A collection of essays by Michel Löwy on Rosa Luxemburg, drawn from writing over many decades, provokes stimulating debates, finds Elaine Graham-Leigh

Paul Le Blanc, the editor of this essay collection, argues in his own 2019 collection of essays on Rosa Luxemburg that she has not been well-served by writers on either the right or the left. It has been possible, he says, ‘to construct one’s very own Rosa Luxemburg’, which frequently on the left means either criticising her as a ‘wooly-minded “spontaneist”’ or ‘cast[ing her] in the role of Lenin’s Most Magnificent Enemy in some cosmic morality play.’ Luxemburg, he argues, ‘was qualitatively different from, and more interesting than, any of this, and she deserves better from us.’ⁱ Löwy’s collection is an attempt to give Luxemburg’s legacy the consideration it deserves, not through a systematic study, but, as Löwy explains, through looking at aspects of Luxemburg’s beliefs ‘with fresh eyes’ (p.xi). It is a worthwhile ambition, but it is not clear that it entirely succeeds.

As is to be expected in an essay collection, there is a certain amount of repetition, which while understandable, does mean that in these often rather short pieces, key ideas are treated with some brevity. It is also unfortunate that it is not made particularly clear to the reader that the essays included here range in date of original publication from the 1970s to the 2010s. None of the original publication details are given, although Löwy does mention in his preface to the French edition that the essays were chosen from among his work on Luxemburg from the 1970s and following decades.

This might seem a frivolous objection. It is certainly not the case after all that last century’s work on Luxemburg is not worth reading, and indeed, some of the most interesting essays here prove to be among the oldest. Omitting the dates does prevent us, though, from tracking the evolution of Löwy’s views on Luxemburg over the decades, and also ignores any rethinking which he may have done in the interim. One of the oldest essays here, ‘Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky’, first published in 1979, was republished online on International Viewpoint in 2021, where Löwy noted, as he did not in this collection, that ‘if I would rewrite it today, I would probably give greater emphasis on the positive side of Rosa Luxemburg’s and young Leon Trotsky’s views on political organization. But I still agree with the essential argument of the paper, bringing together both thinkers, as the guiding inspirations of the Fourth International.’ⁱⁱ

Preventing the reader from viewing the essays here in their historical context also limits the application of the arguments to the contemporary political situation. This is clearly important. In her Foreword to this collection, Helen C. Scott argues that ‘engaging with the debates and conflicts of her and our movements, Löwy illuminates Luxemburg’s commitment to revolutionary self-emancipation and explains her continuing relevance for the twenty-first century’ (p.ix).

Context and political priorities

Some of the pieces do relate explicitly to modern political debates, such as where, for example, Löwy argues that Luxemburg’s internationalism is more needed now than ever in the face of the climate crisis. Löwy would perhaps argue that all of them do, as he states that he selected ‘those which struck me as timely, whether they were among the oldest (which is rare), or more recent (which encompass the majority)’ (p.xiii). Some of the essays, however, do show evidence of having been written in different political times and with accordingly different political priorities. This is true for example of the 1979 essay where Löwy points out that, ‘contrary to latter-day Eurocommunists’, Luxemburg did not abandon the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that her commitment to democracy had been shown to be justified by ‘sixty years of bureaucratic degeneration in the USSR’ (p.100).

This is not to argue that those older essays are now irrelevant, simply that they have to be understood in the context in which they were written. This is why, for example, when Tony Cliff’s 1959 pamphlet Rosa Luxemburg was republished in 1983, Lindsey German explained in her introduction that because the aim of the pamphlet had been to ‘present Rosa Luxemburg’s ideas in order to reassert the revolutionary socialist tradition’ against Stalinism, it didn’t go into detail about Luxemburg’s ideas about revolutionary organisation and class struggle, which in 1983 appeared to be of greater importance than they were in 1959.ⁱⁱⁱ It is, of course, now necessary to read German’s introduction also in the context of its political time. All of this is only possible if pieces are clearly dated, so it is a weakness that the essays here are not.

To be fair, Löwy’s position on many of the debates around Luxemburg’s thought has appeared to remain consistent over the decades. On the question of whether Luxemburg was the ‘wooly-minded spontaneist’ of some critical left views, Löwy’s position can perhaps be summed up as a sort of nuanced ambivalence. In a chapter on the philosophy of praxis in Luxemburg’s thought, first published in 2011, he concludes ‘was Rosa Luxemburg therefore spontaneist? Not quite…’ (p.16). Luxemburg, he points out, did appreciate the need for revolutionary organisation, and indeed was criticised by Karl Liebknecht for being too mechanical and centralising in her view of the role of the International. Her difference with Lenin was about the nature of the revolutionary party:

‘for Vladimir Ilyich, editor of the newspaper Iskra, the revolutionary spark is brought by the organized political vanguard, from the outside toward the interior of the spontaneous struggles of the proletariat; for the Jewish/Polish revolutionary, the spark of consciousness and revolutionary will ignite in the struggles, in the action of the masses’ (p.14).

