Rosa Luxemburg

[p031] Rosa Luxemburg A Review Article by C. Slaughter Rosa Luxemburg, by J. P. Nettl, Oxford University Press, 2 Vols. 948 pp. £6 6s

[p032] 187 A Review Article by C. Slaughter Rosa Luxemburg, by J. P. Nettl, Oxford University Press, 2 Vols. 948 pp. £6 6s

[p033] 188 ROSA LUXEMBURG has until now received not even the merest frac- tion of the serious attention which her actions and theoretical work re- quire for Marxists. She is one of the giants of Marxism and the pro- letarian revolution, and yet her col- lected works are not yet published in German, let alone translated into other languages. Nettl’s book, because it is the work of a thoroughly diligent re- searcher who has investigated every available source of Rosa Luxem- burg’s work and life, and because it is written with a sincere enthusiasm for Rosa’s greatness, is an important and welcome work. Sympathetic to Rosa and to the socialist aims which she set herself, Nettl is nevertheless no Marxist, and consequently his book suffers serious weaknesses. Other reviewers have paid lavish compliments to the posi- tive sides of his book, and certainly Marxists will for years find it an authority. The most serious tribute we can pay to it is to make the most thorough criticism of its shortcom- ings, and to take the opportunity of a review to restate the views of the followers of Lenin and Trotsky on Rosa Luxemburg’s work. In approaching Nettl’s book Marxists will recall, particularly on a sub;ect such as this, the opening words of Trotsky’s ‘Introduction’ to Harold Isaacs’ Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution:} ‘First of all, the mere fact that the author of this book belongs to the school of historical material- ism would be entirely insufficient in our eyes to win approval for his work. In present-day conditions the Marxist label would predis- pose us to mistrust rather than to acceptance. In close connection with the degeneration of the Soviet State, Marxism has in the past fifteen years passed through an unprecedented period of de- cline and debasement. From an instrument of analysis and criti- cism, it has been turned into an instrument of cheap apologetics. Instead of analysing facts, it occupies itself with sélecting sophisms in the interests of exalted clients.’ Nett] himself traces the conse- FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, NOVEMBER 1966 quences of this debasement of Marxism by the Stalinists in his account of the use of Rosa and her literary heritage after her death by the Stalinist bureaucracy. His own work has the advantage of freedom from this school of distortion, and he has no ‘exalted clients’ to serve. But he also has the great disadvan- tage of trying to start from a vantage-point which stands above or outside this history, rather than from the Marxist vantage-point of struggle against it. Such was the position taken up by Trotsky. Nettl provides us with a very large number of citations from all of Rosa’s works and from unpublished letters and other sources, but for Marxists his book remains to a large extent raw material for analysis rather than the finished article. And when this material is worked over, it is necessary to say without quali- fication to Mr. Nettl that his ‘de- tached’ viewpoint in historical and sociological analysis is untenable, and nor are its consequences avoided by a feeling of support for Rosa’s aims. Before taking up the substance of some of Rosa’s ideas and contribu- tions to Marxism, it is worth con- sidering a little further this initial criticism of Nettl himself. In a foot- note (page 543) Nettl glimpses the problem: ‘At some stage every writer on Marxism or on any im- portant Marxist must face for himself the problem of the “correct” rela- tionship between theory and prac- tice, as implied by a Marxist system of thought and as interpreted by current Marxist orthodoxy. .. Nettl gives high marks to Rosa on her ability to relate the particular to the general, but he omits the relation between her theoretical conquests and her revolutionary actions. His failure to place his own work and his own method in this context is therefore hardly surpris- ing. When Nettl takes up the view- point of the abstracted individual, passing his verdict on processes out- side of himself, using for this the ‘insights’ of modern sociology and political science (the honorific titles taken by academic prejudice in social and political matters), he is in fact occupying the definite political ground of a definite social and ideological group. Max Weber, Alfred Weber, Karl Mannheim and others have attempted the most systematic statement of the social and political ‘independence’ of this free- wheeling intelligentsia, largely to be found in the universities. Their in- dependence of the state and of the private employer is supposed to put them in a specially advantageous position for rationally understand- ing society as a whole. For example, Nettl writes in a number of places that the problem of bureaucracy in the working-class movement, political parties and the state has now been opened upto us much more by advances in sociology. In other chapters he makes slighting references to the ‘talmudic’ pre- occupations of Trotsky and the Left Opposition with the social nature of the USSR under Stalin. Marxists will rightly dismiss Nettl’s supposi- tion that he can take _ suitable theories from bourgeois sociology and ‘apply’ them to the problems tackled by Luxemburg and Trotsky. The modern ‘insights’ of sociology on bureaucracy, for example, are de- rived from the work of Max Weber, Rosa’s contemporary. We must see Rosa’s_ attitude to the Social- Democratic bureaucracy, and Trot- sky’s critique of the Stalinist bureau- cracy, aS moments in a struggle against counter-revolutionary forces in the working-class; if we start instead by viewing them abstractly as analyses of bureaucracy, we will never understand their scientific value. Such a separation of the views of Marxists on this or that question from their whole revolu- tionary struggle is what is meant by a complete failure to understand the unity of theory and practice in Marxism. Max Weber’s theory of sociology, and in particular his theory of bureaucracy, were also developed in close connection with the political struggles in which Rosa 1 Martin Secker and Warburg, 1938 editon. This edition was dedicated ‘To the martyred heroes and the living fighters of the Chinese revo- lution’. Trotsky’s introduction was omitted from the later editions of Isaacs’ book.

