Rosa Luxemburg & the Russian Revolution, 1905-17

Rosa Luxemburg After 1905

Norman Geras

As is well-known, a number of different strategic lines on the nature of the Russian revolution crystallized during and immediately after 1905, out of a debate which received its impetus from the revolutionary upheaval of that year. Rosa Luxemburg was a participant in this debate within Russian and European Social Democracy. Her contribution is recorded in some of her articles and speeches of the period. These, and later writings, offer a coherent formulation of her general alignment in relation to the three contemporary conceptions provided, respectively, by the Mensheviks, by Lenin and by Trotsky. The present article documents, and tries to resolve, the deep confusion which exists concerning Luxemburg’s attitude toward the Russian revolution in the period before 1917.

In 1931, Stalin ventured a little essay in the historiography of the European socialist movement. Its main purpose was to assert that the struggle against Kautsky and the spd ‘centre’ had been undertaken earlier and more energetically by Lenin than by Luxemburg and the German Left Social-Democrats. The opposite is in fact the truth. Luxemburg had been doing battle with spd orthodoxy for nearly a decade when Lenin first became aware of its shortcomings; she broke with Kautsky in 1910, fully four years before the spd’s response to the outbreak of war revealed to Lenin his own misappraisal of that party and its theoretical ‘Pope’. In any case, in the course of denouncing this truth as a slander (to ‘be branded as such and not made the subject of discussion’), Stalin also let it be understood that henceforth Rosa Luxemburg was to be regarded as one of the main architects of the theory of permanent revolution: ‘In 1905, disagreement developed between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks in Russia on the question of the character of the Russian revolution . . . What was the attitude of the German Left Social-Democrats, of Parvus and Rosa Luxemburg, to this controversy? They invented the utopian and semi-Menshevik (sic) scheme of permanent revolution . . . and opposed this scheme to the Bolshevik scheme of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. Subsequently, this semi-Menshevik scheme of permanent revolution was caught up by Trotsky . . . and transformed into a weapon of struggle against Leninism.’ Luxemburg’s responsibility for inventing the theory and opposing it to the Bolshevik conception was ranked by Stalin amongst ‘the most generally known facts of history’. [1] Wholly in keeping with the spirit of his essay, this was, however, less a comment on the differential epistemological status of various facts than something in the nature of the latest ultimatum. Six years earlier he had himself chastised the unfortunate Radek for allegedly attributing the same theory to Luxemburg. ‘It is not true’, Stalin had then written, ‘that the theory of “permanent revolution” . . . was advanced in 1905 by Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky. Actually, this theory was advanced by Parvus and Trotsky.’ [2]

Luxemburg and Trotsky

Stalin’s essay soon drew a reply from Trotsky himself. Having set the record straight with regard to Lenin’s and Luxemburg’s relationship to Kautsky before the First World War, Trotsky went on to deal with the authorship of the theory of permanent revolution. By now ascribing this to Luxemburg, he pointed out, Stalin was not only contradicting his own earlier assertion but also coming forward with a ‘new’ and ‘unexpected history of the origin of the theory’. Trotsky also suggested, however, that Stalin’s approach to historical questions, despite its vulgarity and unscrupulousness, had here generated a conclusion with a certain anachronistic rationale: ‘[Stalin] approaches every question as if that question were born only today and stood apart from all other questions. [He] contributes his judgements entirely depending upon whatever personal interest of his is uppermost and most urgent today . . . Rosa Luxemburg does not appear to him in the perspective of the German, Polish, and international workers’ movement of the last halfcentury. No, she is to him each time a new, and, besides, an isolated figure, regarding whom he is compelled in every . . . situation to ask himself anew, “Who goes there, friend or foe?”. Unerring instinct has this time whispered to the theoretician of socialism in one country that the shade of Rosa Luxemburg is irreconcilably inimical to him.’ [3]

The enmity postulated in this last assertion is by no means as speculative as the terminology may make it seem. Not only was Luxemburg’s commitment to proletarian democracy quite incompatible with the practice of Stalinism. The consistent internationalism of her life and work was just as incompatible with the theory of socialism in one country. [4] More specifically, in assessing the significance of the Russian revolution during and after 1917, she did adopt a perspective essentially identical with Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. Since Stalin was now writing in a context where, thanks to his own efforts, that theory existed in antagonistic relation to the idea of socialism in one country, he had good reason to detect a link between Luxemburg’s political legacy and the Trotskyist opposition. With equally good reason Trotsky later placed the work of building the Fourth International ‘under the sign of the “three L’s”, that is, not only under the sign of Lenin, but also of Luxemburg and Liebknecht’. [5] But of course all this leaves untouched the question of Luxemburg’s connection with the theory of permanent revolution in the period before 1917. On that point, Trotsky, in his reply to Stalin, did no more than to register surprise and scepticism at her newly disclosed responsibility for its origin.

Elsewhere, however, he had himself connected her with the theory, albeit in a more limited way. At the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Party, held in London in May 1907, Trotsky noted that Luxemburg, in her interventions there, was espousing a view virtually indistinguishable from his own. Subsequently, referring to this occasion in his autobiography, he wrote: ‘On the question of the so-called permanent revolution, Rosa took the same stand as I did.’ [6] So expressed, even this more restricted claim is inaccurate. It is true that there was an important similarity between Luxemburg’s and Trotsky’s perspectives before 1917: both of them made the same assessment of the proletariat’s leading role, and of its relationship to the other major classes, in the Russian revolution. Since much of the London Congress was devoted to a discussion of just that issue, it is also true that the common ground between them there was considerable and manifest. Trotsky’s autobiographical contention, that Luxemburg’s position at the Congress was the same as his own, undoubtedly refers to this area of overlap which was real enough. The claim is misleading, despite it, because before 1917 Rosa Luxemburg did not accept the central and decisive element in the theory of permanent revolution, the one which separated Trotsky from all of his contemporaries before 1917, not only from the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, but even from Parvus who genuinely had been instrumental in shaping Trotsky’s thinking on the subject. She did not share Trotsky’s view that the vanguard role of the proletariat in the Russian revolution would ‘destroy the barriers between the minimum and maximum programme of Social Democracy’, would forge ‘an unbroken chain’ between its bourgeois-democratic and socialist tasks, had therefore rendered obsolete the reigning orthodoxy of distinct and separate stages. [7] In this respect Luxemburg’s views were more closely similar to Lenin’s than to the theory of permanent revolution.

A legend to the contrary persists nevertheless and it is easy to see why. Stalin and Trotsky both laid the basis for it in different ways. Mutual antagonists in a comprehensive political and ideological confrontation which opposed them to one another on most things, they seemed at least to agree that she had had something to do with the theory in its early stages, whether by ‘inventing’ it or by endorsing it on one occasion shortly after its inception. Add to this that, in the last two years of her life, she did in effect endorse it, and a teleological reading of her work will do the rest. If one projects her later into her earlier conceptions, the partial similarity between these earlier conceptions and Trotsky’s views can be taken for a simple identity. The operation is the more tempting since certain of her formulations from the earlier period, if taken out of context, sound as if they might have been written by Trotsky. For example, in 1906, in her pamphlet on the mass strike, she characterized the Russian revolution ‘not so much as the last successor of the old bourgeois revolutions as the forerunner of the new series of proletarian revolutions of the West’. [8] The sound here is deceptive precisely because it has been set loose from its place in Luxemburg’s own orchestration. But it may help to account for the significant number of writers who, explicitly or implicitly, assimilate her perspective to Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.

Wrong Accounts

What they all have in common apart from being wrong, more accurately, the cause (or perhaps consequence) of their being wrong, is that they offer no detailed analysis of textual sources to substantiate the interpretation of Luxemburg they thereby make. Some simply make it in a general way without citing any sources. [9] Others make it by cursorily repeating the claim that she endorsed Trotsky’s position at the London Congress. [10] Yet others do so by referring, without further analysis, to her pamphlet on the mass strike or to other writings of the same period. [11] As will be seen, these sources in Luxemburg’s work fail when pursued. Here we simply take a closer look at one of the writers in question, by way of illustration. Robert Looker argues that ‘As early as 1906 in her Mass Strike pamphlet, Luxemburg had rejected the schematic Menshevik view’—in which he is right—‘that Russia could as yet only hope to achieve a bourgeois revolution and that socialists must therefore confine their demands to the requirements of that revolution’—in which he is wrong, the above quotation from that pamphlet notwithstanding. What Rosa Luxemburg rejected about the Mensheviks’ view was not the bourgeois-democratic objective of the Russian revolution but the strategic inferences they drew from this, such as the bourgeoisie’s leading role, the necessity of an alliance with it, the desirability of supporting the Cadets, and so forth. Like Lenin, she disagreed with the Mensheviks about the methods necessary to win the most far-reaching demands consistent with the revolution’s bourgeois character and not about this character itself. To make the same point differently, what Looker defines, inadequately, as the Menshevik view was in fact common to all Social-Democrats before 1917, except Trotsky and including Luxemburg. He thus helps to perpetuate the legend which assimilates the views of these two in that period.

On the other hand, a number of commentators have tried to demolish this legend by dissociating Luxemburg’s views, explicitly or implicitly, from the theory of permanent revolution. But they invariably introduce new mistakes and confusions into the picture. One writer notes a theory of stages in her work before 1917 but, overlooking Trotsky, suggests that it was universal amongst Marxists at the time. Another correctly points to the same thing in her Accumulation of Capital but proceeds to deduce from it precisely the Menshevik variant, which Luxemburg rejected, of the need for ‘an alliance with the national bourgeoisie’. A third suggests that she ‘never adopted the Trotskyist conception of permanent revolution’, a suggestion sustained by the misconception that even the October revolution effected no change of view on her part. [12] Nettl, whose account is the best, disputes the claim that she endorsed the theory of permanent revolution and draws attention to the fundamental solidarity between the Bolshevik view and her own. But he is mistaken in the qualification he makes to this by saying that in 1906 Luxemburg, unlike the Bolsheviks, did not ‘talk of any dictatorship, either in words or by implication’. [13] She did talk, and in words, about a dictatorship: the dictatorship of the proletariat. She spoke of it as the only method of successfully carrying to completion the bourgeois revolution in Russia, and not, in Trotsky’s sense, as the strategic objective whose achievement would fuse bourgeois-democratic and socialist tasks into one continuous revolutionary process. Finally, Ernest Mandel correctly stresses the bourgeois-democratic nature of the goal which she assigned to the revolutionary struggle of the Russian proletariat. But by writing that ‘like Lenin, Luxemburg rejected as premature any attempt to establish the proletarian dictatorship in Russia’, he makes the point in a way which obscures the precise contours of her position, and that for the reason just explained. [14] There is, in sum, a more or less total confusion, and no clear and wholly accurate account known to us of Luxemburg’s view in relation to those of her contemporaries. [15] What follows is an attempt to rectify this.

Well before 1905 some general indications can be found in Luxemburg’s writings of the directions her thought would take when brought to bear on the problems of the Russian revolution. These are no more than indications. It was the momentous events of 1905 itself which enabled her to concretize them into a rounded out strategic perspective for Russia. However, they already provide a clear anticipation of what her response would be to the Menshevik ‘orthodoxy’ on the Russian revolution: a blunt rejection of what she was to refer to on one occasion as ‘gigantic stupidities’. [16] Two such anticipatory indications stand out in particular: Luxemburg’s assertion of the inherent prematurity of the proletarian conquest of power; and the theme, pervading all her writings, of the historical bankruptcy of bourgeois democracy and liberalism.

Inherent Immaturity

The first was elaborated, at the turn of the century, against Bernstein, whose argument in favour of gradualism included the notions that the proletariat was neither mature enough to take power nor fit yet to wield it, and that the exercise of proletarian power would in these circumstances be an impracticable, costly and disastrous experiment. The dictatorship of the proletariat, according to Bernstein, was, in a word, premature: a most happy conclusion on his part seeing that he deemed it to be ethically inadmissable in any case, since it violated the norms of ‘democracy’ and, as such, belonged ‘to a lower civilization . . . an age which did not know . . . the present methods of the initiating and carrying of laws’. [17] Luxemburg’s retort was not limited to the observation that beneath Bernstein’s fears of a premature conquest of power there lay in reality ‘nothing more than a general opposition to the aspiration of the proletariat to possess itself of state power’. Examining the argument concerning prematurity on its own terms, she also pointed out that it betrayed a mechanistic conception of the struggle for socialism to imagine that the necessary degree of proletarian political maturity could be produced or measured by factors extraneous to the class struggle itself, to the proletariat’s struggle for, and exercise of, power and to the successes, failures and lessons of that whole process. Outside of the experience it provided there was no school of political maturity for the proletariat. For that reason, initiatives and even conquests of power which were, in an historical sense, premature would be unavoidable: ‘These “premature” attacks of the proletariat constitute a factor, and indeed a very important factor, creating the political conditions of the final victory . . . in the course of the long and stubborn struggles, the proletariat will acquire the degree of political maturity permitting it to obtain in time a definitive victory of the revolution.’ It should be borne in mind, however, that Luxemburg’s argument here was developed in the context of a controversy about the general strategic orientation of the German spd and justifies neither the inference that she believed socialist revolution to be on the agenda everywhere and immediately, nor the imputation to her of tactical recklessness. Her contention was simply that the proletariat’s struggle for power could not be postponed until it was completely assured, in advance, of a definitive victory in ideal conditions, since that would be a postponement sine die. No revolution could even begin if its precondition was the complete political maturity of the proletariat, and no conquest of power be undertaken if it had to be legitimated by guarantees of perfect success. Where the conditions for the revolutionary seizure of power emerged, the proletariat could and must, nevertheless, attempt, within the limits of its strength, to implement its historical objectives. ‘There can be no time’, Luxemburg wrote, ‘when the proletariat, placed in power by the force of events, is not in the condition . . . to take certain measures for the realization of its programme.’ [18]

