Who Are the Heirs of Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht?

We want to commemorate three proletarian leaders who have fallen in the revolutionary struggle by responding vigorously to shameful speculation that is emerging about them in the workers’ movement.

In all four corners of the Earth the bankruptcy of “Leninism” and the triumph of “Luxemburgism” are being proclaimed. Behold the heralds of the new faith. They just forget, like the monkey of Florian’s fable, to light their magic lantern. Look at what has become of Soviet Russia and the Communist Parties which, based on Leninist foundations, are today instruments of capitalism. Rosa Luxemburg, by contrast, foresaw and predicted this bankruptcy, she alone advanced the necessary positions for the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. Let’s go back to “Luxemburgism”!

It’s all very simple, quite clear. It remains only to prove such assertions, to highlight the elements on which we intend to base ourselves. And here, this is more difficult. We’re going to try to prove it.

Rosa’s pamphlet on the Russian Revolution of 1917 is contrasted with Lenin’s work in October 1917. Moreover, some hold up as their banner her articles in the Neue Zeit against the methods of organization, the conception of Lenin’s party as set out in the latter’s “What is to be done?” Historically, can these conceptions be contrasted as two different systems? Yes! for those weak‑minded people who reduce eras of class struggle to polemics between “leaders” or between groups. No! for Marxists who see in these ideologies attempts conditioned by the stage of class struggle in different countries, with the goal of expressing the historical and internationalist consciousness of the given proletariat.

Unfortunate people who, without fear of ridicule, oppose the struggle of German workers for the world revolution to that of the Russian workers and who exclaim solemnly: «The efforts of Russian workers have become bankrupt, but not those of the German proletariat». History laughs, with good reason, at these judgments and there will come a time when proletarians themselves, disgusted, will kick them away.

We deny anyone the right to “judge” Lenin and Luxemburg.

Their work is not a cold theoretical manifestation coming out of their brains, like Minerva from Jupiter’s brain, but the fruit of bitter battles by workers over decades of incredible sacrifices by thousands of proletarians, of the painful ascent of proletarian classes towards their emancipation. Let us therefore try to understand the historical epochs for which they were the brilliant expressions, the objective limits faced by the proletariats whose march they guided; let us therefore try, for both, to separate the essential from the contingent, the doctrinal contribution from the hypothesis and then we will be doing useful work rather than causing confusion.

But above all we need to start with the right criteria. Either we base ourselves on the class struggle to explain the doctrine, or else doctrine is used to invent a fantasy class struggle. If Lenin is the result of a maturation of class struggle in Russia, it must be proved that this maturation had to abort in “Leninism”, a theory that is claimed today by the builders of socialism in one country. Is this possible? Yes! if we look at class struggle “in one country”, thus using an anti‑Marxist method, and if we claim that the October Revolution was not the explosion of international class antagonisms on the weakest sector of the capitalist world, but the result of the backward conditions of Russia, which made “Leninism” the theory of domination of the Communist Party “over” the proletariat and “Luxemburgism” the theory of democratic domination of the proletariat in the more developed sectors of the capitalist system. But if we stick to the Marxist criteria that see the collision of a rapidly developing proletariat in Russia with the most advanced positions of Western socialism, a timid bourgeoisie, feudal and peasant classes, we can understand why the formation of the Bolshevik party was made through a selection process expressing the international conclusions that resulted in the class struggles in Russia, peremptorily proving that, in the global imperialist phase, the proletariat had to fight for the proletarian revolution, even when the bourgeois revolution did not take its course, taking up economic tasks on its own account. If the Russian proletariat took the initiative for the constitution of the Third International, it is because its victory was only possible on the basis of internationalist criteria that made October 1917 an endeavor on behalf of workers around the world.

That the special circumstances of Russia were of great importance, we do not deny; that they prevented Lenin from accurately seeing certain problems, such as the problem of national minorities and colonial movements, we perfectly admit¹. But is this where the contribution of the Russian proletariat in the work of global emancipation, which we commemorate in Lenin, resides? You would have to be blind to believe this. From 1903 to l917, Russian workers fashioned the party theory that allowed them to march towards insurrection. This is a historic event that no opportunistic hand can tear away. It is said that Rosa was right at the time against Lenin, who had created a machine which, after his death, was bound to produce the “dictator Stalin”. Once again, if the class struggle depended on the parties and not the latter on the class struggle, this stupid explanation would become a source of profundities. For a Souvarine, this historical (??) vision (?) may suffice, as it will certainly suffice for all those who proclaim themselves “democratic communists” and cling to the formulations of formal democracy, therefore bourgeois, which we found among other class formulations in the aforementioned pamphlet by Luxemburg.

