolutionism of Bebel and Kautsky as 'opportunism'?
Where and when have I presumed to call into existence in the international
social-democracy a special tendency which was not identical with the tendency of
Bebel and Kautsky?" A year and a half later, Lenin wrote that "the vanguard of
the Russian working class knows Karl Kautsky for some time now as its writer",
and a month later, in January 1907, he described Kautsky as "the leader of the
German revolutionary social-democrats". In August 1908, Lenin cited Kautsky as
his authority on the question of war and militarism as against Gustave Herve,
and as late as February 1914, he invoked him again as a Marxian authority in his
dispute with Rosa Luxemburg on the national question. Finally, in one of his
last pre-war articles, in April 1914, "Wherein the German Labor Movement Should
Not Be Imitated", speaking of the "undoubted sickness" of the German
social-democracy, he referred exclusively to the trade union leaders
(specifically to Karl Legien) and the parliamentary spokesmen, but did not even
mention Kautsky and the centrists, much less raise the question of the left wing
(also unmentioned) splitting with them.
It is this pre-war attitude of Lenin towards the German center -- against which
Luxemburg had been conducting a sharp frontal attack as early as 1910 -- that
explains the vehemence and the significant terminology of Lenin's strictures
against Kautsky immediately after the war broke out, for example, his letter to
Shliapnikov on October 27, 1914, in which he says: "I now despise and hate
Kautsky more than all the rest.... R. Luxemburg was right, she long ago
understood that Kautsky had the highly-developed 'servility of a
theoretician'..."
In sum, the fact is that by the very nature of her milieu and her work before
the war, Rosa Luxemburg had arrived at a clearer and more correct appreciation
of the German social-democracy and the various currents within it than had
Lenin. To a great extent, this determined and explained her polemic against
Lenin on what appeared to be the "organizational questions" of the Russian
movement.
The beginning of the century marked the publication of two of Lenin's most
audacious and stirring works, One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward, and its
forerunner, What to Do?. The Russian movement was then in no way comparable to
the West-European, especially the German. It was composed of isolated groups and
sections in Russia, more or less autonomous, pursuing policies at odds with each
other and only remotely influenced by its great revolutionary Marxists abroad --
Plekhanov, Lenin, Martov, Potressov, Trotsky and others. Moreover, the so-called
"Economist" tendency was predominant; it laid the greatest stress on the element
of spontaneity in the labor struggle and under-rated the element of conscious
leadership.
Lenin's What to Do? was a merciless criticism of "Economism", which he
identified with "pure-and-simple trade unionism", with khovstism (i.e., the
policy of dragging at the tail of events, or of the masses), with opportunism.
Social-democracy, he argued, is not a mere outgrowth of the spontaneous ...
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