Prospects of Bourgeois Democracy

The significance of this argument in the present context and its distance from simple ‘rebel’s impatience’ [19] are revealed by a consideration of the second theme, Luxemburg’s diagnosis of the contemporary condition and prospects of bourgeois democracy. The programme of German Social Democracy, adopted at Erfurt in 1891, contained not only those demands, the so-called maximum programme, in which the party expressed its ultimate, socialist objective, but also a set of immediate demands—the minimum programme, to be fought for and won on the terrain of capitalist society itself—concerning the acquisition and extension of bourgeois rights and liberties and the improvement of the material conditions of the working class. Luxemburg’s attitude to the minimum programme was far from being cavalier, despite her sustained fight against the way in which it was understood and projected, first by the revisionists, then by the party leadership and the political ‘centre’ from which the leadership drew its support. She vigorously opposed the revisionist attempt to excise the maximum programme from the perspectives of the spd. From 1905 onwards she opposed, equally vigorously, the party’s actual practice of delaying the struggle for socialism to some unspecified future even while continuing to affirm and reaffirm its currency. She tirelessly exposed as illusory and false the conceptions on which this contradictory practice was based: that the trade-unionist and parliamentary struggle for the minimal demands could be a substitute for a strategy of mass struggle leading towards the conquest of power; that secreted within that day-to-day, bread-and-butter struggle was some automatic trajectory towards socialism; that the trade-union and electoral strength of the working class could ‘become’, through organic growth and a Social-Democratic majority in the Reichstag, the dictatorship of the proletariat; that bourgeois parliamentarism itself might be the organ of proletarian dictatorship and democracy. Yet, at no time and in no way did Luxemburg belittle the importance to be attached to the struggle of the working class for elementary bourgeois-democratic rights. She believed, on the contrary, that that struggle was now the ‘only support’ capable of sustaining bourgeois democracy, and that one of Social Democracy’s most urgent contemporary tasks was ‘to save bourgeois parliamentarism from the bourgeoisie’. [20]

Underlying this belief were two arguments, both of them expressed during the course of the revisionist controversy, though Luxemburg continued to adhere to them thereafter. The first was that the institutions of bourgeois democracy, albeit no substitute for the dictatorship of the proletariat which they could not render superfluous, were needed by the working class nevertheless, since the rights of organization and expression which they allowed, and the very struggle for the defence and enlargement of those rights, constituted at least part of the indispensable preparation for its conquest, and exercise, of power. The second was that these same institutions of bourgeois democracy had, from the point of view of the bourgeoisie, exhausted their historical function and would be, indeed were being, progressively abandoned by it. Luxemburg challenged Bernstein’s naive and unilinear view according to which some law of progress guaranteed that democracy was the exclusive or even natural political form for capitalist relations of production, all other reactionary political phenomena being no more than accidental aberrations from the general law. Not only was this false historically, since capitalism had already coexisted with numerous political forms, from absolute monarchy through constitutional monarchy and democratic republic to Bonapartism. It also provided a dangerously mystifying perspective for the future. Bourgeois democracy, according to Luxemburg, had played a necessary though limited historical role in the bourgeoisie’s struggle against feudalism and in its mobilization of the masses in that cause. But so soon as this struggle was completed or compromised, so soon as its ‘stimulating fire’ went out, as she contended it had already done on a more or less international scale, then bourgeois democracy lost its historical purpose, became useless and dispensable to the bourgeoisie itself. Threatened by a rising working class and racked by the convulsions of imperialist rivalry and militarism, the bourgeoisie would not hesitate to jettison its own democratic institutions. Since these had now lost the kind of support provided by this class in its ‘heroic’ period, Luxemburg’s prognosis for them, should the workers’ movement fail in their defence, was uniformly bleak. Hence the assertions that ‘democratic institutions . . . have completely exhausted their function as aids in the development of bourgeois society’, that ‘liberalism . . . is now absolutely useless to bourgeois society’, that ‘bourgeois democracy must logically move in a descending line’, that ‘bourgeois parliamentarism has . . . completed the cycle of its historical development and has arrived at the point of self-negation’, that ‘parliamentarism has lost all significance for capitalist society’. [21] Hence the references, in a later period, to ‘the inner wretchedness of bourgeois liberalism’, to the ‘merciless trampling down of the last remnants of . . . bourgeois liberalism and bourgeois progress’, to ‘the miserable breakdown of the last remnants of . . . bourgeois democracy’. [22]

Sombre Judgement

There is in all this an evident underestimation on Luxemburg’s part of bourgeois democracy’s potential use, to the capitalist class, and potential life span, as one form of capitalist rule, within the metropolitan centres of imperialism. It should first be said, however, that her whole conception was in no respect inferior, neither analytically nor predictively, to the rosy Bernsteinian vision, an essentially liberal one, against which it was directed. She understood that the bourgeoisie would nowhere again be prepared to wage, let alone lead, an energetic revolutionary fight for the democratic objectives of the bourgeois revolution. She recognized that there were no lengths, however undemocratic, to which it would not go in defence of its rule and in pursuit of imperialist ambitions. She grasped earlier and better than anyone else that the European working class had reached an historical turning point, that the epoch of peaceful growth and struggle in the context of capitalist stability lay behind it, while ahead there stretched a period of economic crisis and violent political conflict. Her writings can be seen as one long effort to erect a signpost at that turning point in order to save the working class from misdirection on a new terrain. When the policy of the spd which she had criticized for a decade came to fruition, during the First World War, in the Burgfrieden and the party’s support for the ‘Fatherland’, she anticipated the general essence, if not the precise and convulsive forms, of the unparalleled calamity which this capitulation foreshadowed and which, twenty years later, would overtake the German and European working class and European Jewry in the shape of triumphant Nazism.

In 1915 Luxemburg wrote the following prescient lines: ‘German freedom . . . has been endangered by this attitude of the social democracy far beyond the period of the present war. The leaders of the social democracy are convinced that democratic liberties for the working class will come as a reward for its allegiance to the fatherland. But never in the history of the world has an oppressed class received political rights as a reward for service rendered to the ruling classes . . . The indifference with which the German people have allowed themselves to be deprived of the freedom of the press, of the right of assembly and of public life, the fact that they not only calmly bore, but even applauded the state of siege is unexampled in the history of modern society . . . . That such a thing is possible in Germany today, that not only the bourgeois press, but the highly developed and influential socialist press as well, permits these things without even the pretense of opposition bears a fatal significance for the future of German liberty. It proves that society in Germany today has within itself no foundation for political freedom, since it allows itself to be thus lightly deprived of its most sacred rights. Let us not forget that the political rights that existed in Germany before the war were not won, as were those of France and England, in great and repeated revolutionary struggles, are not firmly anchored in the lives of the people by the power of revolutionary tradition. They are the gift of a Bismarckian policy granted after a period of victorious counterrevolution that lasted over twenty years. German liberties did not ripen on the field of revolution, they are the product of diplomatic gambling by Prussian military monarchy, they are the cement with which this military monarchy has united the present German empire. Danger threatens the free development of German freedom not . . . from Russia, but in Germany itself. It lies in the peculiar counterrevolutionary origin of the German constitution, and looms dark in the reactionary powers that have controlled the German state since the empire was founded . . . The passive submission of the social democracy to the present state of siege . . . has demoralized the masses, the only existing pillar of German constitutional government.’ [23]

Judged against a period which was bracketed by two bloody and destructive world wars, a period in which bourgeois democracy, where it survived, was subject to severe strain and pressure and, where it did not, made way for the most murderous variant of capitalist rule, Luxemburg’s forecasts concerning the destiny of bourgeois democracy in the advanced countries are actually remarkable in one sense for their perspicacity. Nor is it entirely surprising if she did not see beyond this grim and extended reality to the era of renewed capitalist stabilizaion and expansion which followed it and in which bourgeois democracy was better able to prove its capacity for survival and revival. Theoretically, of course, her conception of capitalist accumulation precluded the possibility of such economic recovery, predicating an increasing aggravation of the problem of realizing surplus-value on the shrinkage of the non-capitalist environment. But there is a more important point here. Historically, capitalist recovery, after 1945, was in part the product of the preceding series of massive and repeated defeats for the European working class. No Marxist of Luxemburg’s generation could fully foresee or measure them, much less all their effects, before the First World War, even though in her own case the onset of the war provided her with an inkling of their possibility. It may be added that recovery could, in any case, be no more lasting or permanent than the period which produced a Bernstein, for all that it too, at its peak, spawned its own soothing myths. The stability enjoyed by advanced capitalism after the Second World War has already, and quite visibly, begun to fracture.

Advantages of Consent

Even now, however, bourgeois democracy is far from being useless to the bourgeoisie. Luxemburg’s early admonition of its demise in favour of more reactionary variants of capitalist rule, her failure to appreciate its potential resilience in the major countries of developed capitalism, must also partly be put down to a somewhat unilateral definition of its historical role: her belief that it was a political form specific to the bourgeoisie’s struggle against feudalism. In fact, it is a form which has shown itself to be sturdiest where, and in the measure that, that struggle has been consummated, [24] a form of the bourgeoisie’s consolidated ascendancy and not merely of its fight for it. From the point of view of the bourgeoisie there are excellent reasons for giving this political form its support. Bourgeois democracy performs the function, a not so heroic one this, of securing and maintaining the consent of the masses to their own exploitation and subordination. This point should not be oversimplified but nor can it be evaded. In a polemical observation, which may appear to contradict the bald manner in which it is here expressed, Trotsky once wrote for example: ‘Anyone who would say that in England, France, the United States, and other democratic countries, private property is supported by the will of the people would be a liar. No one ever asked the consent of the people.’ [25] The truth of this observation is that bourgeois democracy obtains the consent of the masses not by revealing their subordination to them, but by concealing it from them, much as the wage form conceals the existence of their exploitation. It throws up a screen (which is not just a fiction, however, but a real structure with real effects) of elections, parliamentary legislation and debate, equal democratic rights, etc., behind which the central, executive apparatuses of the state and their points of contact/access to the capitalist class are obscured. It thus creates the illusion in the masses that they control this democratic state at least as much as anybody else. What they consent to is not something which they know to be their own subordination in the light of the clearly presented historical alternative of its abolition but a structure which they understand quite otherwise. A kind of consent is secured from them nevertheless, even if it is misguided and misinformed, even if it is never entirely perfect from the point of view of the capitalist class, because pierced by the experience of a rather less benign reality, contradictory, and therefore in need of reinforcement by the constant threat, and periodic use, of violence.

Trotsky himself understood this. He explained it clearly in a series of writings on Germany embodying not only brilliant, and still unsurpassed, conjunctural analyses of the rise of Nazism, but also the elements of a theory of the capitalist state not to be found in the previous Marxist canon, not in Marx, nor in Lenin, nor in Luxemburg, and one which, to this day, has not been properly assimilated in Marxist research—less still by the most influential currents within the workers’ movement. One of Trotsky’s main concerns in these writings was precisely to elucidate the different forms and methods of bourgeois rule and the different social blocs they attempt to construct, and lean on, for their support. On the subject of bourgeois democracy he wrote: ‘In a developed capitalist society, during a “democratic” regime, the bourgeoisie leans for support primarily upon the working classes, which are held in check by the reformists. In its most finished form, this system finds its expression in Britain during the administration of the Labour government as well as during that of the Conservatives.’ [26]

Bourgeois democracy’s strength in eliciting such support derives from mechanisms of ideological legitimation and political integration incomparably more powerful than those available to the alternative, overtly repressive forms of bourgeois rule and for want of which the latter employ systematic terror. All bourgeois democracies, to be sure, also possess an armed, repressive apparatus which they use not only as a last resort, when these other mechanisms begin to fail decisively, but also on a more regular basis: piecemeal or in generous doses depending on the nature of the case. They rely upon ‘a combination of repressions and concessions’. [27] But the basic pillar of their strength is a dense and complex structure of institutions and practices, many of them external to the state apparatus itself—of elections, legislative, executive and advisory bodies, political parties, pressure groups and trade unions, newspapers and other mass media, etc.—through which the needs and demands of the masses are processed. This structure has a dual character. On the one hand, it does provide the workers’ movement with the organizational and political means for opposing the more blatant forms of exploitation and oppression, for defending the workers’ most immediate interests, and for winning material gains on their behalf. This provision is the source of bourgeois democracy’s self-legitimating power, and explains why it is no mere fraud and why an attitude of sectarian, ultra-left abstentionism towards it will not win the confidence of politically conscious workers. On the other hand, this structure largely succeeds in sublimating and neutralizing, or sabotaging, such genuinely anti-capitalist demands and initiatives as do emerge, by taking them through its many ‘competent’ and ‘specialized’ channels, i.e. away from the masses, out of their direct control and sight—generally with the assistance of reformist workers’ parties and trade-union leaders. This is why bourgeois democracy is in large measure a fraud, not class-neutral, not democratic tout court, and why the purely parliamentary road to socialism is a vain hope. The costs of this type of polity to the bourgeoisie, costs attendant on not having a prostrate workers’ movement at its command, are not to be denied. But it has often been prepared to bear them, especially in the advanced countries where it could most afford to. Their levels of wealth and position within the imperialist nexus made possible, over long periods, fundamental concessions to the working class in terms of rising standards of living.

Risks

From the point of view of the bourgeoisie there are also certain risks. The organizational strength which the working class is able to build up can become a serious threat to bourgeois rule once it begins to be released in the direction of forms of proletarian self-activity and self-organization which overflow bourgeois democracy’s constricting framework and paralyse its function as the political expropriator of the initiatives of the masses. Bourgeois democracy itself furnishes points of support from which such initiatives toward proletarian democracy and power can be launched. This is why abstentionism is also a miserable substitute for a socialist strategy which can learn how to use these points of support in a revolutionary way, opening up the contradiction within bourgeois democracy in order to dispatch it once and for all. The bourgeoisie has, in any case, been prepared to live with these risks up to a point. But only up to a point. Wherever and whenever the dam has begun to burst, it has moved, in the most resolute and bloodiest possible fashion, to liquidate all the paraphernalia of democratic government; and no one has yet produced a convincing reason for thinking that things are now different in this respect, though before 11 September 1973 Chile was offered in place of a reason. Luxemburg was therefore entirely correct to insist that the capitalist class is everywhere less sentimental about democracy than about its own continued rule. Nor was she alone in doing so. It has been a central principle of revolutionary Marxism, supported by good evidence, that the road to socialism cannot bypass the preparation of the working class and its allies for armed self-defence and armed struggle. Accordingly, the denial of this principle by individuals and organizations within the labour movement, whether Social-Democratic or Communist, has always marked their passage toward, or destination at, a meliorative, reformist perspective unable to get beyond or, sometimes, even see beyond the end of capitalist society.

