Posted on

The Propertied and the Propertyless by Anton Pannekoek

Translation and introduction by Rida Vaquas. The original text in German can be found here.

Gerd Arntz, Strike, 1936

Anton Pannekoek is well-known as one of the principal theorists of council communism, a man who broke from both the traditions of Kautskyist social democracy as well as Bolshevism. By 1935, this break had crystallized into a clear attitude against the party as an instrument for working-class liberation: “a party is an organization that aims to lead and control the working class.”1 However, Pannekoek was very much a child of orthodox Second International Social Democracy, and a self-described pupil of Karl Kautsky, just as much as Lenin was. By presenting a translation of this short text, I hope to emphasize the Social Democratic inheritance of Pannekoek and the continuities of council communism with radical readings of Karl Kautsky.

The essay ‘The Propertied and the Propertyless’ was originally published in the SPD paper Leipziger Volkszeitung and eventually compiled as one of seven essays in a pamphlet Der Kampf der Arbeiter (The Struggle of Workers) in 1907. Much of Pannekoek’s early career in German Social Democracy resulted from his close friendship with Kautsky. After the German authorities prevented Pannekoek from taking up his position at the SPD Party School, it was Kautsky who found him alternative positions, including writing a weekly column for socialist newspapers. Kautsky’s aid hence embedded him into the German socialist movement and Pannekoek eventually moved to Bremen, where he was part of ordinary party life.

It would be wrong to construe this as simply a close personal friendship: Kautsky and Pannekoek shared a political outlook about the world. Both were representatives of the last great generation of scientific socialism. This was not ‘scientific’ in the sense of a vulgar determinism in which one keeps vigil for the final set of statistics that make revolution inevitable, but scientific in that it posited hypotheses and demanded proofs, one had to show their working when they claimed to solve the formula of social change. An amusing article in the SPD’s satirical magazine Der Wahre Jacob in 1912 aptly illustrated their affinity in approach, even when their conclusions differed. In an imaginary debate about fashion, Kautsky writes a beautiful chapter about the “genesis of trousers” in the emergence of humanity, ending with the proposition that had Adam had trousers, he may not have bitten into the fatal apple. Pannekoek, who had witnessed the conversations with Kautsky, reproaches Kautsky for having overestimated the role of trousers as a Marxist.2

This exchange mirrored the real split between Kautsky and Pannekoek that first became public in 1911-12 (one may note that Pannekoek split with Kautsky somewhat later than Rosa Luxemburg did) in a debate in Die Neue Zeit about mass action, in light of the 1911 strikes in England. Kautsky outlined a perspective in which the development of capitalism causes the emergence of mass actions by periodically creating conditions of extended unemployment, taxation pressure, inflation, and war.3 However, the development of the organized proletarian masses, through the institutions of Social-Democracy and the trade unions, changed the character of mass actions to ensure both that defeat is not a disaster and that victories are enjoyed by the proletariat, and not exploited by a faction of the enemy. Yet Kautsky’s case against embracing spontaneous mass actions as a tactical principle is simple: they are completely unpredictable and hence nothing can be said about what is to be done when they arise in advance, the party can only ensure that it is not caught off guard by them, by building up its own understanding of state and society and power.

What marks Pannekoek’s response to this analysis is his own disappointment with a great master of Marxism. In his view, although no one had proven the significance of Marxist theory as much as Kautsky did in his historical writing, in this instance Kautsky had “left the Marxist tools at home” and hence obtained no result.4 For Pannekoek, contemporary mass action differentiated itself from the mass actions of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries because the class who carried it out had changed: from bourgeois to proletarian. The distinction between the unorganized and organized is irrelevant, as many of the unorganized are capable of the same proletarian discipline and solidarity through the conditions of their work. In Pannekoek’s most cutting perspective, Kautsky “is not doing himself justice” in claiming he is unable to ascribe a particular political character to the masses when he has successfully done so for parliamentary politics.

It becomes clear that Pannekoek’s first critiques of Kautsky’s Marxism emerged from wanting to push it beyond its limits and seek to apply it to new scenarios. Pannekoek’s ultimate conclusion in 1912 was that the party must instigate revolutionary action at the right moment, not when the masses can simply no longer be held back, but when the conditions mean that large-scale actions by the masses have a chance of success. Only later disillusionments turned him away from the party form altogether. There is much merit in Pannekoek’s objection to Kautsky that one has not determined very much at all if the determination is that the masses are unpredictable. Yet it was clear that Pannekoek’s own formulas didn’t hold up in the light: the masses by no means tend towards radicalism in all cases, and there has been no guarantee that they would rise against war. In their final parting of ways, both Kautsky and Pannekoek sought a more rigorous application of a Marxist framework they shared from each other.

This translation demonstrates the analytical clarity that this Marxist framework had to offer at its strongest.

The political struggle that the socialist working class leads and of which every election campaign is an episode is not in the first instance a struggle about particular political institutions and legal demands, but instead a universal struggle between the propertied and propertyless class. To understand it correctly, it is necessary to take a close look at the combatants, the causes, and the aims of this struggle.

According to this classification of both of the parties in conflict, it may appear that the ownership of money or income is the basis for class division. This is how it’s often understood by our bourgeois opponents. They take income or assets statistics in their hands, draw a few lines that separate the low from the middle incomes and the middle from the high incomes, and believe that they’ve obtained an insight into the class relations of the present-day. Even more comically, they do this when they present a statistic from the Middle Ages or the eighteenth century and from this prove that there were proportionately just as many low, middle and high incomes at the time as there are now and with this they believe they have refuted the concentration of capital, the demise of the middle class and the escalation of class contradictions.

These poor jokers, who want to demonstrate away the obvious facts of the great social upheaval in this way, clearly don’t have the faintest idea of what a social class actually is. A class is not a group of people that have the same size of income, it is instead a group of people who fulfill a particular function economically in social production. We say ‘economically’ so that you don’t fall for the idea that the technical side of work is understood as the social function. A weaver and a typographer professionally have a different function, technically their work is varied, but economically they are both waged workers and belong to the same class.

In the manifold diversity of the social production process it is no wonder that a colorful picture of the most diverse social classes appeals to the eye. In industry, capitalist employers stand against waged workers; from this universal fundamental relationship, different class relationships are built up, according to the scale of the industry. The independent craftsman concurs with the capitalists that he is an independent businessman, but he employs no waged workers. And the small masters of artisanal small enterprises, just like shopkeepers, are even described in colloquial language as separate from the large-scale capitalists, as the middle class. Their difference consists in the smaller number of workers and the smaller amount of capital, without it being possible to identify firm boundaries between the two groups. In large industry, a group of overseers and technical work managers slide in between the capitalists and the workers. The high technical and scientific demands placed on today’s large and giant conglomerates have called into being a class of private technical and scientific officials that form the ‘intelligentsia’ alongside similar and equally-placed public officials. Economically they belong to wage workers as even they sell their labor power—a special intellectual labor power trained by long studies and better paid—for wages. The higher level of wages, i.e. their very different living standards, again separates them from workers. At the same time, the development of large industry has effected a separation between the industrial entrepreneur, who lives off profits, and the owners of money, who live off interests, through the vast amounts of capital that it demands. In the stock company, a paid official even steps into the role of the employer, the director. The double function of the capitalist, to direct production and to pocket the surplus-value, has been divided between two types of people. However, all finance capitalists cannot be lumped together, just like all industrial capitalists. According to their size, a differentiation persists like in the world of fish in the sea: the big devour the little. A little rentier is as much a finance capitalist as a member of high finance, but to these stock market wolves he is a stock market lamb as it were and hence his social role is another one.

If we now take a look at agriculture, we find the same gradations, even if not in exactly the same way, as in industry. Only a class is added here, because the landowners, through their monopoly, can extract a ground rent from the yield of agriculture without playing any active role.You have dwarf peasants, small farmers, medium and large farmers and farmworkers. Here the hybrid and transitional forms are emerging that confuse the picture of social classes to an untrained eye. The agricultural workers often have a small plot of land, while owners of smaller plots of land, too small to live off, seek additional income as agricultural or even industrial workers. They are hence simultaneously independent landlords and wage workers. In the home industry we find supposedly independent craftsmen that are totally dependent, body and soul, upon capitalist businessmen. That the legal form of waged service doesn’t suffice to ascertain class is shown by the numerous transitions from the paid director to the worker, via subdirector, head of department, chief engineer, technician, draughtsman, supervisor. Here one will often be at a loss to define precisely, in the gradual transitions, which class distinctions one must accept and where their boundaries lie.

So social life offers a colorful picture of the most diverse classes whose functions, and hence interests, directly show sharp contradictions and enormous differences and even gradual transitions. Isn’t this picture a resounding refutation of our assertion that only two classes stand against each other in the social struggle? And doesn’t a look at the varied functions of classes immediately show that the definition of two groups, only according to their assets is unscientific and unsustainable— a fictitious assertion only for the purpose of demagogic sedition?

No. This definition is substantiated in the social order in its deepest essence. It emerges from the specific role that money plays since the advent of capitalism. All money has the characteristic of being able to work as capital, i.e. when the owner buys the means of production with it, rents workers, and sells the commodities they produced, it comes back in their hands as more money, as larger, as capital blessed by surplus-value. They do not even have to do it themselves, with the greatest pleasure others will take away the stress and worries of running a business and pay them part of the profit as interest for the use of their capital. Money has acquired the characteristic of bringing its owner interest through capitalism. Whoever has access to money can hence secure an income without any work.

This income comes from surplus-value which formed in the process of production. The working class brings into being vast quantities of value through their work; they only receive a part of it back as wages. The remainder is surplus-value which falls to the capitalists. This surplus value must be distributed amongst the different capitalists and groups of capitalists because they all live from it. The landowners demand their share, the businessmen and middlemen ask for their share, the directors and highly paid industrial managers take their piece, the finance capitalists obtain their interest or dividends. They fight amongst themselves about the distribution of surplus-value. The distribution is partly decided by economic laws and partly by political power balances. What matters to us here is the fact that all those who have money are thereby entitled to a certain extent to some of the surplus-value, provided of course that they do not hide it in an old stocking like the former misers. The surplus-value is created by the exploitation of the lower classes whose work produces that surplus; all those classes who share the surplus value among themselves together form a great society of exploitation, and everyone who has money is thereby, by the grace of Mammon, a shareholder in this excellent corporation.

