“A century after Rosa Luxemburg’s death, her revolutionary heart beats loudly still,” biographer Dana Mills tells us.[i]  Revolution was inseparable from all she was and all that she had to say.

In a sense, this is in conflict with the thematic structure chosen for the Complete Works.  Volume 5 is the final installment of three volumes devoted to the theme of “Revolution,” following two initial volumes devoted to the theme of “Economics,” but those five volumes are of a piece with each other and the entire series.[ii]

This centrality of revolution permeates the quality of Luxemburg’s thought and expression, ensuring that the Marxism she personified vibrates with an energy, critical-minded humor, and creativity infused with radically democratic and internationalist sensibilities.   These sensibilities animate her economic analyses, which in turn refutes the notion that capitalism can gradually be reformed into socialism.

Debates over reform or revolution flared within the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which was Luxemburg’s political home for most of her life. By 1909, it became clear that the official leadership of the SPD favored patient trade union negotiations combined with a legislative program undergirded by electoral victories and advanced through parliamentary maneuver.  But the combined economic, political and cultural analyses one finds in Luxemburg’s writings insist that such reformist moderation will prove no match for the relentless, voracious capital accumulation process, with its attendant militarism, imperialism, and – whenever necessary – authoritarian and murderous violence.  This understanding intimately connects with Luxemburg’s revolutionary “mass strike” orientation, brilliantly elaborated in Volumes 4 and 5.

Whether a member of the German Social Democratic Party or of the German Communist Party (which she helped create just before her death), Luxemburg’s revolutionary socialist orientation was consistent throughout her life.  At the same time, there was a complex evolution.  In the remainder of my remarks, I want to give attention to Luxemburg’s relationship to Communism – particularly to Lenin, early Bolshevism, and the Russian Revolution.[iii]

First, it may be useful to identify five phases in Luxemburg’s relation to Lenin.

FIRST PHASE.  From the 1890s through 1902, Luxemburg and Lenin seem to have had somewhat similar trajectories – becoming intensely active in the revolutionary wing of the world socialist movement, seeing the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) as an ideal form of organization, considering its leading theoretician, Karl Kautsky, to be outstanding mentor as they seriously engaged with and embraced Marxist theory as a guide to action.  Their first meeting in May 1901 included discussions about possibilities of political collaboration.

SECOND PHASE.  In the wake of the Bolshevik-Menshevik split of 1903 within the Russian Social Democratic Party (RSDLP), Luxemburg inclined toward the Mensheviks who depicted Lenin as an authoritarian hyper-centralist.  This was the tone of her “Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy,” a widely read polemical review-essay of the pamphlet One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, Lenin’s account of the split.  Published in Die Neue Zeit, the SPD’s prestigious theoretical journal, her review drew from Lenin not an intolerant denunciation, but a respectful and clarifying response (which Die Neue Zeit chose not to publish).[iv]

THIRD PHASE.  In the wake of the 1905 revolution, converging political orientations caused Lenin and Luxemburg to draw closer together.  In her correspondence, Luxemburg describes multiple discussions with Lenin in this period, commenting: “I enjoy talking with him, he’s clever and well educated, and has such an ugly mug, the kind I like to look at.”  It was in this period that she wrote a defense of Lenin in “Blanquism and Social Democracy,” responding to a polemic by Menshevik chieftain George Plekhanov.[v]

FOURTH PHASE.  Events of 1911-12 pulled them apart.  Luxemburg and her Polish comrades opposed Lenin’s effort to create a Bolshevik-dominated RSDLP through the 1912 Prague conference.  Luxemburg expresses her views quite clearly and sharply in “Credo” (1911) and “The Breakdown of Unity in the RSDLP” (1912), repeating her 1904 characterizations (in seeming contradiction to those of 1906, and certainly in contradiction to the facts), describing Lenin’s organizational views as involving a “purely bourgeois conception of a political party, according to which the leader is everything and the masses nothing.”  A variety of scholarly works – including those by Tamás Krausz, Lars Lih, August Nimtz, Ronald Suny, Alan Shandro, and Paul Le Blanc – have shown this not to be the case.[vi]

