Major Work on a Major Figure (Rosa Luxemburg, by J. P. Nettl)
Coser, Lewis
ROSA LvxEMBURG, by J. P. Nettl. Two volumes. London and New York: Oxford University Press. 984 pp. $20.20. By the standards of vulgar Hegelians, such as E. H. Carr, this book should never have...
...They used all the political deviousness, sophistry, and intrigue which characterized so much of Russian— Polish emigre life in the prewar years...
...To some extent Rosa was always aware of this...
...Not only did she personally dislike Germany and never could feel at home there, but she never really understood the peculiar differences between the German movement and the East European...
...Julian Marchlewski always wrote under the name of Karski and was so known in the socialist movement...
...she did...
...Writes Nettl: It is almost as though we were dealing with two different people...
...They followed it out of the morally admirable and politically suicidal urge "not to abandon the masses...
...She represents one of the last offshoots of the great enlightenment tradition...
...I have not dealt with Rosa's peculiar and obsessive opposition to Polish nationalism which put her at odds with practically all Marxists of her generation and fatally undermined her influence among the Polish majority socialists as well as among the Russians...
...she lectured Jogiches about it but without realizing the extent of her own schizophrenia...
...This book, even though based on a number of patently erroneous interpretations of Marx, still contains enough brilliant insights into the nature of imperialism and "underdevelopment" to put to shame all subsequent Marxist writing on the subject...
...All this puts a somewhat different light on her perceptive analysis and critical attack on Leninist centralism and Lenin's 'Blanquist' conceptions (1904...
...But these are very minor blemishes...
...Despite all her critical onslaughts on European Social Democracy, she was above all a part of this movement...
...She was a magnificent orator, a first-class political pamphleteer, a skillful polemicist, but when one reads her writings now through glasses that have been ground in subsequent historical experience he cannot but feel that "the masses" for Rosa always functioned as a kind of deus ex machina whenever a political or theoretical impasse threatened to stop her elan...
...Rosa is remembered, if at all, as the apostle of spontaneity, as a believer in the spontaneous creativity of the masses, as the inveterate adversary of party bureaucracies, be they Leninist or Social Democratic...
...Even the disastrous uprising of January 1919, which led to the assassination of Rosa, Jogiches, and Liebknecht, had not been planned by the Spartakus League...
...It was her tragedy that she approached German and West European society with sets of ideas and ideals which had already become obsolescent there...
...Nettl discusses in exhaustive detail...
...Luckily not all British historians, even on the Left, share Carr's worship of the bitch-Goddess success, and so we owe to J. P. Netts a monumental biography of the great revolutionary socialist...
...Her message was utopian and unrealizable, yet she helped preserve the moral vision of socialism, of a fraternal and democratic alternative to authoritarian and totalitarian collectivism...
...His is a full-scale portrait, warts and all, of the woman, the revolutionary, the political activist, and the socialist theoretician...
...As the intellectual leader of the Spartakus League, that little band of courageous and self-sacrificing socialists who opposed the war and castigated the leaders of the S.P.D...
...Previous writers have been misled in this respect by looking at her only in terms of German socialist history...
...In the years of the struggle against Bernstein's revisionism, the official leadership of Bebel and Kautsky were only too pleased to use her enthusiasm and devotion in their campaign against Bernstein, so that Rosa soon became a nationally and internationally known figure...
...She failed as a political leader, no doubt...
...Rosa Luxemburg's enduring claim to fame clearly derives from her activity in the German socialist movement...
...Kautsky opposed Bernstein because the latter's outspoken revisionist realism threatened to upset the cozy equilibrium of revolutionary phraseology and reformist practice on which the party officials had established their grip on the party...
...She faced a highly organized and bureaucratized Social Democratic movement in Germany, and so she endeavored from the beginning of her career in the German party to galvanize it into action through the mobilization of "spontaneous" working-class energies...
...But she never fully realized, even after her break with Kautsky in 1910, how far her alliance with the official S.P.D...
...Even those who have some detailed knowledge of Rosa's political work and ideas and of the history of the Polish and German socialist movements during her lifetime—and I am afraid there are not very many outside the ranks of specialized historians —will now have to revise a number of their assumptions...
...Not that she opposed party organization in principle, in Germany or elsewhere, as some of her Stalinist detractors have argued, but she sought at all times to prod these masses into action so as to reanimate a recalcitrant and timid party machinery...
...As was bound to happen in so large an enterprise, there are a few minor blemishes in Nettl's work...
...And while Froelich had the advantage of having known Rosa personally, his work was marked by an almost hagiographic attitude toward his heroine and by a somewhat tortured attempt to play down the differences that existed between Rosa and Lenin...
...Although Rosa was an exceptionally integrated person, her every movement controlled by an overall political philsosophy, her politics were mainly reactive and were dictated by the organizational structure of the movement in which she functioned...
...When the war broke out, and international socialism collapsed, Rosa's world came to an end...
...To use their family names in a political history makes as much sense as to refer to Trotsky as Bronstein or to Radek as Sobelson...
...Nettl, though clearly under the spell of Rosa, writes with considerably more distance...
...In her cool and analytical moments Rosa could give herself to deeply pessimistic short-run predictions...
...Rosa Luxemburg's political life (1871-1919) is the record of a magnificent quixotic failure...
...In the last analysis, and this makes for her profound appeal as a person as well as for her ineffectiveness as a theoretician, she was always moved by moral revulsion against capitalist society and by a profoundly humanitarian ideal...
...There are a few errors of fact, for example, Hermann and Kaethe Duncker, founding members of the Spartakus League and later Communist militants—whom I still had the privilege to know—were husband and wife rather than brother and sister...