[p034] ROSA LUXEMBURG was involved. If Nettl took up the question of bureaucracy in the workers’ movement dialectically, historically, he would treat the ‘sociological’ (i.e. bourgeois) theory of bureaucracy as a ‘moment’ in the struggles which have taken place over this problem. Max Weber had his chance to struggle against the virus of bureaucracy in the German Social—Democratic Party, but he certainly did not fight alongside Rosa, encouraging the rank and file to act and remove the bureaucrats, improving their understanding of the bureaucracy and how fo defeat it. His standpoint was exactly the ovposite. He put forward a fatalistic theory that along with the rest of modern society political parties would inevitably become bureaucratised, and that socialism was but a dream. Take for example a speech he made to the ‘Verein fiir Sozialpolitik’ in 1909: ‘I could not but shake my head at the illusion which seems to have possessed all of you here that, when the private employer has been revlaced to the fullest possible extent by the state or municipal official, the result will be anything other than the admin- istration of state authority from the employer’s point of view.’2 The so-called insights of modern sociology, following in Weber’s footsteps, have not passed beyond these smug and petty horizons of the middle-class citizen, which give us only a more __ sophisticated formula for the most banal and con- servative objections to socialism. One cannot agnostically take ‘in- sights’ from a theory developed within such narrow class limits and ‘apnly’ them eclectically to the ‘improvement’ of a revolutionary critique of bureaucracy. There is no misunderstanding here: Weber understood clearly enough, for all his tortured moral posturings, where he stood in relation to the revolution of 1918-19 in Germany. The Social-Democratic government which supervised the murder of Luxemburg and _ Liebknecht had Weber as one of its constitutional: advisers. At that time Weber wrote: ‘I have no _ political plans except to concentrate all my intellectual strength on the one problem, how to get once more for Germany a great general staff.’ So much for the great battler against bureaucracy! But he had a cure: ‘Only the election by the people of a Reich president provides the opportunity to achieve selection of political leadership and may consequently lead to a revitalisation of political parties which will overcome the antiquated system run by notabilities hitherto practised.’ It was this conclusion, drawn largely from Weber’s own theory of ‘charisma’ in leadership, that brought the inclusion in the Weimar Constitution of the famous article 41: ‘The President of the Reich is elected by the whole German people.’ It is not just that under this clause Chancellor Hitler took office; Fascists do not take power because of flaws in constitutions. But Weber proceeded from the point of view that it was possible to carve out some path for a democratic bourgeoisie in Germany. He rejected the consistent dialectical analysis, from Marx and Engels in 1848 to Rosa and Trotsky, of the historical impotence of the ‘democratic’ bourgeoisie in Ger- many, a rejection which the epigones of Weber cling to in modern sociology, vide the work of Talcott Parsons and Ralf Dahren- dorf on Germany. It will seem to many readers that we have over-laboured this point. Most serious reviewers of Nettl’s book have lightly dismissed his references to sociology as an idiosyncrasy out of character with the seriousness of his subject. But it is in fact indicative of a failure to choose between the continuity of Marxism, a unity of theory and practice, in which his book would have been written as a weapon in the continuing struggle for the proletarian revolution, and _ the tradition of the pseudo-scientific intelligentsia whose false independ- ence conceals its fundamental failure to challenge any of the assumptions of capitalism. In a period of social revolution like our own, that position has an inexorable logic. 189 Having established the relation between Nettl’s philosophical assumptions, basically those of an eclectic and an empiricist, which cannot but lead to an _ idealist method, in which several separately derived ‘insights’ are combined with the individual’s sympathies to arrange and present the subject to the reader, and the method of Marxism, we can perhaps now show more clearly the basic political fault in this biography. It is a fault which derives directly from the failure to produce this book as a weapon to continue the fight of Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky. It is only because Nettl’s work is so thorough and scrupulous in presenting Rosa’s own writings (with a few exceptions, such as the cavalier dismissal of her writings on France in the years 1898-1901) that his grave errors on the Russian and international con- text of Rosa’s work, particularly after her death, do not do grave damage to the entire work. I refer to Nettl’s constant impli- cation of a continuity between Bolshevism and _ Stalinism. In estimating the place of Rosa Luxemburg in the history and development of the Marxist move- ment, Nett] discusses in terms of the division between the Second or Social-Democratic and the Third (Communist) International as if it was a static and fixed phenomenon. Stalin’s bureaucratic centralism is seen as the logical development of the democratic centralism of Lenin. The relation between Stalin’s Com- intern and the member parties is even projected back to make a mockery of the early days of the International. From a study of the material available it is obvious that the International did function as an International, giving guidance to the newly-formed parties. The training and experience of the Bolsheviks gave them an undisputed authority, which they used in the first place to correct the ‘infantile leftism’ of some elements in the European parties. Without any analysis whatsoever of these early 2Quoted in J. P. Mayer, Max Weber and German Politics, p.97.

