This Thursday's branch meeting was on the topic of Rosa Luxemburg and her pamphlet
The Mass Strike. It was prepared fairly hurriedly so please forgive any glaring omissions.
Rosa
Luxemburg and the Mass Strike
Who
was Rosa Luxemburg?
Early
Life
Rosa Luxemburg lived an extraordinary, if cruelly
foreshortened life. From her birth to her early political activity, to her
leadership and activism for socialism, to her murder by agents of the German
state at the age of 47, she did remarkable things and was a tireless
revolutionary.
Rosa was born into a Jewish family in Poland in 1871. At
the time the area now in Poland was divided between imperialist powers and Rosa
was a Russian Polish Jew. As if life was not hard enough already, as a child
she had a severe illness which left her with a deformity in her leg that gave
her a permanent limp. So she started from a pretty difficult position in
society. The Tsarist regime was extremely anti-Semitic and Poles occupied a
subservient position within the Russian empire.
However, she received a good education. She used her time
when she was ill to read, and her father who was a petit bourgeois, moved to
Warsaw at least partly so that his children could have an education. She
excelled at school, but was drawn towards revolutionary politics from a young
age, being known in the underground by the time she was 15. In fact she was
denied a medal for academic excellence when she graduated high school on the
grounds of her revolutionary associations.
Revolutionary
Politics
She became involved initially with anarchist politics but
soon gravitated towards socialism and when she had to flee to Geneva under
threat of arrest became one of the very few women who attended university.
So from a very young age she was familiar with extreme
repression, she showed an incisive intellect and was a committed activist and
revolutionary. By the time she was 23 she was a leading figure in the SKDPiL, a
socialist party in Poland that opposed the nationalist agenda of the much
larger PPS (Polish Socialist Party) in favour of an internationalist view.
In 1898, at the age of 27, Luxemburg moved to Berlin.
Berlin was an important centre for any socialist at the time. It was home to
the world’s largest communist party, the SPD, which had a million members. For
many socialists at the time, if there was to be a communist revolution the
natural starting point was Germany, and Rosa wanted to be where the action was.
The SPD, however, posed problems for revolutionaries. It
was a sprawling party that encompassed trades unions, scores of newspapers, and
parliamentary politics. It was a communist party in name, but in practice was
largely reformist, with a significant revolutionary minority inside it. This
was not, by the time Rosa arrived, a new problem. Marx and Engels had
criticised the turn towards reformism in a pamphlet called ‘Critique of the
Gotha Programme’ in 1875. However, Rosa threw herself into the party. She began
a speaking tour around Germany to whip up support for the party in forthcoming
elections.
Within a year, Luxemburg was involved in a huge debate
between herself and Eduard Bernstein, a leading intellectual within the SPD and
an advocate of reformism. Reformism, in a nutshell, is the idea that workers
can gradually reform the capitalist system from within, fighting to give
workers a greater share of capitalist profits, until socialism is constructed
in a piecemeal fashion. Rosa was a revolutionary, and argued that the system is
fundamentally unstable and prone to crisis, which would always result in an
attack on workers’ living conditions. Further she argued that the state is not
an independent entity, but that it reflects the needs of capital rather than
labour – socialists cannot take over the institutions of such a state and use
them for socialist ends.
This is not to say that workers and their organisations
should not fight for reforms and improvements. These activities bring
improvements to workers’ lives and build confidence to fight. It is to say that
socialism cannot be achieved through them. These arguments won her support
within the SPD, but also enemies, especially within the bureaucratic and
reformist elements that were steering the practical direction of the party.
This tension between reformists and revolutionaries, both across Europe and
within the SPD would define a lot of Luxemburg’s focus, especially in her
pamphlet The Mass Strike, which is
the focus of tonight’s meeting.
The
1905 Russian Revolution
Before going into what Luxemburg argued in The Mass
Strike, I need to briefly explain the context in which she was writing.
This context is the 1905 revolution in Russia, so I need to explain some of
what was going on in Russia at the time.
In 1905, 140,000 people marched to the Winter Palace in
St Petersburg to hand a petition to the Tsar. The petition demanded various
reforms, including free universal education, universal suffrage and an
eight-hour day. The march was led by a monk and many of the demonstrators carried
pictures of the Tsar. It was the essence of a reformist demand. The Tsar
ordered troops to open fire, and hundreds were killed in what became known as
Bloody Sunday.
