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WorkRosa Luxemburg

Aufsätze und Artikel

(lit.: Essays and Articles)

A quarter-century of journalism, from a student's strike reports to the article printed the day before her murder.

by Rosa Luxemburg1,361 passages held

  • German, the original language
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First published
(aged 48)
Original language
German

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Overview

For a quarter of a century the daily and weekly press was where Rosa Luxemburg did her arguing. These pieces run from 1893, when she was a student in Zürich writing for the Polish socialist press, to January 1919. They appeared in the Leipziger Volkszeitung, a Social Democratic daily; in Die Neue Zeit, the party's theoretical weekly, edited by Karl Kautsky; in the illegal Spartacus letters of the war years; and finally in Die Rote Fahne, the Berlin daily she edited after her release from prison in November 1918. Most are arguments with named people. In 1899 she reviews, as an ally, Kautsky's book against Eduard Bernstein, who wanted the party to give up revolution for reform. In 1901 she examines the case of Alexandre Millerand, the French socialist who had joined a non-socialist cabinet, and concludes that a socialist minister ends by defending the government he sits in. By 1910 the opponent is Kautsky himself. During the campaign for equal suffrage in Prussia she urges the party towards a mass strike and wants it to demand a republic; the party's central daily and Kautsky's weekly both turn down her article, and a Dortmund party paper prints it. In "Ermattung oder Kampf?" and "Die Theorie und die Praxis" she then attacks his advice to wear the enemy down by waiting for the next elections. "Friedensutopien" (1911) argues that agreements to limit armaments cannot restrain powers whose rivalry is economic. The wartime pieces begin with "Der Wiederaufbau der Internationale" of April 1915, which says that on 4 August 1914 German Social Democracy abdicated and the International collapsed with it. The last, "Die Ordnung herrscht in Berlin", appeared in Die Rote Fahne on 14 January 1919, after government troops had put down the Berlin rising. Its title recalls the announcement made in Paris in 1831, when Russian troops had retaken Warsaw. She was murdered the next day.

Key concepts

What is the strategy of attrition Luxemburg argues against in 1910?

It is Karl Kautsky's view that the workers' movement wins by wearing its opponent down and avoiding any decisive clash. He set it against a strategy of overthrow, which he thought had been right only until the Paris Commune of 1871. In practice it meant building the organisation and waiting for the next Reichstag elections. Luxemburg replies in “Ermattung oder Kampf?” that a movement told to wait while it is in the streets will stop.

What does Luxemburg mean by parliamentary cretinism?

It is the illusion that parliament is the axis of social life and that history is made by the speeches of a few hundred deputies. In “Sozialdemokratie und Parlamentarismus” she calls it the natural outgrowth of middle-class politics. Whoever suffers from it overlooks the forces at work outside the chamber, in the economy and among the mass of people. Her conclusion is practical: a parliament has weight only when a movement outside it gives weight to what is said inside.

What did Marx give the workers' movement, in Luxemburg's essays?

He gave it a knowledge of where society is heading, which she compares to Ariadne's thread, the cord that led Theseus out of the labyrinth. In the article “Karl Marx” of 1903 she writes that Marx discovered the modern working class as a class with its own conditions of existence and laws of movement. With that knowledge a workers' party can link each small daily task to its final aim, and so knows what it is doing.

What is council government, as Luxemburg uses the term in 1918?

Council government means that all power lies with the workers' and soldiers' councils, the bodies elected in factories and barracks during the German revolution of November 1918. Luxemburg sets it against a national assembly chosen by the whole population. In “Nationalversammlung oder Räteregierung?” she presents the two as a choice between giving up socialism and fighting for it, since an assembly in which owners and workers vote together cannot, in her view, decide the conflict between them.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Whether a workers' party waits or fights

Over twenty years the same question returns in these pieces under new names: may socialists share in governing, rely on elections, hold back a movement already in the streets?

In 1899 the French socialist Alexandre Millerand entered a non-socialist cabinet. Luxemburg's articles on the case hold that in bourgeois society a socialist party is by nature an opposition, and that Millerand, who stayed in office after troops shot strikers, ended as the government's hostage. In 1904 she describes the Reichstag as a machine for saying yes to decisions taken elsewhere, worth defending only with pressure from outside it. In 1910 the opponent is Karl Kautsky, who advised wearing the enemy down until the next elections. She answers that this strategy of attrition comes to nothing but parliamentarism, and asks the party to raise the demand for a republic.

  • political strategy
  • parliamentary politics
  • mass strikes
  • republicanism
  • party politics
  • social democracy
  • political action
  • mass movements
  • trade unions

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Armaments, war and the International

Can war be restrained by treaties while the rivalry that causes it goes on? And what is an international movement worth if it holds only in peacetime?