None of this, however, adds up to bourgeois democracy’s uselessness to the bourgeoisie in an epochal sense. It is not just that it has proved its worth, in certain conditions and over a considerable period of time, as a means of containing and integrating the masses. The course of liquidating it into naked repression, particularly where it has achieved any real hold, also entails both risks and costs for the bourgeoisie. For this course amounts to an open declaration of war on the workers’ movement, a war whose outcome is never entirely certain. Even if the bourgeoisie triumphs, this is likely to be at the expense of a profound economic dislocation, and of a generalized ideological and social crisis which it will not quickly be able to repair. Furthermore, the hands into which it thereby entrusts its rule, whether those of military chieftains or those of fascist demagogues, have not always proved as pliable to its will or as sensitive to the long-term dictates of capitalist accumulation as have its democratic representatives and functionaries. It is out of fears and considerations of this kind that the bourgeoisie, though often forced to resort to them, is less than enthusiastic about what Trotsky, in a reference to fascism, termed ‘the “plebeian” means of solving its problems’. [28] While, therefore, there is every reason, both defensive and offensive, for the workers’ movement to be alert and vigorous in its attention to bourgeois democracy, a point on which Luxemburg was, once again, perfectly correct to insist, it is not true to suggest, as she did, that the bourgeoisie for its part will carelessly or lightmindedly abandon it. By the same token, it is not universally true to say that the workers’ movement is its only contemporary support. On the contrary, where the workers’ movement is the only such support, there bourgeois democracy is doomed in a much shorter-term sense than Luxemburg intended, frequently a conjunctural one. Withdrawing its support from democratic institutions which are beginning to jeopardize its rule, the bourgeoisie will either succeed in finding the means to overturn them or it will fail, and if it fails in that then the ultimate sanctions of its hegemony will have crumbled. The working class will understand this.

The capitalist class, to conclude here, has continued to give support to bourgeois democracy in certain conditions not because this class is, in the 20th century, a revolutionary or progressive force, but because it is not. It has used bourgeois democracy, where it could, to arrest that one form of revolutionary progress which has been haunting it for over a century and which is now more urgent than ever, the emancipation of the working masses from exploitation. Bourgeois democracy still performs this function for it in the countries of advanced capitalism today. How long it can continue to do so is a problem that has yet to be resolved.

Luxemburg’s underestimation of bourgeois democracy’s potential resilience in the advanced capitalist countries was coupled with a converse, and paradoxical, overestimation of its prospects outside those countries—in particular, of its prospects in Russia. This complement was paradoxical because the force which she herself posited as having been the precondition for the birth of a bourgeois-democratic polity was, on her own analysis, absent from the Russian situation. Here there was no bourgeois class ready to undertake, in a spirit of democratic radicalism and at the head of the workers and peasants, a resolute fight against the Tsarist order. What served to give this paradox at least a semblance of coherence in her work was the theme, discussed above, that bourgeois democracy’s unique support was now the proletariat itself. This theme, in fact, was the copula linking Luxemburg’s differential prognoses for the different environments. In the advanced countries the workers were to keep bourgeois democracy alive against the opposition of a bourgeoisie which had deserted it. What life it had left in it was entirely due to this proletarian sustenance which meant that it would henceforth function less as a stable form of bourgeois rule, in which capacity it was becoming increasingly useless, than as a weapon in the struggle for socialism. In Russia, on the other hand, this same struggle could not yet be on the agenda. The Russian workers’ movement was separated from any attempt to implement the goals of the maximum programme by a whole historical stage, one of further capitalist development and of bourgeois-democratic rule during which it would be strengthened both numerically and politically. Here bourgeois democracy had still to begin its life. But here too it had been deserted, forsworn even as an aspiration before it could become a reality, by a bourgeoisie which was heavily compromised with the old order and fearful of the consequences of sanctioning any mass revolutionary movement. In Russia, therefore, the proletariat would have actually to create bourgeois democracy against the opposition of the bourgeoisie.

All the elements of this perspective are already present in Luxemburg’s writings before 1905, as can be seen from a text of 1903 on the antecedents of Polish Social Democracy. It is directed against certain Blanquist and populist illusions in the ideological positions of the Polish Proletariat Party of the 1880s, a circumstance whose importance will be considered in due course. In it, Luxemburg insists that the proletarian ‘revolution is impossible if the bourgeois society has not previously passed through the necessary phases of development’, if it has not ‘already reached a state of economic as well as political development which allows the introduction of socialist institutions’. The ‘indispensable stage in the development of . . . capitalist society’ which she has most in mind is that of ‘parliamentary-bourgeois forms of government’, and she condemns as Blanquist the hope of ‘carrying out a socialist overthrow directly, without going through the bourgeoisparliamentary phase’. [29] Accordingly, she upholds for the Russian Empire, including Congress Poland, the distinction between the minimum and the maximum programmes, and rejects any notion that a programme of measures transitional towards socialism might there be applicable. [30] The decisive current goal is specified and reiterated as ‘the winning of political freedom, i.e. constitutional forms within Russia’, as ‘the overthrow of personal rule and the struggle for political freedom and a parliamentary-democratic form of government’. At the same time, Luxemburg is already clear which class will have to shoulder the burden of this struggle: ‘The attaining of democratic institutions in the state . . . is—at a certain historical moment, in a certain phase in the development of class antagonism—impossible without the active struggle of a conscious and organized proletariat.’ [31]

Before 1905, in other words, Luxemburg subscribed to the Social-Democratic orthodoxy according to which ‘the revolution soon to break out in Russia will be a bourgeois and not a proletarian revolution’. [32] Even then, however, she was not prepared to deduce from this that it must be led by the political representatives of the bourgeoisie, a deduction the Mensheviks would not hesitate to make. As logical as it may have seemed to them to be, it did violence to the reality of the Russian situation and to Luxemburg’s sense of that reality. ‘In Russia’, she had written in 1899, ‘capitalism prospered for a long time under the regime of oriental absolutism, without having the bourgeoisie manifest the least desire in the world to introduce democracy.’ [33]

Bourgeoisie and Proletariat

The revolution of 1905 itself preserved the outlines of this perspective intact, as regards both the putative objective of the Russian revolution and the roles within it of bourgeoisie and proletariat respectively. The political weakness and vacillation of Russian liberalism, on the one hand, and the enormous revolutionary energy of the Russian workers, on the other, were both features of 1905 which confirmed to Luxemburg’s mind the correctness of her general position. But the events of that year also enabled her to give concreteness and precision to what had hitherto been a merely indicative and rather abstract schema, because they provided her with the raw materials out of which to fashion clearer strategic ideas about the exact dimensions of the proletariat’s role. These raw materials were the forms of struggle embraced by the Russian masses themselves. In the vast wave of mass strikes and demonstrations which flowed over the Russian Empire during 1905, Luxemburg perceived the methods of assault which would be required to bring Tsarism to its knees and which, in order to do this and in the course of doing it, would sensitize the masses to the intimate connection between their economic and political problems, would foster and strengthen the forms of their self-organization, would impart to them an invaluable and irreplaceable lesson in the practice of proletarian democracy, and would prepare the most fertile ground for the implantation of revolutionary socialist ideas. Moreover, she understood the truly international significance of this whole experience. The Russian workers had, she held, adopted forms of struggle which were more advanced, more effective and more specifically proletarian in character than those to which the European workers’ movement had become accustomed, schooled as this was in years of peaceful, parliamentary and trade-unionist activity. They had furnished an example to the international working class which it would have to assimilate and repeat wherever it embarked upon any decisive struggle for power. To be adequately prepared and oriented for such a struggle, the European workers’ parties and leaders must learn from the Russian workers, which meant in particular that the limitations of the ‘good old’, ‘tried and tested’, parliamentary tactic of the spd must now be recognized. Luxemburg’s grasp of this point was second to no one’s. [34] And it was in this sense, and this sense alone, that she spoke about the Russian revolution, in formulations which have led many commentators astray, as the forerunner of the proletarian revolutions of the West, as having ‘a more pronounced proletarian class-character than any previous revolution’, as being ‘a pure proletarian one’. [35] What she meant was not that the Russian proletariat could now go beyond the objectives of the bourgeois revolution but that, in order even to reach them, it had already begun, in advance and anticipation of the European proletariat, to extend and deepen the forms of proletarian combat, and would have to pursue this course to the maximum limit: to the point indeed where—as the ultimate consequence of the Luxemburgist paradox—it would temporarily hold state power in its hands.

Revolution by Stages

It is here precisely that we arrive at the fusion, within Luxemburg’s response to 1905, of the two themes which were treated above: the world-historical bankruptcy of bourgeois democracy and the irreducible prematurity of the proletarian conquest of power. According to her, the flight of the bourgeoisie from its own liberal values and institutions into the arms of counter-revolution meant, in a country like Russia which had yet to experience the most elementary benefits of bourgeois democracy, that the dictatorship of the proletariat would be required to secure them. In a broad historical sense, that dictatorship would be premature because unable, in the objective conditions defined by the Russian social formation, to initiate a transition to socialism. However, to the Menshevik fears of such prematurity Luxemburg opposed the view that, if the Russian proletariat was bound to suffer a defeat of sorts by having to give up the power which it would for a time possess, this had to be measured against the considerations that the proletariat in power would do its best to implement the entire minimum programme of Social Democracy [36] and that the goals embodied in that programme, themselves indispensable preconditions of the struggle for socialism, could not otherwise be reached—certainly not by heeding the Menshevik advice concerning the need for ‘tact’ and circumspection toward the liberals, the need, that is, to restrict the scope of proletarian struggle and subordinate it to the timid initiatives of the Cadets so as not to antagonize them. Luxemburg’s perspective, therefore, remained locked within the problematic of a path to socialism involving two distinct, and chronologically separate, revolutionary stages, the first bourgeois, the second proletarian, in aim. It was, for all that, different in a decisive respect from the outlook of the Mensheviks. In 1917, her alignment was to be determined by that decisive difference rather than by the stages theory, hitherto common to her and them, which she finally, but definitively, discarded.

Right up until 1917, however, this theory continued to inhabit her work. It is evident, for example, in the following passage from The Accumulation of Capital, published in 1913, in which the Russian revolution, though its proletarian features are alluded to, is situated firmly within a schema of capitalist emancipation from imperialist domination: ‘The achievement of capitalist autonomy in the hinterland and backward colonies is attained amidst wars and revolutions. Revolution is an essential for the process of capitalist emancipation. The backward communities must shed their obsolete political organizations, relics of natural and simple commodity economy, and create a modern state machinery adapted to the purposes of capitalist production. The revolutions in Turkey, Russia and China fall under this heading. The last two, in particular, do not exclusively serve the immediate political requirements of capitalism; to some extent they carry over outmoded pre-capitalist claims while on the other hand they already embody new conflicts which run counter to the domination of capital. These factors account for their immense drive, but at the same time impede and delay the ultimate victory of the revolutionary forces. A young state will usually sever the leading strings of older capitalist states by wars, which temper and test the modern state’s capitalist independence in a baptism by fire. That is why military together with financial reforms invariably herald the bid for economic independence.’ [37] Again, in 1915, discussing the failure of 1905, Luxemburg characterizes the Russian revolution in these terms: ‘There was the difficulty . . . of creating a class state for the supremacy of the modern bourgeoisie against the counter-revolutionary opposition of the bourgeoisie as a whole . . . It was a proletarian revolution with bourgeois duties and problems, or if you wish, a bourgeois revolution waged by socialist proletarian methods.’ [38]

Torn from this last quotation the phrase, ‘proletarian revolution with bourgeois duties and problems’, can of course be read in a Trotskyist sense, since for Trotsky the Russian revolution did have bourgeois problems to resolve: [39] its ‘permanence’ signified not the simple circumvention (‘leaping’, in the Stalinist terminology) of these problems, but their inseparable combination with properly socialist tasks. Enough has already been said to indicate why such a reading of Luxemburg’s phrase would be incorrect and, in context, its meaning is in any case unambiguous: proletarian in method, the Russian revolution is nevertheless bourgeois in content, its objective being the consolidation of the political supremacy of the modern bourgeoisie. [40] Below, we shall document at greater length, and by direct reference to her statements during and immediately after 1905, Luxemburg’s attachment to the perspective which has here been briefly sketched.

Lenin’s View

Before doing that, we want to situate this perspective in the context of the wider controversy of which it was a part and to uncover some of its theoretical assumptions and implications. In particular, reference will be made to Lenin’s writings of the period, for, with certain differences of emphasis, his strategic orientation was broadly the same as Luxemburg’s. Fifty years of uninterrupted obfuscation on the part of all those currents in the socialist movement which trace their lineage back, in one way and another, through Stalin, have succeeded in blurring the exact nature of the differences that divided the various parties to the controversy over the Russian revolution. Since the object of this article is to give a clear account of Luxemburg’s position within that debate, some clarification of the issues at stake in it is essential; otherwise, the explanation of her work here being attempted may simply be lost in the broader confusion.

We shall take as our point of departure for this discussion a number of passages in which Lenin, in the period 1906–9, invokes the authority of Kautsky in support of the strategic perspective of the Bolsheviks [41] ‘Is the revolution in Russia a bourgeois or a socialist revolution? That is not the way to put the question, says Kautsky . . . Of course, the Russian revolution is not a socialist revolution. The socialist dictatorship of the proletariat (its “undivided sway”) is out of the question. But neither is it a bourgeois revolution, for “the bourgeoisie is not one of the driving forces of the present revolutionary movement in Russia”. “Wherever the proletariat comes out independently, the bourgeoisie ceases to be a revolutionary class.” . . . This first answer of Kautsky’s is a brilliant vindication of the fundamental principles of Bolshevik tactics . . . To interpret the category “bourgeois revolution” in the sense of recognizing the leadership and guiding role of the bourgeoisie in the Russian revolution is to vulgarize Marxism.’ ‘The revolution in Russia is not a socialist revolution, for it cannot possibly result in the sole rule or dictatorship of the proletariat . . . A bourgeois revolution, brought about by the proletariat and the peasantry in spite of the instability of the bourgeoisie—this fundamental principle of Bolshevik tactics is wholly confirmed by Kautsky.’ ‘Kautsky rectified [Plekhanov’s] mistake by pointing out that the bourgeoisie was not the driving force of the Russian revolution, that in that sense the days of bourgeois revolutions had passed.’ ‘The victory of the bourgeois revolution is impossible in our country as the victory of the bourgeoisie. This sounds paradoxical, but it is a fact . . . This peculiarity does not eliminate the bourgeois character of the revolution . . . It only determines the counter-revolutionary character of our bourgeoisie and the necessity of a dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry for victory in such a revolution. For a “coalition of the proletariat and the peasantry” [Kautsky], winning victory in a bourgeois revolution, happens to be nothing else than the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.’ ‘Plekhanov . . . confused the “general character” of the revolution, its social and economic content, with the question of the motive forces of the revolution . . . Kautsky immediately detected Comrade Plekhanov’s errors and corrected them in his reply. As regards the social and economic content of the revolution, Kautsky did not deny its bourgeois character—on the contrary, he definitely recognized it.’ [42]

