New perspectives on Rosa Luxemburg’s concept of the transition to socialism

The life and thought of Rosa Luxemburg have long been a point of attraction for socialists, feminists, and anti-imperialists, yet interest in her seems to increase whenever a new stage of spontaneous freedom struggles emerge. This was true of the 1960s, when the birth of a new generation of revolutionaries made her a focus of attention after decades of being ignored or belittled by established ‘Marxism’, as well as the 1980s, when the feminist movement brought a new lens to appreciating aspects of her work that had been earlier overlooked. ¹ Following the 2008 global recession and the Occupy Movement and Arab Spring, interest in her revived again, leading to numerous new studies and translations of her work – including in Farsi, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Indonesian. ² A similar rebirth of interest in her work may be in store today, in light of the mass protests against police abuse and for racial justice that rose in the USA and spread worldwide in the spring and summer of 2020. ³ These protests – which occurred in over 2600 US towns and cities and in dozens of countries around the world – indicate that a new generation of activists is seeking a liberatory alternative to existing society. It was preceded and followed by a burst of interest in socialist ideas – and all signs indicate that this will continue in light of the depth of today’s economic, political, and ecological crisis. It is only to be expected that many will be drawn anew to aspects of Luxemburg’s work which have received insufficient attention in the past – especially now that a project is underway to finally make all of her writings available in English translation. ⁴

I will focus here on Luxemburg’s contribution to one of the most difficult issues facing radical theory – how to achieve a transition to socialism in a particular country if socialism as a social system can only exist on an international scale. Internationalism was clearly one of the central motifs of Luxemburg’s work, but she is often overshadowed by discussions of other Marxists (Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, et al.) when it comes to the question of how to navigate the transition to socialism. ⁵ Now that thousands of pages of writings by her (in German, Polish, and Russian) have been discovered over the past decade that were previously unknown or unavailable, ⁶ we are in a much better position to explore the entire corpus of her work in light of contemporary debates and concerns. I will therefore focus on some of these lesser-known writings composed during and after the 1905 Russian Revolution, which point to why her ideas come alive anew each time a new stage is reached in spontaneous freedom struggles.

Luxemburg’s openness to spontaneous mass struggles was most fully manifested in her response to the 1905 Russian Revolution. Although a number of Marxists of the time (such as Karl Kautsky and Anton Pannekoek ⁷ ) argued several years before 1905 that Russia was the ‘weak link’ in capitalism and its growing industrial proletariat could become a leading force in the European labor movement, no one anticipated the depth and breadth of the uprisings that swept the Empire in the days, weeks, and months following ‘Bloody Sunday’ on 22 January 1905. Luxemburg, who was living in Germany at the time, spent the entire year intensely studying and commenting on the new forms of democratically organized grassroots committees, councils, unions, and parties that spontaneously arose during the revolution. She published articles and essays on it on almost a daily basis, especially from October 1905, when she became an editor of Vörwarts, the SPD’s main daily newspaper, following a dispute over the lukewarm response to the Revolution by its former editors. Virtually every issue over the next three months had a front-page column written anonymously by Luxemburg entitled ‘The Russian Revolution’. These were finally identified and republished in German in 2014 and in English for the first time in 2019 ⁸  – providing an invaluable window into how a revolutionary Marxist theoretician sought to comprehend the ebbs and flows of an ongoing social revolution.

Although Luxemburg held that spontaneous actions of the working class showed that it was instinctively democratic as well as socialist in orientation, she did not downplay the role of organization. She repeatedly refers to the ‘years of patient work’ by Russian and Polish Social Democrats in preparing the humus from which the revolution emerged. This was typical Luxemburg: ideas for her were not epiphenomenal, since they provide the organization of thought that precedes and paves the way for many a ‘spontaneous’ uprising. Since socialism, as she saw it, is the first social system that is the product of the conscious, self-determined decisions of masses of people, the central task of revolutionary Marxists is to enlighten the working class as to the nature of capitalism and its ability to surmount it.

