In the course of this past semester, our group meetings have been punctuated by debates on issues of democracy and democratic organising, that have been informed by theory produced by political movements (such as feminist ones). In parallel, I have come to reflect on bureaucracy and its political bearings as part my group project, and its links to various political systems, and especially capitalism. This ‘reflection’ is a bit off-topic, as I took it as an opportunity to think about recent readings I have done and how they could help our course.
This winter break gave me the opportunity to think more about these issues and perhaps take a step back through readings that I originally did independently of any academic purposes. In particular, I read a collection of essays by Rosa Luxemburg in which she addresses quite specifically matters of political organising, revolution, democracy and bureaucracy. Her essays were intended with a very pragmatic and empirical purpose, as they are directed towards the political challenges faced by the German Communist party at the time of her writings. (She also incorporates a substantive amount of historical analysis in her works, as part of her intellectual training in Marxist dialectical materialism.) These times, and forms of political organisation may seem remote from the context of our University and our course. However, reading them made me think about how timeless and increasingly relevant her reflections are for any form of political endeavour. I will try to analyse some of her ideas that may prove useful for contemporary radical political theory and practice. The collection of essays I read is entitled Reform or Revolution and Other Writings (Dover Publications). It includes: Reform or Revolution (1899), ‘Leninism or Marxism’ (1904), ‘The Mass Strike’ (1906) and ‘The Russian Revolution’ (1918). Unless otherwise specified, all references allude to this book.
A common theme in all these writings is the issue of revolution and the role of central organisation and directives imposed by committees. Luxemburg, in her historical as well as contemporary analyses of the workings of revolutions, makes a strong case for the ‘organic’ character of revolutions, as opposed to policies of discipline and precise planning appointed by intellectuals and party leaders.
This is particularly salient in her weighting of the Mass Strike as revolutionary strategy. She shows that contrary to Engels’s theory, the Mass Strike can be a successful instrument of revolutionary action, when it arises naturally from historical conditions. This view lies in a historical materialist understanding of history, according to which historical phenomena follow a dialectal movement (in Marxist thought, one that is driven by the class struggle). This implies that in the Marxist tradition, the proletarian revolution is an inevitable outcome of the material and historical conditions of the world, and the role of the Communist party and trade unions is to precipitate it. The Mass Strike can be seen as a means to launch the process of the revolution, for example if it emanates from a party committee decision. Luxemburg takes the example of mass strikes in Russia (before the 1917 revolutions, as she wrote her essay in 1906) to show that they emerged from the workers’ spontaneous action, and were symptomatic of a wider revolutionary context. Therefore, the revolution does not consist in a neatly-defined historical event marked with street rioting and barricades (although armed struggle is also part of the process of the revolution). It is a historical situation in which ‘the social foundations and the walls of the class society are shaken and subjected to a constant process of disarrangement’ (140). It is this context of revolution that enables mass strikes to take place, and not the other way around.
Moreover, Luxemburg shows that mass strikes arise from everyday experiences of oppression. Because of a set of historical circumstances and the accumulative effect of the process of history and the inevitable advancement of the class struggle, an ‘apparently trivial circumstance [fills] the cup to overflowing’ (112) and results in the revolt of the workers in the form of a mass strike. This political analysis of revolutionary movements echoes to contemporary events. For example, the recent ‘gilets jaunes’ (yellow vests) movement in France came about as a result of the government’s plan to increase tax on fuel. This political act was interpreted as a symptom of a wider situation of class oppression and led to a movement which pushed forward an extremely broad range of revindications. Likewise, Rosa Luxemburg argues that precise economic struggles are always enmeshed in the Socialist political struggle, which means that workers who go on strike for a specific reform become part of a revolutionary political movement aimed at overthrowing capitalism. According to Luxemburg, class consciousness, class solidarity and political organisation develop during the fight (at various stages and forms of the revolution, the mass strike being one possibility) and usually exceed and/or undermine the orders and previsions of party institutions. She argues that order must arise out of the chaos of the revolution, and provides the example of the establishment of a central trade union committee in Moscow that was created based on the reports of local trade unions, instead of having a central committee dictating the policies of trade union branches.
This also provides the basis for Luxemburg’s criticism of Leninism and the autocratic tendencies of the Bolshevik revolution (in her later essay ‘The Russian Revolution’, in which she also uses ideas from her earlier piece ‘Leninism or Marxism?’). I believe these reflections echo to contemporary debates taking place in the radical left, in which the revolution is often seen as anti-democratic and against the will of the majority – an issue that Luxemburg also addresses in her refutation of the reformist current in the German Communist party. I will show that according to Luxemburg, the revolution is 1. Indispensable to the realisation of Socialism and the end of class oppression and 2. Essential for the advent of a truly democratic society, and a democratic process in itself.
