Philosophic Dialogue
November 1999

The todayness of Rosa Luxemburg

Editor's note: As we approach the end of 1999, the year in which we celebrate the life and thought of the revolutionary activist and thinker, Rosa Luxemburg, on the 80th anniversary of her murder by the proto-fascist Freikorps, we print excerpts from talks by Paul LeBlanc and Olga Domanski given at a forum in Chicago celebrating her life and work.

Prison Letters: 'what it means to be human'

by Olga Domanski,
Contributor to WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND THE DIALECTICS OF REVOLUTION

One way I want to show the "todayness" of Rosa Luxemburg is through the question of her prison letters. Nothing more resonates for me with the question "What does it mean to be human?" than those letters.

What suddenly made me look at Rosa's letters from prison with such new appreciation may be because News and Letters Committees recently published a new work called VOICES FROM WITHIN THE PRISON WALLS. It was written by a prisoner who asked us to help him distribute to other prisoners throughout the entire land a questionnaire he had composed, so the booklet would represent not just his own but the hundreds of other voices that responded. Since it has begun to circulate, we have received a veritable torrent of letters from all sorts of prisoners raising all sorts of questions about what one could only call "the struggle to be truly human."

Stephen Bronner, who brought out an important collection of Luxemburg's letters with his own Introduction in 1978, estimated that if all of Luxemburg's correspondence were completely compiled, it would amount to at least six huge volumes. It is significant that the first small volume of any of her correspondence to be printed was of her letters from prison which she had written to Karl Leibknecht's wife, Sonja, while Karl was at the front (a favorite punishment for dissenters) and later in jail. They were published a year after the murder of Luxemburg and Leibknecht. I can attest that they were known in the revolutionary movement as what showed Luxemburg to be "human." That is certainly the way I was introduced to them when I joined the movement during World War II.

I recently found the copy of her letters I was given, published in 1946, and here is how those letters are presented: "There are Socialists who regard an interest in anything but the class struggle as treason to Socialism. Poetry, music, art-all are mere forms of escapism, enervating drugs which weaken the will-to-victory of the advancing proletariat. Rosa Luxemburg was not a Socialist of that kind. These prison letters of Rosa Luxemburg may not rank as a 'Socialist classic' in the ordinary sense of the term. But as revelations of the inmost personality of a great socialist who was also a great human being, their place in the literature of the international movement is secure." It was as if it was taken for granted that only the letters in which Luxemburg wrote very nearly lyrically about nature or poetry made her "human." It's as if her wonderful declaration "The revolution is magnificent. Everything else is bilge" was in a different compartment.

It is certainly to his great credit that Bronner stressed that with his collection of letters he wanted to present Rosa as a total person, not separating her political and social views from her personal life. Yet even Bronner, whose important book succeeded in presenting her multidimensionality, seemed to slip into a little downplaying of Luxemburg's role as theoretician in his discussion of her prison years. After describing Rosa's escape from the drudgery of prison life by "looking to the clouds and the multicolored stones ... while she watched insects and fed her birds," he describes how much she suffered from serious physical problems in prison, and then writes: "Still, Rosa remained active throughout those years. It is true that she wrote little during her confinement: there was the Korolenko translation, and the extraordinary ANTI-CRITIQUE, but little more."

It is hard to see how Rosa's theoretical work during her prison years could be called "little more"-not only because she considered her "Anti-Critique" to be one of her greatest works, but because of all the rest she wrote from her prison cell. It includes everything from the "Junius" pamphlet which she wrote in the first two months after she was imprisoned in 1915, managing to smuggle it out, as a blast not only against the war but against the Social Democrats who had betrayed and voted war credits to the Kaiser-to her "Theses on the Tasks of International Social Democracy" which followed "Junius," all the way to her pamphlet on the 1917 Russian Revolution where her praise for that revolution was not separated from her opposition to anything that would infringe on democracy.

