Luxemburg's revolution

Rosa Luxemburg's "The Russian Revolution" is a classical text, but like all classical texts, it's also completely misunderstood. Luxemburg was a well-known revolutionary Marxist in Germany, a leader of the revolutionary upheaval in Germany after World War I, and a founding member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). She was murdered in 1919 by proto-fascist "Freikorps" working for the anti-revolutionary Social Democrat Gustav Noske.

Luxemburg's status as a revolutionary martyr has led many groups on the left to claim her mantle, from the German Stalinists to the Trotskyists and anarchists. Even some Social Democrats pay tribute to her memory. "The Russian Revolution" is probably Luxemburg's most quoted text. In East Germany, dissidents frequently used her statement "freedom is always freedom to think differently" when protesting the Communist regime, the same regime which claimed Luxemburg as one of its forerunners.

But how many has really read the text? And how many have understood what they are reading? A popular Swedish edition from 1967 is typical in this regard. When Luxemburg attacks Lenin's "agrarian reform", the editor naturally assumes that she is attacking War Communism with its forced requisitioning of grain from the peasantry. The usual complaints about Stalin's forced collectivization and the low productivity in Soviet agriculture follow. All true...except for one tiny detail. Luxemburg *didn't* criticize Lenin's collectivist attacks on the peasantry. She criticized the Bolsheviks for not collectivizing the countryside fast enough! The "agrarian reform" rebuked by Luxemburg refers to Lenin's (tactical) decision to accept private property in land, one of the earliest decrees issued by the Bolshevik regime. That a man who edited a pamphlet by Luxemburg so dismally could fail to comprehend it is, I think, rather telling.

While "The Russian Revolution" is an often sharp criticism of the Bolsheviks, it must also be seen in context. Luxemburg explicitly defends the October revolution. She believes that the mistakes of the Bolshevik regime are ultimately caused by their international isolation, and therefore calls for world revolution. At one point, Luxemburg upbraids the German working class for not taking power, thereby ending the isolation of the Russian revolution. I think it's obvious that Luxemburg saw her criticism of Lenin and Trotsky as "in house". Hardly surprising for a founding member of the German Communist Party!

My problem with Luxemburg is that her critical remarks are a weird combination of "democratic" and "ultra-left" positions. Thus, she criticizes the decision of the Bolsheviks to dissolve the unrepresentative Constituent Assembly without calling elections for another, more representative one. She also seems to criticize the limited suffrage introduced by the Bolsheviks in the elections to the soviets. Luxemburg's vision includes both a Constituent Assembly and soviets. There is also criticism of the "Red Terror", and it is in this context that Luxemburg says that freedom is always the right to think differently.

However, on two other important points, Luxemburg takes positions *more extreme* than those of the Bolsheviks. As already mentioned, she is opposed to "the Leninist agrarian reform", i.e. the tactical decision of the Bolshevik regime *not* to collectivize the land. The Bolsheviks didn't even seize the lands belonging to the former landlords, instead letting the peasants take it over and parcel it out among themselves. To Luxemburg, this has created a vast layer of stubborn small-property holders all over Russia, fundamentally disloyal to the Bolshevik regime. Here is an extensive quote: "The French small peasant became the boldest defender of the Great French Revolution which had given him land confiscated from the émigrés. As Napoleonic soldier, he carried the banner of France to victory, crossed all Europe and smashed feudalism to pieces in one land after another. Lenin and his friends might have expected a similar result from their agrarian slogan. However, now that the Russian peasant has seized the land with his own fist, he does not even dream of defending Russia and the revolution to which he owes the land. He has dug obstinately into his new possessions and abandoned the revolution to its enemies, the state to decay, the urban population to famine. ... The Leninist agrarian reform has created a new and powerful layer of popular enemies of socialism on the countryside, enemies whose resistance will be much more dangerous and stubborn than that of the noble large landowners."

The other point on which Luxemburg attacks Lenin "from the left" is the national question, Luxemburg's special obsession. She steadfastly opposed the demand for national self-determination throughout her political career, seeing it as fundamentally anti-Marxist and anti-revolutionary. The Bolsheviks took the opposite position: while opposing nationalism, they nevertheless supported national self-determination for tactical reasons, as a way to undermine Czarist Russia, "the prisonhouse of nations". In this way, the Bolsheviks hoped to gain the support of workers in Poland, Finland, the Transcaucasus and other regions oppressed by Czarism. (The demand could also be given an anti-colonialist spin and be directed against, say, the British Empire and its domination of India, etc.) It's not clear to me why Luxemburg would so staunchly, dogmatically and (frankly) hysterically oppose the slogan of national self-determination, while supporting other democratic demands such as the Constituent Assembly or freedom of speech. Luxemburg felt vindicated in her critique of the Bolsheviks when many anti-Bolshevik movements decided to fight under nationalist banners, thereby "proving" that the demand for national self-determination was "counter-revolutionary". For whatever reason, Luxemburg reserved her sharpest attacks on Ukrainian nationalism, which she regards as "tomfoolery" , "the folly of a few dozen petty-bourgeois intellectuals" and "the ridiculous pose of a few university professors and students". Apparently, Ukraine "never formed a nation or a government, was without any national culture, except for the reactionary-romantic poems of Shevchenko". An independent Ukraine would be just as silly "as if one fine day, the people living in the Wasserkante should want to found a new Low-German (Plattdeutsche) nation and government!".

Really?

In all fairness to Rosa Luxemburg, "The Russian Revolution" is an unfinished text published posthumously. Nobody knows how it might have looked like in a definite edition, or what conclusions Rosa would have drawn had she survived the civil strife in Germany, and perhaps been able to visit Soviet Russia (or Soviet Ukraine). However, as it stands, Luxemburg's pamphlet is a confused, albeit interesting, response to the issues raised by the Bolshevik revolution. It deserves to be read for what it is, not promoted to something it clearly is not: a supposed vision of the follies of Stalin and Erich Honecker.