However, since it is necessary not to link, but to brutally oppose the period of the Russian revolution of 1917 to the victory of the centrist bureaucracy, we should attempt to do the same between the time when Luxemburg wrote her pamphlet on Russia in prison, and the period when, liberated by the German revolution, she wrote her Spartakusprogramm, which breaks with democratic mirages and joins the Bolshevik front, fighting for the dictatorship of the proletariat. What we don’t do for Lenin, we don’t do for Rosa. We do not want to give the idea that after the victory in Russia, Lenin could only reflect the degree of maturity of the workers from all over the world grouped around the Third International. What if this maturity was not enough to help the Bolsheviks solve the greatest problem of their century? It is the fault of “Leninism”, we are told. What if the ideological immaturity of the proletariats of the different countries were to allow Lenin to push for the formation of the Communist Party not on the historical basis verified by the Bolshevik Party, but on a retrograde basis, in the name of the largest gathering of the masses for the world revolution; if this is one of the causes of the easy victory of centrism, who is responsible for this? “Leninism?” But the latter was created on other foundations! The same goes for Rosa; they prefer to destroy her memory by quoting her pamphlet on the Russian revolution (where the weak points of her doctrinal work appear, weak points that we will find in other pre‑war writings and which result from the conditions of the class struggle in Germany, in which the containment of social antagonisms in a young imperialist country, itself economically contained, was to allow the expression of a Marxist current that could only take a clear and well‑defined form when these antagonisms erupted in a violent outburst of class struggle) rather than examining the historical conditions that weighed on it and which jumped in 1919.

It is no coincidence that the admirable figure of Luxemburg appears in all its sharpness, in the directives for the German revolution, in the Spartakusprogramm. Those who wanted Spartakus’ death had no cure for the democratic formulations previously expressed by Rosa. They understood that the outburst of class struggle had allowed the German proletariat to glimpse the path followed by the Russian Bolsheviks and that it was the application of the same principles to German conditions. Rosa has the merit of presenting the problem of national minorities better than the latter. The Second Congress of the Communist International paid an involuntary tribute to her by modifying, at the proposal of Lenin himself, the traditional Bolshevik point of view in a contingent position, marking the doubt and uncertainty of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. But on the party’s problem, Rosa could say nothing other than what German workers felt before the war, failing to find in their class struggle the strength to oppose an organic fraction to opportunism, but just an ideological current, a global phenomenon and the fruit of burgeoning imperialism. One can only rely on the phenomena posed for the real development of situations: Rosa could clearly perceive the national problem in the prototype country of imperialist capitalism, but not the historical problem of the party in the absence of the revolutionary explosions experienced in Russia².

We will therefore not recognize “Leninism” or “Luxemburgism” but only a method of historical investigation bequeathed by Marx and which, in different periods of class struggle, allowed a Lenin and a Luxemburg to systematize or express lessons generated by these phases in a set of principles. These principles are milestones for moving forward and not empty formulas of content as they would like us to believe by linking Lenin and his discourse on cooperation to “socialism in one country”; Rosa and her famous prison pamphlet, to “democratic communism”, to the anti‑party, to anti‑Lenin. They cannot be pitted against one another, just as the struggle of the German workers of 1919 cannot be pitted against that of the Russian workers of l917. The synthesis of these currents, also directed towards the world revolution, is still to be done, and is done, let us be sure, in the fractions that are preparing ideologically and practically for the latter.

Between Lenin and the Russia of Stakhanovism, there is the abyss of the German defeats of 1923, the Chinese defeats of 1927, the advent of fascism in March 1933, the entry of the USSR into the League of Nations, the race towards the new imperialist war, in which Russia will participate in one or the other of the constellations. Between the “Luxemburgism” of the Souvarines and Laurats³, of the German SAP⁴ and Luxemburg’s work, there is the Spartakusprogramm: two periods of class struggle.

Liebknecht would illustrate this program by concretizing the deep impetus of the proletarian masses in Germany towards the revolution in 1919. But Liebknecht, especially in the current period, would be a glorious example, full of lessons for internationalist communists. He would prove that isolation is the ransom that must be paid, in certain periods, in order to retain the right to maintain positions around which the workers will gather tomorrow. At the risk of one’s life, you have to stand up to the pack. You have to resist, alone. For us, Liebknecht’s example did not die at a time when socialists and centrists commemorate the three “Ls” by preparing the workers for the Sacred Union, by approving, in the name of “Leninism”, the worsening of exploitation of Russian workers.

Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht are now tied to fractions which, against all odds, are struggling to fashion the new party of the proletariat, to add a further link to the work of proletarian emancipation; to fractions which, despite the current situation, do not doubt the triumph of the communist revolution for which they work and the course of events and internationalist communists. We reclaim their flag and tomorrow the masses will add their victory and the doctrinal contribution resulting from the period that witnessed the betrayal and sinking of the first proletarian State, the Third International and the Communist Party.

1. Our current’s position on the national and colonial question would be clarified following an important theoretical work in the fifties, which would lead, among other things, to the publication of “Factors of Race and Nation in Marxist Theory”. ↩︎
2. Here is a more precise formulation that we have given: the programme of the Communist Party was born, complete and final, in 1848; the formal parties that follow tend to move close this limit, in theory and in tactics; any deviation from it, among leaders and communists, can be explained but not justified by the contingent situation. ↩︎
3. Lucien Laurat was one of the founders of the Austrian Communist Party, who moved closer to Souvarine after 1923. ↩︎
4. SAP: a German left social-democratic party created in 1931. ↩︎