This is the reason we can speak about a great class contradiction between the propertied and the propertyless. It is because these words are synonymous with the exploiting and the exploited classes. Whoever doesn’t own anything is forced to sell their labour-power to the owners of the means of production, i.e. indirectly to the owners of capital, in order to live. These capital owners give them a wage for long and hard work, which only suffices for a poor living standard, and the remainder of the worker’s produced value goes into their pockets. Whoever does not own anything must allow themselves to be exploited, the private ownership of the means of production cuts them off from any other way out. The situation remains mainly the same even when the worker owns a little bit of money, the interest of which forms a small subsidy to their wages. Even if they have money at the bank, they are still not exploiters. In this interest, they only gain a tiny little piece of the great mass of surplus-value which is squeezed out of the entire working class, and this little bit doesn’t even come into view next to the surplus-value they contribute to the total mass by their own wage labor. They increase surplus value and are exploited, they find themselves in the same situation as their comrades. And as a rule, they regard this money not as capital but as a saving fund by which they will meet their needs in the case of unemployment or accidents. 

But as soon as the wealth exceeds a certain level, it enables the owner to live from exploitation instead of his own work, modestly if he is a small rentier or entrepreneur, lavishly if he is one of the rich. As much as there are class differences among these people, as much as they perform different active or passive functions in the exploitation process, as much as they still struggle with each other for their share of the spoils – the reason why their property is not always secure – they do have a common interest because they are all participants in the exploitation. In the great social opposition between exploiters and exploited, the size of the fortunes within the community of exploiters is not important. Equally, it follows from this discussion that we do not claim that society consists only of these two large groups. There is a layer between them, of which it is impossible to say whether it is closer to one or the other group, such as a peasant who exploits workers and are themselves exploited by the landlord, or a civil servant who receives a mediocre salary. How they will stand in the great political struggle can only be determined from a particular examination of their class situation. But for the greater masses of people and classes, in the vast political struggle their various specific social functions will stand behind the basic question of whether they belong to the propertied or the propertyless, that is, to the exploited or the exploited.

 

Posted on

Fragment on War, National Questions and Revolution by Rosa Luxemburg

Translation and introduction by Rida Vaquas. Original article can be found here. 

Rosa Luxemburg died on January 15th, 1919.

Introduction 

It has long become a truism that Marxism failed to grasp the problem of nationalism, particularly as the second half of the twentieth century saw national revolutions flourish whilst socialist movements collapsed. As national identity cements itself as a political force in our times, the Communist Manifesto’s declaration that “national one-sidedness and narrowmindedness become more and more impossible” can strike some as impossibly glib. The globalization of capital, far from diminishing the prospects of the nation-state, has instead spawned many nationalisms and even shaken the stability of ‘settled’ nation-states. Both Britain and Spain have faced secessionist movements in recent years. In the wake of this theoretical “failure” of Marxism, the response of Marxists has too frequently been to pack up and go home, taking the failure for granted. Nowadays the claim of “the right of nations to self-determination” is the accepted solution to the national question, even when no plausible working out has been shown. The “Leninist position” has become reified as part of socialist political programmes in the 21st century, even as very little sets it apart from the principle of national self-determination advocated by the Democratic President Woodrow Wilson.

After over half of a century of socialists firmly embracing nation-states, perhaps it is time to re-evaluate this “failure”. As opposed to understanding the principle of national self-determination as necessary to fill a hole in Marxist theory, we should understand it as blasting the hole itself and calling for the bourgeoisie to fill it. It is time to shed a light on the debates that took place within socialism before the principle of national self-determination became widely accepted as a necessary part of socialist programmes, in the period of the Second Socialist International between 1890 and 1914. This means an analysis of the national question from peripheral socialist parties rather than the centers in Germany and Russia. To seriously appraise the defeated alternatives to national self-determination allows us to appreciate that the nation-state is not the final word in history.

Much of the historiographical understanding of the national question debate in this period frames it as a dispute between two of the leading personalities: Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Rosa Luxemburg, as co-founder of the Social Democratic Party of Poland and the Kingdom of Lithuania (henceforth SDKPiL), positioned her party against the social patriotism of the rival Polish Socialist Party (henceforth PPS) who demanded the restoration of Poland, which was then partitioned under Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. She fought against the Polish claim to independence at the London Congress of the Second International in 1896 and consistently argued for the Polish socialists in Prussia to be integrated into the German Social Democratic Party (henceforth SPD), rather than being a separate party. On the other hand, Vladimir Lenin, writing from the heart of the Tsarist empire, understood the right of nations to self-determination as a “special urgency” in a land where “subject peoples” were on the peripheries of Great Russia and experienced higher amounts of national oppression than they did in Europe.1

Rosa Luxemburg’s position has been recently evaluated as effectively forming a bloc with the chauvinist bureaucracy of the SPD.2 Luxemburg has further been accused of underestimating the force of national oppression and hence of “international proletariat fundamentalism”.3 By examining the debate as it took place in the Second International as a whole, we can understand these assessments of the case against national self-determination to be unsatisfactory and re-appraise the positive legacy of revolutionary internationalism.

Meanwhile, Lenin’s position has received praise in the wake of socialists relating to the national liberation movements of the 20th century, as “championing the rights of oppressed nations”.4 In this framework, the “liberation” of oppressed nations is the precondition of international working class unity and therefore national struggle clears the way for class struggle.

However, it is important to interrogate the consistency of Lenin’s position and hence dismantle the idea of a coherent Leninist position which emerges from its conclusions. The right of nations to self-determination, as Lenin took care to emphasize, could not be equated with support for secessionist movements. In 1903, as the Russian Social Democratic Party adopted the national self-determination as part of its programme, Lenin argued that “it is only in isolated and exceptional cases that we can advance and actively support demands conducive to the establishment of a new class state” against the calls of the PPS for the restoration of Poland.5 This lack of sympathy to struggles for national independence in practice was noted by contemporary socialist supporters of nationalism, the Ukrainian socialist Yurkevych polemicized that Lenin supported the right of national self-determination “for appearances’ sake” whilst in actuality being a “fervent defender of her [Russia’s] unity”.6 If the exercise of the right of national self-determination naturally leads to the formation of an independent state, Lenin was politically opposed to it in many of the same cases as Luxemburg. This distinction may be lost upon later “Leninists”, such as the Scottish Socialist Party who assume Scottish independence to be an extension of national self-determination, but it should not be obscured from our view.

Moreover, Lenin’s position changed through the course of his political experiences. The early Soviet government’s policy on nationalities required that “we must maintain and strengthen the union of socialist republics”.7 Instead of promoting secession, the Bolsheviks pursued a policy of Korenizatsiya (nativization) in which national minorities were promoted in their local bureaucracies and administrative institutions spoke the minority language. Hence national autonomy within a larger state was seen as an adequate guarantor of national rights to oppressed nations. Far from a consistent “Leninist position” of supporting the exercise of the right of national self-determination in nearly all cases, it is raised, what emerges as Lenin’s actual position is a theoretical “right” whose use is very rarely legitimated by historical conditions and the interests of the working class in practice, even where there are popular nationalist movements. Is this “right” really so far from the metaphysical formula that Rosa Luxemburg derided the principle of self-determination as?

Having dealt with the historical misapprehensions of Lenin’s position, it is time to reappraise the perspective of Rosa Luxemburg. Whilst her position is frequently presented as a theoretical innovation on her part, Luxemburg herself noted a longer anti-national heritage. Assessing the legacy of the earlier conspiratorial Polish socialist party, the Proletariat, she argued that they “fought nationalism by all available means and invariably regarded national aspirations as something which can only distract the working class from their own goals”.8 Far from national self-determination being an accepted orthodox Marxist position, we should keep in mind that the PPS had to argue for it at multiple congresses of the Second International in the case of Poland. After the revolutionary upsurges in Russia in 1905, a considerable segment of the PPS formed the PPS-Left, which similarly disavowed national independence as an immediate goal for socialists.

There were three core strands to Luxemburg’s opposition to national self-determination. Firstly, it was materially unviable given that no new nation could achieve economic independence owing to the spread of capitalism. Secondly, pursuing national self-determination in the form of supporting independence struggles did not make strategic sense for socialists as it inhibited them from placing political demands upon existing states. Finally, and most saliently for socialists today, even if national self-determination was politically and economically more than a utopian pipe-dream, it would still be against the interests of the working class to pursue it.

These latter two strands are more decisive in understanding Rosa Luxemburg’s position and are what make it more than a miscalculation rooted in economic determinism. Luxemburg herself appreciated the separation of the “economic” from the “political” under capitalism, as she argued capitalism “annihilated Polish national independence but at the same time created modern Polish national culture”.9 Far from being a national nihilist, Luxemburg stated that the proletariat “must fight for the defense of national identity as a cultural legacy, that has its own right to exist and flourish”.10 The 20th century has proven that political independence is materially possible. It has not shown that it is a remedy for national oppression and that it is a worthy goal for socialists.

National self-determination, in Luxemburg’s words, “gives no practical guidelines for the day to day politics of the proletariat, nor any practical solution of nationality problems”.11 As we can observe from Lenin’s policies on nationalities, there is no consistent conclusion that comes from the acknowledgment of this “right”. The only real conclusion is that affairs must be settled by the relevant nationality, which is presented as a homogeneous socio-political entity, as opposed to a site of class struggle in itself. The impracticality of this formula was not only resisted by Luxemburg, but also by Fritz Rozins, a Latvian socialist. Rozins, criticizing the position of Lenin in 1902, made the argument that several nations can occupy the same territory which problematized the demand for national self-determination.12

When examining contemporary manifestations of the national problem, these issues are thrown into sharper focus. In the case of Israel and Palestine, the framework of two competing claims of national self-determination which need to be reconciled with each other ultimately leads to endorsing an indefinite political and economic subordination of one nation by another. One way some sections of the modern Left attempt to address this is by rendering one nation’s claim (Israel’s) as inherently illegitimate, on account of its annexationist political project and racist domestic policy, and hence dismissing Hebrew Jewish people as constituting a national people with particular rights. However, making the right of national self-determination contingent upon the political project of its claimants would leave very few nations, if any, with this “right” at all, as its claimants tend to be an aspirational national bourgeoisie, whose class interests are tied to the continuation of the subjugation of the working class peoples within a territory, including working-class national minorities. The best way forward is to abandon such a “right” altogether, which assumes a basic unity between the interests of the oppressor and oppressed as part of the same nation. The question should instead be examined from the perspective of the common interests of the Israeli and Palestinian working classes against the Israeli state.