For Luxemburg, Löwy argued in 2011, the revolutionary party was the organic expression of the working class. This was also the picture he presented in 1979 of Luxemburg’s view of the Bolshevik revolutionary victory, where he points out that she was in favour of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but as a dictatorship of the entire class, not simply a revolutionary vanguard.

Lenin and Luxemburg

Löwy comes close here to presenting the straw Lenin, mechanical and voluntarist, of much anti-Leninist criticism, rather than fairly representing Lenin’s understanding of the relationship between the revolutionary party and the class. While Löwy’s formulation of the revolutionary paper editor versus the Jewish/Polish revolutionary tips its hat towards locating Lenin and Luxemburg’s views in their political situations, there is little consideration here of how the differing situations in Germany and Russia would have required Lenin and Luxemburg to put differing emphases on the role of organisation. Luxemburg spent much of her political life fighting against the deadening hand of the SPD party bureaucracy, so for her, stressing the need to relate to workers’ struggles was of key importance. For Lenin, on the other hand, the need for organisation was the vital argument to win.

Löwy is careful to stress the extent to which Luxemburg agreed with Bolshevik positions and celebrated the October 1917 revolution. He deplores the tendency of anti-Bolshevik writers on her 1918 pamphlet on the Russian Revolution to ignore the first section, which is ‘a powerful testimony to her profound admiration for the Bolshevik leadership’. Skipping this first section is, Löwy says, ‘an outright falsification’ (p.45). This more rounded consideration of Luxemburg’s view of the Bolsheviks is welcome and useful. As can be seen, however, in the discussion of Luxemburg, Lenin and spontaneity, Löwy is not immune to the tendency to counterpose Luxemburg on the one hand and the Bolshevik leaders on the other, a tendency which, as Le Blanc has argued, ‘obscures not only the realities of Lenin’s politics but also of Luxemburg’s.’^iv

It is notable in this regard that the section of Luxemburg’s writings for which Löwy reserves the most praise in these essays is the chapter on democracy in the 1918 pamphlet on the Russian revolution, in which she was very critical of what she saw as the Bolsheviks’ rejection of democracy. For Löwy, this is ‘one of the most important texts of Marxism, of communism, of critical theory, and of the revolutionary thought of the twentieth century. It is difficult to imagine a refounding of socialism in the twenty-first century that does not take into account the arguments developed in these feverish pages’ (p.21).

It is difficult to read this as other than an argument for seeing Luxemburg’s position on the one hand and that of Lenin and Trotsky on the other as opposed, and for rejecting the latter in favour of the former. In the same essay, from 2011, Löwy argues that Luxemburg’s writing has become ‘one of the most important references in the debate … on a socialism of the twenty-first century, capable of going beyond the impasses of the experiences conducted in the name of socialism in the last century’ (p.23). While this is most obviously referring to Stalinism, the implication seems to be that Luxemburg’s writings are a replacement for the Leninist tradition as well. As the introduction to the US edition of this collection argues, Luxemburg represents, at least for her American readers, ‘a democratic version of revolutionary socialism, in association with – or in some cases, instead of – Leon Trotsky’ (p.xvii).

Democracy and revolution

This is not of course to argue that anti-democratic authoritarianism would be a correct policy for any revolutionary socialist party. It is possible however to recognise that our knowledge of developments in Russia in the years following the revolution can affect our assessment of the justice or not of Luxemburg’s critique in 1918. It is also possible to regard Luxemburg as something other than the critical friend, observing from afar, that she comes over as in Löwy’s account.

As Löwy says, Luxemburg recognised that ‘“it would be demanding something superhuman from Lenin and his comrades if we should expect of them that under such circumstances [the attacks from White armies and foreign powers] they should conjure forth the finest democracy”’ (p.100). Her criticism was that the Bolsheviks were making a virtue of necessity, and a virtue into policy, so that they were recommending ‘“the tactics forced upon them by these fatal circumstances … to the international proletariat as a model”’.

It would be worth considering here that Lenin was well aware that the only way out of these fatal circumstances for the revolution would be for the revolution to spread to other European countries, in particular Germany. A major factor in the failure of the German revolution was the reformism of the SPD and arguably the failure of Luxemburg and others to split from it until late on, so that they then had insufficient time to build a strong alternative. While apparent disagreements between Luxemburg and Lenin could arise because they were operating in different countries with incomplete knowledge of each other’s circumstances and writings, they were nevertheless not in separate spheres but engaged in the same struggle. The difficulties of the German socialists affected the course of the Russian revolution just as much as the example of the Bolsheviks was relevant for the struggle in Germany.

Löwy is undoubtedly right to stress the importance of Luxemburg’s commitment to democracy. In a collection published (in English) this year, however, it seems a missed opportunity not to have found a way of considering this commitment in the context of modern debates. Löwy’s identification of ‘the vital necessarily of an unlimited democracy to safeguard the power of the proletariat’ (p.100) rather than Stalinist dictatorship is clearly correct, but explicit support for Stalinism is hardly a major current any longer in the US or British left. A more widespread idea is that of replacing representative democracy with citizens’ assemblies selected by sortition, which is championed by XR among others. It seems clear that Luxemburg would not have been in favour of this, given her identification of the historic mission of the proletariat ‘to create a socialist democracy to replace bourgeois democracy – not to destroy democracy altogether’ (p.100), but a collection aiming to relate Luxemburg’s thought to the politics of the twenty-first century should perhaps have found room to consider what light she could shed on such current issues.

