WorkRosa Luxemburg

Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy

A 1904 review of Lenin's plan for a centralised party, asking who in a workers' movement is supposed to do the thinking.

by Rosa Luxemburg48 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Organisationsfragen der russischen Sozialdemokratie
First published: 1904(aged 33)
Original language: German

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Overview

In 1935 a small anti-parliamentary group in Glasgow reprinted a German article of thirty years earlier under a title its author never gave it: Leninism or Marxism? The name stuck. What Rosa Luxemburg had published in July 1904 was a review of a book. It ran in two issues of Die Neue Zeit, the theoretical weekly of the German Social Democrats, and in Russian in the party paper Iskra. The Russian Social Democrats had split the year before, and in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back Lenin defended his side of the quarrel: a tightly organised party whose central committee could form local committees, choose their members and direct their work. Luxemburg agrees that the scattered Russian circles need one party. Her objection concerns who does the thinking in it. Lenin had praised the factory for teaching workers discipline; she answers that obedience learned under a foreman or in a barracks is the habit a socialist movement exists to break. The tactics that had carried the Russian movement forward, she points out, were not devised by any committee. The mass strike at Rostov-on-Don broke out on its own, with street meetings improvised on the spot, and the leaders followed. A centre with the powers Lenin wanted would be good at one thing, supervision, and she compares its spirit to a night-watchman's. The mistakes of a real workers' movement, she concludes, teach more than the infallibility of the best central committee. Lenin wrote a reply that September and sent it to Karl Kautsky, the editor of Die Neue Zeit, who would not print it; it stayed unpublished until 1930.

Key concepts

What does Luxemburg mean by ultra-centralism?

Ultra-centralism is her name for Lenin's plan of organisation. It rests on two rules. Every local body obeys a centre that thinks, decides and acts for all, and the organised revolutionaries are kept sharply apart from the wider circle of sympathisers around them. In practice the central committee could set up local committees, name their members, give them their statutes and dissolve them. Luxemburg accepts a united party and rejects this way of uniting it.

What is the self-centralism Luxemburg sets against Lenin's plan?

Self-centralism is the majority of a party's active, politically schooled workers ruling over its separate groups and individuals. The centre gathers the members' will and has none apart from them. Luxemburg names two conditions for it: a broad layer of workers already trained in political struggle, and the means for them to exert influence openly, through party congresses and the party press. In the Russia of 1904, she adds, both were only beginning to exist.

What is Blanquism, and why does Luxemburg bring it up?

Blanquism is the idea that a small, tightly disciplined conspiracy seizes power for the people, who learn of it afterwards. Such a group needs no daily life among the masses: its plan is fixed in advance and its members only carry it out, so blind obedience suits it. Luxemburg argues that Lenin has taken this model of organisation and fitted it onto a mass movement, whose tactics arise in the struggle and cannot be laid down beforehand.

What role does spontaneity play in this essay?

Spontaneity means that workers act before any organisation has decided they should. Luxemburg treats it as the source of every new form of struggle. Her phrase is that the unconscious comes before the conscious: people do something new under pressure of events, and only afterwards is it understood and taken up as a tactic. Her cases are Russian, such as the textile strike in St Petersburg in 1896, which no socialist group had planned.

How does Luxemburg explain opportunism here?

Opportunism, the readiness to trade socialist principle for quick gains, is for Luxemburg a product of circumstances and not of bad rules. It enters with recruits from outside the working class, intellectuals above all, and it feeds on parliamentary work inside the existing order. It has no fixed view of organisation. In Germany its spokesmen wanted loose structures, but in a young movement, she warns, strict centralism serves them better, since a few educated leaders then command the rest.

Themes of the book

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

Who does the thinking in a workers' party

Luxemburg grants Lenin that scattered groups need one party. Her question is what the centre is for: to gather the will of the members, or to replace it?

In Lenin's plan the central committee forms the local committees, decides who sits on them and can dissolve them, so that every other body becomes its tool. Luxemburg traces this to conspiracies of the Jacobin and Blanquist kind, where a few plan and the rest carry out. A workers' party is another thing, she argues: it is the class's own movement, and its centralism can only be the majority of its active members ruling themselves. Lenin had praised the factory as a school of discipline. She answers that a baton passed from the employer to a committee still conducts people who have been trained not to think.

centralization
democratic centralism
party discipline
political organization
party organization
bureaucracy
conspiracy
political theory

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A movement that learns from its own mistakes

Where do a movement's tactics come from, and who keeps it from going wrong? Luxemburg holds that workers find their way by acting, and that a guardian who spares them every error also spares them the lesson.

Every turning point in the Russian movement, Luxemburg observes, came unplanned: the St Petersburg strike of 1896, the student demonstrations of 1901, the mass strike at Rostov-on-Don. The deed came first and the leaders followed. Leadership, she holds, is by nature conservative and turns each gain into a bulwark against the next. Lenin wanted the party statute to bar opportunism, the watering down of principle. She replies that this drift grows out of the conditions of the struggle and cannot be kept out on paper, and that a rigid centre delivers a young movement to a handful of intellectuals. Workers must be free to make their own errors.

mass movements
spontaneity
worker autonomy
political education
political agency
opportunism
intellectuals
political tactics
political practice

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Within this work

passages held: 48
distinct concepts: 92
by passages held, corpus-wide: #658

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: “centralization” and “political organization”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 7 concepts, joined by 17 pairings. 40 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
centralization	political organization	8
mass movements	political organization	6
opportunism	political organization	6
centralization	mass movements	5
democratic centralism	political organization	5
class struggle	political organization	4
opportunism	social democracy	3
class struggle	democratic centralism	2
class struggle	mass movements	2
centralization	class struggle	1
centralization	democratic centralism	1
centralization	opportunism	1
centralization	social democracy	1
class struggle	social democracy	1
democratic centralism	opportunism	1
mass movements	opportunism	1
political organization	social democracy	1

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.

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
1904 Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy (Organisationsfragen der russischen Sozialdemokratie) you are here DE
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
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
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
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
1919 Aufsätze und Artikel
Newspaper and journal pieces from 1893 to 1919, the running record beside the books. They include the 1910 polemics against Karl Kautsky and her last articles for Die Rote Fahne.
DE
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
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
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

— or open another of their works