Abandoning national self-determination as a democratic “right”, which socialists should cease to guarantee as a part of their programmes is often equated with opposing national struggles in all cases. Rosa Luxemburg’s attitude to Armenia at the beginning of the 20th century demonstrates this is not the case. Unlike a number of her contemporaries who were concerned that the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire would only strengthen the hand of Tsarist Russia, Luxemburg argued emphatically that “the aspirations to freedom can here make themselves felt only in a national struggle” and hence that Social Democracy must “stand for the insurgents”.13 In her reasoning, the national struggle was appropriate for Armenia in a way that it was not for Poland, as the Armenian territories lacked a working-class, and were not bound to the Ottoman Empire by capitalist economic development, but by brute force. Perhaps ironically, this put her at odds with the Armenian Social Democrat David Ananoun, who rejected national secession on the grounds that new nation-states could not guarantee the rights of national minorities within them. The Armenian Social Democrats “always subordinated the solution of the national problem to the victory of the proletarian revolution”, including rejecting the specificity of Armenian situation.14 One could say they surpassed the supposed “international proletariat fundamentalism” of Rosa Luxemburg.

Both Ananoun and Luxemburg rejected territorial national self-determination as a framework, yet drew different conclusions in the specific case of Armenia. Why is that? By moving away from the idea that national oppression can be resolved by emergent nations, settling national oppression becomes the affair of the working class. Franz Mehring, on the left-wing of the SPD, clarified this in the case of Poland: “The age when a bourgeois revolution could create a free Poland is over, today the rebirth of Poland is only possible through a social revolution in which the modern proletariat breaks its chains”.15 Supporting a nationalist movement for Luxemburg only became tenable in the absence of an organized working class, and nationalism could not be the slogan raised to lead it. For Ananoun, conscious of the lack of capacity of forming coherent territorial states along ethnic lines in heterogeneous Transcaucasia, his position was conditioned by the concern of maintaining the rights and cultures of national minorities in territories that were necessarily going to contain multiple nationalities. This reveals the national question as it should be for the socialist movement: a question of the interests and the capacities of the working classes to place their demands upon bourgeois class states, and hence, the conquest of political power by the working classes. The maintenance of nationalities, in the form of culture and language, is part of the political and social rights that the working class wins through struggle against class states, not by creating them. Rather than debating whether a nation ought to exercise a “right” of self-determination, socialists should see the nation itself as a veil, under which contending classes are hidden.

What fundamentally determined Rosa Luxemburg’s attitude was understanding that nationalism was not an empty vessel in which socialists could pour in proletarian content. The ideology of nationhood intrinsically demands temporary class collaboration, at the very least, to the advantage of the ruling classes. An article she penned in January 1918, intended as friendly criticism of the early Soviet government’s policy on nationalities, most clearly articulates this perspective:

“The “right of nations to self-determination” is a hollow phrase which in practice always delivers the masses of people to the ruling classes.

Of course, it is the task of the revolutionary proletariat to implement the most expansive political democracy and equality of nationalities, but it is the least of our concerns to delight the world with freshly baked national class states. Only the bourgeoisie in every nation is interested in the apparatus of state independence, which has nothing to do with democracy. After all, state independence itself is a dazzling thing which is often used to cover up the slaughter of people.”16

This has been vindicated by historical experience. When we look at Poland today, a right-wing government is installing “Independence Benches” that play nationalist speeches.17 The speeches were delivered by none other than Józef Piłsudski, a former leader of the PPS who later abandoned socialism altogether. The warning of the Polish Communist Party, published in 1919, a year after Polish independence, that bourgeois “independence” in reality meant “the brutal dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat” has proven more correct than any fantasy about the achievement of independence offering a permanent resolution to the national question, opening up the battlefield of class struggle.18 The formation of new class states does not resolve national oppression, so much as redistribute it.

Revolutionary internationalism, or the so-called “international proletariat fundamentalism”, stands as a rejoinder to those who seek shortcuts to social revolution by the construction of nation-states. Yet it also allows for a more positive assessment of nationalities. Rather than being bound to the political form of territorial states responsible for the oppression of millions across centuries, the traditions, institutions, and languages associated with nationalities can become part of a universal cultural legacy and human inheritance that requires neither the violence of borders nor of class rule. We can be moved by the words of the poet Adam Mickiewicz without scrambling to statehood. Capitalist development has made the endgame of the exercise of national self-determination, the nation-state, a dead-end for socialists. It is now necessary to pose the national question once more and seek different answers.

Monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, built in 1926 and destroyed in 1935.

Fragment on War, National Questions and Revolution

When hatred of the proletariat and the imminent social revolution is absolutely decisive for the bourgeoisie in all their deeds and activities, in their peace programme and in their policies for the future: what is the international proletariat doing? Completely blind to the lessons of the Russian Revolution, forgetting the ABCs of socialism, it pursues the same peace programme as the bourgeoisie, it elevates it to its own programme! Hail Wilson and the League of Nations! Hail national self-determination and disarmament! This is now the banner that suddenly socialists of all countries are uniting under – together with the imperialist governments of the Entente, with the most reactionary parties, the government socialist boot-lickers, the ‘true in principle’ oppositional swamp socialists, bourgeois pacifists, petty-bourgeois utopians, nationalist upstart states, bankrupt German imperialists, the Pope, the Finnish executioners of the revolutionary proletariat, the Ukrainian sugar babies of German militarism.

In Poland the Daszyńskis are in a cosy union with the Galician slaughterers and Warsaw’s big bourgeoisie, in German Austria, Adler, Renner, Otto Bauer, and Julius Deutsch are arm-in-arm with the Christian Socials, the landowners and the German Nationals, in Bohemia the Soukup and the Nemec are in a close phalanx with all the bourgeois parties – a touching reconciliation of the classes. And everywhere the national drunkenness: the international banner of peace! The socialists are pulling the bourgeoisie’s chestnuts out of the fire. They are helping, using their ideology and their authority, to cover up the moral bankruptcy of bourgeois society and to save it. They are helping to renovate and consolidate bourgeois class rule.

And the first practical coronation of this unctuous policy – the defeat of the Russian Revolution and the partition of Russia.

It is the politics of 4th August 1914, only turned upside down in the concave mirror of peace. The capitulation of class struggle, the coalition with each national bourgeoisie for the reciprocal wartime slaughter transformed into an international world coalition for a ‘negotiated peace’. The cheapest, the corniest old wives’ tale, a movie melodrama – that’s what they’re falling for: Capital suddenly vanished, class oppositions null and void. Disarmament, peace, democracy, and harmony of nations. Power bows before justice, the weak straighten their backs up. Krupp instead of cannons will produce Christmas lights, the American city Gari [?] will be turned into a Fröbel kindergarten. Noah’s Ark, where the lamb grazes peacefully next to the wolf, the tiger purrs and blinks like a big house cat, while the antelope crawls with horns tucked behind the ear, the lions and goats play with blind cows. And all that with the help of the magic formula of Wilson, of the president of the American billionaires, all that with the help of Clemenceau, Lloyd George and the Prince Max of Baden! Disarmament, after England and America are two new military powers! Disarmament, after the technology has immeasurably advanced. After all, states sit in the pocket of arms and finance capital through national debt! After colonies – colonies remain. The ideas of class struggle formally capitulate to national ideas here. The harmony of classes in every nation appears as the condition for and expansion of the harmony of nations that should emerge out of the world war in a ‘League of Nations’. 

Nationalism is an instant trump card. From all sides, nations and nationettes stake out a claim for their right to state formation. Rotted corpses rise out of hundred-year-old graves, filled with fresh spring shoots, and “historyless” peoples, who never formed an independent state entity up until now, feel a violent urge towards state formation. Poland, Ukraine, Belarussians, Lithuanians, Czechs, Yugoslavia, ten new nations of the Caucasus. Zionists are already erecting their Palestine Ghetto, provisionally in Philadelphia. It’s Walpurgis Night at Blockula today!

Broom and pitch-fork, goat and prong… To-night who flies not, never flies.

But nationalism is only a formula. The core, the historical content that is planted in it, is as manifold and rich in connections as the formula of  ‘national self-determination’, under which it is veiled, is hollow and sparse.

As in every great revolutionary period the most varied range of old and new scores come to be settled, oppositions are brought to their conclusions: antiquated remnants of the past, the most pressing issues of the present and the barely born problems of the future whirl together. The collapse of Austria and Turkey is the final liquidation of the feudal Middle Ages, an addendum to the work of Napoleon. In this context, however, Germany’s breakdown and diminution is the bankruptcy of the most recent and newest imperialism and its plans for world mastery, first formed in war. It is equally only the bankruptcy of a specific method of imperialist rule: by East Elbian reaction and military dictatorship, by siege and extermination methods, first used against the Hereros in the Kalahari Desert, now carried over to Europe. The disintegration of Russia, outwardly and in its formal results: the formation of small nation-states, analogous to the collapse of Austria and Turkey,  poses the opposite problem: on the one hand, capitulation of proletarian politics on a national scale before imperialism, and on the other capitalist counterrevolution against the proletarian seizure of power.

