Rosa Luxemburg, The Incendiary Spark
Mike Lowy, Haymarket Books 2024
This book was originally compiled in 2018. The 2024 edition by Haymarket Books includes a foreword by Helen Scott and is edited by Paul Le Blanc.
Luxemburg has been studied by many on the Left for years. However, this appreciative but critical set of essays is an important addition to the analysis of this important revolutionary. It has many interesting insights.
Socialist Fatalism?
One issue Lowy raises is Luxemburg’s view of the inevitability of socialism. He says that until 1914, she saw socialism as inevitable. The role of the Party was to speed along its development. After 1914, she broke with “socialist fatalism”:
“The final victory of the socialist proletariat will never be accomplished if the material conditions that have been built ..don’t flash with sparking animation of the conscious will of the great popular masses.”(5)
Lowy contends that this shift in her attitude to fatalism led to her famous statement that humanity faced a future of “socialism or barbarism”. Lowy contends that this insight comes from Luxemburg herself, though she attributed it to Engels. Lowy explains that Marx and Engels approached this position but never articulated it as sharply as Luxemburg did.
Her conclusion was that “The experience of our generation: capitalism will not die a natural death”.(25)
This led her to be “one of the few in the workers and socialist movements to challenge the ideology of progress.”(27)
Class Consciousness
Luxemburg explained the difference between “latent theoretical consciousness characteristic of the workers movement during periods of domination of bourgeois parliamentarianism, and practical and active consciousness which emerges during the revolutionary process when the masses themselves … appear on the political stage.”(16).
This distinction is important as is the dialectical relationship between the two types of consciousness. Even conscious revolutionaries in a party cannot make revolution without the practical and active consciousness of the working class as a whole. The consciousness of revolutionaries in a non-revolutionary period is an active theoretical consciousness that is practical and as active as it can be before a revolutionary situation.
The Party Question
Too often, Luxemburg’s view on the party is portrayed as fundamentally different from Lenin’s. Lowy points out that her views shifted over time and ended up as very similar to Lenin’s. He also notes that:
“The Polish organization led by Rosa Luxemburg, the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, clandestine and revolutionary, resembled the Bolshevik Party much more than it resembled German Social Democracy.” (17)
Luxemburg waged a battle for revolutionary politics within the German Social-Democratic Party( SPD), most famously in her book Reform or Revolution. As such, she was a critic of bourgeois democracy, while defending democratic rights:
“…as soon as democracy shows the tendency to negate its class character and become transformed into an instrument of the real interests of the population, the democratic forms are sacrificed by the bourgeoisie and by its state representatives.”(27)
Democracy
Her commitment to democracy carried over into the party and unions:
“she fought against the tendency of the trade union and political bureaucracy, or the parliamentary representations, to monopolize political decisions.” (42)
The Russian Revolution
After the October Revolution in Russia, the Bolshevik Party dissolved the Constituent Assembly elected by universal suffrage. The Soviets, directly elected and recallable representatives from the workers and peasants, were much more reflective of popular will than the Assembly. Luxemburg at first criticized this dissolution.
Lowy contends that Luxemburg came around to supporting the Bolshevik decision,
“changed her opinion on this issue because she supported in Germany, after the November Revolution of 1918, the call for all power to the councils.”(47)
According to her friend and fellow revolutionary Clara Zetkin “It is for this reason that Luxemburg did not want to publish her pamphlet.”(47)
The pamphlet referred to was her supportive but critical book on the Russian Revolution of 1917. Critics of Leninism and the October Revolution often try argue that there was a fundamental conflict between her and Lenin about the Russian Revolution. Lowy rejects this assertion, citing her failure to publish the pamphlet during her lifetime.
While Lowy stresses the fundamental solidarity of Luxemburg with Lenin and Trotsky, he argues that Luxemburg’s warnings about the need for democracy in the revolution are important today and in the future.
Some on the Left imply that Luxemburg was soft on bourgeois democracy. In fact, she satirized the revisionist/reformist position of Eduard Bernstein savagely:
“But Bernstein, proposing to change the sea of capitalist bitterness into a sea of socialist sweetness, by progressively pouring into it bottles of social reformist lemonade.”(35)
Imperialism
Luxemburg as a revolutionary was a consistent opponent of militarism and imperialism. Unlike Kautsky and other reformists, she saw these as inherent in capitalism. Her analysis on Marxist economics saw capitalism as dependent on non-capitalist areas. This analysis has been controversial on the revolutionary left.
This analysis underlined her fierce commitment to anti-imperialism. It also allowed her to develop in great detail the horrific effects of imperialism on pre-capitalist societies. As part of her study, she went into detail on the development of pre-capitalist economic formations.
Her fervent internationalism led Luxemburg to reject Lenin’s slogan on the right of nations to self-determination as generally unrealistic economically. Yet she was a consistent opponent of national chauvinism. While opposing the influence of nationalism of the oppressed or oppressor on workers’ struggles, she supported for example the national struggle of the Armenians against the Ottoman Empire ( 84). Her difference from Lenin on this question is real but has often been exaggerated.
Besides these issues, Lowy takes up Luxemburg’s relationship to Trotsky and Lukacs as well as her understanding of Marxism as a science.
This book is very stimulating. It emphasized aspects of Luxemburg’s thought that is not well known.
Luxemburg brought her own stamp to the development of international socialism. Her ideas were not identical to those of Lenin or Trotsky and in some cases clashed with them. Some of these clashes were temporary. For example, Luxemburg came around to the Leninist idea of the party. She also recognized the need for the socialist transition to be based on soviets, workers councils.
For Luxemburg and Lenin
However, Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky were in line with Marxism as the theory and practice of working-class revolution.
Some on the Left try to draw a sharp distinction between the politics of Luxemburg and Lenin. This is wrong! By 1918, Luxemburg was a “Leninist” in regard to party organization. Even her pamphlet on the Russian Revolution gave high praise to Lenin and Trotsky. They returned the appreciation of Luxemburg’s contributions.
Marxist revolutionaries will return again and again to the brilliance of Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky! Some on the Left try to create “ Luxemburgism” as separate from and opposed to Leninism. They try to paint Luxemburg as more democratic than Lenin and portray Lenin as elitist.
In fact both Lenin and Luxemburg were committed to workers’ democracy, internationalism, opposition to oppression and to revolution and the need for a revolutionary party. Revolutionaries today have much to learn from both Luxemburg and Lenin.
This short book makes these points clearly as well as adding important little-known aspects of Luxemburg’s thought. It is well worth the read for anyone interested in working class revolution!