[p035] 190 years, Nettl makes the following comment on the consequences of the assassination of Luxemburg and Jogiches: ‘But for the Russians the event had its useful side, for with Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches there disappeared two determined opponents of Bolshevik control of international socialism. Hence- forth the Russians were the more easily able to impose their will on the German party, and after the adhesion of the larger part of the USPD to the KPD in the summer of 1920, a real mass base was at last available to the Com- munists’. Other reviewers have contrasted Nettl’s vast knowledge of Rosa’s own career and his knowledge of German politics, on the one hand, with his less expert knowledge of the Polish and Russian backgrounds. This unevenness is to some extent understandable in a specialised work of this kind, but it is fatal when it extends to the very heart of Rosa’s own preoccupations, the internal struggles in building the interna- tional revolutionary leadership. The history of Bolshevism in the inter- national movement is not a history of encroaching Russian control. In the years between 1919 and 1923, it was a question of a struggle to learn the lessons of the Russian Revolu- tion and the Bolshevik experience Trotsky FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, NOVEMBER 1966 for all the parties. Once the Stalin faction gained control, however, the Bolshevik tendency was locked in struggle against the leadership of the Comintern. When Trotsky claimed in the 1930’s that the Fourth International could justifi- ably claim to fight under the banner of Rosa as well as that of Lenin, he spoke from the point of view of the Bolshevik opposition to Stalinism, the same Stalinism which distorted the history and the ideas of Rosa and the Spartacus League. Nett] challenges this claim. In the first place he sees Rosa’s theories as a unique combination of some of the revolutionary aspects of Bolshevism with a supposed human- itarianism and democracy more at home in the Second International (though he does not identify this with the ‘democratic’ ideology of Social Democracy). He is really rationalising his own position and that of many like him. Attracted by the conquests of the October revolution and by the revolutionary successes of the Bolsheviks, they at the same time shy away from the break with the ‘freedom’ and com- fort afforded to the middle-class intelligentsia which is required by the struggle to continue the work of the Bolsheviks. Secondly, Nettl chooses to ignore the question of whether or not Trotsky’s struggle against Stalinism was not in fact the continuation of all that was best in Rosa’s ‘independent’ position. Surely the essence of Rosa’s own lifelong fight against the right wing of the Social Democracy was the assertion of the political independ- ence of the working class against pettv-bourgeois and _ bureaucratic tendencies, in the field of theory and of political strategy and tactics. She herself recognised that the success of the Bolsheviks in Russia opened a completely new stage in this fight. Trotsky’s battle against bureaucracy in the inter- national communist movement was the next great struggle against revisionism. He was perfectly right to claim Rosa as one of the forbears of the Fourth International. Jt was precisely in terms of this fight to build a leadership, and not from an abstract point of view of the exact tallying of ideas, that Trotsky made his claim. Defending Rosa Luxem- burg from the slanders and dis- tortions of the Stalinists, he con- cluded: ‘It is evident that the crisis of working-class leadership cannot be resolved by some abstract formula. It is a question of a very long process, i.e., a process of the objective conditions of conscious activity. Rather, what is involved is a continuous chain of ideological, political and organisational measures, taken in order to weld together the best and most farsighted elements of the international proletariat under a spotless banner, to strengthen more and more their numbers and and their self-confidence, _to develop and deepen their links with other, larger layers of the working class; in a word: to give back to the proletariat, in a new and extremely difficult situation with pressing responsibilities, its real historical significance and its leadership. The ‘spontaneity’ con- fusionists of the latest variety have as little right to call up Rosa in their services as have the Comintern functionaries to invoke Lenin. If we leave aside second- ary features and things by-passed by the march of events, we have every right to put our work for the Fourth International under the sign of the ‘three L’s’, i.e., not only that of Lenin, but also of Luxemburg and Liebknecht.”3 It certainly must be said in Nettl’s favour that his book gives no comfort to those who have tried to make out of Rosa’s weakest sides a political system, opposed to cen- tralised proletarian leadership on the grounds of the _ inevitability of bureaucracy and the powers of spontaneous generation of leader- ship by the proletariat in struggle. Similarly, on her criticisms of the Bolshevik revolution, Nett] con- cludes: ‘Those who are made joyful by criticism of the fundamentals of the Russian revolution would do better to turn elsewhere.’ Anti- communists and ‘state-department 3 Trotsky, ‘Rosa Luxemburg et la Quatrieme Internationale’. 1935.

