Theory & Practice

by Rosa Luxemburg

Unknown Binding

First published December 1, 1980

About the author

Rosa Luxemburg (Rosalia Luxemburg, Polish: Róża Luksemburg) was a Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist and activist of Polish Jewish descent who became a naturalized German citizen. She was successively a member of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, the Social Democratic Party of Germany(SPD), the Independent Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party of Germany.

In 1915, after the SPD supported German involvement in World War I, she co-founded, with Karl Liebknecht, the anti-war Spartakusbund (Spartacist League). On 1 January 1919 the Spartacist League became the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). In November 1918, during the German Revolution she founded the Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag), the central organ of the Spartacist movement.

She regarded the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 in Berlin as a blunder, but supported it after Liebknecht ordered it without her knowledge. When the revolt was crushed by the social democrat government and the Freikorps (WWI veterans defending the Weimar Republic), Luxemburg, Liebknecht and some of their supporters were captured and murdered. Luxemburg was drowned in the Landwehr Canal in Berlin. After their deaths, Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht became martyrs for Marxists. According to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, commemoration of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht continues to play an important role among the German far-left.

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

This work constitutes a polemic by Luxemburg against Kautsky over his views on the usage of mass strike tactics as a political and economic weapon in the hands of the proletariat. While I am skeptical of Luxemburg's wide-ranging application of the mass strike for the modern era, this piece points to the revisionism and reformist attitudes of Kautsky and the majority of the SPD that would lead to the split and failure of the German Revolution.

Against both the advice of Marx and Engels in their various critiques of the Gotha and Erufrt Programmes of the SPD, Kautsky denies the necessity of agitation for a republic by the proletarian party simply for reformist expediency. He denies the use of mass strikes at all, in any situation, except for an overwhelming parliamentary victory that would change the "situation." As Luxemburg correctly notes, this "amount to Nothing-But-Parliamentarianism."

Additionally, Luxemburg makes an interest critique of Kautsky regarding his attitude towards the Russian peasantry in the 1905 Revolution that can be extended to Trotsky (as Trotsky himself noted that Kautsky agreed with his theory of permanent revolution):

"In passing only, I wish to point out that Comrade Kautsky’s depiction of the Russian situation is, in the most important points, an almost total reversal of the truth. For example, the Russian peasantry did not suddenly begin to rebel in 1905. From the so-called emancipation of the serfs in 1861, with a single pause between 1885 and 1895, peasant uprisings run like a red thread through the internal history of Russia: uprisings against the landowners as well as violent resistance to the organs of government. It is this which occasioned the Minister of Interior’s well-known circular letter of 1898 which placed the entire Russian peasantry under martial law. The new and exceptional in 1905 was simply that, for the first time, the peasant masses’ chronic rebellion took on political and revolutionary meaning as concomitant and totalization of the urban proletariat’s goal-conscious, revolutionary class action."