Interestingly, Luxemburg seems to be in basic agreement with Lenin’s evaluations of his factional opponents: of the Liquidators and the Mensheviks in general, as well as of the Bolshevik ultra-lefts (Bogdanov and others), and also of Trotsky.  Nonetheless, she denounces what she terms “Lenin’s sectarian and factionalist policy” which blocks “the road to organizational unity with the rest of the party” and thereby condemns the RSDLP’s revolutionary wing to isolation and impotence.  In fact, Lenin’s approach had a quite different result.  The Bolsheviks became a hegemonic force within the Russian workers’ movement.[vii]

This stands in contrast to the more dismal organizational accomplishments of Luxemburg and her comrades in Poland and Germany.  In Poland it can even be argued that Luxemburg was far more factionalist and sectarian than Lenin.  In any event, she would later conclude, in the classic critique “On the Russian Revolution” – without entirely relinquishing her critical views – that “the future everywhere belongs to ‘Bolshevism.’”[viii]

FIFTH PHASE.  In the period of 1914-1919, war and revolution, they are drawn together more closely than ever – with Luxemburg and those around her ultimately converging with the early Communist movement of which Lenin is the keystone.  Even here – as indicated by materials in volume 5 (most of all with her brilliant critique of the Russian Revolution) and in her correspondence – Luxemburg’s critical mind remains intact.  Some elements of her earlier criticisms of Lenin seem to have been revised, but some persisted.  Of these criticisms, one might question her judgments on the national question and the peasant question, and also on the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly.[ix]  But what she has to say about the necessity of genuine democracy for genuine socialism, and her sharp warning against the Bolshevik regime’s violations of democracy in the period after the 1917 Revolution, remain prescient and essential – and consistent with what Lenin himself had been insisting from the 1890s through 1917.[x]  It is worth allowing Luxemburg to make the point in her own words:

That we have never been idol-worshippers of formal democracy merely means that we always distinguish the social core from the political form of bourgeois democracy, we have always revealed the bitter core of social inequality and lack of freedom beneath the sweet shell of formal equality and freedom—not, however, in order to discard this shell; instead we have done so in order to spur the working class not to content itself with this mere husk, but rather to conquer political power so as to fill it with a new social content. It is the historic task of the proletariat, when it comes to power, to create socialist democracy in place of bourgeois democracy—not to eliminate democracy altogether. Yet socialist democracy is not something that only begins in the Promised Land, once the substructure—the socialist economy—has been established; it does not come as a ready-made Christmas present for the obedient populace who, in the interim, have loyally supported the handful of socialist dictators. Socialist democracy commences simultaneously with the dismantling of class domination and the construction of socialism. It begins at the very moment of the seizure of power by the socialist party.[xi]

It is clear from any serious reading of her polemic that Luxemburg is neither breaking with Lenin and Trotsky and other revolutionary leaders as betrayers of the socialist ideal nor scolding from them from the sidelines.  It is a critique from within.  She sees them as outstanding comrades engaged in the very same struggle to which she has committed her life, comrades who have – particularly under the pressure of events – begun to make grave mistakes which she wants to help them correct.

Had Luxemburg lived for at least several years beyond January 1919, the German Communist Party (which would soon become a well-organized revolutionary force on the German scene) her efforts could have helped tilt German and Russian and global realities onto a different path – which was her intention, and Lenin’s hope as well.  Understanding (as Luxemburg and other Marxists also understood) that backward Russia was economically too underdeveloped to create socialism, Lenin’s Bolsheviks were “banking on the inevitability of the world revolution,” as he explained in his August 1918 “Letter to American Workers.”   The spread of revolution would largely be inspired by what the Russian revolutionaries were doing, but it would also come to their rescue.  Lenin and his comrades anticipated that this would sweep working-class majorities into control of industrially advanced countries, which would then join forces with the beleaguered Soviet Republic.  Luxemburg herself explained: “The whole calculation behind the Russian fight for freedom is based on the tacit presumption that the revolution in Russia ought to become the signal for the revolutionary rising of the proletariat in the West: in France, England and Italy, but above all in Germany.”  Lenin emphasized: “We are now, as it were, in a besieged fortress, waiting for the other detachments of the world socialist revolution to come to our relief.”[xii]

While the Bolsheviks attempted to hold out, the young and fragile Soviet Republic was being invaded by foreign armies, being strangled by an economic blockade, suffering an increasingly complex and brutalizing civil war (that was financed by foreign powers), being battered by assassinations and assassination attempts, and more.  In reaction to this – not to “create socialism” but simply to survive – they consolidated a one-party dictatorship, establishing secret police known as the Cheka, which unleashed the Red Terror.[xiii]