[p036] ROSA LUXEMBURG 191 Karl Liebknechat addressing anti-war rally in Germany. socialists’ of various hues have in the last few years sought to use Rosa’s criticisms to turn away from Marxism those who have begun to seek an alternative to Stalinism. Nettl gives a balanced account of these criticisms and_ establishes the spirit in which they were made. Rosa’s primary consideration was to emphasise the overwhelming neces- sity for a revolution in the advanced capitalist countries if the October revolution was to be saved. She would have dismissed with contempt those who have used her pamphlet, written after the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, to discredit the Soviet regime. Before this she had written to her friend Luise Kautsky, wife of Karl Kautsky: ‘What do you think of the Russians? Of course, they will not’ be able to maintain themselves in this witches’ Sabbath, not because statistics show economic develop- ment in Russia to be too back- ward as your clever husband has figured out, but because Social Democracy in the highly developed west consists of miserable and wretched cowards who will look quietly on and let the Russians bleed to death. But such an end is better than “living on for the fatherland”; it is an act of historical significance whose traces will not have dis- appeared even after many ages have passed. I expect. great things to come in the next few years, but how I wish that I did not have to admire world history only through the bars of my cage’ (Nov. 24, 1917). The opinions expressed in her later pamphlet were in precisely this same framework, even though she made many errors on questions of the nature of the _ proletarian dictatorship in Russia. Thus: ‘Lenin aud Trotsky and their friends were the first who went ahead as an example to the pro- letariat of the world... But in Russia the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved there. In this sense, the future everywhere belongs to Bolshev- ism.’ — Nett] refers to the testimonies that she changed her mind on many of the detailed criticisms which she had made, and the material pro- vided in his book leaves little scope for the professional quotation- mongers who are so fond of using Rosa’s pamphlet as an instrument in a cause she would never have countenanced. Nett] suggests at one point that in the years when social- ism was blackened by the worst excesses of Stalinism, Rosa, had she survived 1919, might have finished up the anguished occupant of some US university fellowship; here he

[p037] 192 Lenin is once again trapped by the temptation to rationalise his own position, sorting out the arguments instead of proceeding from the real struggle in the Marxist movement; Rosa never stepped outside this, and she would not have paused for one minute to ponder her destiny in the way Nettl poses it. Here again we are compelled to draw the con- trast between his scholarly devotion to his subject and at the same time the dangerous abstraction of that subject from the real struggle in which Rosa acted out her life and which continued after her death. It continued in different forms, and the biographer must master the method by which she would have tackled these new forms, rather than pose against these new forms the established positions of Rosa at earlier times. As Nett] himself shows, her ideas on all important questions went through constant change and development. In his chapter, ‘Luxemburgism— Weapon and Myth’, Nett] traces the most important phases of the Stalinists’ treatment of Rosa’s work according to the needs of the bureaucracy at the various stages of its development, and this will remain a useful reference work. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, NOVEMBER 1966 Unfortunately Nett] again tries his hand at conclusions in the spirit of putting all the ‘good’ things in one basket, rather than from the point of view of the actual political struggle. Convinced that Rosa can inspire those who wish to combine ‘a complete loyalty to dialectical materialism with absolute insistence on the humanistic and self-liberating aspects of revolutionary democracy’, he at the same time concludes from his purely empirical survey of trends in Stalinist thinking that: ‘Just as Rosa reconnected directly to Marx in 1918, so the Russian leaders or Mao and their successors may one day reconnect to an early or even pre-Leninist concevtion in which the process as well as the product of Social- ism is functionally related to the emancipation of humanity—with humanity that is not merely a collective abstraction but the sum of the participating individuals.’ (p. 827) Here is the logical outcome of the attempt to occupy the stance of a mere interested observer. From the failure to grasp the essential dis- continuity, the great conflict, between Leninism and_ Stalinism, one arrives at the point of expecting Rosa’s rehabilitation from her very falsifiers, those who were guilty of destroying everything she fought for. in Germany, in the USSR, and in Poland. As Nettl makes clear once again. Rosa, because of her direct narti- cipation in the German Social Democracy, came earlier than Lenin to a recognition of the depths of opportunism to which its leaders had sunk, behind the mask of Marxist orthodoxy. Kautsky was of course the leading representative of this orthodoxy. In the first years of the 1914-18 war, Lenin acknow- ledged that Rosa had been right about Kautskv. Lenin was not slow in his remaining years to analyse what lay behind Rosa’s difference from the Right and from the centrists in the SPD. In 1920 he wrote: ‘While such outstanding repres- entatives of the revolutionary pro- letariat and of unfalsified Marxism as Rosa Luxemburg immediately realised the significance of this practical experience (the 1905 revolution) and made a critical analysis of it at meetings and in the press, the vast majority of the official representatives of the official Social-Democratic and socialist parties—including both the reformists and people of the type of the future ‘“Kautskyites”, “Longuetists”, the followers of Hillquit in America, etc.