Bloody Sunday sparked off mass strikes across Russia and
the Empire. Chris Harman, in his A
People’s History of the World, puts the 1905 revolution like this:
After
the shootings the tone of the strikes became increasingly revolutionary.
Socialists produced openly revolutionary newspapers. There was mutiny in the
Black Sea fleet, led by the Battleship Potemkin. And there was an attempted
uprising in Moscow in December led by the militant ‘Bolshevik’ faction of the
Social Democratic Party … A new sort of organisation, based on elected
delegates from the major workplaces [the soviets] … became the focus for the
revolutionary forces in St Petersburg … it represented a new way of organising
revolutionary forces.
208:401
The 1905 revolution failed, however. Tony Cliff
explained:
Petersburg was in the
grip of a total strike. And the general strike spread from the capital to many
cities hundreds or even thousands of miles away. The economic demands of
workers led to political demands, economic struggle led to political struggle
and vice versa. The two were not separated.
Finally, on 6 August,
the Tsar made a concession. But instead of giving the long promised National
Assembly, nothing was given but a consultative body – the Duma – with no power
to legislate. The Duma was at the mercy of the Tsar. Out of the 1,400,000
Petersburg citizens only 13,000 had the vote. This roused the popular passion
to fever heat, and led to the second great wave of strikes in October, in which
the demands were overwhelmingly political.
At the same time the
demand for the eight-hour day was central. The strike started in Moscow and
from there it spread to Petersburg. The Petersburg soviet was established. By
13 October the number of strikers throughout Russia exceeded one million.
Practically all the railway lines were stopped? The post stopped, schools were
closed, water and gas supplies ceased, the country, the cities and the
communications between them were practically at a standstill. Poland was
completely paralysed by the strike, as was Finland.
On 17 October the
Tsar signed a proclamation giving a constitution to the Russian people. This
manifesto pledged civil liberty with inviolability of the person, freedom of
speech and association. It promised facilities for spreading electoral rights
throughout the nation, leaving the details to the new Duma. Finally it agreed that
no law would be enforceable without the approval of the state.
The workers were not
satisfied. The Tsar’s proclamation whetted workers’ appetite for more. The
revolutionaries demanded the dismissal of General Trepov, head of the police
and Cossacks in Petersburg, the removal of the troops twenty miles from the
city, a general amnesty and the formation of a national citizen’s militia. They
also demanded a political amnesty.
They declared that
while there was freedom of meeting, the meetings were still surrounded by
troops. While there was freedom of the press, the censorship remained. While
there was freedom of learning the universities were occupied by troops. The
inviolability of the person was given, but the gaols were filled with political
prisoners. A constitution was given but the autocracy remained.
A third wave of
strikes followed in November. The heart of these were economic demands. The
unifying demand for the eight-hour day now dominated the strike. There was a
total strike in Petersburg. On 3 November the whole town was practically shut
down.
Outside St Petersburg
there was a different picture. In the provinces the strike call was not
answered, and in Petersburg itself the employers reacted by mass lockouts
affecting tens of thousands of workers. By the beginning of December the Tsar
felt strong enough to take massive repressive measures. The whole Executive
Committee of Petersburg trade unions was arrested, the National Railroad Union
was dissolved, new anti-strike regulations were promulgated.
On 7 December a
strike broke out in Moscow in protest against these repressive measures. It
spread to St Petersburg where about 125,000 people came out on strike. This was
the springboard for an armed insurrection in Moscow. Alas, after a week of
struggle the insurrection was bloodily crushed by the Tsarist army.
Socialist Worker Review, 1985:1, January 1985,
pp.15-17.
The
Mass Strike
It was against this backdrop that Luxemburg wrote The Mass Strike, The Political Party and the
Trade Unions in August 1906. As the full title suggests, she was interested
in the way that political parties and trades unions should approach a mass
strike.
In the Mass Strike, Luxemburg takes on a host of
opponents. She condemns the ‘romantic’ anarchists, ‘Mr Gradgrind’ trades unionists,
and Engels’ position on strikes.
Engels had said, in 1873, that strikes could not be a way
to win socialism. He believed, in Luxemburg’s words, that
Either
the proletariat as a whole are not yet in possession of the powerful
organisation and financial resources required [to win], in which case they
cannot carry through the general strike: or they are already sufficiently well
organised, in which case they do not need the general strike.