Embodying as they do a view of the Russian revolution which we have called, and which Lenin himself at one point calls, paradoxical, these passages serve to focus attention on the basic community between Lenin’s and Luxemburg’s positions on this matter. The only differences which they bring to light, one in precision, another in emphasis, relate to the central Bolshevik formula of the period, the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. In the context of what both Luxemburg and Lenin considered to be a bourgeois revolution to whose outcome the revolutionary struggle of the working class would be decisive, she was sometimes prepared, and he usually reluctant, to speak simply of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Given the classical connotation of the phrase, and displaying a greater concern for adopting unambiguous slogans, Lenin preferred to qualify it by the term, democratic, in order clearly to underline that the task of this dictatorship in Russia would be to carry out a bourgeois-democratic, and not a socialist, revolution. Secondly, it must, according to him, be a dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry because, except in alliance with the peasants, except by recognizing and encouraging their revolutionary aspiration completely to destroy all the oppressive remnants of serfdom, the proletariat would be unable to consummate the bourgeois revolution in Russia. On both of the substantive points contained in these qualifications Luxemburg concurred: this has already been articulated with regard to the first of them and it must especially be emphasized now with regard to the second. For, like Trotsky, Luxemburg has sometimes been accused of overlooking the Russian peasantry and of underestimating the significance of the agrarian problem, a charge which is as absurd in her case as it is in his and which reflects the same attitude of indifference to historical and textual evidence. [43]

Proletariat and Peasantry

It is true that the peasantry was not as central to Luxemburg’s attention as it was to Lenin’s and that she did not dwell on the subject at the same length or devote the same careful study to it. But far from overlooking it, both she and Trotsky were explicit in stipulating the need for a class alliance between proletariat and peasantry. What really united them in this question was not some oversight but their common association with a slogan which differed from the Bolshevik one in laying stress on the fact of proletarian political hegemony within such an alliance. Trotsky had formulated this in July 1905: ‘It goes without saying that the proletariat must fulfil its mission, just as the bourgeoisie did in its own time, with the help of the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie. It must lead the countryside, draw it into the movement, make it vitally interested in the success of its plans. But, inevitably, the proletariat remains the leader. This is not the “dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry”, it is the dictatorsbip of the proletariat supported by the peasantry.’ [44] In 1908, this same formula was adopted in preference to the Bolshevik one by the Sixth Congress of Luxemburg’s own party, the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. [45] But, the partial junction of Luxemburg’s and Trotsky’s perspectives which it undoubtedly represents must be interpreted with proper care. It expressed their common assessment of the political relationship between proletariat and peasantry in Russia, and not of the relationship between bourgeois-democratic and socialist revolutions. To cite Luxemburg’s association with the slogan in support of the contention that she then subscribed to the theory of permanent revolution is therefore quite wrong. It is equally wrong to see in it the proof of some major division between Trotsky and Luxemburg, on the one hand, and Lenin, on the other, over the general disposition of class forces in the Russian revolution. Where their formula emphasized the leading role of the proletariat in a proletarian-peasant alliance, Lenin’s stressed only the alliance itself. Its more ‘open’ character, and what Trotsky was later to term the ‘algebraic’ aspect of Lenin’s position, were due to a more sanguine estimation on his part of the independent political role that might be played, within the dictatorship projected for the completion of Russia’s bourgeois revolution, by a revolutionary peasants’ party. [46] Lenin was always clear, however, this estimation notwithstanding, that the proletariat, under Social-Democratic leadership, must strive to remain in the forefront of the struggle: wanting to push the bourgeois revolution to the furthermost limits because its ulterior goals lay beyond them, and guided by the scientific theory of Marxism, it would be more clear-sighted and more consistently democratic than even the most revolutionary representatives of the peasantry. The mere Leninist formula, speaking only of proletariat and peasantry, may not have said anything about proletarian leadership. But the texts in which Lenin explained that formula did. On countless occasions, in fact, he insisted on the need for the proletariat to assume the leadership of the Russian revolutionary movement in general and of the peasantry in particular. [47]

Lenin himself defined the extent of his differences with Luxemburg and the Polish Social-Democrats. They were limited to the ‘terms’ on which Social Democracy might participate, alongside the political representatives of the peasantry, in a provisional revolutionary government of the democratic dictatorship. [48] For the rest, he regarded the difference between the two slogans and the two positions as of no strategic significance. At the London Congress of 1907, he had already affirmed that the Bolsheviks and the Poles saw ‘eye to eye’ on the fundamental issues concerning the relationship of classes in the Russian revolution. [49] Then, in December 1908, the Poles succeeded in getting their slogan adopted at the Fifth Conference of the Russian party. When Martov tried to represent its adoption as a break with the Bolshevik position, Lenin derided him and labelled the attempt ‘a model of pettifoggery’: ‘Is it not obvious that the same idea runs through all these formulations, that this idea is precisely the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, that the “formula”, the proletariat relying upon the peasantry, remains part and parcel of that same dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry?’ Both the Bolsheviks and the Poles, he went on to point out, recognized that the proletariat must play the leading role in the conquest of power and that its main ally in this would be the peasantry. ‘We are at one . . . against the Mensheviks’, he concluded, ‘on all essentials, and . . . disagree only on minor points.’ [50]

Bourgeois Revolution against the Bourgeoisie

The existence of this unanimity over essentials is confirmed by the passages from Luxemburg’s and Lenin’s writings adduced above. When she spoke of the pronounced proletarian character and methods of the Russian revolution, and when he said that the bourgeoisie had ceased to be a revolutionary class and that, in that sense, the days of bourgeois revolutions were over, each was registering what could be called a dislocation between the social content of the Russian revolution and the social forces alone capable of carrying it through. A bourgeois revolution in spite of or against the bourgeoisie: by this general characterization, both of them condemned the Menshevik accommodation to liberalism as well as the expectation, supporting it, that the Russian revolution might furnish a new instance of the ‘classical’ Marxist model in which the bourgeoisie, universal class, represents its particular interest as general and rouses the people to an assault against absolutism. A bourgeois revolution, but made by the proletariat, leading the peasantry: to that extent at least, this revolution could not be a simple historical repetition, another edition of 1789 translated into Russian. To that extent also it foreshadowed its future, proletarian successor. The developing class antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat had firmly set its imprint on the very first stages of Russia’s bourgeois revolution. The latter, as Luxemburg put it, already embodied a conflict which ran counter to the domination of capital. [51]

More than once during 1905, Lenin made the same point. ‘Like everything else in the world, the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry has a past and a future. Its past is autocracy, serfdom, monarchy and privilege . . . Its future is the struggle against private property, the struggle of the wage-worker against the employer, the struggle for socialism . . . Of course, in actual historical circumstances, the elements of the past become interwoven with those of the future; the two paths cross. Wage-labour with its struggle against private property exists under the autocracy as well; it arises even under serfdom. But this does not in the least prevent us from logically and historically distinguishing between the major stages of development. We all contrapose bourgeois revolution and socialist revolution; we all insist on the absolute necessity of strictly distinguishing between them; however, can it be denied that in the course of history individual, particular elements of the two revolutions become interwoven?’ ‘Naturally, as a result of the special position which the proletariat occupies in capitalist society, the striving of the workers towards socialism and their alliance with the Socialist Party assert themselves with elemental force at the very earliest stages of the movement. But purely socialist demands are still a matter of the future: the immediate demands of the day are the democratic demands of the workers in the political sphere, and economic demands within the framework of capitalism in the economic sphere. Even the proletariat is making the revolution, as it were, within the limits of the minimum programme and not of the maximum programme.’ [52]

Permanent Revolution

From the same point of departure, namely, the dislocation between social content and motive forces of the Russian bourgeois revolution, Trotsky’s destination was the theory of permanent revolution. This was not based, as his detractors would have it, on ultra-leftist maximalism, a desire to ‘skip’ the bourgeois stage, and so forth. It was due to the conviction, unique to him and wholly correct, that the necessary logical distinction between the two revolutionary stages could not be transposed into a simple chronological succession within the real, historical process. That process, on the contrary, would so thoroughly combine with one another not just particular elements of the bourgeois and proletarian revolutions, but their decisive substantive contents—a peasant agrarian revolution with the establishment of a workers’ state, the destruction of the Tsarist state apparatus with the first encroachments on capitalist property—as to confute any neat or clear-cut historical periodization. The organic combination of revolutionary stages was a strategic inference on Trotsky’s part from the same correlation of forces that lay at the centre of Lenin’s and Luxemburg’s vision: a consequence of the extent to which capitalist relations had seized both the towns and the countryside of Russia, producing thereby, on the one side, a highly concentrated and militant proletariat, on the other, a bourgeoisie only weakly liberal where it was not downright reactionary, and between them a sharp class antagonism in a country still governed by an absolutist state and entrammelled by survivals of serfdom. The theory of permanent revolution, by which Trotsky, from 1905 onwards, linked the bourgeois to the proletarian revolution and the minimum to the maximum programme, was anchored in what he was later to designate the law of ‘combined and uneven development’. [53]

Before 1917, neither Lenin nor Luxemburg was able to make this link, each remaining faithful to a conception in which the theoretical constructs, bourgeois revolution/proletarian revolution, had to find their counterparts in two discrete historical stages. That conception was confounded by the course of events during 1917, and they then crossed its limits. However, that they were able to take this step with no great difficulty is explained by the fact that both of them had already pushed the conception of separate stages to its very limits. Between the Mensheviks, who also subscribed to it, and themselves they dug what in real political terms was an abyss, repudiating, as we have seen, the idea of a bourgeois revolution so ‘pure’ that any independent proletarian struggle against the bourgeoisie should be postponed. Nor did they hesitate, in their central slogans as well as in the whole impetus of their strategic thinking, before the idea, truly scandalous to the Mensheviks, of a bourgeois revolution so ‘impure’ that the proletariat would have actually to wield or share political power to carry it out. This last point is the crux of the matter. The theory of stages never served Lenin and Luxemburg, in the way it did the Mensheviks, as a reason for curbing or moderating the mass struggle and revolutionary initiatives of the proletariat, or for compromising with liberalism, because the element of paradox and dislocation which they introduced into this theory went to the point of envisaging, as a proximate objective, the seizure of political power by an alliance of class forces under the leadership of revolutionary Social Democracy. [54] Furthermore, both of them were insistent that, if this power could not at once be used to embark on the transition to socialism, its most immediate achievements, in the shape of a bourgeois-democratic republic, a solution of the agrarian problem, a freer and more rapid development of capitalism, etc. would create the terrain on which the struggle for socialism could be begun in earnest. For that reason, Social Democracy must not for a moment compromise its political and ideological independence or water down its commitment to the full, i.e. maximum, programme but must rigorously preserve, throughout the course of the bourgeois revolution, its profile as a revolutionary socialist party. In doing so, it would give notice that while standing at the head of the struggle for a democratic republic, for the satisfaction of the most pressing needs of the peasantry, its perspectives did not end there.

By contrast with the Menshevik attitude, therefore, for Lenin and Luxemburg the revolutionary struggle of the Russian proletariat was not something to be put back into the indefinite future. Social Democracy had, on the contrary, to project as very practical goals for that struggle, first, a conquest of power for the consummation of the bourgeois revolution, then, the utilization of this revolution’s fruits, of the bourgeois-democratic political and economic conditions which it would create, to begin the struggle for socialism. From here it was not a big step to the realization that the proletariat, if it came to power with the peasantry, would have in the very course of consummating the bourgeois revolution to take the first transitional measures towards socialism: it could not stop to leave intact the economic power of the bourgeoisie, much less countenance delivering political power into its hands, since such ‘self-restraint’ in a situation of acute class warfare would jeopardize even the objectives of the minimum programme by inviting a counter-revolution. It was not a big step to the realization that, if the bourgeois revolution had to be made against the resistance and opposition of the bourgeoisie itself, then the social and class basis for a bourgeois-democratic polity was absent from the Russian social formation. Taking this step in 1917, Luxemburg and Lenin came to stand on the same ground as Trotsky. Lenin reached that destination at the Finland Station, proceeding with the April Theses to throw the Bolshevik party into confusion.

Leninist Party

In the light of the above one can better understand why, despite Trotsky’s greater strategic foresight in this matter, Lenin’s historical contribution to the success of the October Revolution must be judged, if this kind of balance sheet can be made at all, to have been the greater one. For, during the years when Trotsky elaborated and defended the more adequate perspective, Lenin, who dismissed it, was building the political instrument for its implementation. Of course, the ability to make this judgement depends on the hindsight that Lenin proved capable not only of adjusting his own positions in time but also of overcoming the Bolshevik party’s resistance to making the same adjustment. Nor was that such an automatic thing. Lenin may have made the transition with no great difficulty, but it took all of his political energy and his immense authority amongst his followers to break down their incomprehension of, and opposition to, this change of course. The point however remains that the transition was made. In that sense, the deficiency in Lenin’s overall political orientation was capable of being rectified in time. The same cannot be said about the organizational weakness which resulted from Trotsky’s ‘conciliationism’. [55] The finest political strategy in the world is nothing but an abstraction if it is not translated into a material, organizational force in place at the right moment to implement it. Trotsky understood this even before 1917, for he was no simple spontaneist and did not, in theory, deny the importance of the revolutionary party. Nevertheless, the practical effect of his hostility, before 1917, to the Leninist party project and of his persistent and abortive efforts, in those years, to reconcile the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions, was that he entered 1917 with a perspective which, however correct, was also disembodied, having no effective political vehicle for its realization. It is quite utopian to imagine that, had the Bolshevik party not carried out the reorientation it did, this absence could have been made good: that in the space of only a few months an organization capable of commanding the confidence of the broadest masses could have been built. It is still more utopian to think that the Russian proletariat could have taken power without such an organization. Drawing the lessons of his past mistakes Trotsky made his own political adjustment and joined the Bolshevik party, a step made easier for him by Lenin’s reorientation. Thereafter, he himself was always the first to acknowledge Lenin’s incomparable historical merit. Its substance can be expressed in another paradox: even against his own view that the proletarian revolution was not yet on the agenda in Russia, Lenin forged the organizational consequence of the theory that it was, a revolutionary proletarian party with its sights on political power. [56]

Danger of Stages Theory

That said, the full weight of Trotsky’s own historical merit must be recognized. As we have indicated, Lenin’s abandonment of the theory of stages was no mere trifle. Without it, it is, at the very least, doubtful that the October Revolution could have taken place since, before his return to Russia, his closest lieutenants in the Bolshevik party were completely impervious to the notion and possibility of an imminent proletarian revolution in Russia. Their initial response to the February Revolution was governed by the limitation of Leninism, its fidelity to the theory of stages, and this threatened momentarily to submerge the whole difference between Bolshevism and Menshevism in a common endorsement of the bourgeois, and far from revolutionary, Provisional Government. Their response thereby validated Trotsky’s judgement of 1909 that, despite its considerable distance from Menshevism whose ‘anti-revolutionary aspects’ were already apparent, Bolshevism secreted a similar aspect which would become a danger only with the advent of revolution itself. [57] Lenin’s response, however, was governed by the ability to go beyond both the limitation and the letter of his own erstwhile perspective in order to preserve its whole revolutionary spirit and impetus against such a miserable denouement. This difference in reaction was in part a product of the profound tension at the heart of the Leninist perspective, a tension which reflected its transitional status between a mechanistic theory of stages, on the one hand, and the theory of permanent revolution on the other. In Lenin’s case, this transition was completed in 1917. But the drama of that year also confirmed that it could not be taken for granted and that the failure to make it would have the most reactionary political consequences. If further confirmation of this is needed, it exists abundantly, in the sequel of the 20th century, in the politics of all those Communist Parties, Stalinist and ‘de-Stalinized’, which, having resurrected the theory of stages against Trotskyism and the mature post-revolutionary positions of Lenin, took the path of reformism. With a variety of names, from the Popular Front to the British Road, they covered a uniform and far from accidental confusion: of the wholly correct point that democratic demands and reforms are of vital importance to the workers’ movement with the wholly incorrect point that until these have been won no real struggle for socialism can be begun. By this confusion they have managed and still manage to satisfy themselves, even where it is no longer possible to talk seriously of the bourgeois revolution, that the struggle for socialism is always for tomorrow and never—God preserve them from ultra-leftism!—for today.