It makes it imperative to put into their proper, revolutionary perspective, what those crucial years represent between February 1915 when she was first jailed and November 1918 when the German revolution came right to her prison and freed her. These were the critical years filled with war and the Russian Revolution. And what you find in Rosa's writings-whether her formally written theoretical works or her informal letters-is how completely she refused to be isolated from the struggles outside no matter how hard the authorities tried to do just that.

There is no time here to go into much detail on all that Rosa's prison letters mean but what comes through loud and clear is that their manifestation of "what it means to be human" is not just a question of the birds and flowers she loved but of how nothing-including that-was separated from the revolution, which was "magnificent" while everything else WAS "bilge." "Bilge" is most especially what she considered those who called themselves socialists but whom she promised, in the blistering letter she wrote to Mathilde Wurm, "to hunt and harry with trumpet blasts, whip crackings, and blood hounds" as soon as she was free again. It is the letter in which she demands that those who were claiming to be socialists, "stay human." It begins with blasting those who capitulated to the war or made excuses for that betrayal, and then makes it clear that to Luxemburg, "being human" means not giving way to despair but "joyfully throwing your whole life 'on the scales of destiny' when need be, but all the while rejoicing in every sunny day and every beautiful cloud." And then she throws her hands up in frustration because she knows of no "formula" to write for "being human."

When I said that what has illuminated Rosa's prison letters for me may be the experience we are having in News and Letters Committees with the kinds of prisoners' letters we have been receiving in response to D.A. Sheldon's VOICES FROM WITHIN THE PRISON WALLS. I certainly don't mean that Rosa's experience of being imprisoned for being a revolutionary is the same thing as becoming revolutionaries out of the prison experience-which is what we are witnessing in such vast numbers today. What I do see Rosa's letters and the prison correspondence sharing in common is the determination not to be isolated from the world, and from the kind of revolution that is needed to not only uproot the old but to build something new on truly human foundations. What we are seeing is such a powerful reaching out for a philosophy of liberation that it seems to reveal nothing less than a new revolutionary consciousness developing within the mind of the most oppressed human beings in society today. You cannot help feeling that Rosa would have recognized that as "magnificent."

The todayness of Rosa Luxemburg

It is possible to characterize Rosa Luxemburg as one of the finest of the "post-Marx Marxists," and at the same time one with a lively sense of humor. She confessed to an intimate friend that "in theoretical work as in art, I value only the simple, the tranquil and the bold. That is why, for example, the famous first volume of Marx's CAPITAL, with its profuse rococo ornamentation in the Hegelian style, now seems an abomination to me (for which, from the Party standpoint, [she joked] I must get 5 years' hard labor and 10 years' loss of civil rights....)"

Yet this was someone for whom-despite her banter about Hegel-dialectical thinking came most naturally. Applying the dialectical approach to her economic studies, Luxemburg understood capitalism as an expansive system driven by the dynamic of accumulation. Capital in the form of money is invested in CAPITAL in the form of raw materials and tools and labor-power, which is transformed-by the squeezing of actual labor out of the labor-power of the workers-into CAPITAL in the form of the commodities thereby produced, whose increased value is realized through the sale of the commodities for more money than was originally invested, which is the INCREASED CAPITAL out of which the capitalist extracts his profits, only to be driven to invest more capital for the purpose of achieving ever greater capital accumulation.

Luxemburg's one-sided emphasis, in her economic analysis, on capitalist expansion into NON-CAPITALIST areas in no way obscured the inhumanity inherent in the global accumulation process.

Since the German Social Democracy represented the best organized, most powerful, most influential component of the world socialist movement, Luxemburg's comrades encouraged her to become part of it. Almost immediately she had an impact-infuriating the moderate right of the party, delighting the revolutionary Left, and making those in-between increasingly uneasy.

