WorkRosa Luxemburg

The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions

What the Russian strikes of 1905 had shown, written in Finland weeks after a Warsaw prison, for a German party about to vote.

by Rosa Luxemburg171 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Massenstreik, Partei und Gewerkschaften
First published: 1906(aged 35)
Original language: German

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Overview

The Social Democrats of Hamburg had asked Rosa Luxemburg for a pamphlet in time for the party congress at Mannheim in September 1906, where the question was whether German workers might ever use a political mass strike. She wrote it that August in the Finnish village of Kuokkala, a few weeks after she was released on bail from a Warsaw prison. She had gone to Warsaw in December 1905 to take part in the Russian revolution and was arrested there in March. The trade unions had already answered: their congress at Cologne in May 1905 rejected the idea, and in February 1906 the party executive promised the union leaders, at a confidential meeting, not to promote such a strike without their consent. Both sides, Luxemburg argues, picture the mass strike as a tool that leaders take out or put away. Russia showed something else. She follows the strikes from the St Petersburg textile workers in 1896, through Baku in December 1904, to the January days of 1905, and finds that economic and political strikes kept turning into one another, that nobody had planned them in advance, and that unorganised workers struck first and built their unions afterwards. Organisation, on this account, grows out of the struggle. It does not have to be complete before a struggle can begin. A mass strike is therefore the form a revolutionary period takes, and a party can neither order one nor forbid it; its task is to give political direction when the movement comes. Union leaders rejected the pamphlet as too radical. The Mannheim congress agreed that the party would call no mass strike without them.

Key concepts

What is a political mass strike, as Luxemburg uses the term?

It is her name for a whole period of class struggle, lasting years, in which strikes of every kind follow and feed one another. She rejects the picture of a single planned stoppage for one political demand. That fits only the short demonstration strike, a minor variety. In Russia general strikes of whole cities, wage disputes in single factories, street fights and peaceful walkouts ran side by side, and she counts them all as one movement.

What was the anarchist idea of the general strike?

It was the belief that all workers would one day lay down their tools together and that this stoppage would bring the old society down without political struggle. Engels had answered it in 1873 with a dilemma, which Luxemburg quotes. Either the workers are too weakly organised to carry out such a strike, or they are strong enough to need no such detour. She holds that 1905 made both the idea and the reply obsolete.

What does Luxemburg mean by the spontaneous element?

The spontaneous element is everything in a mass movement that no leadership has decided: when a strike breaks out, how far it spreads, when it ebbs. Luxemburg finds it in every Russian mass strike, sometimes driving the movement forward and sometimes holding it back. Her reason is that too many economic, political and psychological causes meet in each event for anyone to calculate it like a sum. Leading then means keeping close touch with the mood of the mass.

What is the difference between latent and active class consciousness?

Latent class consciousness is knowledge that workers hold without acting on it together. Active class consciousness shows itself in what the mass does. Luxemburg uses the pair to compare Germany and Russia. The educated German worker has learned his view of society from the party, and in quiet parliamentary times it appears only in election campaigns and separate wage disputes. In a revolution the mass itself steps onto the political stage, and what was theory becomes practice.

Where does Luxemburg locate the conflict between party and unions?

She locates it between the party and one layer of union officials, and denies that party members and union members are opposed, since they are largely the same workers. Fifteen years of growth in calm times, she argues, produced a body of full-time union officers. Their specialised work and narrow field of vision led to what she calls bureaucratism: the organisation, once a means, became an end to be protected from the risks of any struggle.

Themes of the book

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

A mass strike can be neither ordered nor forbidden

German unions and party leaders argued over whether to permit a political mass strike. Luxemburg holds that both sides were debating something that no committee has in its gift.

Supporters and opponents alike, Luxemburg argues, picture the mass strike as a pocket-knife carried folded and opened by resolution. The Russian events of 1905 showed otherwise. Strikes over wages turned into political demonstrations and fell back into wage disputes, unplanned, and each defeat prepared the next wave. She calls the mass strike the living pulse of the revolution, a name for a whole period of struggle and not for a single act. The anarchists' general strike, meant to topple society at one blow, was buried in Bakunin's own country. A party cannot summon such a movement. Its task is to give it political direction once it has begun.

mass strikes
revolution
spontaneity
general strike
anarchism
political leadership
revolutionary strategy
economic struggle
political struggle
collective action
labor strikes

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Organisation grows out of the struggle

Must workers be organised before they can fight, or do they organise because they are fighting? Luxemburg's answer decides how much the unorganised majority counts.

German union leaders held that a great strike needed strong organisations and full treasuries first, and feared a revolutionary storm would smash them like porcelain. Russia showed the reverse order, Luxemburg reports: unorganised workers struck, and unions rose from the strikes like Venus from the sea-foam. A century of quiet union work in England had organised only a better-off minority. The rest, railwaymen, postal workers and farm labourers among them, are reached in periods of open struggle. She therefore rejects the unions' claim to equal standing beside the party. They are one part of a single movement, and the quarrel is with a layer of officials, not with the members.

trade unions
labor unions
labor organization
class consciousness
social democracy
working class
political organization
labor movement
political education

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Within this work

passages held: 171
distinct concepts: 162
by passages held, corpus-wide: #387

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: “mass strikes” and “revolution”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 76 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
mass strikes	revolution	29
class struggle	mass strikes	19
mass strikes	trade unions	12
social democracy	trade unions	12
class struggle	trade unions	10
class consciousness	revolution	9
labor movement	trade unions	9
class consciousness	trade unions	8
labor movement	mass strikes	8
mass strikes	working class	7
class consciousness	social democracy	6
class struggle	revolution	6
class struggle	social democracy	6
labor movement	revolution	6
labor movement	social democracy	6
revolution	trade unions	6
revolution	working class	6
class consciousness	working class	5
mass strikes	social democracy	5
trade unions	working class	5
class consciousness	labor movement	4
class struggle	labor movement	4
revolution	social democracy	4
class consciousness	class struggle	2
class struggle	working class	2
social democracy	working class	2
class consciousness	mass strikes	1
labor movement	working class	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)
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
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) you are here 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