Preconditions for Socialism

What, then, accounts for Lenin’s and Luxemburg’s failure, before 1917, to transcend the limits of the reigning Social-Democratic orthodoxy concerning stages? A partial answer, itself in need of further explanation, is that it was their tendency to equate that orthodoxy with one of the most central, and for them indisputable, tenets of classical Marxism: the thesis that there can be no socialism except on the basis of very highly developed productive forces and of the overwhelming predominance within social production of a modern industrial proletariat. What was at fault was the equation and not the classical tenet. The latter, on the contrary, bears repetition and reaffirmation in these days of Maoist enthusiasm and in view of the radical impoverishment which the concept of socialism has had to suffer in order that it might accommodate realities too well-known to need rehearsal here. In its Marxist meaning, socialism requires, beyond the expropriation of capitalist property, levels of productivity which can begin to release men from the tyrannies of labour and the division of labour; the existence of a collective work-force possessing the scientific and cultural prerequisites to achieve the fullest popular control of the production process; a populace which is capable of sustaining unprecedentedly advanced forms of direct democracy. Lenin and Luxemburg understood these requirements and they therefore refused the notion that backward Russia with its vast peasantry might immediately be ripe for socialism. The insistence on the necessity of a separate bourgeois-democratic stage was, for both of them, merely the equivalent of this refusal. Although it was no part of the theory of permanent revolution to claim that Russia was immediately ripe for socialism, Trotsky did not accept this equation. The error in it, which he perceived, arose from the belief that in Russia those material preconditions of socialism which we have mentioned had to be achieved in more or less the same way as they had been achieved in the advanced capitalist countries.

It would be wrong simply to locate the source of this belief in certain formulations from the works of Marx. The latter, to be sure, had written in the preface to Capital that ‘The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.’ But he had also protested vigorously against the attempt to ‘metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophic theory of the general path every people is fated to tread . . . in order that it may ultimately arrive at the form of economy which ensures, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man’. [58] And the protest was known within Russian Social Democracy for the very good reason that it had been made in connection with the historical possibilities facing Russia. As early as 1894, in fact, Lenin had rejected the allegations that Russian Marxists counted on the development of capitalism in Russia out of a commitment to some supra-historical dogma, that they thought this development to be inevitable because that was what had happened in the West. What they maintained against the Russian populists was only that Russia had embarked, already and irreversibly, on the course of capitalist development and that any strategic projections for the Russian revolutionary movement must be firmly situated within an analysis of that fact and its consequences. [59] All the same, the projections which Russian Social Democracy proceeded to make out of this registration of fact did, for the most part, reflect a belief that Russia, having taken the path of capitalist development, would now have to conform to one of the ‘models’ of historical progress which had been provided by the older capitalist nations. The vitality of this belief should not be underestimated. It had an especially strong historical root in the Russian Empire. For Marxism took shape and grew there in a soil cultivated by the fierce polemic against populism, an ideological antagonist which fused utopian and obscurantist notions into a vision of some uniquely Russian way to socialism.

Fight against Populism

We quoted earlier from Luxemburg’s text of 1903 on the Proletariat Party, bringing out her contention that bourgeois society must pass through all the ‘necessary’ stages of economic and political development, in particular the parliamentary stage, before any transition to socialism might be conceivable. That is one side of the picture. The other is the ideas with which she was taking issue. She was contesting, first, the idea that Russia could create an indigenous type of socialism founded on the traditional peasant commune, and could simply bypass or undo the results of a capitalist development which was deemed by the populists, insofar as they recognized it at all, to be an alien transplant in the Russian social body. She was contesting, secondly, the Blanquist confidence in the efficacy of political will-power, the illusion that socialism could be ushered in without further ado by the conspiracy and the coup, the tendency to belittle in their favour the ongoing work of proletarian organization and education and the importance of the struggle for simple, democratic demands and economic reforms. She was challenging, in short, the notion of a miraculous leap, out of Russian backwardness and across all objective obstacles, into socialism. Against the ‘fantastic concept of the . . . “independent” path to socialism in Russia’, she upheld the most elementary acquisitions of historical materialism: ‘The ABCs of . . . Marxian socialism teach that the socialist order is not some sort of poetic ideal society, thought out in advance, which may be reached by various paths in various more or less imaginative ways. Rather, socialism is simply the historical tendency of the class struggle of the proletariat in . . . capitalist society against the class rule of the bourgeoisie. Outside of this struggle . . . socialism cannot be realized—neither through the propaganda of the most ingenious creator of a socialist utopia nor through peasant wars or revolutionary conspiracies.’ [60]

The same applies in Lenin’s case. When Lenin, on occasions too numerous to reckon, emphasizes the bourgeois-democratic character of the Russian revolution and the necessity of ‘a clear line of demarcation’ between minimum and maximum programmes, his target is only rarely Trotsky, whom he then convicts, and in the most cursory fashion, of being ‘unclear’ about the relationship between bourgeois and socialist revolutions or of ‘mixing up different historical periods’. [61] Usually that emphasis is made in explicit contrast to the populist ideas against which Lenin, in the 1890s, acquired his basic theoretical and political formation. We cite just one, fairly typical passage, dating from 1905: ‘Marxists are absolutely convinced of the bourgeois character of the Russian revolution. What does that mean? It means that the democratic reforms in the political system, and the social and economic reforms that have become a necessity for Russia, do not in themselves imply the undermining of capitalism, the undermining of bourgeois rule; on the contrary, they will, for the first time, really clear the ground for a wide and rapid, European, and not Asiatic, development of capitalism; they will, for the first time, make it possible for the bourgeoisie to rule as a class. The Socialist-Revolutionaries cannot grasp this idea, for they do not know the ABC of the laws of development of commodity and capitalist production; they fail to see that even the complete success of a peasant insurrection, even the redistribution of the whole of the land in favour of the peasants . . . will not destroy capitalism at all, but will, on the contrary, give an impetus to its development and hasten the class disintegration of the peasantry itself . . . Since the rule of the bourgeoisie over the working class is inevitable under capitalism, it can well be said that a bourgeois revolution expresses the interests not so much of the proletariat as of the bourgeoisie. But it is quite absurd to think that a bourgeois revolution does not at all express proletarian interests. This absurd idea boils down either to the hoary Narodnik theory that a bourgeois revolution runs counter to the interests of the proletariat, and that, therefore, we do not need bourgeois political liberty; or to anarchism which denies any participation of the proletariat in bourgeois politics, in a bourgeois revolution and in bourgeois parliamentarism. From the standpoint of theory this idea disregards the elementary propositions of Marxism concerning the inevitability of capitalist development on the basis of commodity production. Marxism teaches us that at a certain stage of its development a society which is based on commodity production and has commercial intercourse with civilized capitalist nations must inevitably take the road of capitalism. Marxism has irrevocably broken with the Narodnik and anarchist gibberish that Russia, for instance, can bypass capitalist development, escape from capitalism, or skip it in some way other than that of the class struggle, on the basis and within the framework of this same capitalism.’ [62]

Lenin’s Models

The foregoing attests to what was one of the most crucial ideological components in these Marxist controversies over the nature of the Russian revolution. In play here were not simply the exigencies of abstract reason. As in all such debates, the reason of the protagonists had to cut a path through the immediate, familiar, and for them very material, reality of certain specific and determinate ideological constructs. Until 1905, the suggestion that the Russian revolution might be anything other, or more, than bourgeois-democratic in its objectives was not one that was open to any number of interpretations. It stood for one thing and one thing alone: Russian populism. It thereby represented, for all its concision, a whole constellation of ideas in which the most primitive tactical concepts sat side by side with a failure to appreciate the extent to which Russia had already come within the orbit of capitalism, this incomprehension in turn sitting adjacent to the vision of a socialism which could forgo the material and cultural achievements of capitalism and the efforts of an organized, politically conscious working class. The suggestion, in other words, came to be associated with a general assault against Marxism. In resisting that assault, Luxemburg and Lenin (and not only they) also rejected the suggestion associated with it and, by a kind of ideological reflex, they continued to do so even when, after 1905, a lone voice from within the ranks of Social Democracy itself began to maintain that the Russian revolution could be something more than a bourgeois-democratic one on the basis now of Marxist and not populist premises. Trotsky on his own could not repair, to the satisfaction of his comrades, the discredit into which this notion had fallen. Nor could he overturn their belief in the applicability of Western European models and historical stages to Russia. That belief was understandably strong for having been born and bred in opposition to a ‘socialism’ proud of its Russian nationality and more or less contemptuous of the products of European civilization. Since the attribution of such a belief to Lenin is likely to be contentious, the time and trouble will here be taken to exhibit its presence in his writings.

Early in 1905 Lenin raised the following question about the Russian revolution: ‘Will it go on to the complete overthrow of the tsarist government and the establishment of a republic? . . . Or will it limit itself to a curtailment of tsarist power, to a monarchist constitution? In other words, are we to have a revolution of the 1789 type or of the 1848 type?’ It is true that he immediately went on to add an important qualification: ‘We say type in order to dispose of the preposterous idea that there can be any repetition of the irrevocably vanished social, political, and international situations of 1789 and 1848.’ [63] As has already been indicated, for Lenin a straightforward historical repetition was out of the question owing, for one thing, to the central role which would be played in the Russian revolution by a modern, industrial proletariat under the leadership of a Marxist party. Nevertheless, if 1789 and 1848 could serve him even as analogues, it was because in respect of their different political offspring they did resemble the two alternative lines of development which he foresaw for the Russian revolution. Social Democrats must work for the first outcome, a consummated bourgeois revolution issuing in a democratic republic and political conditions most advantageous to the future struggle of the working class. But they had also to reckon with the possibility of a miscarriage, a failed bourgeois revolution ending in a compromise between the liberal bourgeoisie and the autocracy, and in constitutional concessions which would circumscribe the latter’s power without destroying it. In either case the Russian workers’ movement would be faced on the morrow of the revolution with political institutions familiar to the more advanced capitalist countries. To this extent, it would have to repeat in the early 20th century some variant of the revolutionary experience which these countries had long ago lived through and left behind. Throughout 1905 Lenin continued to invoke the alternative revolutionary models of 1789 and 1848, the tradition of the dead generations impinging even on his astute brain. [64]

Russia and the West

These projections concerning Russia’s political future found their counterparts in the alternative lines of economic development which Lenin in this period envisaged. During 1905 itself he did not go beyond rather general allusions on this score: he argued, as we have seen, that the Russian revolution would, if successful, ‘clear the ground for a wide and rapid, European, and not Asiatic, development of capitalism’; on another occasion he suggested in passing that, in the event of failure, ‘Russia will meet the fate of Turkey—a long painful decline and disintegration’. [65] In the years following 1905, however, Lenin both replaced these vague analogues with others more precise and dwelt on the replacements at greater length. The change was inspired partly by his close attention to the agrarian problem and to the evolution in progress in the Russian countryside. In any case, he now argued that the development of capitalism in Russia would take place either along Prussian, or—by a decisive shift to the West—along American lines, these alternatives depending respectively on whether the revolution was defeated or carried to completion.

In 1908 Lenin wrote: ‘Either the latifundia remain, and gradually become the basis of capitalist economy on the land. This is the Prussian type of agrarian capitalism, in which the Junker is master of the situation. For whole decades there continue both his political domination and the oppression, degradation, poverty and illiteracy of the peasant. The productive forces develop very slowly . . . Or else the revolution sweeps away the landed estates. The basis of capitalist agriculture now becomes the free farmer on free land, i.e. land clear of all medieval junk. This is the American type of agrarian capitalism, and the most rapid development of productive forces under conditions which are more favourable for the mass of the people than any others under capitalism. In reality the struggle going on in the Russian revolution is not about “socialisation” and other absurdities of the Narodniks . . . but about what road capitalist development of Russia will take: the “Prussian” or the “American”.’ ‘The genuine historical question which objective historical and social development is putting to us is: a Prussian or an American type of agrarian evolution? A landlords’ monarchy with the fig-leaf of a sham constitution, or a peasant (farmers’) republic? . . . We cannot get rid of the “bourgeois state”. Only petty-bourgeois philistines can dream of doing so. Our revolution is a bourgeois revolution precisely because the struggle going on in it is not between socialism and capitalism, but between two forms of capitalism, two paths of its development, two forms of bourgeois-democratic institutions.’ [66]

These alternatives were, again, ones to which Lenin made repeated reference and their relationship to the two types of revolution he had in view is clear. We do not pretend that his politico-economic hypotheses in these years were obtained simply from an amalgam of such historical comparisons. To do so would be a travesty given the painstaking research devoted by him to the specificities of Russian society and apparent throughout his work. These were precisely comparisons, not substitutes for empirical analysis, and their status as such was signalled by Lenin whenever he had occasion to appeal to them. However this may be, and when full allowance has been made for the customary mutatis mutandis, the manner in which Lenin used, and continually returned to, these historical examples points to the conviction on his part that Russia could not avoid traversing a course similar to the ones mapped out by the advanced capitalist countries: the stages of development derived, in the traditional Marxist periodization, from the history of those countries must be valid, by and large, for each capitalist country taken on its own. The same conviction is evident in the dichotomy he consistently set up between Europe, on the one hand, and Russia on the other, the former having already entered the epoch of proletarian revolutions and the latter not yet having done so. [67] According to Lenin it was a mistake of which Trotsky was guilty to ‘mix up different historical periods and compare Russia, which is going through her bourgeois revolution, with Europe, where these revolutions were completed long ago. In Europe the real political content of Social-Democratic work is to prepare the proletariat for the struggle for power against the bourgeoisie, which already holds full sway in the state. In Russia, the question is still only one of creating a modern bourgeois state, which will be similar either to a Junker monarchy . . . or to a peasant bourgeois-democratic republic.’ [68]This is not to say that Lenin regarded the Russian revolution as an exclusively local affair, unfolding in its own place and in its own time without any relationship to the class struggle in Europe. On the contrary, he did situate it in its European context and did try to fathom its international implications. However, this did not alter the fundamental outlines of his conception, only the tempos of development which it envisaged. In other words, a victorious bourgeois revolution in Russia could, he held, act as a powerful stimulus to proletarian revolutions in the West. These in turn would, if successful, help to protect Russia from the danger of a restoration and to consolidate the gains of its bourgeois revolution, providing at the same time an international milieu which would facilitate the Russian proletariat’s own struggle for socialism. In that event, the duration of the Russian journey could be shortened. [69] Nevertheless, what remained in the Leninist conception was the belief that Russia had to follow in the wake of Europe, to complete the bourgeois-democratic stage before embarking on the socialist, and so on. This belief in a ‘necessary’ historical order Lenin sustained unquestioningly right up to 1917, even his solitary reference to the prospect of uninterrupted revolution leaving it perfectly intact. We want to dwell on this last point for a moment.

