Rosa Luxemburg: The Case for a Mass Workers’ Strike

the quite enormous slave herds of Prusso-German state employers, railroad workers and postal workers, as well as the farm workers, who unfortunately enjoy very limited measure of that contented preoccupation with “organizations, meetings, and options of all sorts” as long as the right to organize is legally or practically denied them.

Whole categories of workers, Luxemburg continues, “live politically as well as economically in genuine ‘Russian’ conditions…not to mention miners – will find it impossible, in the midst of a political convulsion, to maintain their slavish obedience or to refrain from presenting their special bill of reckoning in the form of giant mass strikes.”

But Kautsky further claims that “the strongest” government has experienced the “glory of almost a century of continuous victories over the strongest great powers in the world.” And – “a strike in Germany would result in failure.” German worker could “take up the strike as a means of struggle only when he has the prospect of attaining definite successes with it. If these successes fail to appear, the strike has failed its purpose.”

This is the gospel according to Karl Kautsky – not Karl Marx! Participate in the elections, not in strikes and street protests! And, of course, Kautsky is a self-declared Marxist at the time he writes, “A New Strategy.”

As any union agitator knows, writes Luxemburg, “definite successes” in the form of material gains “absolutely are not and cannot be the sole purpose, the sole determining aspect in economic struggles.” In other parts of Europe, strikes “without much ‘plan’” erupt because “a great exploited mass of proletarians [stand] opposed to the concentrated ruling power of capital or the capitalist state.” Strikers are not infrequent but frequent, she continues, and “mostly end without any ‘definite successes’ at all – but in spite, or rather just because of this are of greater significance as explosions of a deep inner contradiction which spills over into the realm of politics.”

These are periods of the “most beautiful confusion” – “spontaneous combustion of the masses,” union leadership, “economic struggle and political struggle, mass strikes and revolution.” But it seems “that ‘theory’ does not merely ‘stride forward’ more slowly than practice: alas, from time to time it also goes tumbling backwards.”

Organize voting rights campaigns! Prepare for the elections! We are the Left; we’ve got your back!

And we wonder why in the 21st Century it is possible for the capitalist state to amass its power to repress the voice of opposition and protests and to misrepresent the lived experiences of the workers even to themselves? Look to the Left, Luxemburg suggests! Look to those who present themselves as adherents of class struggle but who function for the capitalist rulers.

How can the workers here in the U.S. call for a General Strike for May 1st when we are “the strongest” government in thee world and we have a “Black” president?

While the Occupy Movement is supporting the May 1st call to stage a general strike, the Left press is silent.

Elections! Change again is on the way!

We should focus our attention, as Kautsky would argue, to supporting “the strongest government” and postpone expectations for “a mass strike until the year after the Reichstag elections.”

Luxemburg: This is “nothing-but-parlimentarism.” – politics for the capitalists – and the rise of a fascist state will not be far behind!

Rosa Luxemburg did not live to see the rise of the fascist state. She was murdered by the Freikorps in Janaury 1919. But she knew…