A K. [Kautsky] sees in this, in his pedantic, school-masterly schematism, the triumph of ‘democracy’, whose component parts and manifestation form are simply the nation-state. The washed-out petty-bourgeois formalist naturally forget to look into the inner historical core, forgets, as an appointed temple guard of historical materialism, that the ‘nation-state’ and ‘nationalism’ are empty pods into which each historical epoch and set of class relations pour their particular material content. German and Italian ‘nation-states’ in the 1870s were the slogan and the programme of the bourgeois state, of bourgeois class rule. Its leadership was directed against medieval, feudal past, the patriarchal, bureaucratic state and the fragmentation of economic life. In Poland the ‘nation-state’ was the traditional slogan of agrarian-noble and petty-bourgeois opposition to modern capitalist development. It was a slogan whose leadership was directed against the modern phenomena of life: both bourgeois liberalism and its antipode, the socialist workers movement. In the Balkans, in Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania, nationalism, the powerful outbreak of which was displayed in the two bloody Balkan wars as a prelude to the world war, was one hand an expression of aspirational capitalist development and bourgeois class rule in all these states, it was an expression of the conflicting interests of the bourgeoisie among themselves as well as the clash of their development tendency with Austrian imperialism. Simultaneously, the nationalism of these countries, although at heart only the expression of a quite young, germ-like capitalism, was and is colored in the general atmosphere of imperialist development, even with distinct imperial tendencies. In Italy, nationalism is already thoroughly and exclusively a company plaque for a purely imperialist colonial appetite. The nationalism of the Tripolitan war and the Albanian appetite has as little in common with the Italian nationalism of the 1850s and 1860s as Mr. Sonnino has with Giuseppe Garibaldi.

In Russian Ukraine, up until the October uprising in 1917, nationalism was nothing, a bubble, the arrogance of roughly a dozen professors and lawyers who mostly couldn’t speak Ukrainian themselves. Since the Bolshevik Revolution it has become the very real expression of the petty-bourgeois counterrevolution, whose head is directed against the socialist working class. In India, nationalism is the expression of an emerging domestic bourgeoisie, which aims for independent exploitation of the country on its account instead of only serving as an object for English capital to leech. This nationalism, therefore, corresponds with its social content and its historical stage like the emancipation struggles of the United States of America at the outset of the 18th century.

So nationalism reflects back all conceivable interests, nuances, historical situations. It shines in all colors. It is everything and nothing, a mere shell. Everything hangs on it to assert its own particular social core.

So the universal, immediate world explosion of nationalism brings with it the most colorful confusion of special interests and tendencies in its bosom. But there is an axis that gives all these special interests a direction, a universal interest created by the particular historical situation: the apex against the threatening world revolution of the proletariat.

The Russian Revolution, with the Bolshevik rule it brought forth, has put the problem of social revolution on the agenda of history. It has pushed the class contradictions between capital and labor to the most extreme heights. In one swoop, it has opened up a gaping chasm between both classes in which volcanic fumes boil and fierce flames blaze. Just as the June Rebellion of the Paris proletariat and the June massacres split bourgeois society into two classes for the first time between which there can only be one law: a struggle of life and death, Bolshevik rule in Russia has placed bourgeois society face to face with the final struggle of life and death. It has destroyed and blown away the fiction of the tame working class that is relatively peacefully organized by socialism, which bragged in theoretical, harmless phrases but practically worshipped the principle: live and let live – that fiction, which was what the practice of German Social Democracy and in its footsteps, the entire International, consisted of for the last thirty years. The Russian Revolution instantly destroyed the modus vivendi between socialism and capitalism, created out of the last half-century of parliamentarism, with a rough fist and transformed socialism from the harmless phrases of electoral agitation, the blue skies of the distant future, into a bloodily serious problem of the present, of today. It has brutally ripped open the old, terrible wounds of bourgeois society that had been healing since the June Days in Paris in 1848. 

All of this, of course, is initially only in the consciousness of the ruling classes. Just as the June Days, with the power of an electric shock, immediately imprinted the consciousness of an irreconcilable class opposition to the working class upon the bourgeoisie of all nations and cast a deadly hatred of the proletariat in their hearts whilst workers of all nations needed decades in order to adopt the same lessons of the June days for themselves, the consciousness of class opposition, it now repeats itself: The Russian Revolution has awakened a fuming, foaming, trembling fear and hatred of the threatening spectre of proletarian dictatorship in the entirety of the possessing classes in every single nation. It can only be compared with the sentiments of the Paris bourgeoisie during the June slaughters and the butchery of the Commune. ‘Bolshevism’ has become the catchword for practical, revolutionary socialism, for all endeavors of the working class to conquer power. In this rupturing of the social abyss within bourgeois society, in the international deepening and sharpening of class antagonism is the historical achievement of Bolshevism, and in this work – like in all great historical contexts – all errors and mistakes of Bolshevism vanish without a trace. 

These sentiments are now the deepest heart of the nationalist delirium in which the capitalist world has seemingly fallen, they are the objective historical content to which the many-colored cards of announced nationalisms are reduced. These small, young bourgeoisie that are now striving for independent existence, are not merely trembling with the desire for winning unrestricted and untrammeled class rule but also for the long-awaited delight of the single-handed strangling of their mortal enemy: the revolutionary proletariat. This is a function they had to concede up until now to the disjointed state apparatus of foreign rule. Hate, like love, is only grudgingly left to a third wheel. Mannerheim’s blood orgies, the Finnish Gallifet, show how much that the blazing heat of hate that has sprouted up in the hearts of all small nations in the last few years, all the Poles, Lithuanians, Romanians, Ukrainians, Czechs, Croats, etc., only waited for the opportunity to finally disembowel the proletariat with ‘national’ means. From all these young nations, which like white and innocent lambs hopped along in the grassy meadows of world history, the carbuncle-like eyes of the grim tiger are already looking out and waiting to “settle the accounts” with the first stirrings of “Bolshevism”. Behind all of the idyllic banquets, the roaring festivals of brotherhood in Vienna, in Prague, in Zagreb, in Warsaw,  Mannerheim’s open graves are already yawning and the Red Guards have to dig them themselves! The gallows of Charkow shimmer like faint silhouettes and the Lubinskys and Holubowitsches invited the German ‘liberators’ to Ukraine for their erection.

And the same fundamental idea reigns in the entire peace programme of Wilson. The “League of Nations” in the atmosphere of Anglo-American imperialism being drunk on victory and the frightening spectre of Bolshevism traversing the world stage can only bring forth one thing: a bourgeois world alliance for the repression of the proletariat. The first blood-soaked sacrifice that the High Priest Wilson, atop his omens, will make in front of the Ark of ‘The League of Nations’ will be Bolshevik Russia. The ‘self-determined nations’, victors and vanquished together, will overthrow it.

The ruling classes once again show their unerring instinct for their class interests, their wonderfully fine sensitivity for the dangers surrounding them. Whilst on the surface, the bourgeoisie are enjoying the loveliest weather and the proletarians of all countries are getting drunk on nationalist and ‘League of Nations’ spring breezes, bourgeois society is being torn limb from limb which heralds the impending change of seasons as the historical barometer falls. Whilst socialists are foolishly eager to pull their chestnuts of peace out of the fire of world war, as ‘national ministers’, they can’t help but see the inevitable, imminent fate behind their backs: the terrible rising spectre of social world revolution that has already silently stepped onto the back of the stage.

It is the objective unsolvability of the tasks bourgeois society faces that makes socialism a historical necessity and world revolution unavoidable.

No one can predict how long this final period will last and what forms it will take. History has already left the well-trodden path and the comfortable routine. Every new step, every new turn of the road opens up new perspectives and new scenery.

What is important is to understand the real problem of the period. The problem is called: the dictatorship of the proletariat, the realization of socialism. The difficulties of the task do not lie in the strength of the opponent, the resistance of bourgeois society. Its ultima ratio: the army is useless for the suppression of the proletariat as a result of the war, it has even become revolutionary itself. Its material basis for existence: the maintenance of society has been shattered by the war. Its moral basis for existence: tradition, routine, and authority have all been blown away by the wind. The whole structure has become loosened, fluid, movable. The conditions for struggle have never been so favourable for any emergent class in world history. It can fall into the lap of the proletariat like a ripe fruit. The difficulty lies in the proletariat itself, in its lack of maturity, or rather, the immaturity of its leaders, the socialist parties. The working class balks, it recoils before the uncertain enormity of its duty again and again. But it must, it must. History takes away all of its excuses: to lead us out of the night and horror of oppressed humanity into the light of liberation.

Posted on

Speech On Environmental Protections by Karl Liebknecht

Translation and Introduction by Rida Vaquas. 

Garden City of Tomorrow, Howard Ebenezer, 1902

This speech was delivered in 1912 to the Prussian House of Deputies in response to a proposal by the Free People’s Party. Environmental destruction was not as far-reaching then as it is now, yet Liebknecht was keenly aware of the disappearance of butterflies and insects, of the small changes that bode ill. 

For Liebknecht, protecting nature was inextricable from putting nature in the hands of the people. In his day, Berlin had seen many conflicts between its working-class inhabitants and the Prussian government in particular regarding access to the Grunewald, the forests around Berlin. By the turn of the century, the people of Berlin had successfully driven the Kaiser from hosting the Saint Hubertus hunt there, using it for their own recreation and abusing the participants in the hunt. While the populace made it their spot for picnics and trips, the state government made numerous attempts at selling it off to real estate developers. Time and time again, Berliners mobilized themselves to resist this privatization of green space, and repeatedly won.

In our time, the garden city movement has largely been associated with well-meaning middle-class liberalism. Yet while those elements were certainly present in Wilhelmine Germany, when Liebknecht calls for cities to be transformed into garden cities, he is speaking for working-class communities who organized themselves for the right to live in flourishing environments. In 1909 social-democratic metalworkers founded Gartenstadt Kolonie-Reform, a project to build social housing in green surroundings in Magdeburg. These colorful buildings, designed by Bruno Taut, the ‘worker’s architect’, are a reminder that class struggle is concerned with aesthetic values, with the way that the light falls on a blue house.

We are at the point that capitalism is threatening our continued existence. Two million people in London are living with illegal air pollution. Millions of songbirds are vacuumed to death every year in the course of industrial olive harvesting. Across the world, millions of people are already living with climate-related disease, displacement, and desertification. The exploitation of natural resources by capital has not been in our interests. As the wealthy flee Phoenix for Flagstaff to escape the rising temperatures, the poor risk their lives to migrate only to be detained. Capitalist organization of industry and agriculture has led to the devastation of entire communities, resource depletion on a mass scale and the sixth mass extinction. Protecting our natural environment can only be accomplished by overcoming the alienation from nature that is synonymous with the alienation of labour that capitalism has wrought upon us.

Absent from this speech is hope in a technological deus ex machina that can save us at the 11th hour.  As he argues nature ‘once destroyed cannot easily be replaced again’. This rings even truer today. Recycling has been revealed to be only another administrative step on the way to landfills, ‘clean’ energy can be just as dirty as fossil fuels. The Left today needs to reckon with this reality: there is no way out of the coming catastrophe other than totally transforming how we live. 

