In our series of revolutionary pamphlets we look at Rosa Luxemburgs The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions
`It flows now like a broad billow over the whole kingdom, and now divides into a gigantic network of narrow streams; now it bubbles forth from under the ground like a fresh spring and now is completely lost under the earth. Political and economic strikes, mass strikes and partial strikes, demonstrative strikes and fighting strikes, general strikes of individual branches of industry and general strikes in individual towns, peaceful wage struggles and street massacres, barricade fighting all these run through one another, run side by side, cross one another, flow in and over one another _ it is a ceaselessly moving, changing sea of phenomena.'
Most of us may not have lived through a revolutionary mass strike, but Rosa Luxemburg's description comes a pretty good second. The power and excitement of workers in struggle are captured brilliantly on each page of this truly exceptional pamphlet.
Luxemburg wrote it in 1906 in Finland, where she was recuperating from imprisonment in Poland. Born in 1871, she had been a leading socialist theoretician and activist since her youth, first in her native Poland and then also in Germany from the late 1890s. She was murdered in 1919 during the German Revolution, having seen the ideas outlined in this pamphlet vindicated and realised during the 1917 Russian Revolution.
The Mass Strike was targeted at the German trade union leadership and its increasing conservatism about political and general strikes. A few months earlier the 1905 Cologne Trade Union Congress had met under a slogan that Tony Blair would kill for: `The trade unions need peace and quiet above all.' The bureaucracy feared that mass strikes would undermine its leadership, destroy its organisation and empty their coffers. Even those who supported the political strike saw it as a weapon to be summoned up by the leadership when all else had failed.
Luxemburg poured scorn on such ideas. She had studied the great strikes in Belgium in the 1890s and, crucially, those in the 1905 Russian Revolution. She understood that the mass strike could not be summoned up by anyone, let alone trade union leaders. Instead, it erupts spontaneously often unexpectedly and for almost accidental reasons. It is not the result of a tactic, devised in smoke-filled rooms, but a natural phenomenon arising out of class struggle. It is not a device to make working class struggle more effective, `but the method of motion of the proletarian mass'.
Moreover, rather than destroying trade unions, as the bureaucracy feared, the mass strike (in fact, any strike) revitalises working class organisations, `From the whirlwind and the storm, out of the fire and glow of the mass strike and the street fighting rise again, like Venus from the foam, fresh, young, powerful, buoyant trade unions.'
Luxemburg's incisive dialectical approach revealed for the first time the dynamics of the mass strike, which she describes as the `living pulsebeat of the revolution and at the same time its most powerful driving wheel'.
She shows that in a period of mass struggle, whatever trade union leaders might want or plan, economic strikes throw up political demands and political strikes throw up economic demands. They are inextricably connected, one feeding off the other.
`After every foaming wave of political action a fructifying deposit remains behind from which a thousand stalks of economic struggle shoot forth. And conversely. The workers' condition of ceaseless economic struggle with the capitalist keeps their fighting energy alive in every political interval; it forms, so to speak, the permanent fresh reservoir of the strength.'
Such struggles, she shows, are integral to the revolution and distinguish the socialist revolution from all others. `In order to be able to overthrow [capitalism], the proletariat requires a high degree of political education, of class consciousness and organisation. All these conditions cannot be fulfilled by pamphlets and leaflets, but only by the living political school, by the fight and in the fight, in the continuous course of the revolution.'
Luxemburg was careful to show that her analysis did not mean that the most class conscious workers should not be organised in a revolutionary party, or that there was no role for revolutionaries.
`They cannot and dare not wait, in a fatalistic fashion, with folded arms for the advent of the "revolutionary situation", to wait for a spontaneous movement of the people to fall from the clouds. On the contrary, they must now, as always, hasten the development of things and endeavour to accelerate events.' No other pamphlet more thrillingly excites the reader with the energy and liberation of mass revolutionary struggle. No other pamphlet explains better the socialist revolution, showing that it is not just about manning the barricades and seizing power, but is essentially `a long continuous social process'.
`Its solution demands a complete undermining of the soil of society; the uppermost part be placed lowest and the lowermost part highest, the apparent "order" must be changed to a chaos, and the apparently "anarchistic" chaos must be changed into a new order.'
The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions is available from Bookmarks, 265 Seven Sisters Rd, London N4 2DE, for £1.95 plus 30 pence postage.