V V: Red Rosa and the poetics of revolution

Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) was a brilliant and engaging Marxist intellectual and one of the greatest theoretical minds of the European socialist tradition. Born a Polish Jew, she was a polyglot, writing in Russian, German and English besides Polish. She also participated in the creation of the German Communist Party and rapidly rose to the party echelons to become a star. In the words of another Jewish intellectual, Hannah Arendt, she was – and remained – a Polish Jew in a country “she disliked and a party she came to despise”.

Luxemburg is remembered today as a champion of the socialist, communist and feminist movements around the world and, more significantly, as someone who took on Lenin and told him in essays and pamphlets where to get off. And Lenin returned the compliment by recommending the publication of her complete collected works (despite “her errors”) because she was “an eagle of the revolution”. The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg (Verso, £25.99) written to friends, lovers and colleagues, among whom were all the leading lights of European and international labour, reveal a multi-faceted woman: economic theorist, political activist, literary critic and lyrical stylist with a tormented inner life.

 

These letters cover a vast area of interest, personal and political, but of interest to Indian readers would be her opposition to the official party line and blind faith in the theory and practice of communism. “Revolutions,” she had said in an essay titled “The Mass Strike, The Political Party and the Trade Unions” admonishing Lenin in 1905, “do not allow anyone to play the school master with them.”

Though she acknowledged that no one was better placed than Lenin to understand the mechanics of making a socialist society, she felt he was completely mistaken in choosing the means: “decrees, dictatorial force of the factory manager, draconian penalties, rule by terror.” The editors to this volume of letters remind us that the demand for a constituent assembly, though a central plank of the Bolsheviks, was dropped in 1917 because there was always a possibility that democracy could throw up wrong results. For Lenin, the elections following the October Revolution, in which the peasant masses had returned Kerensky supporters to the Assembly, indicated the limits of democracy in a revolutionary situation.

For Rosa this was a betrayal of everything that the Bolsheviks had been fighting for. Rosa quoted Trotsky here: “As Marxists we have never been the idolisers of formal democracy.” “Nor,” she snapped back, “have we ever been idolisers of socialism and Marxism.” And she didn’t stop at that. In a speech in 1907, with Stalin in the audience she said that a slavish adherence to The Communist Manifesto was “a glaring example of metaphysical thinking”. In fact, she insisted that under conditions of rampant inequality, formal democracy was a hoax. Only under socialism would true democracy have a chance. “The remedy which Trotsky and Lenin have found, 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 the innate shortcomings of social institutions, That source is the active, untrammeled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people.”

Because of Rosa’s criticism of the communist party’s central leadership she has been portrayed as a “revisionist” who opposed the socialist revolution in the making. These letters show her not as an anarchist but as a passionate democrat whose political actions were based on the call for elections and representative parliamentary forms.

She called for freedom of the press, right of association and assembly which had been banned. Anything less, she insisted, would lead to “brutalisation” of public life.

The course of politics is incalculable, she said — it came to be known as Luxemburg’s theory of spontaneity. It was a theory that was severely criticised as a form of adventurism that could only lead to political disaster. But these letters elaborate what she really meant: that a revolutionary momentum was unpredictable but the spirit must be carried over after the revolution had taken place. In other words, organisation was always to be subservient to spirit. This was not something that Lenin could ever have accepted if it had to be done; only organisation and the discipline behind it could achieve the goals; for Rosa “only experience was capable of correcting and opening new ways”.

Rosa Luxemburg was one of those romantic exiles who believed that dreams were the stuff we were made of. Read the letters if only for their lyricism and practical wisdom.