Uninterrupted Revolution

The reference in question occurs in an article written during 1905: ‘From the democratic revolution we shall at once, and precisely in accordance with the measure of our strength, the strength of the class-conscious and organized proletariat, begin to pass to the socialist revolution. We stand for uninterrupted revolution. We shall not stop half-way . . . We shall bend every effort to help the entire peasantry achieve the democratic revolution, in order thereby to make it easier for us, the party of the proletariat, to pass on as quickly as possible to the new and higher task—the socialist revolution.’ [70] Save for its use of the formula ‘uninterrupted revolution’, the passage is in no sense an unusual one in Lenin’s writings of this period. It expresses an idea which he put forward dozens of times and which was touched on earlier, the idea, namely, that the completion of the democratic revolution would create the preconditions for, and mark the beginning of, the proletariat’s struggle for socialism. [71] If this struggle was not immediately on the agenda according to Lenin, he did clearly situate it in a foreseeable rather than remote future. In the above passage he chose to give this fact a particularly pronounced emphasis, using what was for him a quite uncharacteristic formulation which suggested, contrary to many of his other formulations, that the period between the two revolutions might not after all be a very extended one. That would depend on the degree of proletarian strength within the overall relation of political forces existing in the aftermath of the democratic revolution. When this passage is set beside some of the other material which has been cited, one finds in the contrast the most striking confirmation of what we have called the profound tension within the Leninist perspective. The latter continued to reproduce an orthodoxy in which the bourgeois-democratic stage was seen as a more or less lengthy period of development, and thus to circumscribe the proximate revolutionary possibilities with boundaries based on a dogmatic schema, while at the same time embodying a strategic approach which was revolutionary to the very core because attentive to every real revolutionary possibility which might present itself. Considering Lenin’s thought as a whole, in its integrity and complexity, it is therefore perfectly proper to indicate, as many people have done, the important degree of continuity that there was between his perspective before 1917 and his orientation and conduct during that year. We ourselves attempted earlier to draw attention to the elements of that continuity. However, once that has been said, it is perfectly derisory to pretend, as the whole Stalinist tradition has done, that in 1917 Lenin made no significant break with his anterior conceptions, that these were purely and simply adequate to, and harmonious with, the subsequent course of events. This piece of hagiography is derisory for two reasons at least.

Stalinist Distortions

The first is that it disregards, in favour of one lonely phrase, a substantial proportion of what Lenin said and wrote during the course of twelve years. If, from 1905 onwards, he really did envisage such a running together of bourgeois-democratic and proletarian revolutions as in the event occurred; if this was his fundamental conception and not, as we contend, something which threatened from time to time to irrupt into his discourse against and despite the very different orthodoxy which resided there; how, then, could he have spoken about a development of capitalism in Russia along European, or American, lines and about the creation there of a modern bourgeois state? If Marxist concepts retain any meaning at all, these projected results of the bourgeois-democratic revolution do surely constitute something of an interruption in the revolutionary process. But the Stalinist tradition has always ‘skipped over’, so to speak, this aspect of Lenin’s perspective. It is a tradition in fact which has failed, in fifty years, to produce so much as one account of these issues which displayed any respect for the integrity of his thought or, more generally, for the elementary requirements of serious research. The fact, in any case, remains that before 1917 Lenin spoke as if the bourgeois-democratic and proletarian revolutions were separated by precisely the kind of ‘Chinese Wall’ which, after 1917, he castigated Kautsky for attempting to raise between them. [72] He spoke like this repeatedly: ‘any concern over too rapid a transition to the maximum programme is simply absurd’; the ‘revolution will strengthen the rule of the bourgeoisie’; ‘we cannot get out of the bourgeois-democratic boundaries of the Russian revolution’; ‘the democratic revolution will not immediately overstep the bounds of bourgeois social and economic relationships’; ‘there is not, nor can there be, any other path to real freedom for the proletariat and the peasantry, than the path of bourgeois freedom and bourgeois progress’; ‘full victory of the peasant uprising can only create a stronghold for a democratic bourgeois republic’; ‘what the Russian proletariat is demanding now and immediately is not something that will undermine capitalism, but something that will cleanse it, something that will accelerate and intensify its development’; ‘the present revolution is a bourgeois revolution . . . it is proceeding on the basis of capitalist production relations, and will inevitably result in a further development of those same production relations . . . the rule of capital will remain in the most democratic republic’; ‘the aims of the revolution that is now taking place in Russia do not exceed the bounds of bourgeois society’; and so on. [73]

The revolution which Lenin was here talking about was to be made, according to his own hypothesis, by workers and peasants, who furthermore would, under the leadership of revolutionary Social Democracy, actually conquer political power to carry it out. One has only to remember that to understand that the important question is not, in the end, whether he envisaged a long or a short period of time intervening between this and the proletarian revolution. He was a revolutionary and not a seer, took account of different possibilities. The decisive thing is what he envisaged intervening between the two revolutions: and that was some period of bourgeois political rule and capitalist economic development conceived straight out of the history of Western Europe. But why should a worker-peasant alliance, if it already held effective political power, pause for any length of time to respect the ‘validity’ of that model? There was no real answer to this question other than the one already embodied in the theory of stages. This was a necessary stage of historical development which had to be gone through before the dictatorship of the proletariat, in the strict sense, could be put on the agenda. The democratic revolution must be completed before the proletariat could ‘begin to pass to the socialist revolution’. Failure to grasp this, according to Lenin, was equivalent simply to a confusion of theoretical thinking, to the blurring of an essential distinction between two different types of revolution, to anarchism, adventurism, petty-bourgeois philistinism. Until 1917 he did not, ever, entertain the possibility that the Russian masses might combine the tasks of the two revolutions, might overturn the rule of capital and begin the transition to socialism, even while still liquidating Russia’s massive pre-capitalist past.

February and October

In 1917 Lenin not only did come to recognize that possibility but also contributed as much as any single individual could to making it an actuality of world-historical consequence. And this brings us to the second reason why the Stalinist reading of Lenin is derisory. In a first moment, and in order to accommodate the events of 1917 to the perspective he defended before then, it passes over in silence Lenin’s frequent and emphatic assertion that the Russian revolution must inevitably lead to one or another type of capitalist development. However, because of its repugnance for the idea that Trotsky may actually have been on to something, which is more than just a matter of historical sentimentality on its part, Stalinism still wants to preserve the notion of a distinct and separate bourgeois-democratic stage. In a second moment, it therefore tries to find, in the history of the Russian revolution, something which might correspond to the clear line of demarcation between the two revolutionary stages that Lenin had previously insisted on upholding. It comes up with such a line in a simple chronology: the bourgeois-democratic and proletarian revolutions in Russia took place in February and October of 1917 respectively; Lenin’s reorientation of the Bolshevik party in April, accordingly, represented no kind of departure by him from the problematic of separate stages, but was a perfectly natural response to the fact that what he had always defined as the indispensable precondition of the proletarian revolution had now been achieved. The small flaw in the argument is that this last contention is utterly false. What Lenin for an entire decade defined as the main content of the democratic stage, the tasks whose fulfilment he regarded as essential before there could be any question of going beyond the boundaries of that stage—that of sweeping away the remnants of serfdom in the Russian countryside through an agrarian revolution, and that of razing to the ground the whole apparatus of the Tsarist state—these tasks were achieved not by the February Revolution but by the October Revolution. They were achieved by, and bebecause of the October Revolution, which means, bearing in mind Lenin’s role in making that revolution possible, that they were achieved because in 1917 he ceased, finally, to regard them as preconditions of the proletarian revolution, understood finally that no truly thoroughgoing and consummated democratic revolution could take place in Russia except as a consequence of the proletarian revolution, except, that is to say, as part and parcel of a process which would initiate the transition towards socialism. The democratic revolution was not thereby ‘skipped’ but its tasks were inextricably combined with those of the proletarian revolution, and consequently some of the anticipated features of the democratic stage were denatured. A modern bourgeois state was not created: its rudiment, the Constituent Assembly, had a fleetingly brief life and that, furthermore, not before but after the inauguration of the proletarian dictatorship. There was no rapid development of capitalism along European lines but there was the New Economic Policy. The course of the Russian revolution did not observe any clear line of demarcation. It overturned the whole orthodox conception of a standard historical sequence valid for each country. Lenin drew the consequences of it.

‘The victorious Bolshevik revolution’, he wrote in 1918, ‘meant the complete destruction of the monarchy and of the landlord system (which had not been destroyed before the October Revolution). We carried the bourgeois revolution to its conclusion.’ Again: ‘It was the Bolsheviks, and only the Bolsheviks, who, thanks only to the victory of the proletarian revolution, helped the peasants to carry the bourgeois-democratic revolution really to its conclusion.’ And: ‘Only the October Revolution, only the victory of the urban working class, only the Soviet government could relieve the whole of Russia, from end to end, of the ulcer of the old feudal heritage, the old feudal exploitation, landed estates and the landowners’ oppression of the peasants as a whole.’ In 1921: ‘We solved the problems of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in passing, as a “by-product” of our main and genuinely proletarian-revolutionary, socialist activities . . . the Kautskys Hilferdings, Martovs . . . were incapable of understanding this relation between the bourgeois-democratic and the proletarian-socialist revolutions. The first develops into the second. The second, in passing, solves the problems of the first.’ [74]

We cannot here explore the factors which enabled Lenin to break with the orthodoxy he had defended hitherto. We will touch on only one of them, the impact of the First World War. This led first, via the débâcle of European Social Democracy, to a radical reappraisal on his part of the Marxism of the Second International in which that orthodoxy, amongst others, was enshrined. Secondly, it brought out in the starkest possible way the reality and the effects of capitalism as a global system, setting Lenin to the study of imperialism. Out of this double reflection emerged a qualitatively different understanding of the trajectory necessary for the backward countries. The tasks assigned classically to the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the bourgeois-democratic stage, those of agrarian reform, national independence, development of the productive forces, and so on, were now clearly seen by him as part of an anti-imperialist, and therefore anti-capitalist struggle, squarely situated by him in the context of an international struggle for socialism. These countries could not simply take the path that had been trodden by the first capitalist nations, ‘the path of bourgeois freedom and bourgeois progress’ which Lenin in 1905 had held to be the only possible one. In 1918, he was saying by contrast: ‘After the long and desperate world war, we can clearly discern the beginnings of a socialist revolution all over the world. This has become a necessity for even the more backward countries . . . irrespective of any theoretical views or socialist doctrines.’ [75] Needless to say, Lenin was not denouncing theory as such, only a specific variant of it. Nor had he suddenly become a partisan of the miraculous leap into socialism, of the view that the material preconditions stipulated by classical Marxism could be evaded. Far from it. To those who, in the name of Marxism, challenged the historical legitimacy of the October Revolution, Lenin replied by asking why Russia should not ‘create the fundamental requisites of civilization in a different way from that of the West-European countries’. He still acknowledged as ‘incontrovertible’ the proposition that in Russia the productive forces were not sufficiently developed to make socialism possible. But the distance he had by now travelled from the orthodox inferences from that proposition can be measured in the following passage: ‘You say that civilization is necessary for the building of socialism. Very good. But why could we not first create such prerequisites of civilization in our country as the expulsion of the landowners and the Russian capitalists, and then start moving towards socialism? Where, in what books, have you read that such variations of the customary historical order of events are impermissible or impossible? . . . It need hardly be said that a textbook written on Kautskian lines was a very useful thing in its day. But it is time, for all that, to abandon the idea that it foresaw all the forms of development of subsequent world history. It would be timely to say that those who think so are simply fools.’ [76] And it would be timely, on the part of some, to recognize in all this a certain settling of accounts.

‘The cause of international reaction has now, on 22 January, on the streets of Petersburg, had its bloody Jena. For on this day the Russian proletariat burst on to the political stage as a class for the first time; for the first time the only power which historically is qualified and able to cast Tsarism into the dustbin and to raise the banner of civilization in Russia and everywhere has appeared on the scene of action.’ In this manner did Rosa Luxemburg greet the beginning of the 1905 revolution. From its very first weeks she was insisting that the central driving force of the whole revolution, ‘the pillar of the movement for freedom’, must be the industrial working class, that only it could lead ‘all the oppositional and revolutionary forces in Russian society’ in a successful assault against Tsarism. ‘The power and the future of the revolutionary movement’, she therefore wrote, ‘lies entirely and exclusively in the class-conscious Russian proletariat.’ [77]

However, even while emphasizing this point, Luxemburg upheld the proposition that the objectives of the Russian revolution were limited to bourgeois-democratic ones. ‘The Russian Revolution will, formally speaking, bring about in Russia what the February and March Revolutions [1848] brought about in Western and Central Europe half a century ago. At the same time, however—and just because it is a belated and straggling fragment of the European revolutions—it is a very special type in itself. Russia is stepping onto the revolutionary worldstage as the politically most backward country . . . Precisely and only for this reason, contrary to all the generally held views, the Russian revolution will have a more pronounced proletarian class-character than any previous revolution. It is true that the immediate objectives of the present uprising in Russia do not go beyond the limits of a bourgeois-democratic constitution, and the final result of the crisis (which may, and most probably will, last for years, alternating between flood and ebb-tide) may, if anything at all, be no more than a wretched constitution. And yet the revolution which is condemned to give birth to this political changeling will be a pure proletarian one, unlike any before it.’ [78]

The development of these themes in the period that followed led Luxemburg to the strategic conclusion that the Russian proletariat should endeavour to take power in order to carry out the tasks of the bourgeois revolution. In that sense it led her, as we have argued, to the very limits of the theory of stages. But she stopped short at those limits with the idea that, for the moment, the Russian proletariat’s hold on political power could be but temporary and would have to give way to a period of bourgeois-democratic rule. This conclusion was spelt out quite clearly in a short text entitled ‘Blanquism and Social Democracy’, which she wrote in the middle of 1906 and which, it is worth mentioning in passing, was a defence of Lenin and the Bolsheviks against the charge of Blanquism levelled by Plekhanov. The point is of interest because only two years earlier Luxemburg herself had made the same charge, [79] and the article in which she did so has served as the basis of countless attempts to freeze the differences existing between her and Lenin in 1904 into a fixed and timeless antagonism. In any case, for present purposes the main interest of the later text lies elsewhere, in its treatment of Russia’s revolutionary prospects.