Her numerous articles on the Revolution, which also appeared in the Polish publication Czerwony Sztandar, served as the raw material for one of her most famous works – The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions. It was written after she had traveled to Russian-occupied Poland to directly participate in the Revolution, for which she earned a four-month jail sentence. Upon being freed in July 1906, she traveled to Finland and composed the Mass Strike pamphlet while engaged in intense discussions with Lenin and other Bolsheviks. It stated:

Social Democracy is the most enlightened, most class-conscious vanguard of the proletariat. It cannot, and must not, await in fatalist fashion, with folded arms, the onset of the ‘revolutionary situation’ – it cannot wait for such a spontaneous popular movement to fall from the sky. On the contrary, it must, as always, anticipate the development of events and seek to accelerate them. It cannot do this, however, through suddenly and indiscriminately issuing a ‘call’ for a mass strike at what might be the right or the wrong point in time, but rather, and above all, by making clear to the broadest proletarian strata the inexorable onset of this revolutionary period and by clarifying the internal social moments that lead to it and its political consequences. (Luxemburg, 1975: 200)

At the same time, she sharply criticized parties that are ‘always ready to give “marching orders” to the working class’, on the grounds that

Social Democracy is merely the advance guard of the proletariat, one part of the vast working mass, blood of its blood and bone of its bone. Social Democracy searches out and identifies the paths and slogans of a particular workers’ struggle only as that struggle develops, interpreting signs for the road ahead from the struggle itself. (Luxemburg, 1906a: 2)

Moreover, ‘it should be borne in mind that while Social Democracy, with all its resolutions, is certainly an important factor in history, it is merely one factor among many’ (Luxemburg, 1975: 1620). Later in 1906, she noted:

A truly working-class party may consider itself, and has the right to consider itself, a representative of the interests of working people and as their champion in the revolutionary fight; it cannot ever during the course of its activities consider itself to be identical to the people or to the revolutionary government – unless it wants to make of revolutionary government a ‘revolutionary’ farce. (Luxemburg, 1906b: 2)

Luxemburg was attentive to the limits as well as the accomplishments of the 1905 Revolution. Although the working class was the leading force for the first time in a nationwide revolution, she argued that achieving a transition to socialism was not on the agenda for Russia at the time. The most that could be hoped for was the overthrow of tsarism and the creation of the capitalist-bourgeois preconditions for socialism – that is, a democratic republic. She wrote:

No revolution has yet ended in any other way than with one class holding power, and every detail suggests that now the proletariat may become the liquidator [of the old order]. Of course, no social democrat fools himself that the proletariat will remain in power; if it remained, that would lead to the rule of its class ideas, and it would realize socialism. Today there is not sufficient strength [for that], since the proletariat constitutes a minority of [Russian] society, in the strict sense of the word. Indeed, that a minority should realize socialism is out of the question, as the very idea of socialism does not allow minority rule […] And since the fact remains that in our society the working class is not the majority – the petty-bourgeois and the peasants are – Social Democrats will not constitute a majority in the Constituent Assembly, only democrats from the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie [will]. We may regret this, but we cannot change it. (Luxemburg, 1906c: 1)

Luxemburg was restating a principle that was central to Marx, but which became largely lost sight of with the advent of Stalinism: namely, that ‘The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority’ (Marx, 1976: 495). Marx never imagined that ‘socialism’ could be introduced by a party or grouping that is representative of a minority of the populace. However, Russia in the early 20th century was a developing society in which 85 percent of the populace were peasants. While Luxemburg viewed the peasantry as an important force in battling tsarist oppression, its natural inclination, she held, was to obtain private ownership of the land – a perspective at odds with the socialization of the means of production. Since she held that socialism cannot be forcibly imposed by a minority group or party, Russia must endure an extended period of capitalist industrialization that ultimately creates a proletarian majority.

