To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Rosa Luxemburg’s heroic death, we present this translation of Luxemburg’s thought on the building of a new International, translated and with an introduction by Rida Vaquas.
It is difficult to know how to commemorate someone who you have never really seen as dead, a woman who shapes the contours of your mental landscape with a startling intimacy. (Certainly, her words have sat with me and taken my hand in many difficult hours of the past six or seven years). Moreover, I am wary of the insipid kinds of commemoration that really kill a revolutionary by making them harmless. No revolutionary, besides perhaps Marx, has experienced the process described by Lenin of “hallowing their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it” more than Luxemburg. Whilst Lenin’s name can still provoke a few into a blind rage, very few give Luxemburg the credit of being a clear and present danger to the capitalist system, and the opportunists and cowards who lull themselves into being its supporters. To commemorate Luxemburg properly these days means making her so dangerous that not one of the descendants of the December Men (the SPD centrists) will dare invoke her name. To commemorate her properly means bringing out her ideas, her programme, her revolutionary will into blazing life.
What strikes me about Luxemburg these days is her clarity, a quality that has both unsettled and inspired those who encounter her over the years. Zinoviev described her as the “clear intelligence” of the German Communist Party in 1920. In 1922, the group Rote Jugend (Red Youth) described her as part of “the ones who brought together proletarian class consciousness, theoretical clarity and practical activity” who are now lost to us. With regards to her relationship with Leo Jogiches, her male biographer J.P. Nettl accused her of “blinding” clarity which was “the most destructive element in all human relationships”. What Nettl misses is that there was no way for Luxemburg to love without clarity.
To know how to love is to know how to see things for what they are. That means being able to appreciate them in the fullness of their existence outside of how you desire them to be. Rosa Luxemburg was not an incurable optimist because she did not know what German Social Democracy was like. She was an incurable optimist because she knew precisely what German Social Democracy was like and hence could discern its capacity for transformation all the more sharply. Clarity is not simply a weapon against false hope, it is a weapon against the distorting effects of despair upon political action. Nothing in Rosa Luxemburg yields to howling, which she rightly derided as “for the weak”.
However, it is all too easy to idealize her clarity, her ability to grasp the deliberately occluded dynamics of the world. It was not a gift and it was not a miracle. She obtained her clarity through years of hard work. This included serious and dedicated study, for which her multiple spells in prison were immensely useful, but also the more routine party work; going to Silesia to run an election campaign amongst workers there, writing articles for the various party newspapers, addressing demonstrations. It is essential that we do not exceptionalise Luxemburg for her clarity, but do everything we can to obtain it for ourselves.
This kind of clarity is not compatible with the brittle “unity” which calls for submerging our differences in principles under a red banner and getting on with it. That kind of unity is only a vulgar ‘follow the leader’ game that Luxemburg, a woman who unhesitatingly butted heads with every leading theorist of her time, had no patience for. It calls for a meaningful unity, a unity based on a shared political programme, that has been worked out over countless hours of discussion — one which seeks not to evade divisive questions, but answers them boldly.
The Resolution she presented to the second conference of the International Group (the forerunner to the Spartacist League), which I have translated below, exemplifies the kind of revolutionary internationalism we are still working towards.
Resolution on the Character of the New International
This resolution was passed unanimously at the second national conference of the “International Group” in Social Democracy. The conference took place on 19th March 1916, composed of delegates of 17 different cities. The second resolution Rosa Luxemburg proposed related to the obligations of Social Democratic parliamentarians, in which she advocated that war credits had to be rejected at every vote on the basis of socialist principles.
The new International, which must rise again after the disintegration of the old on 4th August 1914, can only be born out of the revolutionary class struggle of the proletarian masses in the biggest capitalist nations. The existence and effectiveness of the International is not a question of organisation, it is not a question of a common understanding between a small circle of people, who appear as representatives of the opposition-minded sections of the workers. It is a question of the mass movement of the proletariat of all countries returning to socialism. In contrast with the International which collapsed on 4th August 1914, whose only external authority and existence consisted of the loose relationships of small groups of party and trade union leaders, the new International must root itself in the convictions, the capacity for action and the daily praxis of the broadest proletarian masses in order to be a real political force. The International will be resurrected from below to this extent and through the same process: how the working class of all warring nations, freeing themselves from the fetters of the civil truce and the poisonous influence of their official leaders, will throw themselves into revolutionary class struggle. The first word of this struggle must be the systematic mass action to secure peace, and this alone can be the hour of birth for the new, living, active International.
As a symptom that the orientation of socialist circles across different countries in this direction is already underway and an international association is increasingly a requirement for these groups, the conference welcomes the direction of the “International”, i.e. the united opposition of German Social Democracy on the basis of the “Guiding Principles”, the Zimmerwald meeting from which the conference in Hague has emerged, and expects that its expressions will create new impulses in order to accelerate the birth of the International from the energetic will of the proletarian masses.
