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Rosa Luxemburg on revolutionary violence

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Abstract

Rosa Luxemburg is considered as important critic of the economic and political violence which is indispensable to the capitalist system. However, little is written about her concept of revolutionary violence, as is usually the case in the context of her criticism of the Russian revolution. The aim of the article is to reconstruct her views on revolutionary violence based on less known sources. The analysis shows that the Polish Marxist was an original theoretician of revolutionary violence who consiedered the issues of armed uprising and the use of brutal means against counter-revolutionaries in an interesting and unique way.

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Notes

  1. It is also worth noting in this context that during the fights of the 1905 Revolution on the Polish territory, the tactics of the SDKPiL (Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania) were similarly subversive. For several months, there were battle groups set up by this party, which carried out acts of individual terror against confidants and officers of the tsarist regime. This was probably not done without Luxemburg's knowledge.

  2. Lenin was not interested in strictly military matters such as logistics, creating fortifications, etc., but he was quite well-versed in the subject of warfare. The primary view in the literature, that he did not know about military matters, is largely a myth supported by Stalin's statements (See Dexter 1950). This is quite ironic because, as a result, most of the merits in terms of the effectiveness of the Bolsheviks in war affairs are attributed to Trotsky.

  3. This happened only in 1921, thanks to a friend of the Polish revolutionist from the Communist Party of Germany—Paul Levy, who was removed from the party for criticizing the support of the Central Committee of the KPD for a workers' uprising in central Germany in March of the same year. The publication of this booklet was to be part of the fight with party leadership.

  4. In practice, Luxemburg had a rather flexible approach to the Constituent Assembly. When the movement of workers' and soldiers' councils was pacified in Germany, she took into account that the Constituent Assembly could play a revolutionary role if the masses elected revolutionary deputies to them. This does not change the fact that at that time she ceased to believe in revolutionary changes through parliamentary channels (Szlezinger 1966).

  5. Especially that there is no information about whether she changed her views on the army and her attachment to anachronistic concept of workers militia.

  6. However, historians estimate that the failure of the German Revolution is largely to blame on the Spartacists themselves, as they did not work properly with the masses and they created their own party too late. (Czubiński 1988, 106–130).

  7. The Bolshevik leader himself aptly diagnosed the nature of military operations a few years earlier: 'when the war breaks out, all historically created political relations between classes! There are "simply" those who attack and defending themselves, "simply" the warding off "the enemies of the fatherland"!' (Lenin 1974, 220). It is not hard to imagine that such a situation is intensifying in the face of civil war. Doctrine ceases to count, and survival is what matters the most.

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  1. Independent Researcher, Chodkiewicza 18/50, 80-506, Gdańsk, Poland

    Damian Winczewski

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Winczewski, D. Rosa Luxemburg on revolutionary violence. Stud East Eur Thought 72, 117–134 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-020-09358-2

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