...Of previous work, only the biography of my friend, the late Paul Froelich (Rosa Luxemburg, Her Life and Work, London, 1940) merits serious attention...
...She was as alien to actual proletarians as Marx had been before her...
...For Rosa, faith in "the masses" and their creative potential was unbound ed...
...I do not mean to imply that she had no following or influence in Germany...
...leadership had been built on a mutual misunderstanding...
...She was indeed a revolutionary Don Quixote and the Hegelian Panzas of this world have good reason to sneer at her lack of realism...
...Her Polish activities, as they are detailed in Nettl's book, appear but too often like replicas of those of Lenin in a party which, similar to his, was little more than a small elite sect...
...By the standards of vulgar Hegelians, such as E. H. Carr, this book should never have been written...
...With all that, Rosa had but little direct relation with the masses about whom she wrote...
...There is no space either to deal with her brilliant analysis of the Russian revolution or with her only major economic treatise The Accumulation of Capital...
...Rosa fought Bernstein because he opposed the Messianic vision of a coming cataclys mic Proletarian Revolution on which her whole world view was premised...
...But her moral heroism, her uncompromising political morality, her utter devotion and commitment remained an example which helped to keep socialist ideals alive through the subsequent age of destruction and despair...
...But Nettl makes clear that for the major part of her political career she was as much involved with the Polish as with the German movement...
...but a substantive clash of attitudes, mutually incompatible, which had to be kept separate...
...Some repetitions could easily have been eliminated with better editing...
...She thought that she represented the vanguard of the European proletariat while in fact the "renegade Bernstein" had a better nose for the shape of things to come...
...This review cannot touch on a variety of other subjects which Mr...
...The final peroration, "The errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee," still rings true in our ears, but it appears to be written from the vantage point of Rosa's involvement with the German Social Democratic party...
...Given, indeed, to a somewhat romantic belief in the creative potentialities of the working class—a belief which led to her most egregious political mistakes— she was yet not adverse to tight, conspiratorial and centralized political activity...
...As one follows her trajectory from her first arrival in Berlin in 1898 to her final years as a founder of the anti-war Spartakus Bund and the Ger man Communist party, one is struck by the fact that she always remained a spiritual alien in Germany...
...And on the Polish scene she and her close associate Leo Jogiches ran their party with rigorous, almost dictatorial, methods...
...The Spartakus League had little political influence during the war and it remained a marginal force in the preparation and the subsequent development of the revolution...
...The story is told, and told well, in Nettl's book and I can only urge readers to turn to it...
...Even, after the 1904 attack, it might be remarked in passing, her Polish group worked at times in close collaboration with Lenin against his Menshevik opponents...
...but it was also a source of her political ineffectiveness...
...Adolf Warszawski used the pseudonym Warski...
...When not on lecture tours and at meetings, or in prison, she lived a rather sheltered and protected life in a fastidiously kept apartment to which only a small band of chosen party intellectuals had access...
...But finally her revolutionary elan would always take over and she would rush into action even though she might be intellectually unconvinced as to the chances of success...
...But Froelich had no access to the archival materials in Poland, Russia, East Germany, and elsewhere which Nettl has put to excellent uses...
...Though Rosa Luxemburg's name has loomed large in the historical imagination of the socialist movement ever since her brutal assassination by counterrevolutionary soldiers after the Berlin Spartakist rising in January 1919, no satisfactory biography has been available up till now...
...for abandoning the principled internationalism so often proclaimed from the tribunes of International and party congresses, her activities were morally admirable but politically largely ineffective...
...She endeavored to infuse the German working class with that revolutionary spirit and ardor which she had absorbed in her Polish milieu and she never fully realized, it would seem, the extreme structural differences be tween a highly industrialized society in which the working class had a stake and conditions in which the working class was an outcast underclass...
...She originally thought that, "of course, the Bolsheviks will never be able to maintain themselves...
...But there is much more...
...But in the Polish case there was but little mass activity till the revolution of 1905, and so she attempted to build her party, the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, by all the standard conspiratorial methods then current in the world . of emigre politics in Zurich, Paris, and Berlin...
...The careful, secretive compartmenting was not merely convenience...
...It is especially striking that Rosa, who staked her political life on a principled internationalism transcending all national interests and issues, operated completely differently in the Polish and German movements...
...This tradition was already dying in the West even as it still energized the Russian—Polish intellectual circles in which Rosa had spent her formative years...
...Her polemical onslaughts against her adversaries are a pleasure to read, even today—but she proposed no alternative political theory...
...She cautioned her young radical friends in the last days of 1918 that there was no chance of taking power in the immediate future...
...One can only wish that despite its size—and its price —it will be read and pondered, espec ially by those members of the New Left whose devotion to "spontaneity" Rosa would have admired even as she would have been appalled by their historical and theoretical naivety...
...Nettl's painstaking work fills a gap...
...It is an unqualified success...
...Also, I fail to see why several Polish militants who are usually known by their party names are referred to by their family names...
...Hegelians are concerned with the history of those movements and persons that have been historically successful and in tune with the Zeitgeist...
...The world of the Second International was her world, even though for many years she had riddled most of its leaders with her well-aimed arrows...
...As a whole this is a monumental achievement, a socialist biography which is equal, and in some sense superior, to Deutscher's monumental Trotsky volumes...
...She rejected Lenin's organizational methods — at least in the German context—but she had few concrete alternatives...
...This unbounded faith in the masses is among Rosa's most endearing personal attributes...
...Luxemburg was, as Nettl recognizes with some reluctance, "a critic, albeit profound and acute, rather than a political theorist...
Vol. 13 • September 1966 • No. 5