— proved absolutely incapable of grasping the significance of this experience and of performing their duty as revolutionaries, i.e, of setting to work to study and propagate the lessons of this experience.’ 4 It is important to bear in mind that this was Lenin’s unqualified verdict on Rosa Luxemburg, that she belonged wholly to the revolu- tionary tradition, and that she stood apart from and against both the Right and centrist ‘swamp’ in the Second International. But it is equally important to clarify the difference between Bolshevism and the group. of Marxists around Rosa Luxemburg. It is these weaknesses of Rosa, the failure to express organisationally the political independence which she asserted against the o»npor- tunists and the centrists, which are glorified and built into a system by small sects of _ self-styled ‘Luxemburgists’. It would of course be better for them if Rosa had not been the founder of the German Communist Party in her last days. But she was, and no Marxist will doubt that once having taken this step she would, had she lived, have been a great leader of a Leninist party in Germany. The difference between Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin on organ- isational questions is one of the most instructive aspects of the whole history of the workers’ move- ment. Paul Froelich, in what was hitherto the only available biography of Rosa in English, was guilty of blurring over the differences 4 Lenin, ‘Contribution to the History of the Dictatorship’ in Collected Works, Vol 31, p. 343

[p038] ROSA LUXEMBURG between Lenin and Luxemburg, and this was precisely because he himself was dithering on the basic question which divided them—the building of the independent revolutionary leadership, by that time the Fourth International. Froelich’s subservience to the Popular Front politics of the Kremlin made it necessary’ to present Rosa’s ideas on this and other questions as differing only in emphasis from those of Lenin. Nettl, on the other hand, does not really attempt an estimate of the lessons of Rosa’s opposition to Leninism on organisational ques- tions. Most readers would conclude from his account that her objections to Lenin’s intransigence in these matters was a consequence of her stress on the self-liberating aspect of the proletarian movement, the insistence on ‘organisation as process’, and that her opinions about this should be considered part and parcel with the positive heritage which Nettl considers she has left to non-Stalinist Marxists. However, Nett] does give, on this as on many other’ disputed questions, sufficient evidence to make clear that Rosa herself never made a rigid ‘system’ out of her stress on spontaneity. All the citations, right from her writings on the ‘Mass Strike’ to her wartime letters, confirm this judgement of Trotsky. Most important of all, to read once again the history of the revolutionary events of 1918-19 is to see very clearly the fatal weak- ness of Rosa and the German Left. Since Nett] writes as historian and biographer rather than as _ partici- pant, it is worth using this review to outline the political conclusions. This is particularly necessary be- cause of the general character of Nettl’s approach, which we have already criticised. In writing about the lessons of the 1905 Revolution in Russia, for which she was later commended by Lenin, Rosa made a number of brilliant observations on the rela- tionship between political leadership and the strike actions of the masses.’ For example: ‘The leadership of a mass strike rests with Social Democracy and its responsible leaders in quite a different sense. Instead of rack- ing their brains about the techni- cal problems, the mechanics, of a mass strike, Social Democracy must take over the _ political leadership even in the midst of a revolutionary period. The slogans, the direction of the battle, the tactics of the political struggle have to be organised in such a way that every phase and every moment in the struggle is related to the existing and _ already realised achievements of the pro- letariat and that this is always taken into account when the plan of campaign is made so that the tactics of Social-Democracy ... must never fall below the level of the genuinely existing power possi- bilities, but must always be in advance of them-—this is the most important task of the “leadership” during any period of mass strikes. And it is such a leadership which automatically settles technical problems as well.’ Here and in other writings Rosa insists that the task of leadership is net just administration but poli- tical leadership of the whole move- ment. The fact that she constantly fought along this line, and that she saw every struggle as the expression of a revolutionary process, placed her in the revolutionary camp. And yet on the organisational questions in Russian Social Democracy she sided with the Mensheviks. Her mistakes on this question were to have tragic consequences. When the revolution broke out in 1918, the Spartacists were still organised as the left wing of the USPD (a centrist split from the SPD). As Mehring wrote in his open letter to the Bolsheviks: ‘We have made one big mistake, namely that from an or- ganisational point of view we joined the Independents in the hope of driving them forward. This hope we have had to give up....’ Lenin was well aware of this de- ficiency long before 1918, and put his finger on it in his comments on Rosa’s famous pamphlet on the war and the Social Democracy (the ‘Junius pamphlet’): ‘,. . Junius states quite correctly that you cannot “make” a revo- 193 lution. Yet the revolution was on the programme (of history) in the years 1914-16. It is contained in the womb of the war, it would have emerged from the war. This should have been proclaimed in the name of the revolutionary classes; their programme should have been fearlessly developed. ... (Quoted by Nettl, page 625.) In this criticism there comes out clearly the danger inherent in Rosa’s stress on the spontaneity of the masses. Lenin elaborates on the point: ‘One senses the outsider who, like a lone wolf, has no comrades linked to him in an illegal organi- sation, accustomed to thinking through revolutionary solutions right to the end and to educating the masses in that spirit. But these shortcomings—and it would be entirely wrong to forget it-~are not personal failures in Junius but the result of the weakness of the entire German Left, hemmed in on all sides by the infamous net of Kautskyite hypocrisy, pedantry, and all the ‘goodwill’ of the opportunists.’ The parties of the Second Inter- national, and in particular the SPD, had achieved their most spectacular growth in non-revolutionary periods, and even where Marxist theory went beyond the limitations of these conditions, as in Rosa’s case, it did not get to the point of a theory of revolutionary organisation, as Lukacs has pointed out. Rosa made a wholly positive stress on the self- action of the revolutionary masses as a corrective to the fossilised bureau- cracy of the trade unions and the SPD. But to stop there was to fatally delay the tasks of preparation which are the _ responsibility of Marxists. Rosa insisted on the up- surge of the masses in revolutionary struggle as the corrective to oppor- tunism, but this involved an under- estimation of the strength and deep- rootedness of bourgeois ideology within the working class itself. She tended to assume that the correct- ness of Marxist theory and pro- gramme would find a natural re- sponse in the working class, and an automatic acceptance which would quickly sweep away opportunism.

[p039] 194 But it is precisely at the point of revolutionary struggles that these bourgeois ideas, implanted in the working class by reformism and bureaucracy, place in front of the workers their biggest obstacle, and require an independently steeled and trained leadership, proceeding from the overall needs of the class. This is what Lenin was driving at in What is to be Done when with characteristic sharpness he insisted that, while militant trade union con- sciousness can develop spontane- ously through the struggle of the working class, socialist or political consciousness must be brought from the outside. Rosa failed to see the political implications of Lenin’s firmness on organisational questions against the Mensheviks. Lukacs, in the years before he hid away in the field of literary criti- cism (and self-criticism!), summed up the consequences of this error for Rosa and her comrades: ‘The weak spot of all the non- Russian left tendencies in the Second International lay in that their taking up of revolutionary positions against the opportunism of the revisionists and the cen- trists could not and would not concretise itself at the organisa- tional level. This left it open to their opponents, and particularly to the centrists, to obscure the actual differences before the revo- lutionary proletariat. And so their opposition was unable to prevent the centrists from appearing to be the representatives of Marxism.’ (Lukacs, Histoire et Conscience de Classe.) Lukacs is only summarising the actual experience of the Spartakus- bund, an experience from which Rosa drew, too late, the conclusion that the Communist Party of Germany must be formed. In the earlier years, she had insisted on the preservation of the unity of the Social Democracy, confident that the struggle and developing class- consciousness of the workers would defeat the opportunism of the leaders. We have seen that the Spartakusbund then made the mis- take, in the developing revolutionary situation of 1918, of remaining as the left wing of the ‘Independent FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, NOVEMBER 1966 Socialists’. It is interesting that R. Palme Dutt, leading Communist Party scribe, refers in his review of Nettl’s book> to the failure to split from the SPD, but draws a blind across the mistake in relation to the Independents. Such are the penalties of being tied to the line of ‘left unity’ in 1966—one is obliged to defend it for 1918, even when it led to the annihilation of a whole leader- ship. Dutt’s review of Nettl’s book could indeed have served as a use- ful illustration of the kind of Stalinist criticism of Rosa Luxem- burg which Nettl outlines in his final chapter. Dutt complains about the subjective and ‘maddening’ in- terpretations of political questions by the biographer, but he makes no analysis of the meaning of these interpetations as a preliminary to putting the record straight. Instead he indulges in the same old game of sorting out from Rosa’s work that which is suitable to Stalinism today and making formal criticisms of her mistakes. Because he, like Nettl, does not distinguish between Leninism and Stalinism, he can say nothing about the decades of dis- tortion and obfuscation which Rosa has suffered. He mentions quite blithely her ‘well-known’ writings on the Mass Strike and on reform and revolution, without making the slightest indication that the Stalinist- controlled publishing houses did nothing to circulate these invaluable works, and still do nothing. When Dutt replies to Rosa’s criticisms of the Russian proletarian dictator- ship in 1917-18, he mentions the standard reply that she changed her mind on the important question of the Constituent Assembly, but he completely omits the basic frame- work of her approach, viz., the primary importance of the prole- tarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries. It is this which assures Rosa’s place in the revolu- tionary tradition, even in her errors, and it is because the Stalinist Dutt, still tied to the ideology of ‘Social- ism in a single country’, cannot admit this that he ends up by praising her only for her implacable revolutionary will and determina- tion, as contrasted with what Dutt patronisingly calls her theoretical ‘ambitions’. Dutt provides a similarly simplified view of the dispute over national self-determination, proceed- ing not from Lenin’s