This was hardly a controversial position at the time – even if her emphasis on the need for a socialist transition to first have the support of a majority of the populace was somewhat distinctive. It had been an article of faith in Russian ‘Marxism’ since its founding by Plekhanov in the early 1880s that Russia (like all developing societies) must endure an extended period of capitalist industrialization before being ready for socialism. This despite the fact that Marx reached a very different conclusion in the last years in arguing in his letters to Vera Zasulich (and elsewhere) that it was possible for Russia to bypass or shorten the capitalist phase and move directly to communism. Marx’s position, however, was not only ignored but actively suppressed by Plekhanov and his followers. ⁹ Even Luxemburg – who, unbeknownst to her, studied some of the same sources as Marx in developing studies on the non-Western world that praised the progressive character of its pre-capitalist communal formations – held that they were doomed to perish upon contact with capitalism-imperialism. ¹⁰ She, like almost all other Marxists, held that such indigenous pre-capitalist formations could not provide the basis for a transition to socialism.

The issue that did deeply divide the Russian Marxists was which class would lead the bourgeois-democratic revolution. The Mensheviks, following Marx’s approach during the 1848 revolutions, held that the liberal bourgeoisie must be the primary force since the Russian working class was relatively small and unorganized. Luxemburg castigated their position on the grounds that the Mensheviks were mechanically adopting the schema of 1848 to a radically different reality. The Russian proletariat, she held, was now stronger and more mature than the West European of 1848, ¹¹ while the Russian bourgeoisie, which tended to seek compromises with tsarism, was far weaker. Therefore, the immediate task was to displace the bourgeoisie from leadership of the revolution. She stated:

The Russian proletariat fights first for bourgeois freedom, for universal suffrage, the republic, the law of associations, freedom of the press, etc. but it does not fight with the illusions that filled the proletariat of 1848. It fights for [such] liberties in order to instrumentalize them as a weapon against the bourgeoisie. (Luxemburg, 1906d: 180)

Herein lay the dual character of the Russian Revolution – proletarian in form, but bourgeois-democratic in content. It is therefore no accident than from 1905 to 1907 Luxemburg worked closely with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who adopted a very similar position. ¹²

This also produced an important, though rarely noticed, modification of her earlier criticism of Lenin’s organizational theories, expressed just before the Revolution in her 1904 ‘Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy’. It accused Lenin of elevating ‘the Party’ above the masses in an elitist, voluntarist manner, which ‘seems to us to be a mechanical transposition of the organizational principles of the Blanquist movement of conspiratorial circles to the Social Democratic movement of the working masses’ (Luxemburg, 2006 [1904]: 253). In 1906, in contrast, she rejected the Mensheviks’ critique of Lenin for adhering to a Blanquist concept of organization:

We do not agree that comrades from so-called Bolshevism in Russia have now, in a time of revolution, fallen into the Blanquist errors which Comrade Plekhanov ascribes to them. There were perhaps traces of this in the organizational plan put forward in 1902 by Comrade Lenin, but that belongs in the past, the distant past, since we live today quickly, at a dizzying pace. These errors were corrected by life itself, and it does not do to fear that they may be repeated…If ‘Bolshevik’ comrades speak today of the dictatorship of the proletariat, they have never given it a Blanquist meaning. They have never fallen into the error of People’s Will, which dreams about ‘seizing power’ (zakhvatit’ vlast’). But they claimed that the current revolution may end in the control by the proletarian class of the entire state machine. (Luxemburg, 1906c: 2)

Luxemburg’s relation to her fellow revolutionaries was more complex and nuanced than many contemporary writers give her credit for – whether they approach her work from a ‘Leninist’ or an ‘anti-Leninist’ position.

It may appear that her view that Russia must first endure a prolonged period of capitalist development was rooted in a rigid, unilinear view of history – first feudalism, then capitalism, and ultimately socialism. But this is only partly the case. If she simply adhered to a crude unilinear determinism, she would have agreed with the Mensheviks that the proletariat cannot play the leading role in the revolution. But she didn’t because she was attentive to the subjective aspirations and capacities of the Russian working class. The Revolution showed that they, not the liberals, were in the position to seize power and form a democratic republic. But the revolution could not immediately achieve a transition to socialism since the working class constituted a minority of the populace. Luxemburg’s attentiveness to the concrete subjective and objective conditions, not a quasi-metaphysical theory of history, was decisive in her arguing that the form of the revolution is proletarian while its content is bourgeois-democratic.