This does not mean regressing into a dreary austerity, of inflicting punishment upon ourselves. Quite clearly, the blithe statement ‘happiness is not found in things’ does not help the people who are deprived of the essential material conditions for life, overwhelmingly the international working class. However, the individualized, lonely, consumption of an ever-increasing pile of ‘things’ in the West is a punishment that capitalism has inflicted upon us: a planetary death sentence. We have been robbed of the time and resources to live in a real community: to share our meals with friends, to develop hobbies, to walk through the woods together.  Instead of clinging to a sordid loneliness, we must bring forward a vision of a good life that contests that this loneliness is all there is.

Karl Liebknecht’s chief insight was that overcoming the alienation of humanity from nature will be joyous! Our programme is to bring nature to the people. We shall transform the ‘stone deserts’ into the people’s gardens.

Liebknecht in 1915

It would have been more desirable for us if the Commission had taken a somewhat more vigorous decision because the trend from which this proposal emerges, which the commission has only adopted in a watered-down form, is so appealing and worthy of credit that we can only express our agreement with great emphasis. It is truly extraordinarily important that we recognize more and more what irreplaceable value nature has in her beauty, and that her glories, once destroyed, cannot easily be replaced again. Unfortunately, that’s why we have every reason, in order to sharpen our conscience, to remind the government: it is easy to clear a forest, to dry out a lake, it is easy to devastate a landscape and to disfigure it – for example the Löcknitztal. But it is tremendously difficult to make amends. When we consider the centuries, the millennia of work that nature has needed in order to create the natural monuments that generations have enjoyed, it can easily be understood that all means of modern technology cannot do anything other than fail in settling the destruction that has already taken place. We cannot – and in Goethe’s phrase, we want to call for levers and screws – force nature to restore to us what a foolish thirst for destruction, a dangerous egoism mixed with short-sighted greed for profits, has ripped away from us in our time.

We are seeing how an appreciation for the value of the treasures of nature has only recently re-emerged amongst broader circles, after the wild period of development of our industry, of our commerce, in which all other interests took a back seat to the interest of “Get rich! Enrichissez vous!” This was the time when people mocked those who sought to appreciate and protect aesthetic values as fools who had not sufficiently understood the spirit of the times. Now, after a while, there has been a certain retreat, substantially because of the immeasurable importance of nature and as its value for the health of the population is increasingly recognized, as well as in the moral, spiritual and physical aspects. When we look at what the landscapes look like when we travel by train, especially close to big cities, we are often filled with seething resentment over the recklessness with which the most beautiful landscapes have been sacrificed for the advertising needs of our capitalist circles. This is a brutality without limits and all attempts to limit this tendency have not been of any use as of yet. This is taught us by simple observation: whether we go out of Berlin to the east, west, north or south, everywhere we see these disgusting billboards, which deface the landscape in the most outrageous manner.

It is undoubtedly true that amongst the population itself the necessary respect for national treasures is not frequently prevalent. If the previous speaker has pointed out that the schools and the press should be a lot more effective in providing this orientation, we can only agree. But we must also consider the following: our metropolitan population, in comparison to the population of a small rural community or town, represents a much larger amplitude of need to be in a closer communion with nature. If the entirety of the metropolitan population was as reckless towards nature as is customary and natural in every village and rural community, the complete devastation of nature would follow as a logical consequence. The harm caused as a result of the destruction of natural resources in the vicinity of metropolises therefore cannot be traced back to some kind of brutalizing influence of the metropolises, but is simply a result of the tremendous accumulation of masses of people, who only have a much smaller area of nature available to them in comparison to the rural population, an area to which naturally many more people come than in villages and small cities. Hence, we have every reason to reject the accusations against the metropolitan population. The danger that our natural resources are threatened by big cities is far more simply the logical consequence of the entirely unhealthy amassment of people in the great stone deserts that we called cities.

There is another aspect. The population in the countryside is in a natural communion with nature, nature has not been estranged from them. The rural population is outside every day, almost every hour, and knows how to interact with nature. The population of a city, which has been abruptly detached from nature by the extraordinarily harmful system of colonisation, have been brutally torn from the natural mother soil on which mankind flourished – one can almost say they have been uprooted. This population, when they have the opportunity to go out into nature on holidays or Sundays, will obviously not have the complete understanding for interacting with it, but they will also have an absolute need, such a curiosity, such an intense compulsion to get in touch with nature, to get to know nature that has been wholly estranged from them. They have a requirement for the most diverse orientation, intellectually and viscerally, to do this.  This explains a lot and this is why you will not find such a need in the countryside. It is wholly natural and not an expression of some kind of vandalism when city children come outside and tear off a few leaves, or branches or flowers. It is a natural need and can only be tackled by providing a proper fulfillment of this need. 

This is why, gentlemen, I think it is necessary to point out once more that every measure that aims to protect nature against human intervention and destruction, must necessarily have corresponding measures which bring nature closer to the people and gives people the opportunity to build the kind of relationship with nature that is necessary for intellectual, moral and physical flourishing. And gentlemen, this includes building great people’s parks and playgrounds. It means that children in the big cities are frequently brought out into nature, that even cities themselves are developed into garden cities, and the type of development that is unfortunately still common in big cities is removed and in this way the dangerous character of the big city as a phenomenon which cuts off the people from nature is gradually remedied. This is a tremendous piece of social welfare which concerns the roots of human, physical and psychological needs. The issue is sufficiently grave. If the human race, particularly in the cities, is not to be further crippled, intellectually, morally and physically,  it is urgent to take the direction I have just laid out, at least. This direction means abolishing the separation between human beings and nature once more, to bring people and nature closer to each other, so that people can once more approach the nourishing soil of nature and once more be in a position where they can absorb all of the strength nature alone can provide to man.

Gentlemen, I am firmly convinced that the Persian king who whipped the sea to calm it down performed no less futile work than the previous speakers in their invocations against fashions in ladies’ hats.

I have no doubt that some of you who vociferously clamor against fashions in hats in public must learn at home that fashions pertaining to forces that the male world absolutely cannot match.

I would like to point this out once more: Protection of natural monuments is not enough for us, most importantly, natural monuments must be made accessible to all of us, only then can they be protected because it is only then that the necessary feeling, the necessary appreciation of these natural monuments can be produced and maintained in humanity. As all sorts of nonsense has been mentioned here about what the populace does against nature and its monuments, I would like to take the opportunity after the deputy Ramdohr’s statements to point out how repeatedly the most serious grievances are raised in the press and in every national circles against the activities of the Jungdeutschlandbund and Jugendwehr in nature. Through these events, which serve exclusively militarist and chauvinist purposes, the youth are absolutely not raised to respect nature, to gain a finer appreciation for nature. On the contrary, a contempt of nature is cultivated in them because through these events, they become accustomed to regarding open nature in the fields and forests as merely a plain country for field duty exercises, and not as one of the greatest wonders that humble humanity. In any case, the appreciation for engaging yourself in the details of the beauties of nature is only destroyed by such a militarist violation of nature, but never enlarged.

Gentlemen, I am not alone in expressing these perspectives but rather, I repeat, they have been expressed frequently by the press of thoroughly national circles.

Gentlemen, I must point out yet again: if birds and other species have been spoken about a lot here, it is particularly important to protect them. But when we consider the youth again, the protection of the insect world comes quite eminently into our view. I hope that those amongst us who were butterfly or beetle collectors [in our youth] made it their concern not only to catch the animals but also to nurture them. It is entirely beyond doubt that such an encounter with nature is of overwhelming significance for the moral and intellectual development of the youth. For example, we see in the vicinity of Berlin how the world of insects has been nearly brought to a state of extinction. I remember how at the start of the 1890s, I could still find butterflies, beetles as well as plants around Berlin that you absolutely cannot find anymore these days. These are the regrettable consequences that result from the conditions in the big cities and many other harmful things that are related to each other. I would like attention to be directed particularly towards the protection of the world of insects, butterflies, beetles, etc.

Gentlemen, I have taken the initiative to speak again owing to the statements of the gentleman Schnepp, who spoke of red flyers that had been pasted somewhere obtrusively. I don’t know if the honorable gentleman Dr. Schnepp spoke from his own experience. I am certain he has never seen such a flyer in his life. If such flyers have been stuck up where nature is spoiled by them, then we would be the most remorseful of all, of course.

There is no doubt that such things aren’t approved by us. However I would like to claim that this has never happened. And if one from our side has sinned once, then I am sure that the other side has sinned in this regard three times more.

Posted on

Saint Francis of Assisi by Karl Kautsky

Translation and introduction by Rida Vaquas. 

Karl Kautsky, to the extent his writings on religion are known at all in the English speaking world, is primarily known for writing “Foundations of Christianity” in which he argues that the early Christian community was essentially “a proletarian organisation”, characterized by class hatred against the rich and a common consumption of goods, but changed its character as a result of its contempt for labour. This was the culmination of many years of interest in Christianity, Kautsky had previously edited a four volume book “Forerunners of Modern Socialism” that featured many heretical Christian sects, the first volume appearing in 1895. He was far from alone in the Social Democratic movement from having a sustained interest in Christianity. In the same year as the following article appeared, Vorwärts advertised a book by Emil Rosenow, “Against the Rule of Priests: Cultural Images from the Religious Struggles of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century”, including chapters on asceticism, the monastic orders and the friars. As a journalist, Franz Mehring wrote several articles about the history of the Jesuits, and Calvin and Luther. The topic of Francis of Assisi was taken up once more in 1908, this time in the revisionist journal Sozialistische Monatshefte, by sculptor and writer Emmy von Egidy. 

Most of these publications are underpinned by a form of Protestant secularism: in which the medieval church is represented as a dominant institution within society rather than a “central system of practices, meanings and values”, a medium through which all social life was conducted. Rosa Luxemburg wrote that the Counter-Reformation was a part of what “shattered the beginnings of a new human culture”, which brought those in German lands back under the yoke of an oppressive church. Radical religious movements are recurrently praised insofar as they are a struggle against the papacy, identified as exploiter and ruler analogous to modern states.  Only a minority of socialist thinkers put forward a dissenting perspective, one being the Catholic pastor Wilhelm Hohoff, who argued in his 1881 book “Protestantism and Socialism” that the Reformation had, in fact, paved the way for capitalism.