views but from the current Stalinist mish-mash about ‘the interlinked advance of socialism and national liberation (as) the manifest governing feature of the modern world... .6 Not only Rosa but Lenin too would have boxed the ears of any self-styled Communist who constructed such formulae to obscure the class struggle and the responsibilities of Marxist revolutionaries in the struggle against imperialism. The reactions to Nettl’s book of the Stalinist Dutt serve only to re- inforce the main argument which we have developed in this critical re- view. We have left aside many im- portant aspects of Rosa’s work and lessons of the struggles in which she played so glorious a part. Dutt chooses to quote Lenin on Rosa’s record as a revolutionary heroine, despite her errors, but he also chooses to omit Lenin’s characterisa- tion of her as representing ‘unfalsi- fied Marxism’, This makes it easier for him to avoid the essential questions of Stalinism and the be- trayal of the world revolution. Rosa will resume her rightful place of honour in the history of this revolu- tion, and in the education of a vic- torious generation of communist fighters, only through the fight for the real continuity of the Marxist tradition, the struggle of Bolshev- ism against Stalinism. Nettl’s book will be an invaluable source for those fighting in this battle. But the fight against bureaucratic distor- tions of her work, to establish her real stature, to guarantee the avail- ability of all her works, that re- quires a continuous tradition of struggle against those who have usurped the conquests of the work- ing class and the mantle of Marx, Engels and Lenin. In this sense we reaffirm Trotsky’s claim that the work of the Fourth International goes on under the banner of Luxem- burg and Liebknecht as well as that of Lenin. 5 Labour Monthly, August 1966. 6 Ibid, page 397.

[p040] A Marxist lassie — Trotsky’s last struggle against Revisionism. Price: 10s. 6d. Orders to: NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS LTD.,186A CLAPHAM HIGH STREET, LONDON, S.W.4

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[p042] 196 FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, NOVEMBER 1966 Monopoly Gapital An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order. Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy. Monthly Review Press. New York and London. pp 402. Price 62 shillings. THE authors of the present volume are well known writers in the field of socialism and Marxism. Sweezy, editor of Monthly Review, is author of the popular Theory of Capitalist Development (1942), which is widely thought of as an _ authoritative exposition of Marxist political economy, while the late Paul Baran, formerly Professor of Economics at Stanford University, is author of The Political Economy of Growth (1957). If for no other reason than their popularity this volume would justify serious study and evaluation by all Marxists. To deal, in the first place, with the main contents of the book. After some opening remarks about the weakness of bourgeois social science with its inability to answer any of the crucial questions posed by the development of capitalism, they proceed to examine what they consider to be some of the weak- nesses in Marxism, particularly in the field of political economy. Capitalism has survived in a way which Marx did not nor could not have anticipated. Since the century in which Marx wrote about capital- ism the system has undergone many important changes. Most prominent and important amongst these has been the transformation of the system from one based on largely competitive relationships between capitalists to one dominated by monopolistic and _ oligopolistic market structures. It is this fact which must be taken as the starting point in a _ re-evaluation of the functioning of present capitalist society. Baran and Sweezy point out that writers following Marx, most notably Rudolph Hilferding and Lenin, were aware of the advent and dominance of monopoly (Lenin did after all suggest that the best shorthand definition of imperialism was ‘monopoly capitalism’). But no Marxist, including Lenin and Hilferding, explored the develop- ment of monopoly in terms of the ‘law of motion’ of the economic system: there was no development in ‘economic theory’. The purpose of the book is to begin such an evaluation of monopoly capitalism and its laws of motion. In order to do this American economy is focussed upon as ‘typical’ of these new developments: ‘typical’ in the sense in which Marx chose Britain for his analysis of capitalism in the 19th century. After these initial remarks there follows a lengthy consideration of the structure and role of the modern giant corporation in the American economy. The authors agree that control of these institu- tions has passed largely into the hands of a group of salaried man- agers, although they stress the close ties which the managerial stratum has with stockholders in terms of family, education, ideology and economic interests. The next section of the book must be considered central to the whole analysis. After dealing at some length with the pricing policies of the modern firm, Baran and Sweezy try to demonstrate that modern capitalism is characterised Book Reviews by a tendency for the economic surplus (which, briefly defined, is the the difference between what a society produces and the costs incurred in producing it) to rise. This tendency for the surplus to rise in both relative and absolute terms is now the dominant law of motion of modern capitalism: ‘This law immediately invites comparison, as it should, with the classical-Marxian law of the fall- ing tendency of the rate of profit. Without entering into an analysis of the different versions of the latter, we can say that all pre- suppose a competitive system. By substituting the law of rising surplus for the law of falling profit we are therefore not reject- ing or revising a time honoured theorem of political economy: we are simply taking account of the undoubted fact