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WorkRosa Luxemburg

Reden

(lit.: Speeches)

Some seventy speeches to party congresses, mass meetings and courts, most of them preserved in congress minutes and newspaper reports.

by Rosa Luxemburg612 passages held

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

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Overview

A speech in September 1913 cost her a year in prison. Speaking at meetings in Frankfurt, Rosa Luxemburg had said that German workers, if they were ordered to shoot at their French brothers, would refuse. On 20 February 1914 a Frankfurt court convicted her of inciting soldiers to disobedience. Her address to the judges that day is one of the speeches here. She leaves the legal points to her lawyers and tells the court what she believes: wars can be fought only as long as the mass of working people either support them or put up with them. A few of the speeches survive only in the third person, as a reporter took them down. The earliest is from the Social Democratic congress at Stuttgart in October 1898, five months after she arrived in Germany. There she told the delegates that for a revolutionary party no question was more practical than its final goal. Later speeches show her at the congresses of the Socialist International; at the London congress of the Russian party in 1907, where she spoke on the revolution of 1905; before another court, in Weimar; and at mass meetings during the Prussian suffrage campaign, pressing the mass strike on party leaders who preferred to wait. The last come from the founding congress of the Communist Party of Germany, which met in Berlin from 30 December 1918 to 1 January 1919. Luxemburg argued there that the new party should stand in the elections to the National Assembly and use them as a new instrument of the revolutionary struggle. The delegates voted against her, 62 to 23.

Key concepts

What does Luxemburg mean by cadaver obedience?

Cadaver obedience is obedience without a will of one's own, the soldier carrying out orders as a corpse would let itself be moved. In her Frankfurt defence of 1914 Luxemburg says the prosecutor and the Kaiser both see it as the foundation of the state and of victory in war. She sets another view against it: whether wars happen and how they end is decided by what the mass of working people think and will accept.

What is world policy in Luxemburg's speeches?

World policy, Weltpolitik, is her name for the reaching of the great powers beyond Europe, with fleets, colonies and expeditions such as the one against China in 1900. Speaking for two commissions of the Paris congress of the International that year, she called militarism and colonial policy two sides of this one phenomenon. The practical point was that socialists could no longer confine themselves to declarations and needed joint international action.

What role does Luxemburg give the liberal middle class in a revolution?

She gives it none as a leader. At the London congress of the Russian party in 1907 she attacked the view that the middle class is the natural vanguard of a revolution against the tsar and that workers must not frighten it. That scheme, she said, was taken from earlier revolutions and no longer fitted. The Russian liberals had retreated: in the second Duma they voted the budget and the recruits for the government that would dissolve them.

What was the damping that Luxemburg attacked in 1912?

Damping was the party executive's promise to hold back its own election campaign in sixteen constituencies, as part of a pact with the Progressive liberals for the run-off round of the 1912 Reichstag elections. Luxemburg told party meetings that the executive should have refused the liberals' condition outright. An election campaign, in her view, exists to enlighten and rouse the mass of voters, and a party that mutes its agitation gives up that purpose for the sake of seats.

Themes of the book

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

Why the final goal is the most practical question

From her first congress speech onward Luxemburg presses one point on her party: its everyday work is socialist only if it is tied to the taking of power. How does she argue it face to face with the veterans?

At Stuttgart in October 1898, five months after arriving in Germany, she told the delegates that trade unions, social reform and democracy are pursued by liberals too, and that only their link to the final goal makes them socialist. Called a raw recruit, she answered that she would earn her epaulettes on the left wing. A year later, at Hanover, she took apart the idea that workers must first gain economic power: the middle class had created a new form of property before it ruled, and workers create none. Speaking on the party school in 1908, she said its students leave knowing they must go on learning.

  • socialism
  • class struggle
  • political strategy
  • political education
  • parliamentary politics
  • social democracy
  • trade unions
  • labor movement
  • political power

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Speaking against war, in meetings and in court

Twice she stood before a court for what she had said from a platform. Her speeches on war and her answers to the judges make the same claim: wars depend on the people who are sent to fight them.

At the Paris congress of the International in 1900 Luxemburg called militarism and colonial policy two sides of one thing, world policy. In the same year she reproached her party for thundering against militarism in peacetime and doing nothing when German troops left for China. Before the Frankfurt court in February 1914 she rejected the prosecutor's picture of an army resting on blind obedience. Wars are possible, she said, only while the working mass joins in or tolerates them, and to change that conviction is the task socialists set themselves. To the suggestion that she might flee her sentence she replied that a Social Democrat stands by his deeds.

  • militarism
  • war
  • political repression
  • internationalism
  • imperialism
  • political rhetoric

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Pressure from the street and the uses of an election

When should a party call people into the streets, and when should it send them to the polls? The speeches of 1910 to 1918 argue both, against leaders who wanted to wait and against delegates who wanted to hurry.

In the Prussian suffrage campaign of 1910 Luxemburg spoke at mass meetings for the political mass strike. A hundred thousand people in Berlin's Tiergarten had shown, she said, what the street could win. No state declines to fight for fear of breaking its cannon, and organisations exist to be used. In 1912 she attacked the party executive for damping its own campaign in a pact with the liberals. At the founding congress of the Communist Party she argued the other way, against delegates who would boycott the National Assembly elections. Machine guns or parliament was too crude a choice, she told them. They voted her down.

  • mass strike
  • suffrage
  • mass politics
  • collective action
  • democracy
  • parliamentarism
  • revolution
  • party politics

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Within this work

passages held
612
distinct concepts
534
by passages held, corpus-wide
#116

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 “revolution”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 26 pairings. 82 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
class strugglerevolution23
class strugglesocialism20
capitalismclass struggle16
capitalismsocialism14
mass strikerevolution14
class strugglepolitical strategy13
mass strikepolitical strategy13
class strugglelabor movement12
class strugglemass strike12
revolutionsocialism11
capitalismmilitarism10
labor movementmass strike9
labor movementpolitical strategy6
militarismsocialism6
political strategyrevolution6
class strugglemilitarism5
labor movementsocialism5
capitalismrevolution4
mass strikesocialism4
political strategysocialism4
capitalismlabor movement2
capitalismmass strike2
labor movementrevolution2
capitalismpolitical strategy1
militarismpolitical strategy1
militarismrevolution1

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

    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
  8. 1919 Reden you are here 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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