The present article is not free from the critical assumptions that social progress was a struggle against the medieval church, and that the medieval church itself was a monolithic institution of the ruling class. However, it is unusual in its focus on what Kautsky sees as a communist movement that remained within the Church, even if it ultimately assesses the Franciscans as becoming assimilated into a ruling class institution. This brief introduction is not the place to put forward an alternative perspective on the history of the monastic and mendicant orders, but it is useful to shed a light on what Kautsky understood as communistic about them. 

For Kautsky, the intransigence of a proletarian communist movement ultimately derives from its commitment to labour, “the common duty of work, the communism of production and the means of production”, an ideal which poses a challenge to exploitation in a way that a communism based on consumption cannot. This may seem counterintuitive in an era where we have titles such as “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” and “abolish work” is a common radical slogan. Yet it is precisely the commitment to labour for which Kautsky praises the early Franciscans, and it is their turn away from labour which Kautsky sees as exemplifying their assimilation into the institutions of exploitation. 

A rejoinder that could be posed is that Kautsky was writing at a time in which there were not the technological means to do away with work, in his words, “enjoyment without labour is not yet possible” and surely now, a modern day Karl Kautsky, having watched some TED talks about the state of artificial intelligence technologies, would propose a post-work society as a communist project. But this misses something crucial. Kautsky grasped the human and social dimension of labour, the dimension which is obscured by work in a capitalist society, where work’s ends are profoundly anti-human. In Marx’s famous schema, one does not become a fisherman, hunter, cattle-rearer or critic by working in communism. Nonetheless, one does still fish, hunt, rear cattle and criticise. What then is radical about labour?

The early Franciscans, as Kautsky narrates, “would help the workers in their labour and therefore share their meals and their lodgings”. Numerous biographies of Saint Francis have detailed the kind of labour they would undertake: they served the leprosariums, repaired abandoned chapels, or worked with farmers and artisans. Labour was not simply busy-work, nor was the end simply self-sustenance. It was a way of existing within the community, of living for the sake of one another, even the most outcast amongst us. When we reduce all labour to the debasing kind we do now, ensuring only our own survival for the benefit of the richest, we forget that labour is fundamentally a way of relating to the total human community. Communism, at its most challenging, is not about a redistribution of goods, no matter how sweeping: such a project could be completed by any technocratic social democratic administration. It is about a fundamental transformation of human relations in order to dissolve all that estranges us from each other: it is hence a revolution in how we work and who and what we work for.

Kautsky had a lively interest in Christianity, what he described as a “colossal phenomenon” in “Foundations of Christianity”. However, firmly grounded in the historical materialist method, he did not venture to discuss Franciscans in terms of their spirituality. For that we have to turn to Emmy von Egidy, who wrote that Francis, “the Poverello, led humanity out of the dark torment of medieval spiritual anxieties into a freer, warmer, brighter life, towards the wonderful Franciscan ideal: to own nothing, in order to have everything”. Whilst such exultation is absent in Kautsky, he nonetheless turns eloquent when rescuing the Franciscans from the condescension of bourgeois history deeming their way of life as unnatural. The bourgeoisie, he argues, have confused the imperatives of capital with the imperatives of human life itself. What distinguishes an emancipatory project from an accommodationist one is its radical refusal to accept an unjust world as being representative of who we are and who we can be. For Kautsky, where the Franciscans fail is not in making that radical refusal but in being unable to keep it up. As communists, we are reminded to be watchful of our refusal, and in refusing to accept the permanence of capitalism, we must also refuse to accept the permanence of the injustices we perpetrate towards others owing to our “nature”.

This article was not only intended to be historical. It also had a clear allegorical function, revealed by Saint Francis being described as “the Jaurès of the thirteenth century”.  The Franciscan order gaining papal recognition is meant to be understood as analogous to the decision that Alexandre Millerand, a French Socialist at the time, made in joining the Waldeck-Rousseau cabinet in 1898, a decision that Jean Jaurès justified on account of defending the republic against “more hateful and more violent enemies”. Millerand himself sat in a cabinet with Gaston de Gallifet, the butcher of the Paris communards, whilst the cabinet’s administration was marked out by bloody strikes in which the army was deployed. This was not a problem limited to France; the liberal politician Giolotti sought to convince the reformist Turati to join his government in Italy in 1903, an attempt that failed due to the opposition of the Italian socialist party. The influence of Liberal trade unionists on the early British Labour Party in this period is similarly well-known. 

For Kautsky, as he later outlined explicitly in “Republic and Social Democracy in France” (1905), the entry of a socialist into a bourgeois government was to turn the socialists into a tool of the bourgeoisie, carrying out what they were too weak to do themselves. In this article, it is represented by the papacy striving “to make the Franciscans complicit in the church’s exploitation and make them into its defenders”. Of course, the declaration that socialists should not work with the bourgeoisie does not break much new ground in orthodox Marxism and there are few who would overtly quibble with it today. Yet the much-touted atomization and fragmentation of the working class have often caused many “leftists” to look for power and influence in social alliances, or forced them into a never-ending lesser-evilism in which we justify the violence done to our class and ourselves against the specter of the violence that is still to come. The struggle against “ministerialism” in the Second International was not simply a tactical question about when it is correct for socialists to enter government: it was a question about the nature of the movement. There are many guises by which one can do the bourgeoisie’s dirty work: whether it is by using socialist credentials to spread racist myths about migration or by putting a revolutionary gloss on exploitative resource extraction from the Global South, or by framing our programmes according to what is “reasonable” until we are no more than aspirational administrators of a bourgeois state. In each instance, we both bolster the existing order whilst narrowing the scope of our own project. In order to reject ministerialism, to be able to truly say “for this system, not one man, not one penny!”, we have to reject the entire framework in which these “political” choices are made. The clarification of the world as it is can no longer be confused with the acceptance of the world as it is. Emancipatory politics demands more from us.

Saint Francis of Assisi: Revisionist of Medieval Communism

Original source: Der heilige Franz von Assisi : ein Revisionist des mittelalterlichen Kommunismus von Karl Kautsky, Die Neue Zeit, 22/35 (1904), pp. 260 – 267.

Endeavors to abolish a kind of private property or even all private property are as old as propertylessness, poverty, and the phenomenon of the masses. To this extent, we can say that socialism stretches back far into our history. But the proletariat, the class of the dispossessed, was not always the same, and its differences correspond to the differences in the form of socialism they produced.

This is not a new idea, although it is still not recognized everywhere, and yet it is impossible to fully understand a movement such as the Franciscans, whom a historian has recently written about, without it. For this idea, it is very important to highlight the distinctive features of the different forms of the proletariat is very important because they assemble into two types and because it clearly shows how different the attitude of the papal church is to each of them. 

The communism of primitive Christianity was sustained by a lumpenproletariat on a mass scale. Small enterprise in production still dominated, as far as it was engaged in by free men, collective production, the communism of the means of production, was not worth considering as the ideal of the proletariat. The communism that they strived for was one of enjoyment of goods. Yet the lumpenproletariat shuns work, enjoyment without labour is their ideal and so the ideal of primitive Christianity became a communism of enjoyment without labour. The role models of pious Christians became the lilies and the ravens, who did not spin or weave, who did not sow or reap and yet splendidly thrived.

Yet enjoyment without labour is not yet possible as the common destiny of humanity. Whoever wants to enjoy without labour can only do it off the back of another, whose labour they exploit.

In spite of its communism, the early church hence required the division of society into two classes, one labouring and one exploiting and, as it always goes, the exploiters thought themselves to be better than those they exploited. The latter, they were the sinful children of the world. The exploiters organized in the church elevated themselves above them as saints, as chosen by the Lord. Of course, the exploiters were initially without property and poor and were sustained by the efforts of the community. But the organization of begging and the beggars soon became the dominant force in the church. Begging itself soon reached such staggering excess that from the poverty of the individual religious emerged the wealth of the clergy.

Originally the early church stood in opposition to the dominant society and the state which rested upon inequality, oppression, and exploitation. The more the Church developed from early Christian communism into an institution of exploitation and domination, the more its hostility to the state and society dwindled and hence the easier it became to reconcile itself with the existing order, what Constantine brilliantly attained.

Meanwhile, the same causes result in the same effects time and time again. As often as the masses of lumpenproletariat swell, attempts arise to revive early Christian communism afresh. After some centuries, often even after only decades, the organizations created through this always become a new institution of exploitation and domination within the Church, insofar as they succeed. This is due to the logic of the predicament and is proven by the history of each monastic order.

The communism of the labouring proletariat is of a completely different kind to this lumpenproletarian communism. The labouring proletariat only emerges as a mass phenomenon with the mass production of capital. They recognize the necessity of labour very well. They feel it as a burden, yet they realize it is indispensable. They do not seek to get rid of it, they prefer to make it easier, firstly by the deployment of all members of society capable of work and then by the use of the tools of production that mass industry brings with it. The common duty of work, communism of production and the means of production, that is the necessary ideal of the labouring proletariat.

This ideal signifies the abolition of all exploitation and of all class differences. It is in irreconcilable opposition to all these differences and to society based on exploitation. The communism of the labouring proletariat will be constantly fought against by ruling classes to the bitterest end, even it appears meekly and timidly.

The first beginnings of a proletariat exploited in a capitalist manner – weavers – are found in the cities of North Italy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, where simultaneously a numerous lumpenproletariat roved around, starving and begging. In the Franciscan movement, both classes of the proletariat joined together. It therefore shows the character of both forms of communism: it wanted to renew primitive Christianity and yet it began to develop the sprouts. of a modern socialist movement. However, corresponding to the youth and weakness of the labouring proletariat at the time, they were very weak sprouts lacking vitality and were quickly overrun by lumpenproletarian tendencies. Due to the unification of both elements, the Franciscan movement is of enormous interest for the history of socialism. Its double-sided character also gave the papacy the opportunity to clearly put forward its own position towards both kinds of communism.

Francis was born in Assisi, a small city in Umbria in 1182, as the son of a silk merchant, and had the opportunity to come into contact with the cloth weavers of Lombardy, who had already founded communist brotherhoods at the time. This confirmed anew the important role that weavers played in communist movements of the Reformation period up until the Anabaptists, which I drew attention to in “Forerunners of Socialism”.