‘If today the Bolshevik comrades speak of the dictatorship of the proletariat, they do not give it the old Blanquist meaning . . . On the contrary, they have affirmed that the present revolution could end with the proletariat, the whole of the revolutionary class, laying hold of the state machine. The proletariat, as the most revolutionary element, will perhaps assume its role as the liquidator of the old order by ‘taking power for itself’ in order to oppose the counter-revolution, and to prevent the revolution being derailed by a bourgeoisie which is reactionary in its very nature. No revolution has been consummated otherwise than by the dictatorship of a class and all the signs indicate that at the present time the proletariat can become this liquidator. Evidently, no Social Democrat entertains the illusion that the proletariat can hold on to power: if it could, it would implement its class objectives, it would realize socialism. Its forces are insufficient for that at the present moment, for the proletariat, in the strictest sense of the word, is precisely a minority of society in the Russian Empire . . . the very idea of socialism excludes the domination of a minority. Therefore, on the day of the proletariat’s political victory over Tsarism, the power which it has conquered will be taken back by the majority. To speak concretely: after the fall of Tsarism, power will pass into the hands of the most revolutionary section of society, the proletariat; for the proletariat will seize all the positions and stand guard so long as power is not in the hands legally entitled to hold it, in the hands of the new government which the Constituent Assembly, as the legislative organ elected by the whole population, is alone able to determine. Now it is self-evident that it is not the proletariat but the petty-bourgeoisie and the peasantry that constitute the majority in society, and that, consequently, in the Constituent Assembly it will not be the Social Democrats who form the majority but the peasant and petty-bourgeois democrats. We might deplore this but we can in no way change it.’ [80]

Differences with Trotsky

The above passage resolves the ambiguities inherent in Luxemburg’s tendency simultaneously to characterize the Russian revolution as bourgeois and proletarian. It is that tendency, no doubt, which has led so many people to assimilate her perspective to Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. But if she agreed with Trotsky on the question of the motive forces of the Russian revolution and in that sense described it as proletarian, her own analysis fell short of envisaging the kind of telescoping of bourgeois-democratic and socialist objectives which was central to his perspective and, for that reason, she described the revolution as bourgeois. This difference remained even where Luxemburg developed her argument not, as above, exclusively from the relationship of class forces in Russia, but from the international context of the Russian revolution. She did this at some length in her pamphlet on the mass strike, written in the autumn of 1906, when she attempted to draw together the lessons of the previous year and, in particular, to emphasize their significance for the European workers’ movement. In this pamphlet, the parallels between her own position and Trotsky’s are indeed striking, emerging most clearly in the following, central passage. It too contains the kind of ‘ambiguity’ we have referred to; but, read carefully, it does not speak of the Russian revolution going beyond the limits of bourgeois-democratic objectives.

‘The Russian Revolution has for its next task the abolition of absolutism and the creation of a modern bourgeois-parliamentary constitutional state. It is exactly the same in form as that which confronted Germany at the March Revolution, and France at the Great Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. But the condition, the historical milieu, in which these formally analogous revolutions took place are fundamentally different from those of present-day Russia. The most decisive difference is the circumstance that between those bourgeois revolutions of the West and the present bourgeois revolution in the East, the whole cycle of capitalist development has run its course. And this development has seized not only the West European countries, but also absolutist Russia. Large-scale industry with all its consequences—modern class divisions, sharp social contrasts, modern life in large cities and the modern proletariat—has become in Russia the prevailing form, that is, in social development the decisive form of production. The remarkable, contradictory, historical situation results from this that the bourgeois revolution, in accordance with its formal tasks will, in the first place, be carried out by a modern class-conscious proletariat . . . This contradictory situation finds expression in the fact that in this formally bourgeois revolution, the antagonism of the bourgeois society to absolutism is governed by the antagonism of the proletariat to bourgeois society, that the struggle of the proletariat is directed simultaneously and with equal energy against both absolutism and capitalist exploitation, and that the programme of the revolutionary struggle concentrates with equal emphasis on political freedom, the winning of the eight-hour day, and a human standard of material existence for the proletariat . . . The mass strike is thus shown to be not a specifically Russian product, springing from absolutism, but a universal form of the proletarian class struggle resulting from the present stage of capitalist development and class relations . . . The balancing of the account with absolutism appears a trifle in comparison with the many new accounts which the revolution itself opens up. The present revolution realizes in the particular affairs of absolutist Russia the general results of international capitalist development, and appears not so much as the last successor of the old bourgeois revolutions as the forerunner of the new series of proletarian revolutions of the West. The most backward country of all, just because it has been so unpardonably late with its bourgeois revolution, shows ways and methods of further class struggle to the proletariat of Germany and the most advanced capitalist countries.’ [81]

As is clear, for Luxemburg the Russian revolution was the forerunner of the proletarian revolutions of the West only in respect of the forms of mass struggle which it had thrown up. In case there be any remaining doubt as to what she saw as the goals of this revolution, elsewhere in the same pamphlet she spoke of the mass strike in Russia as a means of ‘creating for the proletariat the conditions of the daily political struggle and especially of parliamentarism’; anticipated ‘the close of the period of revolution and the erection of a bourgeois-parliamentary constitutional state’; and argued that ‘in Russia the great step must first be taken from an Oriental despotism to a modern bourgeois legal order’. [82] Shortly after writing the pamphlet, she made the same point in a speech in Mannheim: ‘Nothing other than a constitutional bourgeois state can be created.’ [83]

The London Congress

In May 1907, Luxemburg was a delegate to the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Party in London, making several contributions to the debate which took place there. The content of these contributions differed in no significant respect from the material which has already been cited. The first of them was devoted to emphasizing how much German Social Democracy had to learn from the rich experience of the Russian proletariat. The latter, she argued, while leading the struggle against absolutism in Russia, was also in the vanguard of the international working class. For it had adopted forms of action which involved the ‘direct intervention of the broadest proletarian masses’ and had begun to develop tactics appropriate to a period of open revolutionary struggle. In a future period of class confrontation in Germany, the German proletariat would have to build on this experience and learn to go beyond the purely parliamentarist tactics which had dominated its political development hitherto. In the context of this argument, Luxemburg again affirmed that the Russian revolution was ‘not so much the last act in the series of bourgeois revolutions of the 19th century as the forerunner of a new series of future proletarian revolutions, in which the conscious proletariat and its vanguard, Social Democracy, are destined historically to play the leading role’. [84] In the major part of her second speech, Luxemburg challenged the attitude of the Mensheviks to the bourgeois parties and attacked their belief that the Russian bourgeoisie could play a revolutionary or leading role and that the proletariat should not be so ‘tactless’ as to adopt tactics which might frighten the liberals into the arms of reaction. The history of Western Europe, she pointed out, showed that the bourgeoisie had long since ceased to be revolutionary, nor could anything be expected of Russian liberalism which had already demonstrated its ‘despairing impotence’ in the face of absolutism. The tactical recipe of the Mensheviks led to the renunciation of any independent proletarian struggle and of the goals of the revolution itself. The extent to which this revolution already expressed the maturing class contradictions of capitalism in Russia could not be artificially concealed. Social Democracy, Luxemburg said, must not hesitate to hold before the Russian working class the goal ‘of achieving political power in order to carry out the tasks of the present revolution’. [85]

It is not very surprising that Trotsky, at the same Congress, should have expressed his solidarity with these positions. He opened his contribution to the debate by saying that ‘The point of view which Comrade Luxemburg has been developing here on behalf of the Polish delegation is very close to the point of view which I defended and still defend. If you can set up a distinction between us, then this is more a matter of individual shades of opinion than one of political direction.’ [86] And, indeed, the analysis which Luxemburg had presented was remarkably close to his own, in terms both of its treatment of the general configuration of class forces and of its recognition that the dynamic of revolutionary struggle could end by placing the proletariat in power. The similarity between their perspectives, moreover, was reinforced by a third speech in which Luxemburg dealt with the question of the peasantry. As the vanguard of the Russian revolutionary movement, she argued, the proletariat must attempt to bring under its influence all the popular revolutionary forces, and this meant, in the first place, the peasantry. The Mensheviks were wrong to discount it, for it was an objectively revolutionary force despite the elements of inconsistency and utopianism in its demands. The peasantry might not be able to play an independent political role, since it always followed the lead of other, more active classes. But ‘In Russia, political leadership of, and influence over, the chaotic movement of the peasantry are now the natural historical task of the conscious proletariat.’ To renounce this role of leadership, Luxemburg concluded, would be the worst form of sectarianism. [87]

It is clear, in the face of all this, that Trotsky’s claim was far from being an empty one. Yet, there remains, despite it, a distinction between his own and Luxemburg’s positions which is more than a mere nuance. From the possibility of a proletarian seizure of power in Russia, Trotsky alone drew the consequence that the Russian workers could initiate a process going beyond the limits of bourgeois society, could inaugurate the transition to socialism. Luxemburg did not. In her speeches at the London Congress, as elsewhere, she was perfectly clear as to what she saw as the objectives and limits of this ‘proletarian’ revolution in Russia. That was why she spoke, for example, of the mass strike of the Russian workers as ‘a means of class struggle for winning the most elementary freedoms of the contemporary class state’. [88] That was also why she repudiated the accusation that her perspective was unduly optimistic: ‘If the working class extends and strengthens its battle tactics in accordance with the ever unfolding contradictions and ever widening perspectives of the revolution, then it may fall into very complicated and difficult positions . . . I even think that if the Russian working class turns out to be capable of fulfilling its task, that is, if, by its actions, it brings the course of revolutionary events to the extreme limit which is allowed by the objective development of social relationships, then almost inevitably at this boundary a big temporary defeat awaits it.’ [89] It should by now be clear what kind of defeat Luxemburg was here referring to: the defeat of having to relinquish political power when the utmost limits of the bourgeois revolution in Russia had been reached.

We do not know through what process of reflection Luxemburg, incarcerated, ceased in 1917 to regard these limits as impassable. Suffice it to say that while, in April of that year, she was still writing that the revolutionary action of the Russian proletariat would again put ‘the programme of 1905 on the agenda: democratic republic, eight-hour day, expropriation of the large landed proprietors’; [90] by May, she was beginning to talk of the possibility that the Russian revolution might be ‘a first proletarian revolution of transition, world-historical in significance and destined to react on the totality of capitalist countries’. [91] When the October Revolution occurred she still feared that the proletarian dictatorship in Russia might go down to defeat. But, as she explained in a letter to Luise Kautsky in November, this was because of the lack of revolutionary support from the West and ‘not because statistics show the economic development of Russia to be too backward, as your clever husband has worked out’. [92] Luxemburg’s critical assessment of the Bolshevik Revolution, penned in the autumn of 1918, was framed by this changed perspective. She began with an unambiguous rejection of ‘the doctrinaire theory . . . according to which Russia, as an economically backward and predominantly agrarian land, was supposed not to be ripe for social revolution and proletarian dictatorship, [and] which regards only a bourgeois revolution as feasible in Russia . . . This doctrine . . . follows from the original “Marxist” discovery that the socialist revolution is a national and, so to speak, a domestic affair in each modern country taken by itself.’ She went on to stress what she saw as the essential merit of the Bolsheviks: that they ‘set as the aim of this seizure of power a complete, far-reaching revolutionary programme: not the safeguarding of bourgeois democracy, but a dictatorship of the proletariat for the purpose of realizing socialism. Thereby they won for themselves the imperishable historic distinction of having for the first time proclaimed the final aim of socialism as the direct programme of practical politics.’ She ended on a note of sober internationalism: ‘In Russia the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia.’ [93] Released from an imprisoning orthodoxy, Luxemburg’s thought, like that of Lenin, had converged finally with the ideas of Leon Trotsky.

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[1] ‘Some Questions Concerning the History of Bolshevism’ (1931), J. Stalin, Leninism, London 1940, pp. 388–92.

[2] ‘The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists’ (1924), ibid. p. 101. The resolution of this contradiction was not beyond Stalin’s talents. It seems that in 1905 Rosa Luxemburg invented the theory and opposed it to the Bolshevik conception without advancing it . . . against Lenin. Thus, according to Stalin (in 1932), the reticent Rosa ‘kept behind the scenes in those days, abstained from active struggle against Lenin in this matter, evidently preferring not to become involved as yet . . . It was not Trotsky but Rosa Luxemburg and Parvus who invented the theory . . . It was not Rosa Luxemburg but Parvus and Trotsky who in 1905 advanced [it] . . . against Lenin.’ ‘Reply to Olekhnovich and Aristov’, J. Stalin, Works, Vol. 13, Moscow 1955, pp. 133–4.

[3] ‘Hands Off Rosa Luxemburg!’, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1932, New York 1973, pp. 139–41.

[4] Cf. V. Fay, Introduction to R. Luxemburg, Lettres ` Léon Jogichès, 2 vols., Paris 1971, Vol. 1, p. 12.

[5] ‘Luxemburg and the Fourth International’, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1935–6, New York 1970, p. 112.

[6] L. Trotsky, My Life, New York 1960, p. 203; and cf. L. Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects, London 1962, p. 94. Nettl, though right to challenge the claim, is wrong to suggest that it was only made ‘long after the actual events’ (J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, 2 vols., London 1966, Vol. 2, p. 504 n. 1.). On this, see below text for n. 86.

[7] See The Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects, pp. 163, 212, 8, 115–19.

[8] ‘The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions’, M.-A. Waters (ed.), Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, New York 1970, p. 203.

[9] K. Tarbuck, ‘Biographical Notes’ to R. Luxemburg and N. Bukharin, Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital, London 1972, pp. 2–3; H. Mehringer, ‘Introduction historique’ to L. Trotsky, Nos Tâches Politiques, Paris 1970, pp. 15–18, 31 ff.; L. Maitan, ‘The Theory of Permanent Revolution’, in E. Mandel (ed.), Fifty Years of World Revolution, New York 1968, p. 57; M. Lowy, Dialectique et Révolution, Paris 1973, p. 99.

