Luxemburg:The Mass Strike, the Political Party

Alongside Bordiga, Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) was another of the ‘left wing communists’ criticised in Lenin’s polemic.[4] Unlike Bordiga, Luxemburg had strong libertarian tendencies, stressing that “freedom is always the freedom of dissenters”, and her pamphlet ‘The Mass Strike’ remains highly influential amongst Marxists who have rejected Leninism, as well as many anarchists.[5] But the pamphlet’s principle flaw is a serious one: it suffers from spectacular dishonesty from its very first page. In light of the Russian Revolution of 1905, which was spearheaded by a self-organised strike wave, Luxemburg seeks to demonstrate how this is not the direct action and the revolutionary general strike advocated by anarchists, but rather a ‘mass strike’, that far from vindicating the anarchist preference for direct action over political action, is in fact “the historical liquidation of anarchism”.[6] In order to contrast her Marxist ‘mass strike’ with the anarchist general strike, Luxemburg does not quote a single anarchist. Rather she opens her pamphlet with an 1873 polemic by Friedrich Engels.

Needless to say, Engels presents a laughable caricature, which has nonetheless provided a persistent anti-general strike straw man for Leninists and – via Luxemburg – libertarians alike. According to Engels, the general strike would be declared “one fine morning”, all workers would simply stop working for “about 4 weeks” and that would be the revolution done. Engels of course then scoffed at this implausible scheme (that he’d just invented) when compared to the practical, hard-headed Marxist goal of a political revolution seizing state power. But rather than rely on such lazy caricatures, the honest thing to do would be to look at what actual proponents of the revolutionary general strike actually said. Not to do so is unforgivably dishonest. In Luxemburg’s day, the principle proponents of the revolutionary general strike were the French CGT. Two of their principle theoreticians, Emile Pataud and Emile Pouget wrote a fictionalised account setting out their vision of a revolutionary general strike, entitled ‘How we shall bring about the revolution’[7]. What did they have to say?

Well for starters, the general strike was not conceived as being called on an arbitrary day set for the revolution. Rather the role of the union was to seek to generalise spontaneous outbreaks of strike action: “The stoppage of work, which on the previous day had been spontaneous, and was due to the accident of personal initiative and impulse, now became regularised and generalised in a methodical way, that showed the influence of the union decisions”.[8] It relied upon the “phenomena of spontaneous inspiration and fruitful boldness”.[9] Contra Engels/Luxemburg, the idea was not to stay out on strike surviving on ‘a full war chest’, but rather to expropriate workplaces and begin production under workers’ control, driven precisely by the imperative for the strikers to continue to feed themselves, maintain necessary services etc.[10] Contra Engels/Luxemburg, the union was seen as being, at the outbreak of the revolutionary general strike “an active minority” which sought to get non-unionised workers involved in expropriation and distribution, and to transform itself from “an organisation for fighting” into “a social organism”.[11]

All of this sounds remarkably like Luxemburg’s mass strike, with one major difference. Whilst both are conceived of beginning as an outbreak of self-organised strikes, the syndicalist conception saw a role for workers, organised at the point of production to actively seek to generalise the strike movement. Luxemburg sees being done spontaneously without any prior organisation. If there is a difference between the revolutionary general strike and the mass strike, that would seem to be it.[12] If we can bring ourselves to overlook the constant inaccurate digs at anarchists, it is only right to acknowledge that Luxemburg’s ‘Mass Strike’ represents a significant libertarian break with both Leninism and social democracy (Luxemburg was a member of Kautsky’s SPD at the time). But does the idea of spontaneous strikes escalating into revolutionary events without the need for any revolutionary workplace organisation offer us anything today?

My recollection of her is that she was really for a less centralized party,

This [the incorporation of non-proletarian movements under the leadership of the workers' movement] is only possible if the Social Democracy already contains a strong, politically educated proletarian nucleus class conscious enough to be able, as up to now in Germany, to pull along in its tow the declassed and petty bourgeois elements that join the party. In that case, greater strictness in the application of the principle of centralization and more severe discipline, specifically formulated in party bylaws, may be an effective safeguard against the opportunist danger. That is how the revolutionary socialist movement in France defended itself against the Jauresist confusion. A modification of the constitution at the German Social Democracy in that direction would be a very timely measure.

Quote:

Alongside Bordiga, Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) was another of the ‘left wing communists’ criticised in Lenin’s polemic.

Unlike Bordiga, Luxemburg had strong libertarian tendencies, stressing that “freedom is always the freedom of dissenters",

A classic example of this appropriation of anarchist ideas into Marxism is provided by the general strike. In 1905, Russia had a near revolution in which the general strike played a key role. Unsurprisingly, as anarchists had been arguing for the general strike since the 1870s, we embraced these events as a striking confirmation of our long held ideas on revolutionary change. Marxists had a harder task as such ideas were alien to mainstream Social Democracy. Yet faced with the success and power of the general strike in practice, the more radical Marxists, like Rosa Luxemburg, had to incorporate it into their politics.