In her essay ‘Reform or Revolution’, Luxemburg makes a strong case against the reformist socialist current and calls for revolutionary action. I think it is worth keeping in mind that in today’s society, the reformist current is seen as the only credible possibility for a Socialist or Socialist-like state and revolutionary programmes seem to have lost all legitimacy (whilst Rosa Luxemburg remains a hero and martyr of the Left, whose face can be bought off Amazon in the form of £15.99 T-shirts). For the purposes of this essay, I will set aside the technicalities of Luxemburg’s analysis of the economic reforms proposed by Bernstein at the time of her writings and focus on the opposition between idealism and materialism, and redistribution vs seizure of the means production. Bernstein’s analysis of class rests on the distinction established between the rich and poor, and the solution he puts forward lies in the redistribution of wealth following an ideal of universal Justice. Much of the contemporary ‘alternative’ economic literature pertains to this same tradition, e.g. Thomas Piketty’s bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (a Marxist reference which, in the light of Luxemburg’s writings, can seem quite ironical) and reformist ‘Social-Democratic’ thought has shaped post-WW2 economic policy in European welfare states. According to Bernstein and most of the current mainstream ‘far’ left (from what I understand of the contemporary, mainly French political scene) Socialism (although this term is hardly ever used, except perhaps in Bernie’s US campaign, in which it enjoyed the benefit of exoticism) can be achieved and inequalities can be resorbed through progressive state intervention in the economy, following what Bernstein calls ‘evolutionary socialism’. This vision presupposes to reject Marx’s historical materialism entirely, because it is incompatible with two of its fundamental principles: economic necessity and the Marxist theory of production. As we have seen, Marx’s historical materialism entails that history is driven in by the class struggle and that Socialism will eventually emerge not out of a collective movement for an abstract ideal of Justice, but out of historical material necessities that will make the capitalist system exhaust itself as a result of its internal contradictions[1] – as an economic necessity. Likewise, the theory of wealth redistribution implies shifting the focus away from the modes of production to its product. However, it is precisely the capitalist modes of production that create the contradiction between Capital and Labour, which brings about the need to socialise the means of production. Therefore, reformist Socialism is an oxymoron. It is only the seizure of the means of the production by the proletariat during the revolution that can put an end to the contradiction between Capital and Labour[2] and achieve Socialism.
Now that I have established the indispensability of the revolution, I will address the issue of democracy. Democracy is at the core of Rosa Luxemburg’s vision of Socialism and the revolution. In ‘Leninism or Marxism?’ she argues that Leninism, with its policy of discipline, hierarchal organisation and bureaucracy managed by the Central Committee, will never achieve a successful revolution (this essay was written before the 1917 revolutions). Indeed, according to her theory of organic revolutions, she believes that the best policies and strategies are learned in the process of the revolution and must come from the involvement of the masses. In ‘The Russian Revolution’ (written after the 1917 revolutions), she argues: ‘The elimination of democracy as such is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure, for it stops up the very living source from which alone can come the correction of all innate shortcomings of social institutions’ (210). She calls for the maintenance of general elections and unrestricted free speech, and emphasises that there is no strict Socialist handbook that would give specific guidelines on the practical realisation of Socialism (aside from its milestone, i.e. the nationalisation of the means of production). She states that Social Democrats, instead of outlining the technicalities of the revolution and of future Socialist orders (in the infamous Soviet bureaucratic fashion) merely have the duty to raise class-awareness to precipitate the revolution, and the rest must arise from a collective and democratic endeavour of the people, which also includes the former bourgeoisie.
All this may seem to be of little relevance to our course. My point is that Rosa Luxemburg’s insights about large-scale political organising and the need for radicality and revolution are extremely relevant to contemporary political debates in the Left. As I believe our course concerns itself with anti-capitalist struggles, it would be worth considering how a Marxist analysis of production in the context of Academia could help us envision a more democratic University – perhaps a Socialist University? And at the same time, how a radical change in the field of education could be inscribed in a wider anti-capitalist endeavour.
[1] The most prominent contradiction being the opposition of Capital and Labour – Labour is socialised, i.e. organised at a social level, whilst the increase in Capital resulting from Labour is individually appropriated.
[2] Bernstein suggests that this can be achieved progressively through the creation of cooperatives and the work of trade unions, but Rosa Luxemburg demonstrates that this is impossible in a capitalist context (47-56).