Nevertheless, Luxemburg would have been on stronger ground if she had a more expansive understanding of the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. Marx argued by 1881 that a revolution in Russia might be able to bypass a capitalist stage of industrialization if a peasant insurrection based on its indigenous communal forms obtained support from the workers of the technologically advanced countries. A worker-peasant alliance of this type, which would also involve the proletarians within Russia, would avoid the problem of a minoritarian revolution – and with it, the need for a bourgeois-capitalist stage. This option, however, was not considered by Luxemburg or any of the Russian Marxists of her generation, who assumed (falsely as it turns out) that the indigenous communal formations of the Russian peasantry had largely disappeared by that point. It was only with Stalin’s forced industrialization of the 1930s that the traditional communal forms of the peasantry became completely obliterated.

On this issue, Lenin was closer to the mark in arguing for a ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’. Luxemburg, however, would have none of it: the furthest she agreed to go was to call for a ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry’. As she put it in 1906:

The peasant movement in Russia, a convergence of various factors, interests, and strata, has no essential unity with the defined, fixed class politics of the proletariat, whose overarching goals range far beyond the most revolutionary of the passing gusts of the peasant movement […] an alliance of the proletariat and the peasantry cannot be the basis for the work of actually achieving political revolution, for determining its objectives, or for realizing them, any more than any other conscious alliance can. (Luxemburg, 1908: 193)

Like Leon Trotsky, she held that the peasants were an unreliable political ally. But she did not accept his theory of ‘permanent revolution’, which held that the Revolution could go beyond the bourgeois-democratic stage and effect a transition to socialism if the West European proletariat came to its aid. Although she admired his work in heading the St. Petersburg Soviet in 1905, she did not take his theory of permanent revolution seriously and never mentions it. ¹³ She too, of course, held that a socialist revolution could not succeed in Russia without revolutions in the advanced capitalist lands. But, unlike Trotsky, she did not think that such subjective factors could overcome the objective barrier to surpassing the capitalist phase – the fact that a minority of the populace, even when led by a highly centralized and disciplined vanguard party, lacks the ability to promote an actual transition to socialism. ¹⁴

Nevertheless, an important question can be raised against Luxemburg’s theorization of the development of the Russian Revolution: how can the working class sustain itself in power in a democratic republic after overthrowing tsarism if it represents only a minority of the populace? Given the latter, is it even possible to establish the preconditions for the realization of socialism through a democratic republic under the leadership of the proletariat?

Luxemburg directly addresses this in a far-reaching analysis written in Polish in 1908, ‘Lessons from the Three Dumas’. This remarkable essay, which can be considered one of her most important theoretical analyses of the problems facing revolutions, will soon appear in English for the first time (Luxemburg, 2021). It surveys the failure of the efforts to create a parliamentary democracy after 1905 and the lessons to be learned for the future now that the counter-revolution has prevailed. She looks to the future, and makes the following claim:

The working class cannot delude itself that, having overthrown absolutism and attained a dictatorship for a certain period, it will establish a socialist system. The socialist revolution can be only a result of international revolution, and the results that the proletariat in Russia will be able to achieve in the current revolution will depend, to say nothing of the level of social development in Russia, on the level and form of development that class relations and proletarian operations in other capitalist countries will have achieved by that time. (Luxemburg, 1908: 189)

Here is one of the most consistent themes in Luxemburg’s work – internationalism. She thoroughly understands that just as capitalism arose as a world system, socialism cannot exist in one country or locale. Yet despite this, important social progress can be made by a democratic republic under the control of the working class in a single country:

