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WorkRosa Luxemburg

The Russian Revolution

An unfinished prison manuscript that defends the Bolsheviks for taking power and criticises what they did with it.

by Rosa Luxemburg75 passages held

  • German, the original language
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Original title
Die russische Revolution
First published
(published posthumously)
Original language
German

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Overview

Her most quoted sentence is a note in the margin of a manuscript she never finished. It says that freedom reserved for the supporters of a government, or for the members of one party, is not freedom; freedom is always that of the person who thinks differently. Rosa Luxemburg wrote the manuscript in the autumn of 1918 in Breslau prison, working from German newspapers and from Russian publications smuggled in to her, and she meant it for Paul Levi, a lawyer and fellow leader of the Spartacus group. It opens by defending the Bolsheviks against the German socialists who held that Russia was not ripe for revolution. Lenin and Trotsky, she writes, showed the revolutionary honour and the capacity to act that social democracy in the West had lacked. Then she turns to what they did with power. Giving the land to the peasants created a mass of new owners who would resist socialism. Promising the nations of the empire a right to secede handed Finland, Ukraine and the Baltic lands to the counter-revolution. Dissolving the elected Constituent Assembly in January 1918, and then restricting the vote, the press and the right of assembly, cut off the public life from which a new society has to learn. Socialism, she argues, cannot be introduced by decree, because no one holds the plan in advance. Without elections and open debate the soviets themselves go dead, a few dozen party leaders rule, and the bureaucracy is the only part still active. She lays part of the blame on the German workers, who had left the Russians to act alone. The text was unpublished when she was murdered on 15 January 1919. Levi printed it in 1922, the year after the German Communist Party expelled him. Clara Zetkin, her friend and ally, replied that Luxemburg had changed her mind after leaving prison. A fuller manuscript came to light in 1928. In East Germany in 1988, opposition activists who quoted the marginal sentence at a demonstration were arrested.

Key concepts

What does Luxemburg mean by the dictatorship of the proletariat?

She means rule by the working class, exercised through the widest democracy. Its dictatorial side lies in firm intervention against the property rights of the old society. In her words it consists in the way democracy is used and not in its abolition, and it must be the work of the class, under public control, and never of a small leading minority acting in the class's name. Lenin and Trotsky, she objects, treat dictatorship and democracy as opposites.

What is the right of nations to self-determination that Luxemburg criticises?

It is the Bolshevik formula that every nationality of the Russian empire may decide its own fate, up to and including separation from Russia. Luxemburg calls it an empty phrase under capitalism. A nation, she argues, is divided into classes, and each class wants to determine something different. In Finland and Ukraine the middle classes used the right to break away from the revolution and preferred German occupation to a national freedom that came with Bolshevism.

What is the ripeness argument that Luxemburg rejects?

It is the doctrine that a country can have only the revolution its economy is ready for. Russia was a backward land of peasants, so on this view only a bourgeois republic was due there, and socialists who went further were adventurers. Luxemburg ascribes the doctrine to Kautsky and to the Russian Mensheviks. She answers that the Russian revolution grew from deep roots at home, and that the doctrine served to excuse the socialists of other countries from helping it.

What does Luxemburg call the law of life of every revolution?

The law is that a revolution must either storm ahead and keep setting itself further goals, or be thrown back behind its starting point and crushed. No middle position can be held. Her image is a locomotive on a slope, which climbs at full steam or rolls back down and drags along those who tried to stop it halfway. She cites the English revolution, where each moderate party had to give way to a more determined one.

Why does Luxemburg call terror a blunt and double-edged sword?

Because, in her judgment, it fails at the task set for it and damages those who use it. The harshest summary justice is powerless against the disorder and crime that spread when an old order collapses. A lasting state of siege leads to arbitrary rule, and arbitrary rule corrupts a society. The effective means she names are of another kind: rapid social measures that secure people's livelihood, and the idealism that only unrestricted political freedom keeps alive among the masses.

Themes of the book

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

Freedom for the one who thinks differently

Can a workers' government build socialism while silencing its critics? Luxemburg argues that the freedoms the Bolsheviks suspended are the means by which a new society finds out what it is doing wrong.

Trotsky had defended the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly on the ground that elected bodies lag behind a people in motion. Luxemburg replies that the mood of the people constantly washes around such bodies and steers them, and that abolishing democracy is a cure worse than the disease. Nobody holds a finished plan of socialism. Tearing down can be decreed, building up cannot, and only experience corrects mistakes. Without elections, a free press and open contest of opinion the soviets go lifeless, a few dozen party leaders direct, and the bureaucracy alone stays active. Her marginal note: freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently.

  • democracy
  • political freedom
  • elections
  • political representation
  • suffrage
  • proletarian dictatorship
  • mass participation
  • political education
  • bolshevism

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Land to the peasants, secession to the nations

Two Bolshevik slogans won the revolution its first support: take the land, and every nation may leave. Luxemburg asks what each of them built, and for whom.

Telling the peasants to seize the estates secured their loyalty, Luxemburg concedes, and created what socialism would later have to overcome: a great mass of new owners working small plots with ancient tools, ready to defend them tooth and nail. Socialist reform of the land, she holds, needs large estates taken over whole and tied to industry. The right of nations to separate fared no better. In a society divided into classes no nation decides as one, and in Finland and Ukraine the propertied classes used the slogan to call in German troops. She notes that the same government valued this right highly and elections at home very little.

  • agrarian reform
  • agrarian question
  • land ownership
  • private property
  • nationalism
  • national self-determination
  • counterrevolution

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A revolution that dared, and was left alone

Before she criticises the Bolsheviks, Luxemburg defends them against the socialists who said Russia should have waited. Who failed in 1917, the party that acted or the parties that watched?

German socialists around Karl Kautsky held that backward Russia was ripe only for a bourgeois republic. Luxemburg answers that a revolution cannot stand still at a moderate stage: it presses forward or is thrown back, and the Bolsheviks alone understood this and acted. What the war and the revolution proved unripe, she writes, was the German working class, which left Russia to face German arms alone. Everything the Bolsheviks did wrong was done under that pressure. The danger starts where they turn necessity into a virtue and recommend their emergency measures to others as a model. In Russia, she concludes, the problem could only be posed.

  • revolution
  • internationalism
  • international socialism
  • political strategy
  • imperialism
  • historical change
  • socialism

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Within this work

passages held
75
distinct concepts
129
by passages held, corpus-wide
#567

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: “democracy” and “socialism”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 17 pairings. 62 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
democracysocialism7
political representationrevolution6
counterrevolutionrevolution5
democracyrevolution5
agrarian reformsocialism4
counterrevolutionnationalism4
democracypolitical representation3
national self-determinationrevolution3
nationalismrevolution3
agrarian reformrevolution2
democracynational self-determination2
national self-determinationsocialism2
nationalismsocialism2
revolutionsocialism2
counterrevolutiondemocracy1
counterrevolutionnational self-determination1
political representationsocialism1

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

    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) you are here 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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