that the structure of the capitalist economy has undergone a funda- mental change since that theorem was formulated. What is most essential about the change from competitive to monopoly capital- ism finds its theoretical expression in this substitution.” Given that a tendency to rising surplus is dominant the central question facing the capitalist system is the absorption and distribution of this growing — surplus. Having decided that this is the key question the remainder of the study falls logically into place. Baran and Sweezy demonstrate that neither the investments nor consumption of the capitalist class come anywhere near to absorbing this surplus. They therefore analyse the role of advert- ising expenditure, the economic activities of the State and the importance of imperialism and expenditures on _ preparation for war as means of absorbing the surplus. Having looked at each of these factors in turn they conclude that, even in combination, they are inadequate to prevent stagnation and the under-utilisation of resources under monopoly capital-

[p043] 196 FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, NOVEMBER 1966 Monopoly Gapital An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order. Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy. Monthly Review Press. New York and London. pp 402. Price 62 shillings. THE authors of the present volume are well known writers in the field of socialism and Marxism. Sweezy, editor of Monthly Review, is author of the popular Theory of Capitalist Development (1942), which is widely thought of as an _ authoritative exposition of Marxist political economy, while the late Paul Baran, formerly Professor of Economics at Stanford University, is author of The Political Economy of Growth (1957). If for no other reason than their popularity this volume would justify serious study and evaluation by all Marxists. To deal, in the first place, with the main contents of the book. After some opening remarks about the weakness of bourgeois social science with its inability to answer any of the crucial questions posed by the development of capitalism, they proceed to examine what they consider to be some of the weak- nesses in Marxism, particularly in the field of political economy. Capitalism has survived in a way which Marx did not nor could not have anticipated. Since the century in which Marx wrote about capital- ism the system has undergone many important changes. Most prominent and important amongst these has been the transformation of the system from one based on largely competitive relationships between capitalists to one dominated by monopolistic and _ oligopolistic market structures. It is this fact which must be taken as the starting point in a _ re-evaluation of the functioning of present capitalist society. Baran and Sweezy point out that writers following Marx, most notably Rudolph Hilferding and Lenin, were aware of the advent and dominance of monopoly (Lenin did after all suggest that the best shorthand definition of imperialism was ‘monopoly capitalism’). But no Marxist, including Lenin and Hilferding, explored the develop- ment of monopoly in terms of the law of motion’ of the economic system: there was no development in ‘economic theory’. The purpose of the book is to begin such an evaluation of monopoly capitalism and its laws of motion. In order to do this American economy is focussed upon as ‘typical’ of these new developments: ‘typical’ in the sense in which Marx chose Britain for his analysis of capitalism in the 19th century. After these initial remarks there follows a lengthy consideration of the structure and role of the modern giant corporation in the American economy. The authors agree that control of these institu- tions has passed largely into the hands of a group of salaried man- agers, although they stress the close ties which the managerial stratum has with stockholders in terms of family, education, ideology and economic interests. The next section of the book must be considered central to the whole analysis. After dealing at some length with the pricing policies of the modern firm, Baran and Sweezy try to demonstrate that modern capitalism is characterised Book Reviews by a tendency for the economic surplus (which, briefly defined, is the the difference between what a society produces and the costs incurred in producing it) to rise. This tendency for the surplus to rise in both relative and absolute terms is now the dominant law of motion of modern capitalism: ‘This law immediately invites comparison, as it should, with the classical-Marxian law of the fall- ing tendency of the rate of profit. Without entering into an analysis of the different versions of the latter, we can say that ail pre- suppose a competitive system. By substituting the law of rising surplus for the law of falling profit we are therefore not reject- ing or revising a time honoured theorem of political economy: we are simply taking account of the undoubted fact that the structure of the capitalist economy has undergone a funda- mental change since that theorem was formulated. What is most essential about the change from competitive to monopoly capital- ism finds its theoretical expression in this substitution.’ Given that a tendency to rising surplus is dominant the central question facing the capitalist system is the absorption and distribution of this growing — surplus. Having decided that this is the key question the remainder of the study falls logically into place. Baran and Sweezy demonstrate that neither the investments nor consumption of the capitalist class come anywhere near to absorbing this surplus. They therefore analyse the role of advert- ising expenditure, the economic activities of the State and the importance of imperialism and expenditures on preparation for war as means of absorbing the surplus. Having looked at each of these factors in turn they conclude that, even in combination, they are inadequate to prevent stagnation and the under-utilisation of resources under monopoly capital-