Nevertheless, if the revolutionary proletariat in Russia were to gain political power as well, however temporarily, that would provide enormous encouragement to the international class struggle. That is why the working class in Poland and in Russia can and must strive to seize power with full consciousness. Because once workers have power, they can not only carry out the tasks of the current revolution directly – realizing political freedom across the Russian state – but also establish the eight-hour workday, upend agrarian relations, and in a word, materialize every aspect of their program, delivering the heaviest blows they can to bourgeois rule and in this way hastening its international overthrow. (Luxemburg, 1908: 190)

Luxemburg is not suggesting that such a successful seizure of power would itself be socialist, even though it would have socialist aims. It would still exist in the context of the capitalist world market and be subject to its irrational ‘laws’. But it would be a highly progressive regime that provides vital democratic rights to the populace – which is the best terrain in which to promote the struggle for a future truly socialist society.

Needless to say, this is not the path that was followed by 20th-century revolutions in the developing world. There were successful seizures of power (China, 1949; Cuba, 1959; Angola and Mozambique, 1975; etc.), but the regimes quickly anointed themselves as ‘socialist’ – even though they were surrounded by a capitalist world market that rendered implausible the actual formation of socialism in any of them. Which is not to deny that they made some important social advances – and that even greater ones could have been made had the regimes taken a democratic form. But anointing regimes as ‘socialist’ that were neither politically democratic nor in the position to forge genuinely socialist economic relations had the effect of transforming ‘Marxism’ from a theory of liberation to an ideology of statist domination. As the Marxist-humanist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya argued:

Even where a state like Cuba is protected from the worst whims of the world market and where state planning is total, the price of sugar is still dependent upon the socially necessary labor time established by world production. In a word, to plan or not to plan is not the decisive question. The state of technological development and the accumulated capital are the determinants, the only determinants when the masses are not allowed their self-activity, which threatens to undermine the stability of the whole globe. (Dunayevskaya, 2003: 225)

Luxemburg did not anticipate such developments, but her discussion in ‘Lesson from the Three Dumas’ does suggest a different direction from what transpired long after her death. The question that she directly addresses is how can the working class maintain itself in power in a single country surrounded by the world market if it constitutes a minority of the populace? Her answer is that it can’t – and yet the effort is still worth it. She writes:

The revolution’s bourgeois character finds expression in the inability of the proletariat to stay in power, in the inevitable removal of the proletariat from power by a counterrevolutionary operation of the bourgeoisie, the rural landowners, the petty-bourgeoisie, and the greater part of the peasantry. It may be that in the end, after the proletariat is overthrown, the republic will disappear and be followed by the long rule of a highly restrained constitutional monarchy. It may very well be. But the relations of classes in Russia are now such that the path to even a moderate monarchical constitution leads through revolutionary action and the dictatorship of a republican proletariat.

Revolution in this conception would bring the proletariat losses as well as victories. Yet by no other road can the entire international proletariat march to its final victory. We must propose the socialist revolution not as a sudden leap, finished in twenty-four hours, but as a historical period, perhaps long, of turbulent class struggle, with breaks both brief and extended. (Luxemburg, 1908: 191)

This is a remarkable expression of revolutionary realism. So much for Red Rosa with her head in the clouds! She acknowledges that the formation of a democratic republic under the control of the working class – which is how she as well as Marx understood ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ – was bound to be forced from power in the absence of an international revolution, especially in a country where the working class constitutes a minority. Although the revolution would therefore have ‘failed’, it would have produced social transformations that provide the intellectual sediment from which a future uprooting of capitalism could arise.

In other words, Luxemburg objected to sacrificing democracy for the sake of staying in power, since the political form required for achieving the transition to socialism is ‘thoroughgoing democracy’. If a non-democratic regime remains in power, the transition to socialism becomes impossible – even if the regime remains in existence for many years. On the other hand, if a proletarian democracy exists even for a brief period of time, it can help inspire the transition to socialism to later arise, either in that land or elsewhere.