Internationalism and the national question

Helen C. Scott, in her introduction to this collection, informs us that while Löwy is ‘a proud partisan for Luxemburg and all she stood for,’ he is not uncritical, as ‘he scrutinizes assumptions and omissions and takes issue with certain positions’ (pp.viii-ix). Chief among these is Luxemburg’s position on the national question, which is the subject of what appears to be one of the most recent essays in the collection, on Rosa Luxemburg and imperialism. As Löwy points out, Luxemburg was consistently opposed to the idea of national independence for Poland, and although she did at times appear to support national self-determination in general, although not in the specific Polish case, in her 1918 pamphlet on the Russian revolution, she dismissed the question as ‘empty petit-bourgeois phraseology’ (p.67).

Löwy is clear that he does not agree with this position, describing it as ‘the very questionable dim view she takes of the political rights of nation-states’ (p.67). He goes on however to set it against Luxemburg’s internationalism and understanding of the evils of colonialism, concluding that she ‘was prophetic in raising the alarm on the dangers of nationalism’ (p.79). The implication is that this was a package: that Luxemburg could not have been ‘all the more cognizant of the rights of colonized peoples to resist imperialist domination’ (p.79) if she had not rejected national self-determination. Luxemburg’s ‘general attitude to the national question … was the problematic and questionable reverse of her radical internationalism’ (p.66). It follows from this that Lenin’s commitment to national self-determination came at the price of ignoring the dangers of nationalism.

There are problems with connecting internationalism and opposition to imperialism with the national question in this way. As Löwy himself pointed out in a 1976 essay, not included here, on the national question, it was not that Lenin was soft on Polish nationalists, but that Luxemburg and the Polish social democrats were led by their understandable opposition to the nationalists to overcorrect. ‘It is quite understandable,’ Lenin wrote, ‘that in their zeal (sometimes a little excessive, perhaps) to combat the nationalistically blinded petty bourgeoisie of Poland the Polish Social Democrats should overdo things.’^v

Löwy in this collection hints that Luxemburg’s over-correction came not just from her assessment of the Polish ‘social patriots’, but from a determination not to support causes on the basis of her own national identity. As he comments, Luxemburg was careful not to pay special attention to anti-Semitism, writing in 1917 ‘what’s the point of going on about the particular suffering of the Jewish people?’ (p.64), despite suffering from anti-Semitic campaigns herself. This meant that she paid less attention to anti-Semitism than other socialists, ignoring for example the pogroms in Tsarist Russia. One can suspect that her particular disdain for the Polish struggle for national self-determination similarly sprung in part from an overcorrection to her own Polishness, and the anti-Semitism of the Polish nationalists of the time cannot have helped.

Lenin understood that the way to oppose such petty-bourgeois nationalism is not for the proletariat to stand aside from struggles for national self-determination, but to support the democratic right to self-determination both in theory and in practice. This was for Lenin part of the struggle against imperialism in both colonising and colonised countries, not an alternative to it. Implying that Luxemburg’s rejection of the national-liberation struggle in Poland was a necessary concomitant of her position on imperialism is to perpetuate her own error, that the only position to take on any national-liberation movement is principled opposition.

In keeping with the aim of giving Luxemburg’s legacy the treatment it deserves, it is important to end on a positive note. It is useful to have here Löwy’s 1993 essay on Luxemburg’s conception of ‘socialism or barbarism’. In this essay, Löwy stresses how Luxemburg’s formulation of the alternatives of socialism or barbarism in her 1915 Junius Pamphlet was not just an important denunciation of the horrors of war, but a rejection of the doctrine of ‘socialist inevitability’: the idea, common within the SPD, that socialism was certain to result from the contradictions of capitalism. As Löwy points out, Luxemburg saw socialism as a historical possibility but not as an inevitability:

‘The phrase “socialism or barbarism” means that, in history the die aren’t cast, the “final victory” or the defeat of the proletariat are not decided in advance, by the “bronze laws” of economic determinism, but depend also on the conscious action, on the revolutionary will of the proletariat’ (p.6).

That we face a choice between socialism or barbarism is not only one of Luxemburg’s most famous phrases – and one which, for the situation in 1915, was clearly correct – but represents the clarity and creativity of her political thought. It illustrates why considerations of her work and her life are always welcome, even when some of their conclusions may be wide of the mark.

i Paul Le Blanc, The Living Flame. The Revolutionary Passion of Rosa Luxemburg, (Haymarket Books, Chicago 2019), p.6.

ii Rosa Luxemburg & Trotsky – International Viewpoint – online socialist magazine

iii Rosa Luxemburg was a revolutionary socialist | Counterfire

iv Paul Le Blanc and Helen C. Scott (eds.), Socialism or Barbarism. Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings, (Pluto Press, London 2010), p.17.

v Quoted in Michel Löwy, ‘Marxists and the National Question’, New Left Review 96 (1976), pp.81-100; p.88.