The head of the Cheka was a recent recruit to the Bolsheviks, who under the party name “Józef” had for many years been one of Luxemburg’s comrades in the Social-Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, Felix Dzerzhinsky.  Writing to another Polish comrade living in Soviet Russia, she commented: “It is clear that, under such conditions, i.e., being caught in the pincers of the imperialist powers from all sides, neither socialism nor the dictatorship of the proletariat can become a reality, but at the most a caricature of both.”  By dictatorship of the proletariat, she was referring to the classical Marxist conception of political rule by the working class.  She continued: “I’m afraid that Józef has been carried away [with the idea] that economic and political holes can be plugged up by energetically tracking down ‘conspiracies’ and killing ‘conspirators.’”  Referring to sweeping threats of “slaughtering the bourgeoisie” as “idiocy of the highest degree,” she concluded that it “only discredits socialism and nothing more.”[xiv]  In fact, Luxemburg’s “On the Russian Revolution” is not simply a polemic against a “wrong” idea about socialism Lenin is purported to have, but instead identifies dangers inherent in the revolutionary struggle itself.

After Luxemburg’s death, the tension within her perspectives persisted among her closest comrades in Germany and Poland, and in the wake of the 1921 March Action fiasco culminated in their either going the way of Paul Levi (who broke with the Communist movement) or Clara Zetkin (who remained within it).  Mathilde Jacob was one close comrade of Luxemburg’s who went with Levi, and it would be good to know more about others who took this path.[xv]  However, a significant number of Luxemburg’s followers did not follow Levi – including Heinrich Brandler, Paul Frölich, Fritz Heckert, Sophie Liebknecht, Julian Marchlewski, Ernst Meyer, Wilhelm Pieck, August Thalheimer, Adolf Warski, and Clara Zetkin.

Luxemburg partisans who eventually left the Communist movement after Levi’s departure seem to have been rejecting Stalinism rather than Leninism.  While Fritz Heckert, Wilhelm Pieck, and Sophie Liebknecht stayed in the German Communist Party and accommodated to its Stalinization, three central figures – Heinrich Brandler, August Thalheimer, and Paul Frölich – were expelled from the German Communist Party in 1929 for resisting the party’s Stalinization.  Another, Ernst Meyer, actively resisted Stalinization but died in 1930.  Clara Zetkin stayed in the party as a notoriously bitter internal critic of Stalinist developments and died in 1933.[xvi]  Among the Polish comrades, Julian Marchlewski (who died in 1925) remained a mainstay of the Polish CP, as was the case with Adolf Warski (who was arrested and executed in the Stalin purges of the late 1930s) – and the Polish Communist Party was dissolved in 1938 as politically unreliable by decision of the Stalin-dominated Communist International.[xvii]

This triumph of Stalinism led to the shipwreck of the world Communist movement.   Activists seeking to rebuild that movement, and to help humanity avoid barbarism through the revolutionary creation of socialism, have a powerful resource in Rosa Luxemburg – in the five volumes of her Complete Works already published, and in the other volumes yet to come.

[i] Dana Mills, Rosa Luxemburg (London: Reaktion Books, 2020), p. 7.

[ii] Volumes produced as of 2024 include: Peter Hudis, ed., The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume I: Economic Writings 1 (London: Verso, 2013); Peter Hudis and Paul Le Blanc, eds., The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume II: Economic Writings 2 (London: Verso, 2015); Axel Fair-Schulz, Peter Hudis, and William Pelz, eds., The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume III: Political Writings 2, On Revolution 1897-1905 (London: Verso, 2019); Peter Hudis and Sandra Rein, eds., The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume IV: Political Writings 2, On Revolution 1906-1909 (London: Verso, 2022); Helen C. Scott and Paul Le Blanc, eds., The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume V: Political Writings 3, On Revolution 1910-1919 (London: Verso, 2024).

[iii] This relationship has been the focal point of controversy over the years. The stark contrast of a benign and admirable Rosa Luxemburg to an evil and despicable Lenin is the influential interpretation advanced through a widely read, lengthy introductory essay by Bertram D. Wolfe in The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism? (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1961), reproduced in his collection Strange Communists I Have Known (New York: Stein and Say, 1965).