Yet they faced a problem. The general strike was indelibly linked with such hearsays as anarchism and syndicalism. Had not Engels himself proclaimed the nonsense of the general strike in his diatribe "The Bakuninists at work"? Had his words not been repeated ad infinitum against anarchists (and radical socialists) who questioned the wisdom of social democratic tactics, its reformism and bureaucratic inertia? The Marxist radicals knew that Engels would again be invoked by the bureaucrats and reformists in the Social Democratic movement to throw cold water over any attempt to adjust Marxist politics to the economic power of the masses as expressed in mass strikes. The Social Democratic hierarchy would simply dismiss them as "anarchists." This meant that Luxemburg was faced with the problem of proving Engels was right, even when he was wrong.

She did so in an ingenious way. Like Engels himself, she simply distorted what the anarchists thought about the general strike in order to make it acceptable to Social Democracy. Her argument was simple. Yes, Engels had been right to dismiss the "general strike" idea of the anarchists in the 1870s. But today, thirty years later, Social Democrats should support the general strike (or mass strike, as she called it) because the concepts were different. The anarchist "general strike" was utopian. The Marxist "mass strike" was practical.

To discover why, we need to see what Engels had argued in the 1870s. Engels, mocked the anarchists (or "Bakuninists") for thinking that "a general strike is the lever employed by which the social revolution is started." He accusing them of imagining that "[o]ne fine morning, all the workers in all the industries of a country, or even of the whole world, stop work, thus forcing the propertied classes either humbly to submit within four weeks at most, or to attack the workers, who would then have the right to defend themselves and use the opportunity to pull down the entire old society." He stated that at the September 1 1873 Geneva congress of the anarchist Alliance of Social Democracy, it was "universally admitted that to carry out the general strike strategy, there had to be a perfect organisation of the working class and a plentiful funds." He noted that that was "the rub" as no government would stand by and "allow the organisation or funds of the workers to reach such a level." Moreover, the revolution would happen long before "such an ideal organisation" was set up and if they had been "there would be no need to use the roundabout way of a general strike" to achieve it. [Collected Works, vol. 23, pp. 584-5]

Rosa Luxemburg repeated Engels arguments in her essay "The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions" in order to show how her support for the general strike was in no way contrary to Marxism. [Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, pp. 153-218] Her "mass strike" was different from the anarchist "general strike" as mocked by Engels as it was dynamic process and could not be seen as one act, one isolated action which overthrows the bourgeoisie. Rather, the mass strike to the product of the everyday class struggle within society, leads to a direct confrontation with the capitalist state and so it was inseparable from the revolution.

The only problem with all this is that the anarchists did not actually argue along the lines Engels and Luxemburg claimed. Most obviously, as we indicated in section H.2.8, Bakunin saw the general strike as a dynamic process which would not be set for a specific date and did not need all workers to be organised before hand. As such, Bakunin's ideas are totally at odds with Engels assertions on what anarchist ideas on the general strike were about (they, in fact, reflect what actually happened in 1905).

But what of the "Bakuninists"? Again, Engels account leaves a lot to be desired. Rather than the September 1873 Geneva congress being, as he claimed, of the (disbanded) Alliance of Social Democracy, it was in fact a meeting of the non-Marxist federations of the First International. Contra Engels, anarchists did not see the general strike as requiring all workers to be perfectly organised and then passively folding arms "one fine morning." The Belgian libertarians who proposed the idea at the congress saw it as a tactic which could mobilise workers for revolution, "a means of bringing a movement onto the street and leading the workers to the barricades." Moreover, leading anarchist James Guillaume explicitly rejected the idea that it had "to break out everywhere at an appointed day and hour" with a resounding "No!" In fact, he stressed that they did "not even need to bring up this question and suppose things could be like this. Such a supposition could lead to fatal mistakes. The revolution has to be contagious." [quoted by Caroline Cahm, Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism 1872-1886, p. 223 and p. 224]

Another account of this meeting notes that how the general strike was to start was "left unsaid", with Guillaume "recognis[ing] that it as impossible for the anarchists simply to set the hour for the general strike." Another anarchist did "not believe that the strike was a sufficient means to win the social revolution" but could "set the stage for the success of an armed insurrection." Only one delegate, regardless of Engels' claims, thought it "demanded the utmost organisation of the working class" and if that were the case "then the general strike would not be necessary." This was the delegate from the reformist British trade unions and he was "attack[ing]" the general strike as "an absurd and impractical proposition." [Phil H. Goodstein, The Theory of the General Strike, pp. 43-5]