In the German Social Democratic Party she and her revolutionary comrades found themselves trapped in the left-wing of a bureaucratized mass party which, when World War I erupted in 1914, supported the brutalizing imperialist war effort instead of organizing working-class resistance. More than this, its leaders looked with relief upon the imprisonment of Rosa Luxemburg for anti-war activity. In the aftermath of the war, as the working-class radicalization foreseen by Luxemburg gathered momentum, the Social-Democratic bureaucracy was able to divert much of the proletarian militancy into "safe" channels. Luxemburg and the most committed revolutionaries were first blocked and then expelled, left without an adequate revolutionary instrument of their own. Amid the rising proletarian ferment and counter-revolutionary violence of late 1918 and early 1919, they were forced to begin rebuilding an organization.

In 1917 Lenin and the Bolsheviks, thanks to the working-class and peasant upsurge in their own country, and thanks also to years of serious organizational development had succeeded in establishing a revolutionary workers' government in Russia and appealed for the spread of revolutions throughout Europe, but in highly industrialized Germany most of all. Increasing numbers of German workers and war-weary soldiers responded with enthusiasm (so, for that matter, did Rosa Luxemburg who soon was released from prison). This coincided with the collapse of the German war effort, and the collapse of the monarchy. It seemed that Germany was on the verge of socialist revolution-but the only substantial organizational expression of socialism in the country was the German Social Democratic Party which by now was in the hands of the worst of opportunistic bureaucrats who were far more hostile to working-class revolution than to their own landed aristocrats and big business interests.

In order to win the radicalized masses to a genuinely revolutionary socialist alternative, Luxemburg and others formed the SPARTAKUSBUND-the Spartacus League (named after the leader of the great slave revolt that shook the Roman empire)-which was not strong enough to lead the workers to a revolutionary victory. In a very useful study entitled The Lost Revolution, Germany 1918 to 1923, British socialist Chris Harman criticizes Luxemburg's refusal, in the years before World War I, to build within the German Social Democracy something like an organized faction functioning-as he puts it-as "a disciplined body of adherents organized around [a revolutionary periodical], discussing the interrelation between their theory and their practice, establishing criteria for membership." Harman concludes: "Rosa Luxemburg was a great revolutionary. But there was to be a high price to pay for this failure to draw her followers together into a minimally cohesive force."

It is important not to underrate the SPARTAKUSBUND, which actually compares quite favorably-with a mass base and a daily newspaper-to all left-wing organizations in the United States today, and even to the more impressive Socialist Workers Party of Britain to which Harman belongs. Many so-called "mainstream" historians have traditionally been quite dismissive of the SPARTAKUSBUND, but William Pelz, an historian more to my liking, argues that "by war's end, Spartakus had grown into an organization of thousands with influence in numerous working class areas." Since Pelz has inquired more carefully than most into the nature and dimensions of this movement that Luxemburg led, it is worth considering more of what he has to say in his fine study THE SPARTAKUSBUND AND THE GERMAN WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT 1914-1919:

"Struggling underground, the SPARTAKUSBUND was able to grow, propagate its ideas and develop linkages with like-minded revolutionary groups and individuals, based heavily in urban industrial areas. Thus, Luxemburg, [Karl] Liebknecht and the other Spartakusbund leaders directed what was the heart of a growing revolutionary workers movement. Young, active and concentrated in the most modern vital sections of the economy, SPARTAKUSBUND members were to prove the revolutionary voice within the ideological vacuum [which the bureaucratized leadership of the German] Social Democracy labored to maintain."

This suggests that if Luxemburg, Liebknecht and other key Spartakus leaders had not met their deaths in 1919, then around them a powerful, self-confident, increasingly experienced leadership core would have crystallized to lead a growing German Communist Party to victory in, say, 1920 or 1923, when genuine revolutionary possibilities emerged. This would have rescued the Russian Revolution from the isolation that would soon generate Stalinism, at the same time preventing the possibility of the rise of Hitlerism in Germany.

From the standpoint of those determined to preserve the old social order, Rosa Luxemburg could not be allowed to live. But Luxemburg's vibrant, passionate life and intelligence are with us still in her writings, which continue to have an amazing relevance to the realities that we face today.

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