It is worth noting that in his years as a partisan of revolutionary Marxism, before he evolved rightward into a Cold War anti-Communist, Wolfe’s approach was similar to that found in Paul Frölich’s splendid biography first published in 1940 and still in print – Rosa Luxemburg (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010) – which portrays Luxemburg and Lenin as comrades who had significant differences on important questions, but whose basic political orientations were compatible.

Leaning more toward Frölich’s approach is the magisterial two-volume biography by J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg (London: Oxford University Press, 1966).  Hannah Arendt, reviewing Nettl’s account while also drawing on her own extensive knowledge, has advanced a similar interpretation in “A Heroine of Revolution,” New York Review of Books, October 6, 1966, reprinted as “Rosa Luxemburg, 1871-1919,” in her collection Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1968).

Frölich’s contention of a Luxemburg/Lenin compatibility is even more pronounced in influential essays produced by Norman Geras, The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg (London: Verso, 1983), and by Michael Löwy, Rosa Luxemburg: The Incendiary Spark, ed. by Paul Le Blanc (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023).  A similar approach can be seen in the work of one of India’s important Marxist scholars, Sobhanlal Datta Gupta, who edited the volume Readings in Revolution and Organization: Rosa Luxemburg and Her Critics (Calcutta: Pearl Publishers, 1994) and produced a valuable essay collection, Rosa Luxemburg (Bakhrahat: Seribaan, 2015).

Occupying a mid-way position on the spectrum of compatibility and incompatibility is the substantial introduction by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson to their volume The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), following in the interpretive footsteps of Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991).

Among some of the most serious German scholars dealing with Luxemburg, there is an inclination to lean at least somewhat toward the Wolfe interpretation.  See, for example, the valuable essays by Ottokar Luban that are available in English – https://www.workerscontrol.net/authors/ottokar-luban.  This is also evident in an important study co-authored by Michael Brie and Jörn Schutrümpf, Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary Marxist at the Limits of Marxism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) – although in separate articles published later, Schutrümpf veers even more strongly toward Wolfe’s interpretation (see “Rosa Luxemburg versus the Leninists”), while Brie pulls more closely to the interpretation of Frölich (see “Seven Reasons Not to Leave Lenin to Our Enemies”).  Both can be found on the website of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation – https://www.rosalux.de/en/publication/id/49686/rosa-luxemburg-versus-the-leninists, and https://www.rosalux.de/en/news?tx_news_pi1%5Baction%5D=detail&tx_news_pi1%5Bcontroller%5D=News&tx_news_pi1%5Bnews%5D=51514&tx_news_pi1%5Bnews_uid%5D=0&cHash=941c32f01813e57fb77641fa6a48ab5.

Also tilting strongly toward the Frölich interpretation are the introduction by Helen C. Scott and Paul Le Blanc, to Volume V of the Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, cited above in note #2, as well as their introduction to Helen C. Scott and Paul Le Blanc, eds., Socialism or Barbarism: Selected Writings of Rosa Luxemburg (London: Pluto Press, 2010).  Also see essays in Paul Le Blanc, The Living Flame: The Revolutionary Passion of Rosa Luxemburg (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019).  This is also the case in the Luxemburg biography by Dana Mills cited in endnote #1 above, and essays of Ankica Čakardić, Like a Clap of Thunder: Three Essays on Rosa Luxemburg (Berlin: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2020 https://www.rosalux.de/en/publication/id/41824/like-a-clap-of-thunder).

[iv] V. I. Lenin, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back – Reply by N. Lenin to Rosa Luxemburg,” Collected Works, Volume 7 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1961), pp. 472-83.

[v] Luxemburg, Letters, p. 290; Rosa Luxemburg, “Blanquism and Social Democracy” (June 1906), Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/06/blanquism.html.

[vi] Rosa Luxemburg, “Credo: on the State of Russian Social Democracy,” in Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, eds., The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), pp. 266-280; Rosa Luxemburg, “The Breakdown of Unity in the RSDLP,” contained in Rosa Luxemburg versus the Leninists (Rosa Luxemburg Foundation) https://www.rosalux.de/en/publication/id/49686/rosa-luxemburg-versus-the-leninists.