“Peace Utopias” of 1911 answers the first question. Fifteen years of colonial wars and naval laws had shown, Luxemburg argues, that militarism belongs to capitalism, so that agreements to limit arms are as illusory as plans to limit crises. The wartime pieces take up the second. “Rebuilding the International” opens by saying that on 4 August 1914 German Social Democracy abdicated, and ridicules the theory that the International is a tool for peacetime only. “Party Discipline” turns the charge of indiscipline around: obedience is owed to the party's programme and congress decisions, and the deputies who voted for war were the ones who broke it.

  • imperialism
  • militarism
  • war
  • internationalism
  • nationalism
  • class struggle

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Defeat as a school: the articles of 1918 and 1919

The last pieces were written for Die Rote Fahne in the ten weeks between her release from prison and her death. They ask who should hold power in Germany, and what a lost battle is worth.

In December 1918 the question was whether an elected national assembly or the workers' and soldiers' councils should rule. Luxemburg calls the assembly a husk left over from bourgeois revolutions, and recalls that in England Cromwell's cavalry settled matters and the speeches in Parliament did not. After the Berlin rising of January 1919 had been put down she wrote “Order Reigns in Berlin”. The rising could not have won, she admits, while the soldiers still obeyed their officers. The leadership failed. Yet every revolution has advanced through defeats, each a part of its later strength, and an order kept up by massacres is built on sand.

  • revolution
  • political power
  • democracy
  • proletariat
  • working class
  • socialism
  • class conflict

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Within this work

passages held
1,361
distinct concepts
836
by passages held, corpus-wide
#47

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “class struggle” and “socialism”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 79 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
class strugglesocialism52
class strugglerevolution44
political strategysocialism27
political strategyrevolution25
labor movementtrade unions24
revolutionsocialism23
class strugglepolitical strategy19
class strugglelabor movement18
social democracytrade unions18
class strugglesocial democracy17
class struggletrade unions16
political strategysocial democracy16
capitalismsocialism15
capitalismclass struggle13
socialismtrade unions13
labor movementpolitical strategy12
labor movementsocialism11
capitalismrevolution10
capitalismtrade unions10
political strategytrade unions9
revolutionsocial democracy9
labor movementsocial democracy7
labor movementrevolution6
revolutiontrade unions6
capitalismsocial democracy4
social democracysocialism3
capitalismpolitical strategy2
capitalismlabor movement1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1899 Reform or Revolution (Sozialreform oder Revolution?)

    Within a year of her arrival in Berlin she had written the newspaper articles gathered here. Their case about where reform stops is the ground she argues from in everything later.

     DE
  2. 1904 Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy (Organisationsfragen der russischen Sozialdemokratie)

    Written against Lenin's plan for a party, this is her sustained piece on how one should be organised. The prison manuscript on the Russian Revolution took the argument up again fourteen years later.

     DE
  3. 1905 Socialism and the Churches (Kościół a socjalizm)

    The Polish side of her work: a pamphlet for the party she helped to lead in Russian Poland, written in the revolutionary year that she analysed afterwards in The Mass Strike.

     DE
  4. 1906 The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (Massenstreik, Partei und Gewerkschaften)

    The fullest statement of her view that mass action cannot be scheduled by leaders. The dispute it opened with the trade unions came back in 1910 as her break with Karl Kautsky, the party's leading theorist.

     DE
  5. 1913 The Accumulation of Capital (Die Akkumulation des Kapitals)

    Among pamphlets and articles, this is the one full-length treatise she finished. It supplies the economic basis for the account of war she gave three years later in the Junius Pamphlet.

     DE
  6. 1916 The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy (The “Junius” Pamphlet) (Die Krise der Sozialdemokratie)

    The account of imperialism from The Accumulation of Capital, applied three years later to an actual war and to the party that had voted for it.

     DE
  7. 1919 Aufsätze und Artikel you are here DE
  8. 1919 Reden

    What she said aloud, on the questions her articles and pamphlets argue in print, from her first months in Germany in 1898 to the last weeks of her life.

     DE
  9. 1922 The Russian Revolution (Die russische Revolution)

    She left it unfinished in Breslau prison in 1918, and Paul Levi printed it four years later. It returns to the objection she had made to Lenin in 1904, now that his party held a state.

     DE
  10. 1925 Introduction to Political Economy (Einführung in die Nationalökonomie)

    Her economics as she taught it: plainer than The Accumulation of Capital, which grew out of it, and the place where her reading on communal societies before capitalism is set out.

     DE
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