1986:14
There is something to be said for this view – carrying
through a mass strike is a huge organisational undertaking that requires a
powerful working class organisations if it is to be victorious. However,
Luxemburg’s understanding of recent events led her to say ‘The Russian
Revolution has now effected a radical revision of the above piece of reasoning.
For the first time in the history of the class struggle it has achieved a
grandiose realisation of the idea of the mass strike and … even matured the
general strike and thereby opened a new epoch in the development of the labour
movement.’ (ibid.) She goes on ‘the mass strike in Russia has been realised …
as a means, firstly, of creating for the proletariat the conditions of the
daily political struggle and especially of parliamentarism.’ (ibid.: 16) So for
her, the mass strike was a means of creating
the organisation that would help them to win.
Luxemburg thought that the mass strike was a potentially
powerful tool. However, she did not believe it could simply happen at the
urging of a few revolutionaries, or that it would automatically succeed. She
criticised ‘revolutionary romanticists’ and anarchists: ‘if it depended on the
inflammatory ‘propaganda’ of revolutionary romanticists or on confidential or
public decisions of the party direction, we should not even yet have had in
Russia a single serious mass strike.’ (ibid.: 20)
Luxemburg believed that a general strike could not be
called through propaganda, but it was purely a historically inevitable
occurrence arising from a particular set of social conditions. The mass strike
she saw as a culmination of waves of economic strikes that had built up over
several years, and Bloody Sunday was merely a trigger that unleashed the power
of a proletariat whose confidence to act had been rising through activity and
which had been politicised by Tsarist oppression, which included several
massacres of workers and socialists..
When the mass strike did break out, Luxemburg says ‘the
appeals of the parties could scarcely keep pace with the spontaneous risings of
the masses’ – the revolutionary parties could not lead that which was the
spontaneous, organic result of independent working class activity.
The sudden general rising of the proletariat
in January … expressed itself forthwith in the circumstances that the
proletarian mass … quite suddenly and sharply came to realise how intolerable
was that social and economic existence which they had patiently endured for
decades in the chains of capitalism. Thereupon there began a spontaneous
general shaking of and tugging at these chains. All the innumerable sufferings
of the modern proletariat reminded them of the old bleeding wounds. Here was
the eight-hour day fought for, there piece-work was resisted, here were brutal
foremen ‘driven off’ in a sack on a handcart
… all these suddenly awakened by the January lightning bethought
themselves of their rights and now sought feverishly to make up for their
previous neglect.
(Ibid.: 33)
Luxemburg goes on to note that the Russian proletariat
went on to create the things that had been denied in it by Tsarism, such as
trades unions, but also a new form of organisation – the workers’ council
(soviet). To Luxemburg, the organisation created by the shaking and tugging at
chains showed the limitations of the political party in creating and sustaining
the mass strike. However, this is not to say that she did not believe that a
party had a role to play. She goes on to say ‘even during the revolution mass
strikes do not exactly fall from heaven. They must be brought about in some way
by the workers. The resolution and determination of the workers also play a
part and indeed the initiative and wider direction naturally fall to the share
of the organised and most enlightened kernel of the proletariat.’ (ibid. : 53)
Part of the context of the Mass Strike is that Lenin at the time had been
‘bending the stick’ towards the party in the Bolshevik wing of the Social
Democratic party, moving the Bolsheviks towards a cadre system and closing the
ranks of the party. Luxemburg argues against this kind of separation in her
polemic, stressing the spontaneity of revolutions and her belief that it is
impossible to steer them; or as she put it, ‘revolutions do not allow anyone to
play the schoolmaster with them.’ (Ibid.: 54)
The role of a revolutionary party, then, is to give
direction to the spontaneous mass strike. Resolute determination on the part of
the party, Luxemburg believed, gave confidence to workers involved in mass
struggle, whereas vacillation and weakness would undermine the mass strike and
lead it only to defeat.
Much of The Mass
Strike is aimed at opponents within the SPD and attempting to apply lessons
from the Russian revolution to the German situation. It might be tempting to
see the SPD as similar to the Labour Party in the UK, but there were
substantial differences. Firstly, at least in theory, the SPD was committed to
revolutionary change in Germany. Secondly, the SPD had the support of sections
of the army, and many of its large demonstrations would be armed – something
which one can scarcely imagine of a Labour Party conference today. Thirdly, the
SPD had its own, separate trades unions rather than, as the Labour Party was
intended to be, being the representative of the interests of the trades union
bureaucracy. In theory, the SPD was committed to workers’ struggles to bring
about socialism.
