Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg (March 5, 1870 or 1871 - January 15, 1919, in Polish language Ró?a Luksemburg) was a Polish-born German Marxist political theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary. She was a social democratic theorist of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and later the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. She started the newspaper The Red Flag, and cofounded the Spartakusbund, a Marxist revolutionary group that became the Communist Party of Germany and took part in an unsuccessful revolution in Berlin in January, 1919. The uprising was carried out against Rosa's advice, and crushed by the remnants of the monarchist army and freelance right-wing militias collectively called the Freikorps, which were sent in by the government. Luxemburg and hundreds of others were captured, tortured, and killed.

Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organization

The central feature of her thought was the Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organization, in which spontaneity can be considered akin to a "grass roots" (or even anarchistic) approach, and organisation to a more bureaucratic or party-institutional approach to the class struggle. According to this Dialectic, spontaneity and organization are not two separable or even separate things, but rather different moments of the same process, so that one cannot exist without the other. These theoretical insights arise from the elementary and spontaneous class struggle; and through these insights, the class struggle develops to a higher level.

Related Topics:
Dialectic - Spontaneity - Organization - Class struggle

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"The working classes in every country only learn to fight in the course of their struggles... Social democracy.. is only the advance guard of the proletariat, a small piece of the total working masses; blood from their blood, and flesh from their flesh. Social democracy seeks and finds the ways, and particular slogans, of the workers' struggle only in the course of the development of this struggle, and gains directions for the way forward through this struggle alone." (In a Revolutionary Hour: What Next?, Collected Works 1.2, p. 554)

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Spontaneity is always mediated by organization, just as organization must be mediated by spontaneity. Nothing could be more wrong than to accuse Rosa Luxemburg of holding the idea of an abstract "spontaneism".

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She developed the Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organization under the influence of a wave of mass strikes in Europe, especially the Russian Revolution of 1905. Unlike the social democratic orthodoxy of the Second International, she did not regard organization as the product of scientific-theoretic insight into historical imperatives, but rather as the product of the struggles of the working classes.

Related Topics:
Europe - Russian Revolution of 1905 - Second International

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"Social democracy is simply the embodiment of the modern proletariat's class struggle, a struggle which is driven by a consciousness of its own historic consequences. The masses are in reality their own leaders, dialectically creating their own development process. The more that social democracy develops, grows, and becomes stronger, the more the enlightened masses of workers will take their own destinies, the leadership of their movement, and the determination of its direction into their own hands. And as the entire social democracy movement is only the conscious advance guard of the proletarian class movement, which in the words of the Communist Manifesto represent in every single moment of the struggle the permanent interests of liberation and the partial group interests of the workforce vis à vis the interests of the movement as whole, so within the social democracy its leaders are the more powerful, the more influential, the more clearly and consciously they make themselves merely the mouthpiece of the will and striving of the enlightened masses, merely the agents of the objective laws of the class movement." (The Political Leader of the German Working Classes, Collected Works 2, p. 280)

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and:

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"The modern proletarian class doesn't carry out its struggle according to a plan set out in some book or theory; the modern workers' struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight... That's exactly what is laudable about it, that's exactly why this colossal piece of culture, within the modern workers' movement, is epoch-defining: that the great masses of the working people first forge from their own consciousness, from their own belief, and even from their own understanding the weapons of their own liberation." (The Politics of Mass Strikes and Unions, Collected Works 2, p. 465)

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