Luxemburg wrote ‘Lessons from the Three Dumas’ in 1908, a full decade before the Russian Revolution of 1917. But in many respects it anticipated her response to it. Since Russia in 1917 was still an overwhelmingly peasant society, it logically follows from Luxemburg’s reasoning of 1908 that it too was not yet in the position to make a direct transition to socialism. Her skepticism, voiced after the Bolshevik seizure of power, concerning the ability of Lenin and his colleagues to effect a transition to socialism was surely based on such factors as foreign invasion, civil war, and economic breakdown; however, it also appears to flow from her understanding of the objective barriers facing any effort to create socialism in which the proletariat is a minority. As she wrote to Julian Marchlewski on 30 September 1918: ‘It is clear that, under such conditions, i.e. being caught in the pincers of the imperialist powers on all sides, neither socialism nor the dictatorship of the proletariat can become a reality, but at the most a caricature of both. I’m afraid that this situation is clear only for you, for me, and a few others’ (Luxemburg, 2011: 471).

Of course, the situation was quite different in Germany, where the proletariat did constitute a majority. And for this reason, Luxemburg fervently pushed for a ‘second chapter’ of the German Revolution after her release from prison in November 1918 that would directly lead to socialism. If that had been achieved, the prospects of the Russian Revolution would be greatly improved, since the time span between the formation of a proletarian regime and the achievement of socialism would be greatly reduced. And yet even for Germany, Luxemburg held firm to the need for a majoritarian revolution. She wrote in December 1918, on the eve of her co-founding of the Communist Party of Germany:

The Spartacus League will never take over governmental power except in response to the clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian mass of all of Germany, never except by the proletariat’s conscious affirmation of the views, aims, and methods of struggle of the Spartacus League. (Luxemburg, 2006 [1918]: 356–7)

Lenin and the Bolsheviks were fully aware in 1917 that the material conditions did not permit the immediate creation of a socialist society, even as they proclaimed the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. ¹⁵ Which is why Lenin worked to foster proletarian revolutions in western Europe. However, two fundamental issues separated him from Luxemburg: 1) the Bolshevik regime did not take the form of a democratic republic, as seen in its suppression of political liberties – which Luxemburg sharply opposed in her critique of the Russian Revolution in 1918; 2) Lenin held that now that the Bolsheviks had seized power, they intended to keep it – permanently. This is far different from Luxemburg’s statement in 1908 that ‘the inability of the proletariat to stay in power’ was not the worst outcome, so long as the vision of liberation projected to the world through its creation of a democratic society based on the rule of the working class inspires others in the world to take up the fight against capitalism.

As it turned out, the ‘worst outcome’ was the pretense that the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ could be maintained even after the failure (by 1923) of the western European revolutions. The only way to sustain such a claim was by draining the notion of ‘proletarian dictatorship’ of any liberatory content by defining it in terms of an actual dictatorship over the masses – instead of as the democratic governance of society by the masses themselves. This in turn set the ground for all subsequent ‘socialist’ regimes, which imposed total state control on virtually every aspect of society under the false pretense that nationalized property equals socialism. With the rise and consolidation of Stalinism, Luxemburg became written out of history, or at the very least denigrated as a hopeless romantic who lacked any programmatic perspective for making a successful revolution. Even anti-Stalinists who admired her idealism and independence tended to view her as looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. But history has proved all of them wrong, since each of the putatively ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ regimes, whether in the form of reformist Social Democracy or revolutionary Marxist-Leninism, produced a ‘transition’ not to socialism but to a new form of capitalism, state capitalism.

As a new generation aspires to rejuvenate a socialist perspective, it will face the challenge of developing a viable alternative to capitalism that charts a completely different path to a new society than envisioned by the Marxists of the 20th century. Luxemburg’s life and work provides important sources for helping to develop such an alternative, even if she, in being as much a product of her time as anyone else, was encumbered by many of its limitations. The one thing we can be sure about is that we do not have the luxury of living through another century of aborted revolutions before getting it right. Given the political retrogression, economic decay, and environmental destruction that increasingly defines our times, we probably have one more chance of getting it right. We owe it to the new generation demanding an end to racism, sexism, and class domination to provide as many resources as possible to help that happen. All revolutionary theory, in the end, is a gift to those who are willing to begin it all anew.