Between Anarchism and Opportunism
From her debut on the German scene, Luxemburg cut her teeth and made her mark as a thorough-going critic of opportunism in both the theory and praxis of the SPD. As Mattick has contended, of all the attacks on revisionism, hers were the most powerful.
In her famous polemic against Bernstein, she diagnosed his “opportunist theory” as “nothing else than an unconscious attempt to assure predominance to the petty-bourgeois elements” that had infiltrated the party, attracted by its inexorable electoral advances, like bears to honey. In this respect, her analysis anticipated and converged with Michels’ perceptive observations about the “iron law of oligarchy.” But unlike Michels, she never turned against parliamentary politics tout court.
Luxemburg was eloquent and persuasive in her warnings against those who espoused “the method of legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution.” She insisted that such a manoeuvre does not mean merely opting for “a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal.” The “realization of socialism” reduced to the more limited task of reforming capitalism. From courageously “taking a stand for a new society,” the party is transformed into simply “taking a stand for surface modification of the old society.” Rather than seeking to eradicate the crisis-prone capitalist system underpinning and driving the perpetuation of oppressive social relations, the party comes to accommodate itself comfortably within the system, to lower the bar of its demands, to seek only to assuage the worst of the system’s abuses
In this sense, Luxemburg was the consummate “orthodox” Marxist, a revolutionary who remained true to Marx’s aspiration for human emancipation, conceived as fundamentally incompatible with life under capitalism, regardless of the level of one’s wages. As Marx had insisted in his youth, when he was still more inclined to employ philosophical and moral modes of argumentation, better payment for the wage-slave would not and could not mean the same thing as the conquest of “human status and dignity” by the worker. (Though, tellingly, Marx wrote for the worker, not by the worker).
For that matter, she also remained true to Marx’s (and Engel’s) early and unflinching belief that the struggle for representative democracy constitutes a first step in the struggle for socialism. She argued, like Therborn would much later, that representative democratic institutions are themselves best understood as the product and reflection of the contradictions of capitalism, and that, inevitably, within the arena of “bourgeois parliamentarianism, class antagonism and class domination is not done away with, but are, on the contrary, displayed in the open.
Access to, and operation within, the parliamentary arena proves “necessary and indispensable to the working class” nonetheless. Necessary “because it creates the political forms, (autonomous administration, electoral rights, etc.) which will serve the proletariat as fulcrums in its task of transforming bourgeois society.” Indispensable because “only through the exercise of its democratic rights, in the struggle for democracy, can the proletariat become aware of its class interests and its historic task.” Whereas Bernstein and the revisionists conceived of parliamentary politics as an alternative route to socialism, an alternative to revolution, Luxemburg insisted instead that such an arena is valuable insofar as it paves the way for the revolutionary “conquest of power.” It does so both (1) by providing necessary political forms and (2) by facilitating the indispensable spread and promotion of revolutionary class consciousness.
Here her argument proved overly optimistic, at least as a prediction of the trajectory that awaited Social Democracy, in which the trend of opportunism among the leadership and the weight of national consciousness among the workers proved capable of fending off the spectre of revolutionary class consciousness among sufficiently broad swathes of the German working class. And yet, as a set of guidelines for the proper aims, goals, and necessary limits of participation in the parliamentary arena, it remains nevertheless most instructive.