[10] I. Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, London 1954, p. 178; H. Schurer, ‘The Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Origins of German Communism’, The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 39, 1960–61, p. 467.

[11] R. Looker (ed.), Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Political Writings, London 1972, pp. 45–6; T. Cliff, Rosa Luxemburg, London 1968, p. 14; C. Morgenstern, ‘Trotsky et Rosa Luxemburg’, Quatrième Internationale, No. 48, March 1971, pp. 22–3. Morgenstern also makes reference to Trotsky’s claim concerning the London Congress.

[12] Respectively: D. Howard (ed.), Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, New York and London 1971, p. 210; G. Lee, ‘Rosa Luxemburg and the Impact of Imperialism’, The Economic Journal, Vol. 81, No. 324, December 1971, pp. 852, 855–6, 858–9; V. Fay, op. cit. Vol. 1, p. 29, emphasis added. On The Accumulation of Capital, see below text for n. 37.

[13] Nettl, op. cit. Vol.1, pp. 90, 214, 338–9, 354–5; Vol. 2, pp. 504 n. 1, 553, 567. The mistaken qualification appears at p. 338 : on this, see below text for n. 80.

[14] E. Mandel, The Leninist Theory of Organization, London 1971, p. 22 n. 50.

[15] The account in P. Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg, London 1972, is at best ambiguous and at worst inconsistent. It maintains, at different points, both that Luxemburg ‘did not accept the idea of permanent revolution’ (p. 122) and that ‘In the most important questions concerning Russia she found herself in agreement with Trotsky’ (p. 183). In general, it hovers uneasily between these alternatives. See pp. 19–21, 89–94, 109, 120–23.

[16] Letter to Emmanuel and Mathilde Wurm, 18 July 1906, cited in Frölich, op.cit. p. 124.

[17] E. Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, New York 1961, pp. 146–7; and see pp. 101–9, 155, 161–3, 196–7, 218–19.

[18] ‘Social Reform or Revolution’, Waters, op. cit. pp. 81–3.

[19] Kautsky’s later characterization of Luxemburg’s positions. See C. E. Schorske, German Social Democracy 1905–1917, New York 1970, p. 185.

[20] ‘Social Reform or Revolution’, Waters, op. cit. p. 76; ‘Social Democracy and Parliamentarianism’, Looker, op. cit. p. 110.

[21] ‘Social Reform or Revolution’, Waters, op. cit. pp. 56, 73–6, 80–81 ; ‘Social Democracy and Parliamentarianism’, Looker, op. cit. pp. 106–10.

[22] ‘What Now?’, Looker, op. cit. p. 172; ‘The Idea of May Day on the March’, Howard, op. cit. p. 318

[23] ‘The Junius Pamphlet’, Waters, op. Cit. pp. 297–9.

[24] As the last quoted passage indicates, Luxemburg herself was aware of this. It did not, however, restrain her from statements, of the kind noted above, which across all national histories declared bourgeois democracy to be generally moribund.

[25] Leon Trotsky on Britain, New York 1973, p. 72.

[26] L. Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, New York 1971, p. 158.

[27] Ibid. p. 281.

[28] Ibid. p. 282.

[29] ‘In Memory of the Proletariat Party’, Howard, op. cit. pp. 179–80, 206, 202.

[30] Ibid. pp. 193–6. The text is very clear on this point. Dick Howard misunderstands the meaning of a ‘transitional programme’ when he suggests (p. 163) that this is what it argues for.

[31] Ibid. pp. 185, 187, 180.

[32] ‘Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy’, Waters, op. cit. p. 127.

[33] ‘Social Reform or Revolution’, Waters, op. cit. p. 74.

[34] This is not just a rhetorical flourish. Neither Lenin nor Trotsky, it is true, overlooked the international significance of the Russian revolution of 1905. However, as regards the urgency, signalled by 1905, of a major strategic reorientation by European, and especially German, Social Democracy, Luxemburg’s thinking was in advance of theirs. It is this, as much as her closer acquaintance with Kautsky, which enabled her to perceive the signs of the latter’s renegacy earlier than they did.

[35] See above text for n. 8, and below text for n. 78.

[36] Cf. above text for notes 18 and 19.

[37] R. Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, London 1963, p. 419.

[38] ‘The Junius Pamphlet’, Waters, op. cit. p. 290.

[39] Cf. for example: ‘The democratic tasks of backward Russia . . . could be achieved only through a dictatorship of the proletariat’; and ‘The application of socialist methods for the solution of pre-socialist problems—that is the very essence of the present economic and cultural work in the Soviet Union.’ L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, New York 1965, pp. 5, 57.

[40] As another representative of Polish Social Democracy put it in 1908: ‘The proletariat has to impose its own solution . . . by reaching a class dictatorship, by capturing the heights of power in order to lift up and help to extend the power of its own eventual antagonists, the bourgeoisie.’ Cited in Nettl, op. cit. Vol. 2, p. 567.

[41] The Kautsky of 1905–6 was not the same political animal as the Kautsky who in 1917–18 wrote The Dictatorship of the Proletariat. In particular, it would be a mistake to infer from his hostile response to the October Revolution, which aligned him with the Mensheviks, that he shared their position in the earlier period. As is evident from what follows, he did not, for at this time he was politically close to Rosa Luxemburg.

[42] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (referred to henceforth as CW), Vol. 11, pp. 372–3, 410–11; Vol. 13, p. 353; Vol. 15, pp. 56–7, 375.

[43] Something should be said here about the contradictory nature of Lenin’s own judgments regarding Trotsky’s alleged oversight of the peasantry. In 1907, Lenin notes Trotsky’s recognition of the ‘community of interests between the proletariat and the peasantry . . . against the liberal bourgeoisie’ and comments on his ‘closeness’ to, and ‘solidarity’ with, the Bolshevik view in this respect (CW, Vol. 12, p. 470). In 1909, he denies that there is any such agreement (CW, Vol. 15, p. 374), and in 1915 speaks of Trotsky as having borrowed from the Mensheviks their ‘“repudiation” of the peasantry’s role’ (CW, Vol. 21, p. 419). The Stalinist way of dealing with this contradiction is simply to suppress its first term: piously to repeat Lenin’s later judgments as if they were Holy Writ while ignoring the earlier one. This impeccably scientific procedure sees no obstacle in the fact that the earlier judgment is, on any scrupulous reading of Trotsky’s texts, the correct one; or in the fact that between 1907 and 1915 Trotsky’s views on this question did not change in any significant respect; or in the consideration that even in his later, negative judgments Lenin is unable to sustain in bald form the point that Trotsky simply repudiated the peasantry, and has to represent as either ‘concession’ or ‘muddle’ his manifest recognition of its role (CW, Vol. 15, p. 373; Vol. 21, p. 419). This is not the place to explore the reasons for these contradictory judgments on Lenin’s part. Leaving aside Trotsky’s ‘conciliationist’ stance within the party and the factional bitterness this created between himself and Lenin, we can only say in passing that Lenin’s works provide no evidence that he ever read Results and Prospects, the text in which Trotsky gave the fullest presentation of his views. Cf. on this Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution, pp. 42, 75–9, 94–5; and E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917–23, 3 vols., Harmondsworth 1966, Vol. 1, p. 71.

[44] L. Trotsky, 1905, London 1972, p. 310. Emphasis added.

[45] Nettl, op. cit. Vol. 2, p. 566; Frölich, op. cit. pp. 94, 122.

[46] See for example CW, Vol. 8, p. 291; Vol. 9, pp. 46–7; Vol. 13, p. 121; Vol. 15, pp. 58, 374; and Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution, pp. 4, 65–74.

[47] For a mere fraction, but representative sample of such occasions, see CW, Vol. 8, pp. 539–40; Vol. 9, pp. 72, 121, 177–8; Vol. 12, pp. 139, 458; Vol. 13, p. 115; Vol. 15, pp. 349, 379.

[48] CW, Vol. 15, pp. 373–4.

[49] CW, Vol. 12, pp. 469–70.

[50] CW, Vol. 15, pp. 368–70. Last emphasis added.

[51] See above text for n. 37.

[52] CW, Vol. 9, pp. 84–5 (and cf. pp. 307–8, 443–4); Vol. 10, p. 77.

[53] L. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, 3 vols., London 1932–3, Vol. 1, pp. 24–6.

[54] See for example CW, Vol. 8, pp. 173, 285; Vol. 11, pp. 373–4, 410; Vol. 15, pp. 56–7, 349, 361–4.

[55] To avoid all possible misunderstanding: we speak here only of the organizational consequence of Trotsky’s alignment in the factional struggle and not of its theoretical/ political source, which was rectified in good time. We utterly reject the argument that Trotsky’s adhesion to the Bolshevik Party in 1917 reflected no real change in his political positions, that even after 1917 he never grasped the Leninist theory of the party, that to the end his thought remained uniform in this respect. On this, see N. Geras, ‘Political Participation in the Revolutionary Thought of Leon Trotsky’, in G. Parry (ed.), Participation in Politics, Manchester 1972, pp. 151–68.

[56] Cf. D. Avenas, Economie et politique dans la pensée de Trotsky, Paris 1970, pp. 26–34.

[57] Trotsky, 1905, pp. 316–7; cf. The Permanent Revolution, pp. 111–13.

[58] K. Marx, Capital, 3 vols., Moscow 1961–2, Vol. 1, pp. 8–9; K. Marx and F Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow n.d., p. 379.

[59] CW, Vol. 1, pp. 191–5

[60] ‘In Memory of the Proletariat Party’, Howard, op. cit. pp. 201–2; and see the whole of pp. 186–93, 197–209.

[61] CW, Vol. 15, p. 371; Vol. 16, p. 379.

[62] CW, Vol. 9, pp. 48–9; cf. p. 309, and Vol. 8, pp. 288, 294, 300, 384, 471.

[63] CW, Vol. 8, p. 257.

[64] See CW, Vol. 8, pp. 291, 385; Vol. 9, pp. 58–9, 241–2, 261; and see, by contrast, Trotsky’s clear rejection of these analogies on the very first page and in the whole third chapter of Results and Prospects (pp. 168, 184–93). Cf. also his observation of 1909: ‘In contrast to the populists, our Marxists have refused to recognize Russia’s “special nature” for so long that they have come, in principle, to equate Russia’s political and economic development with that of Western Europe.’ 1905, p. 313; and Avenas, op. cit. p. 7.

[65] CW, Vol. 8, p. 540.

[66] CW, Vol. 15, pp. 160, 175; and cf. Vol. 3, pp. 32–3; Vol. 12, pp. 356, 465; Vol. 13, pp.239, 343.

[67] CW, Vol. 8, pp. 298, 471; Vol. 9, p. 109; Vol. 21, pp. 418–19.

[68] CW, Vol. 16, p. 379.

[69] See CW, Vol. 8, pp. 258, 287–8, 303, 439, 535, 541–2; Vol. 9, pp. 261, 412; Vol. 10, pp. 91–2; Vol. 13, p. 327; Vol. 15, p. 180; Vol. 21, p. 420. And cf. Trotsky The History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 3, pp. 372–3.

[70] CW, Vol. 9, p. 237.

[71] See for example CW, Vol. 8, pp. 292, 328–9, 384–5; Vol. 9, pp. 50–51, 100, 130, 136, 442–3.

[72] CW, Vol. 28, p. 300.

[73] CW, Vol. 8, p. 297; Vol. 9, pp. 27, 52, 57, 112, 440; Vol. 10, p. 77; Vol. 12, pp. 333–4, 457.

[74] CW, Vol. 28, pp. 301, 314, 338; Vol. 33, p. 54. There is only one way of finding any fundamental difference between this and the perspective which Trotsky elaborated out of the experience of 1905: and that is to pretend that he, by contrast with Lenin, had visualized bypassing, skipping or leaping over the democratic revolution, ignored the peasantry, even ‘failed to understand the idea of the hegemony of the proletariat’, and so forth. The locus classicus of this ‘interpretation’, as of the arguments treated above, is of course Stalin: see for example Leninism, op. cit. pp. 22–6, 59–60, 91–3, 122–3, and passim. For some more recent variants, see M. Basmanov, Contemporary Trotskyism: Its Anti-Revolutionary Nature, Moscow 1972, pp. 17–28; Against Trotskyism, Moscow 1972, pp. 10–11; M. Johnstone, ‘Trotsky: His Ideas’, Cogito (Journal of the Young Communist League), No. 5, London, n.d. (1969?), pp. 8–16; K. Mavrakis, Du Trotskysme, Paris 1971, pp. 20–32. The definitive refutation of these things is contained in Trotsky’s own writings.

[75] CW, Vol. 28, p. 342.

[76] CW, Vol. 33, pp. 478–80.

[77] ‘The Revolution in Russia’, Looker, op. cit. pp. 118–20.

[78] From Neue Zeit, January 1905; cited in Frölich, op. cit. pp. 91–2.

[79] See ‘Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy’, Waters, op. cit. p. 118.

[80] R. Luxemburg, ‘Blanquisme et social-démocratie’, Quatrième Internationale, No. 2, Nouvelle Série, April 1972, pp. 54–5. Luxemburg also writes: ‘We do not accept Comrade Plekhanov’s reproach that [the Bolsheviks] have been the victims of Bianquist mistakes during the course of the revolution. It is possible that there were traces of this in the organizational project drafted by Lenin in 1902, but that is something which belongs to the past; to a distant past, for today life moves fast, at a dizzying speed. These errors have been corrected by life itself.’

[81] ‘The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions’, Waters, op. cit. pp. 201–3. Emphasis added.

[82] Ibid. pp. 158, 199, 205.

[83] Cited in Nettl, op. cit. Vol. 1, p. 370.

[84] Pyatyi (Londonskii) S’ezd RSDRP, Aprel’-mai 1907 goda, Protokoly, Moscow 1963, pp. 97–104. I am grateful to Michael Waller for making translations of these speeches for me.

[85] Ibid. pp. 383–90.

[86] Ibid. p. 397.

[87] Ibid. pp. 432–5.

[88] Ibid. p. 97.

[89] Ibid. p. 436. Emphasis added.

[90] ‘La révolution en Russie’, R. Luxemburg, Oeuvres II: Écrits politiques 1917–1918, Paris 1969, p. 21.

[91] ‘Deux messages de Pâques’, Ibid. p. 39.

[92] R. Luxemburg, Lettres ` Karl et Luise Kautsky, Paris 1970, p. 130.

[93] ‘The Russian Revolution’, Waters, op. cit. pp. 367–8, 375, 395.