Prometeo (II) 127

The commemoration of the proletarian leaders who fell after the war, in the name and for the account of the international proletariat struggling for its release in all countries, is of particular importance due to the current situation. While everything is collapsing in the workers’ camp, and the Italian, German and Russian prisons are filled with revolutionary proletarians; while the capitalist order has broken, either with violence or with corruption, the conscience and the class organizations of the workers; when the imperialist war announces its imminent arrival, it must be proclaimed and demonstrated that the work of Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht persists despite socialists and centrists, despite the momentary victory of capitalism.

It is wrong to find proof of the failure of their efforts in the situations of defeat that we live through, because their genius ultimately only expressed the unleashing of the class struggle that allowed the world proletariat to conquer the State in Russia, to found the Communist International and the communist parties. No amount of corruption can ultimately stop the appearance of this unleashing of the struggle, these social eruptions, because they are the expression of the contradictory bases of the capitalist regime. The current situation is only an interlude before the unleashing of events that will again throw the proletariat into gigantic struggles, in which other leaders will arise with a vision that will mark a continuity with the previous work and a progression in the historical vision of the proletariat.

Today, with the triumph of the counter-revolution, it is filth that generates the proletarian “leaders”, the Stalins, the Blums and Vanderveldes, whose nefarious work is at its height.

We therefore consider Lenin, Liebknecht and Luxemburg as the expression of proletarian conscience in the phase of the struggle against opportunism in the Second International and in the post‑war insurrectionary eruptions.

We categorically refuse to commemorate a “Leninism” or a “Luxemburgism”, considering only the contribution of Lenin and Luxemburg, and of the world proletariat of which they were a progressive expression on its “via dolorosa” towards emancipation, to the ideological heritage and to the arsenal of weapons of the revolution that the proletariat must continually perfect to be able to achieve its specific objectives.

Lenin represents the question of the party, his choice of leaders, the dictatorship of the proletariat through the armed uprising of the workers; Rosa represents the attempt – on a stronger and more complex class front – to approach the theoretical and practical examination of the problems of the proletarian revolution; Liebknecht represents the self‑sacrifice of the revolutionary who gives up his life to lead the workers into the insurrection.

For those who need a “Leninism” and a “Luxemburgism” to complete the task of filling their skulls, Lenin will be the discourse on cooperatives, an introduction to socialism in one country. They will also be the ones who advocate political and structural bases for the establishment of communist parties on foundations other than those on which Lenin founded the Bolshevik party. Rosa will be the spontaneity of the masses, the anti‑party, the democrat irreducibly opposed to “Leninism”. There will be others, such as Trotski, who was what he, alas, will no longer be – a first‑rate proletarian leader – who will need “Leninism” to explain the need to reach socialist parties in the name of political maneuvering.

For us, we will see in the Leninist speculations of the centrists and the trotskists, in the re‑shuffling of Rosa’s work by the Laurats and Souvarines, or by certain socialists forgetful of their complicity in her assassination, which consecrated the massacre of the German proletariat, ideological expressions of a counter-revolutionary work that must hinder workers from continuing their effort of clarification and programmatic progression, whilst at the same time serving to explain their betrayal.

It is true that there were serious differences of opinion between Lenin and Rosa, but their significance must be set in the specific historical context of different situations in Germany and Russia, where these divergences arose. Thus, even Lenin cannot be appraised outside the appraisal of the historical circumstances that allowed him to found a party, to lead the proletariat to insurrection, but that could only allow him to pose for the first time – and without being able to solve it – the question of the management of the proletarian State, of its permanent connection with the struggles of the international proletariat.

Luxemburg and Liebknecht represented the battle of a working class in a zone of very advanced capitalism where democratic corruption had performed extensive work of bribery and destruction. Their vision of events could not march in step with the insurrectionary eruption of the proletariat in 1919. The contradiction between the “Critique of the Russian Revolution”, written by Rosa in prison before the revolutionary events in Germany, and the program of the Spartacus League, which was directly fertilized by the struggles of the German proletariat, rests on this.

Lenin, by contrast, arose from the conjunction of the awakening of the masses of all the countries with the revolutionary eruptions in Russia, where from 1900 to 1917 there was a revolutionary ferment that the overthrow of the Czarist regime could not make disappear and could not delay and that allowed the Bolsheviks to arrive at programmatic formulations before Revolution.

The programme of the world revolution could only be touched on by Lenin, due to the extent of the problem posed by the birth of the first proletarian State. From this we derive the contradictions in the course of this period; a period in which the internationalist notions were fundamental in making the founding the proletarian State a victory of the workers of all countries; not such were instead the conceptions that would be used to build socialism in one country, which would only show how centrism represents the proletarian defeats.

In reality, putting Lenin and Rosa on the same level is affirming that the German workers’ struggle was the first echo of the Russian revolution and the second attempt on the path to world revolution, that these are two phases of the formation of the class consciousness of the workers in the aftermath of war, in which Lenin’s phase could express itself with the seizure of power and in which the other phase, that of Rosa, had to be murdered by capitalism and its socialist agents.

We would commemorate Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht with the conviction that the work they took up after Marx and Engels continues and progresses in workers’ organisms (despite the current depression of the movement) in which the attempt is being made to understand and translate for the new period, in order to arm the communist nuclei with the ideological weapons needed to solve the problems that tomorrow’s revolutionary uprisings will once more present.

We do not need a “Leninism” but only a method of investigation that allows us to understand the significance, the contribution and the limits of the programmatic realizations of our leaders, the significance, the contribution and the limits that are those of formation of proletarian conscience in its time. Let to those who must camouflage themselves, dress in clothes that are not theirs to deceive the proletariat, the task of brandishing these theories. The bourgeois revolutions had to hide the class antagonisms that they revealed under confused ideologies. Traitors and opportunists must adorn themselves with “Leninism” or “Luxemburgism” in order to introduce among the proletarians an ideology of defeat, of despair, of impotence and finally of participation in the imperialist war.

In its communist fractions that once again take up the flag carried by these revolutionaries, the world proletariat will know how to respond, today with contempt, tomorrow with violence, to the bourgeois falsifiers and the regimes of which they are the faithful expression. It will commemorate Lenin by proclaiming its historic mission with which persists despite the momentary defeats, and its devotion to the program of the world revolution for which these great leaders lived.