Scholarly works challenging Luxemburg’s polemical characterization of Lenin and Bolshevism include: Tamás Krausz, Reconstructing Lenin, An Intellectual Biography (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015); Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered. “What Is To Be Done?” in Context (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008); August H. Nimtz, The Ballot, the Streets, or Both? From Marx and Engels to Lenin and the October Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019); Alan Shandro, Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony: Political Practice and Theory in the Class Struggle (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015); Ronald G. Suny Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution (London: Verso, 2017) and Stalin: Passage to Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).

My own research is reflected in Paul Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015) and Paul Le Blanc, Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 2023).

[vii] Leopold H. Haimson, “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917,” Slavic Review vol. 23, no. 4 (1964): 619-642, and vol. 24, no. 1 (1965): 1-22.; Paul Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, pp. 217-31; Paul Le Blanc, Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution, pp. 62-5.

[viii] Eric Blanc, “The Rosa Luxemburg Myth: A Critique of Luxemburg’s Politics in Poland (1893-1919),” Historical Materialism, 25:4, pp. 3-36; Rosa Luxemburg, “On the Russian Revolution,” Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 5 (London: Verso, 2024), p. 246.

[ix] On the national question, see V. I. Lenin, “The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” Collected Works, Volume 21 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), pp. 407-14.  On the peasant question, see: Teodor Shanin, ed., Peasant Societies: Selected Readings (Harmondsworth UK: Penguin Books, 1971); Teodor Shanin, The Roots of Otherness: Russia’ Turn of the Century, 2 volumes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Paul Le Blanc, October Song: Bolshevik Triumph, Communist Tragedy, 1917-1924 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), pp. 255-92.  On the Constituent Assembly, see Le Blanc, October Song, pp. 124-29.

[x] See Paul Le Blanc, “Socialism and Revolutionary Democracy: Lenin’s Legacy for Our Time of Catastrophe,” Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, 5 February 2024, https://links.org.au/socialism-and-revolutionary-democracy-lenins-legacy-our-time-catastrophe and Paul Le Blanc, “Lenin’s Socialism: Labels and Realities,” Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, 13 March 2024, https://links.org.au/lenins-socialism-labels-and-realities.

[xi] Luxemburg, “On the Russian Revolution,” Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 5, p. 244.

[xii] Luxemburg, “Historical Responsibility,” in The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 5, p. 169; V. I. Lenin, “Letter to American Workers,” Collected Works, Volume 28 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), p. 75.

[xiii] George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford UK: Clarendon Press, 1986); James Ryan, Lenin’s Terror: The Ideological Origins of Early Soviet State Violence (London: Routledge, 2014); Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Le Blanc, October Song, pp. 219-54.

[xiv] Robert Blobaum, Feliks Dzierzynski and the SDKPiL: A Study in the Origins of Polish Communism (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1984); Luxemburg, Letter to Julian Marchlewski, September 30, 1918, in The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Georg Adler, Peter Hudis and Annelies Laschitza, (London: Verso, 2011), pp. 474–5

[xv] David Fernbach, ed., In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings of Paul Levi (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2011); Mathilde Jacob, Rosa Luxemburg, An Intimate Portrait (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2000); Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg’s Views on the Russian Revolution (New York: Red Star Publishers, 2017).

[xvi] On perspectives of the Communist Party of Germany (Opposition), see August Thalheimer, “Rosa Luxemburg or Lenin” in Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/thalheimer/works/rosa.htm, and Robert J. Alexander, “The Brandler-Thalheimer Group in Germany,” in his study The Right Opposition: The Lovestoneites and the International Communist Opposition of the 1930’s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), pp. 135-55; also see Isaac Deutscher, “Record of a Discussion With Heinrich Brandler,” New Left Review, I/105, Sept/Oct 1977, https://newleftreview.org/issues/i105/articles/isaac-deutscher-record-of-a-discussion-with-heinrich-brandler.pdf.  Information on Ernst Meyer’s ideas and struggles can be found in the reminiscences of his widow – Rosa Leviné-Meyer, Inside German Communism: Memoirs on Party Life in the Weimar Republic (London: Pluto Press, 1977).  On Zetkin’s anti-Stalinism, see: Mike Jones and Ben Lewis, eds., Clara Zetkin: Letters and Writings (London: Merlin Press, 2015), pp. 7, 115-34, 142-61.

[xvii] Isaac Deutscher, “The Tragedy of the Polish Communist Party” [interview with K. S. Karol, 1958], Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/deutscher/1958/polish-tragedy.htm; M. K. Dziewanowski, The Communist Party of Poland, An Outline History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 75-154.