In practice however, there were fewer differences between
the SPD and an organisation like the Labour Party. In The Mass Strike, one of Luxemburg’s chief aims is to explain the
deficiencies of the SPD approach to strike action, which she believed was
cautious, mechanistic, bureaucratic and pessimistic. When the Russian
Revolution broke out, there was a burst of enthusiasm and the party began to
discuss the mass strike. As the revolution was crushed and the energy of the
workers seemed to ebb, however, Luxemburg felt that the party was looking for
excuses to avoid a mass strike.
In
the endlessly spun out press debates which ensued, the idea was more and more
watered down. The understanding reached between the Party Executive and the
General Commission of the trade unions [returned the mass strike to] the
mechanistic formulae haunting everyone’s mind with the living experiences of
the Russian struggles.
Writes her biographer, Paul Frolich. So Luxemburg again
and again opposes her ideas of the spontaneity of the Russian Revolution to a
mechanised, bureaucratised SPD which is profoundly pessimistic because it does
not want even to call a mass strike that would grow beyond its control, let
alone win one. This is a phenomenon familiar to anyone who knows about the 1926
general in strike in Britain or the unwillingness of other union leaders to
back the miners in 1984.
Lessons
for Today
It is important to recognise that although Luxemburg had
many insights and contributions towards Marxist politics, there is no coherent
‘Luxemburgism’ in the same way that we think of Marxism. Her ideas changed and
developed both in response to debate with figures such as Lenin and also as she
learned from the events she was a part of. For example, in chapter 7, she says
‘the Russian Revolution has for its next task the abolition of Absolutism and
the creation of a modern bourgeois constitutional-state.’!
The
Mass Strike was written in the aftermath of an
astonishing period in working class politics and much of what was written is
specific to the period she was writing in. However, the way in which Luxemburg
generalises from the experiences of the Russian Revolution still have
pertinence – and her criticisms of the Social Democratic parties’ role in the
Russian Revolution were borne out by the way in which Lenin’s Bolsheviks
adapted to respond to the 1905 revolution. The party ‘threw open the doors’ in
the years following 1905, and by 1917 had a massively expanded membership of
hundreds of thousands. By maintaining ideological and practical unity of
purpose but having a larger social base, the Bolsheviks were able to have a far
greater influence on the next wave of struggle. This suggests that Luxemburg
was correct in much of her analysis.
All of this suggests of course that we should not
counterpose a Luxemburgian spontaneity of the masses to a bureaucratic party.
Luxemburg thought that both organisation and spontaneity were needed to make a
successful revolution.
Of course today we are at an historically low level of
working class struggle in the UK. Workers have not had a significant,
large-scale victory in over 40 years. However, as the recent public sector
strikes, and the highly political recent strike at Hovis, where workers won the
fight for the abolition of zero hour contracts and agency staff are to be
offered full-time permanent positions, shows, struggle may again be on the
rise. The fundamental antagonism between capital and labour means that struggle
can only be kept down for so long, and if in the future we are experiencing an
upturn in struggle – and with so many of the strikes being connected to
austerity, any upturn must have a highly political content – the role of
revolutionaries, wary of bureaucratism (and especially the bureaucratism of the
trades unions) on the one side, and yet having sufficient organisation to give
direction to spontaneous struggles, will be of enormous significance. It is
something that we in the SWP must get right.
All these are points which we may want to open up for
discussion, but the last thing I would like to say before we throw the meeting
open is a quote from the last chapter of The
Mass Strike, of which we may want to consider the application to Derby (and
which I hope we may take some issue with):
Amongst
the wider section of the masses in the … provinces, in the smaller and smallest
towns where local political life is not an independent thing but a mere reflex
of the course of events in the capital, where consequently party life is poor
and monotonous, and where finally, the economic standard of life for workers
is, for the most part, miserable, it is very difficult to secure the double
form of organisation [of party and trade union]
(ibid.: 84)
A lively discussion followed, which included a discussion of anarchism in relation to mass strikes, the role of spontaneity in workers' movements, how Luxemburg came to break with the SPD because of their support for World War One, the differences between a general strike and a mass strike, and the links between political struggle and economic struggle.