In around 1207, Francis began to preach communism. He renounced his worldly possessions and assembled young men around him who would live in voluntary poverty, but not without labour, according to the early Christian ideal. They would help the workers in their labour and therefore share their meals and their lodgings. They could not accept money in any circumstance. They were only permitted to beg if they could not do anything else to earn a living.

Labour played a great role in the beginning of the Franciscans. It is said of one of the first young men of St. Francis, Blessed Giles of Assisi:

“‘He resolved to always live by the labour of his own hands and he fulfilled this purpose’. Hence he went to the forest and carried wood on his shoulders, he sold it and therefore acquired what was necessary to him, that did not mean money but rather food. He helped cut grapes, carried them to the wine press and helped to tread on them. He broke nuts and earned half of the crop according to convention, which he distributed amongst the poor. He sifted flour in a cloister and earned seven loaves for it, he earned even more loaves because he carried water and helped with the baking. For good loaves, he also swept the kitchen.”

The Franciscan movement rapidly grew in its spread and influence over the proletarian classes in Northern Italy and soon caught the attention of the papacy. At the time, the church was the owner of the greatest riches and hence was the strongest exploiter of Christian peoples. Naturally, all communist movements of this period were primarily directed against the papal church and between them mortal enmity had to unfold. But the church already knew that one can become the ruler of a people’s movement much more easily by corrupting it with apparent concessions than by seeking to suppress it violently. Only when the former was not successful did it walk the second path, at least in the era of its intelligence. Francis of Assisi made it easier for the papacy to walk the first path. He belonged to the naive ideologues who think that deep-rooted social contradictions could be talked away by convincing the opponent. In 1210 he came before Pope Innocent III and prided himself on making an impression on him.

His organization was recognized and received permission to preach. This was totally unlike the heretical communists such as the Waldensians and the Apostolic Brethren who lived in open war with the Church. Francis, the Jaurès of the thirteenth century, hoped to be able to peacefully use the organization of the ruling classes, at the time the church, in order to imperceptibly undermine and abolish this class. Yet as a result, his communist organization was incorporated into the organization of domination and exploitation. His communism became a new pillar of papal domination and exploitation: that was his achievement. It was communism that changed as a result of this assimilation, not the papacy.

The communism of the labouring proletariat was too incompatible with all exploitation. In contrast, the communism of the lumpenproletariat, who lived by not by labour but by begging, could assimilate itself very well into clerical exploitation, which itself emerged from it. As soon as the papacy achieved influence amongst the Franciscans, it made every effort to get them to give up labour, to restrict themselves to begging without labour, which was sponsored through manifold privileges and made profitable. The papacy strived to make the Franciscans complicit in the church’s exploitation and make them into its defenders. The workshy elements in the order were promoted by the papacy and brought to its leadership, which simultaneously invoked vast greed in it. Organized mendicancy became ever more profitable, popes and cardinals saw to it that the Franciscans acquired property. Of course, the rules of the order forbade all property to them, not only individual but also collective, yet they did not forbid the use of the church’s property. So the order thrived under the papal sun of mercy, it soon lived in palaces and celebrated lavish meals and yet it became ever more estranged from its original purpose. A far cry from weakening or abolishing the wealth and the power of the church, the Franciscans became the most eager advocates of the papacy, the power of which they expanded as a result of the influence they exercised amongst the lower classes of the people. They became for the papacy of the Reformation era the same as what liberal officials of the English trade unions and the ministerialist socialists in France became for the bourgeoisie in our own era: powerful pillars of the existing order which mutate the proletariat from being a revolutionary force into a conservative element. 

It was with anguish that Francis saw this transformation that he had in no way intended. He could not have recognized at the time that things have their natural logic, even today some people cannot grasp it. Over and over again he appealed to the brothers to return to poverty and labour. In his testament he declared:

“I worked with my hands and still wish to work and I firmly wish that all my brothers give themselves to honest work… Let the brothers beware that they by no means receive churches or poor dwellings or anything which is built for them unless it is in harmony with that holy poverty which we have promised in the Rule, and let them always be guests there as pilgrims and strangers. And I firmly command all of the brothers through obedience that, wherever they are, they should not be so bold as to seek any letter from the Roman Curia either personally or through an intermediary, neither for a church or for some other place or under the guise of preaching or even for the persecution of their bodies.”

Yet everything was futile because Francis did not dare to take the decisive step of breaking obedience to the pope. Hence Francis was canonised two years after his death (1228), canonised because he, even against his will, had betrayed the proletarian cause through his alliance with the ruling authorities. Of course, the original tendencies of the order could not be completely blotted out for long. The strict, proletarian tendency sustained itself for a long time, mainly nourished by the Tertiaries, one of the order’s organizations of lay brothers attached to it. These were mostly labouring proletarians, who emphasised again and again the communist and oppositional character and invoked the wrath of the “more lenient” exploiting tendency, whose “leniency” and “tolerance” primarily came to light in their generosity in relation to the rule of the order, the undermining of which they executed calmly. In contrast, they were the most savage opponents of the stricter tendency, whose advocates they cleared away by fire, sword and the burial of living bodies. The strengthening of the Reformation movement finally ended all attempts to reawaken communist tendencies in the arms of the Franciscan order, as it clearly pointed out to all energetic communist elements that the fall of the papacy was the indispensable precondition of every further development in society and showed the absurdity of all endeavors to reform society through peaceful means with the cooperation of the papal church.

It can be clearly seen that the Franciscan movement is an important link in the chain of communist movements and Dr. Glaser should be recognized for the fluent investigation of sources by which he has illuminated its history.

Unfortunately, he is a student of Brentano’s and as such is obligated to remain blind towards class antagonisms. As he cannot go deeper, he must stay at the surface. As he cannot separate different communist tendencies according to the character of the classes from which they emerge, he cannot grasp their emergence from the real lives of their time and hence he must situate them as simple efforts to realize traditional pious hopes.

The master himself does likewise in the review of Glaser’s book, published in the first issue of the new series of “Archiv für soziale Gesetzgebung und Statistik” that is now known by the title “Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik”. Brentano provides a “genealogy of attacks on property” there. In a truly professorial manner, he explains particular communist tendencies not by forms of property and forms of production of their time but rather by the propagation and interpretation of traditional ideas by a teacher, whose students try to realize these teachings. Hence he thinks, alongside Glaser, the entirety of the communist calamity was fundamentally caused by the Old Testament, in which there is only one who owns: Jehovah. This is where Brentano’s family tree of socialism ends. Where the Old Testament’s conception of property comes from remains a mystery. However, once it has been given, it plants itself ineradicably from one mind to another until it gets to Marx. This is where Brentano’s history of socialism meets with Eugen Dühring’s, who uncovered Marxism as a plagiarisation of the Jewish jubilee.

The French utopians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries form one of the mediating links between Marx and Christian communism. At the time, these people gave up being truly Catholic in their thinking yet there remained “the old conception of communism as being the only state corresponding with natural law, but the justification of property as a necessity since the Fall of Man declined … Consequently there were most vehement theoretical attacks on property and attempts to theoretically justify communism. . . . Characteristically, everyone, from whom these arguments originated, had either been clergy or had undergone a theological education and had fallen away from Christianity. So there was Abbé Morreln, Abbe Mabeln, the priest Meslier.”

This demonstration of evidence is characteristic of Brentano. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the educational institutions of Romance countries were almost completely in the hands of theologians, and there were few educated people who had not “undergone a theological education”. Voltaire and Diderot were students of Jesuits. The socialist Abbés can be set against the bourgeois economists, Abbés Baudeau, Rannal and Morellet as well as the Abbot Galliani, and the liberal politicians Abbé Sienes and the Bishop Tallerand – to only call some names which immediately come to my mind. There was no tendency in seventeenth and eighteenth century France that would not have been represented by some Abbés.

On the other hand, it is in no way true that all French communists of this period were theologians. Vairasse, for example, was a soldier, Fontenelle had a legal education, Restif de la Bretonne got through his youth as a typesetter. 

One sees from the evidence – the only thing from which Brentano argues – that nothing is left of the connection between French communism in the period of the Enlightenment and early Christian communism. 

Brentano’s genealogy does less violence to the apparent facts of medieval communism. Its representatives did actually refer to the Bible. But it is completely wrong to see the causes of a party in a party’s arguments. The causes have produced the party and increased their numbers. The human intellect was always a means to serve the needs of mankind. It is limitless in its discoveries to satisfy these needs. The foundations for all social and hence political strivings are to be ultimately sought in this with the social conditions changing the needs, insofar as they are of a social nature, and not in the arguments made to serve them. Whoever, instead of researching the relationship between the needs, aims and the arguments of a social movement, restricts themselves to investigating the formal connections of the arguments and aims of this movement and similar arguments and aims of earlier movements will always remain in the dark about the real driving forces of history.

This limitation of Brentano’s and his students is no accident, it is necessarily grounded in their bourgeois perspective. Only the communist movements appear to them as purely ideological, they recognize very well the connections between the tendencies of the papacy and the economic requirements of nascent capitalism. But the bourgeois way of thinking is the only one that they grasp, it seems to them as normal, as coming from the natural needs of mankind. The contradiction between the proletarian and bourgeois social outlook appears to Brentano as the “contradiction between the natural position of humanity towards worldly goods and the renunciation that is demanded”; “the instincts of human nature are stronger than the legacy of Saint Francis triumph over the demands of asceticism” – by which asceticism means the abolition of property, not the requirement for chastity, which neither Glaser nor Brentano bring into view and, even in the struggle between the strict and the lenient, “the demands of asceticism” of the triumphant tendency in the Franciscans do not come into view. “The instincts of human nature” are not even sexual desires but the desire for property.

The fact that the teachings of the Church adapted themselves to the needs of nascent capital is further described as “the great convergence of church teachings with life”.

The needs of capital are therefore for Brentano the needs of life, of nature, of reality. The needs of the proletariat appear to captives of bourgeois thought as only the needs of the anti-natural, the reveries of an ideology estranged from the world. Class contradictions viewed in this way are happily transformed into a conflict between reality and ideal, the natural and unnatural. The communist endeavors of the Middle Ages, therefore, failed not because of the weaknesses and immaturity of the labouring proletariat but because they could not be reconciled with the demands of life. Hence the impracticability of communism in the Middle Ages changes from being a result of the historically determined relations then into something which holds unconditionally true for all periods, an essentially necessary phenomenon. One sees yet again how closely tied the opposition to the materialist conception of history is with bourgeois thought.

