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Luxemburg, Lenin and the role of the Communist Party

The Morning Star is pleased to run an interview with communist and science fiction writer DIETMAR DATH, who edited a collection of Rosa Luxemburg’s writing and speeches published in Germany last November. This interview is reproduced with kind permission from our German sister paper Junge Welt and first appeared on the centenary of the foundation of the German Communist Party (KPD)

SHOULD today’s left concern itself with the founding of the KPD? If so, with what?

If leftwingers don’t want to know anything about history, history doesn’t want to know anything about them. 

The KPD was very interested in the date of its foundation — did it happen too soon, too late or at just the right time — and how anchored was it in the arena of class struggle with which it had to engage? 

Unfortunately, at first its clout came not from being embedded everywhere at the grassroots but through its most prominent members. 

They would not lose sight of struggles such as that in 1914, when the Social Democratic Party committed its first unforgivable practical betrayal of the class [by supporting the German empire’s decision to go to war]. 

Its knowledge-based connection to world communism, at first low and its high theoretical standard was guaranteed by the famous people in its ranks, and the most famous was Rosa Luxemburg.

In the Basic Biographies series in 2010, you had a work published on Rosa Luxemburg. In it you wrote: “Anyone who studies the current writings of the global left, who are just recovering from serious defeats at the beginning of the 21st century, will encounter Luxemburg’s thinking everywhere … the hunters have failed to silence the hunted.”

Together with Karl Liebknecht, Luxemburg decisively shaped the founding congress of the German Communist Party and its first programme. Why is it that so many who appeal to them ignore this?

Because many who appeal to them wish to dwell in “beauty and purity” — to be able to say that communism is too difficult, we always lose, even Rosa Luxemburg lost to the “pigs,” and so on. An excuse for 100 years of shirking Leninism.

Do you see differences between Luxemburg’s and Lenin’s views on the party?

I would warn against seeing world history as a battle of ideas and perceptions. It consists of a conflict of interests, and not even the party that clumsily pursues its own theory, or has too little theory, or too much, or the wrong theory — always loses; amusingly sometimes the stupid ones are even strongest. 

This could happen because the smarter ones give way, or if by a chance of mood a party with theoretical flaws proves more flexible at a given moment by chance or mood. 

A left bourgeois view of history likes to be enthusiastic about Luxemburg’s text Mass Strike, Party and Unions (1906), which speaks of spontaneity and widespread uproar and represents the party as an important sideshow to the revolution, a bit like a signature on a very assertive letter by the masses to the ruling class.

In Lenin’s What is to be Done, on the other hand, the party is the looking glass through which the sun of theory shines on a bad condition until it burns. What differed more between the two was the real pragmatism.

Some people say Lenin used to sever connections with right-wing social democrats, so he was more willing to disunite, and that proved more successful.

True at a crucial moment, but we must not forget that he was far from sectarian: he would even meet the Socialist Revolutionaries, something like the contemporary counterpart to the Greens, if they had a good idea.

If anything he succeeded in demonstrating to an attentive and awakened public that he often took the good policies of the competition rather more seriously than they did.

Above all Lenin didn’t follow theory out of impulse, but demonstrated to people who didn’t agree the truth of the theory, which is more important.

He made Marxism well known and powerful in party politics, and evidence for his theories was reported in newspapers, while Luxemburg’s thoughts were more in books.

It wasn’t really her fault — the circumstances were less favourable, as social democracy in the German-speaking world was particularly cursed an already well-versed in hypocrisy, with many of its best and brightest mired in opportunism and revisionism by the time Luxemburg joined.

She could only argue with them, and unfortunately that is always the most powerless form of practice.

Rosa Luxemburg considered a Communist Party an indispensable tool in the fight against imperialist war. Was that a belief for its time, or is it meaningful today?

What do you call an alliance in which everyone — the professional soldier, the “classless intellectuals,” the hairdressers, the dustbin lorry drivers, the doctors, the unemployed dental technicians, the freelance journalists — is in touch with the class struggle of every sector in that list, and, if the national and international exploiting classes start a war, resist that war with the idea of a better society in mind? 

Not a trade union, because not all those named would fit within a union. Not a “movement,” as these people won’t be able to “move” their concerns in a synchronised manner, as their problems could be very different. Call what they need whatever you like. But it’s a Communist Party. What else?

This interview was conducted by Arnold Scholzel.

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