Rosa Luxemburg

As we saw in the last article in this series, the central target of the revisionist attack on the revolutionary core of marxism was the latter's theory of the inevitable decline of capitalism, resulting from the irresolvable contradictions built into its relations of production. Eduard Bernstein's brand of revisionism, which Rosa Luxemburg refuted so lucidly in Social Reform or Revolution, was to a large extent based on a series of empirical observations derived from the unprecedented period of expansion and prosperity the most powerful capitalist nations lived through in the last decades of the 19^th century.

In the first part of this article looked at the controversy within the German trade union movement and the SPD (Social Democratic Party) that led to the creation of the Free Association of German Trade Unions (Freie Vereinigung Deutscher Gewerkschaften, FVDG), the organization that would be the precursor of German revolutionary syndicalism.

Notes on the Mass Strike

This article is adapted from the article in International Review 136 available here

In the first three parts of our series on the German Revolution of 1918-19 we showed how, after the collapse of the Socialist International faced with World War I, the tide turned in favour of the proletariat, culminating in the November Revolution of 1918, which, like the October Revolution in Russia the previous year, was the high point of an uprising against the imperialist war. Whereas October represented the first mighty blow of the working class against the "Great War", it was the action of the German proletariat which finally brought it to an end.

When World War I broke out, the socialists met on 4th August 1914 to engage the struggle for internationalism and against the war: there were seven of them in Rosa Luxemburg's apartment. This reminiscence, which reminds us that the ability to swim against the current is one of the most important of revolutionary qualities, should not lead us to conclude that the role of the proletarian party was peripheral to the events which shook the world at that time...

It is 90 years since the proletarian revolution reached its tragic culmination point with the struggles of 1918 and 1919 in Germany. After the heroic seizure of power by the Russian proletariat in October 1917, the central battlefield of the world revolution shifted to Germany. There, the decisive struggle was waged and lost. The world bourgeoisie has always wanted to sink these events into historical oblivion. To the extent that it cannot deny that struggles took place, it pretends that they only aimed at "peace" and "democracy" - at the blissful conditions presently reigning in capitalist Germany. The goal of the series of articles we are beginning here is to show that the revolutionary movement in Germany brought the bourgeoisie in the central country of European capitalism close to the brink of the loss of its class rule. Despite its defeat, the revolution in Germany, like that in Russia, is an encouragement to us today. It reminds us that it is not only necessary but possible to topple the rule of world capitalism.

Faced with all the conflicting arguments about the Russian revolution, it is difficult to steer an even course between the predominant view - that the revolution was a total disaster for humanity and inexorably led to the horrors of Stalinism - and the less fashionable but equally uncritical portrayals of Lenin and the Bolsheviks as superheroes who never made any errors...