Alongside this, it is also remarkable the extent to which Brentano and even more of his students are sympathetic to the tactics of the papacy to make the communists harmless: to elevate them into the ranks of the privileged and hence detach them from the proletariat and corrupt them. Our Munich Professor knows well that these are the same tactics from England that he and his people have been fruitless trying in Germany for the last thirty years in order to embourgeoise Social Democracy. This tactic, which certain gullible souls in our own ranks occasionally boastfully highlight as an example of the great labour sympathies of these gentlemen, is, in fact, more dangerous to the emancipation efforts the proletariat than all oppression. 

The victory march of Social Democracy can no longer be hindered by violent oppression, but rather only by the corruptive privileging of its individual ranks. However, this is only for a while. Class antagonisms break out again and again. They are the great lever that ruin all the tricks of our opponents and launch the driving forces of social development time and time again.

Posted on

100 Years Since Rosa Luxemburg’s Death: A Resolution On The Character of The New International

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.

Posted on

A Worker on Workers’ Education

Translation and introduction by Rida Vaquas. The original article can be found here.

SPD Party School, Berlin (1907)

This article was originally written by Franz Förster (a painter) in 1909, in the leading theoretical journal of the SPD, Die Neue Zeit.  It was a direct intervention into a heated debate around what the nature of political education should be taking place with German Social Democracy, which came to a head in the 1908 Nuremberg Party Congress over the curriculum of the party school. Whilst the revisionist wing of the party, including the Comrades Eisner and Maurenbrecher mentioned in this article, argued that the Party School should only teach hard facts and elementary sciences, the radical left, many of whom were employed at the Party School, emphasized the necessity of learning theory. Maurenbrecher was roundly criticized for suggesting it was pointless to learn about value theory unless one was first familiar with Thomas Aquinas. Luxemburg insisted on the need for “the theory which gives us the possibility of systematizing the hard facts and forging them into a deadly weapon”. 1 This kind of insistence on “systematization” is present in this article, with theory being the basis of understanding, as opposed to knowledge of historical individualities.

The purpose of presenting this translation is not simply to provide a rerun for English-speakers about a particular debate within Social Democracy but to point towards the problems in the discussion of political education today, and ways forward. This article is caustic, polemical and eloquent; precisely because of the urgency of establishing what a class-based educational programme should do and how. Workers’ education (Arbeiterbildung) represented a turn away from the people’s education (Volksbildung) organized by philanthropic societies for self-improvement, it was intended to increase workers’ capacity to participate in the class struggle. The debate in the SPD really centered upon what skills are needed in this struggle and, implicitly, what shape this struggle should take.

A hundred years and innumerable defeats later, socialists have found ourselves in the middle of a resurgence of popular interest in “the Left”, however, we are still working out how we can build up socialist political infrastructures at the base of our movement. Perhaps we need to remind ourselves that the historical institutions we look to as models weren’t conjured out of thin air by parties’ in much better situations than us; they were the product of hard and serious fights and constructed out of insufficient and inadequate parts.

Yet we also need to interrogate how political education works, if it is intended to reduce our dependence on leaders. This article rightly argues that “uncritically tailing leaders” conflicts with democratic principles, however, does teaching theory necessarily prevent this outcome if the leaders are the teachers of theory? Everyone who’s been through school knows that education can cement a hierarchy just as much as it can be used to dismantle it. In order to abide by Franz Mehring’s maxim “With the leaders if they are with us; without the leaders if they fail to act; in spite of the leaders if they oppose us”, there has to be the capacity to build shared understandings of the world and social change which do not hinge upon the leader of the moment, nor act as ideological legitimation for them.2 If socialist theory is a “question of life” for the labour movement, we cannot be content with half-hearted gestures towards education being a good idea, but bring it into the realm of political contestation.

A Worker on Workers Education

By Franz Förster

After Comrade Eisner, tucked away in a casual statement made in justified annoyance, portrayed the “theorising” worker as a pitiable creature, who is not to be taken more seriously in his partial education, and even harms the party, it ought to have deterred any thinking Social Democratic worker from concerning himself with theories, let alone writing about them. And yet I dare.

The issues that I want to discuss were touched upon already by Comrade Kautsky in his article “Some Remarks about Marx and Engels”.

The proponents of the Nuremberg educational methods, the comrades Maurenbrecher and Eisner claim that  Social Democratic workers need to know nothing about value theory or the materialist conception of history. Why? Because firstly they don’t have sufficient background knowledge, secondly because they don’t have enough time at their disposal which is necessary to work through the required material, according to this perspective. And thirdly, because knowledge of these theories for workers and eventually others represents a redundant luxury that one can do without, which Maurenbrecher demonstrates to us with his own person. Indeed, he doesn’t even hesitate to assert that theory, when taken up by the masses, could paralyse the party’s ability to act.

I will refrain from deriding the logic of Maurenbrecher or this claim, even though this restraint costs a great deal in the face of the situation.

A number of comrades, who were not completely satisfied with the level of understanding for our tasks within our own ranks, believed they could accept the curious assertion of Eisner and Maurenbrecher, without perhaps investigating the issue more precisely for the time being. It would be particularly astonishing if the atmosphere in trade union circles was in favour of the Nuremberg educational methods, when even they have reasons to turn against it. At the very least it is very premature to make the proposed educational methods into a shibboleth of revisionism.

If the proponents of new teaching methods say that workers lack the understanding of elementary knowledge and methodical reasoning that are necessary, this is only partially true. Because if understanding and recognition of value theory and the materialist conception of history only depended on mere reasoning, the entirety of our bourgeois social sciences could not oppose them uncomprehendingly. But it is well-known this is not the case. Countless examples could be invoked which show that many intelligent people, some who are even called Professor, commit the greatest offenses against logic as soon as they have to make a judgment on things which fall outside their bourgeois class interests. These are often offenses at which the class-conscious worker pityingly smiles. The effects of the laws of motion of our economy, discovered by Marx, have been sufficiently demonstrated to the working class first-hand. Their theories let us understand what is already familiar to us. The worker is more disposed to understanding socialist theory than members of other classes because as well as the thirst for knowledge, his class interests lend him support. For him, socialist theories are not academic questions, but questions of life itself. Because if he masters them, they become a powerful weapon in his hand in the struggle against his oppressors.

On the other hand, the academically educated new party member, who comes from the non-proletarian classes and therefore lacks the sharp proletarian class consciousness, has to finally free himself from the fetters of the bourgeois ideology which has been instilled in him. Of course, the proletarian way of thinking presents him with much greater difficulties, since enormous amounts of energy were uselessly consumed in the years of higher education. He is usually tired and resentful that he should now expend effort in learning the ropes of a different method of thinking that is completely alien to him. From this perspective, one can empathize with Comrade Maurenbrecher, that he is trying to save so much of the old cargo on the new ship. A longer quarantine would have done a lot of good here.

“If now the worker thinks, then nonetheless he should concern himself with history first and foremost”, that’s a history of quite a strange kind. Maurenbrecher’s method, to lose yourself in a welter of historical episodes, is a rather dangerous sport. These things have already flown over some people’s heads, so they don’t see the wood for the trees. The parts are more important to them than the whole. The danger of confusion through study of events alien to them, ripped out of context and without theory as rendered in the biographies of great men and princes, is particularly strong amongst workers. The workers, who have the doubtful fortune of having to listen to Comrade Maurenbrecher, only have a jumbled mass of historical details in store for them, without the connecting link of the materialist conception of history, because that is only for the leaders. It would “bamboozle” the heads of the workers. Once this is brought about, the soil is prepared for Maurenbrecher sowing the seeds of his bourgeois worldview, on which he – consciously or unconsciously – still stands with both feet.

From this superficial perspective, that Maurenbrecher wants to restrict the workers to, it follows that he and his friends give particular significance to the political constellation in South Germany, which is not merited. They are lost in trivialities, which will turn out to be illusions when disenchantment occurs.

When Comrade Maurenbrecher and his friend Eisner say: “Theory inhibits swift decisions, it is damaging to routine industrial struggles”, they ought to know, or their friends in trade unions ought to know, that serious struggles are not led with merely feelings and desire. As the goals of trade union struggle, just as much as political struggle, are predominantly economic (or would you dispute this too, Comrade Maurenbrecher?), it is our task, as class-conscious proletarians, to attain a clear account of the character of the economy and of bourgeois society. We achieve this through observation and evaluation of experience, in order to discern the laws of the movement, the decisive conditions for the onset of an event, to uncover the relationships between phenomena. A perspective into the past and future of society is only possible by virtue of awareness of the fundamental interconnections between events, only possible when we adopt the materialist conception of history. It alone enables us to turn the political and trade union movement towards the service of the working class wisely and purposefully, and even to overcome particular limitations.

Unquestionably, all of our knowledge about the infinite abundance of social life is only piecemeal. The nuggets of our more or less substantial knowledge must be brought together through a socialist worldview: this and the materialist conception of history consolidate the countless individual events of human affairs in the past and present into a whole. It is the key to understanding these matters. The understanding of our economy is therefore not dependent on the greater or lesser mass of knowledge you have stored up, but rather that whatever “learning” you have at your disposal is harmoniously unified through a clarified outlook, through a “theory”. That is how a worker can often be wiser and more educated than a heavily taught historian or national economist.

The appeal and impact of our party is also dependent on theoretical understanding. We don’t need blind faith, but rather scientific conviction, which gives us certainty and power. The freedom of action of the masses will not be weakened through this, rather strengthened. It is this insight, this knowledge of relevant factors, which guarantees success. A lack of insight absolutely cannot be replaced by “good leaders”. Aside from the fact that we come into sharp conflict with our democratic principles if we uncritically tail leaders, the history of the workers’ movement up until most recently shows us that a working class which is insufficiently aware of these relationships will deny allegiance even to the best leaders.

Perhaps the events which played out in the Nuremberg Party Congress are bringing forth the benefit that comrades concern themselves more with theoretical questions than they previously did.