Perhaps this is why Engels did not bother to quote a single anarchist when recounting their position on this matter? Needless to say, Leninists continue to parrot Engels assertions to this day. The facts are somewhat different. Clearly, the "anarchist" strategy of overthrowing the bourgeoisie with one big general strike set for a specific date exists only in Marxist heads, nowhere else. Once we remove the distortions promulgated by Engels and repeated by Luxemburg, we see that the 1905 revolution and "historical dialectics" did not, as Luxemburg claim, validate Engels and disprove anarchism. Quite the reverse as the general strikes in Russia followed the anarchist ideas of what a general strike would be like quite closely. Little wonder, then, that Kropotkin argued that the 1905 general strike "demonstrated" that the Latin workers who had been advocating the general strike "as a weapon which would irresistible in the hands of labour for imposing its will" had been "right." [Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution, p. 288]

So, contra Luxemburg, "the fatherland of Bakunin" was not "the burial-place of [anarchism's] teachings." [Op. Cit., p. 157] As Nicholas Walter argued, while the numbers of actual anarchists was small, "the 1905 Revolution was objectively an anarchist revolution. The military mutinies, peasant uprisings and workers' strikes (culminating in a general strike), led to the establishment of soldiers' and workers' councils . . . and peasants' communes, and the beginning of agrarian and industrial expropriation - all along the lines suggested by anarchist writers since Bakunin." [The Anarchist Past and Other Essays, p. 122] The real question must be when will Marxists realise that quoting Engels does not make it true?

Moreover, without becoming an insurrection, as anarchists had stressed, the limits of the general strike were exposed in 1905. Unlike the some of the syndicalists in the 1890s and 1900s, this limitation was understood by the earliest anarchists. Consequently, they saw the general strike as the start of a revolution and not as the revolution itself. So, for all the Leninist accounts of the 1905 revolution claiming it for their ideology, the facts suggest that it was anarchism, not Marxism, which was vindicated by it. Luxemburg was wrong. The "land of Bakunin's birth" provided an unsurpassed example of how to make a revolution precisely because it applied (and confirmed) anarchist ideas on the general strike (and, it should be added, workers' councils). Marxists (who had previously quoted Engels to dismiss such things) found themselves repudiating aspect upon aspect of their dogma to remain relevant. Luxemburg, as Bookchin noted, "grossly misrepresented the anarchist emphasis on the general strike after the 1905 revolution in Russia in order to make it acceptable to Social Democracy." (He added that Lenin "was to engage in the same misrepresentation on the issue of popular control in State and Revolution"). [Towards an Ecological Society, p. 227fn]

So, Zanthorus, your quotations and (obviolusly anti-anarchist) commentary, has convinced me that Luxemborg embodied only the left wing of social democracy.

Perhaps if she wasn;t murdered she may have fallen into line with the Third International and, perhaps, later on become a Trotskyist/

Zanthorus wrote:

The International Bolshevik Tendency had a good piece calling him out on this in their pamphlet 'Lenin and the Vanguard Party' (Skip to 'Behind Luxemburg's Anti-Leninist Polemic').

Actually, very poigent and surely a reason why there are inherent and flawed problems with centralization.

The IBT article states:

Quote:

Luxemburg’s pressure for greater centralization in the SPD was successful at the radical-dominated 1905 Jena Congress, which adopted a genuinely centralist organizational structure. For the first time the officers of the basic party unit were made responsible to the national executive. Later on, of course, the SPD’s famous centralized apparatus was used to suppress the revolutionary left led by Rosa Luxemburg.

So, Zanthorus, your quotations and (obviolusly anti-anarchist) commentary, has convinced me that Luxemborg embodied only the left wing of social democracy.

My late-19th/early-20th Century historical figure of the European workers movement can beat up your late-19th/early-20th Century historical figure of the European workers movement.

Actually, very poigent and surely a reason why there are inherent and flawed problems with centralization.

the centralisation was called for in the first place to counter-act a real problem with opportunism.

of course, we demand the strictest discipline from the menshevik gentlemen when we are in a majority. But of course, we will not allow these gentlemen to lead us by the noose

Hummmm...not sure I would agree with how centralization is posed. There's nothing really democratic it. All flows from the center, quite a bit differently from anything libertarian socialism, let alone anarcho-syndicalism.

Now, I get the point about accountability to principle and agreed upon organizational policy.
I guess a question which comes to my mind would be: does the imposition of policy from "the center", resolve issues? Perhaps it imposes an immediate solution, but does not resolve or builds unity.

So, "the question is rather useless in the abstract and anarchist should stop raising federalism and decentralisation as panacea." Well, OK then, what is the proper anarchist view?