Rosa Luxemburg's disagreements with Lenin are well known. Already in 1904, she wrote an article "Organizational Questions of Russian Social-Democracy," which appeared in Iskra (after Lenin's resignation, under an opportunist editorship), in which she did not agree with Lenin on the need for democratic centralism in the party. Over the years, she wrote articles against the right of nations to self-determination. Finally, in September 1918, while still in prison for opposing the imperialist World War I, she wrote a small pamphlet entitled The Russian Revolution, which contained a friendly but critical look at some aspects of the Bolshevik revolution. It is to these last criticisms that Clara Zetkin refers in her 1922 book: "Rosa Luxemburg's Attitude to the Russian Revolution"never translated into English before.
In The Russian Revolution, Luxembourg criticizes the Bolsheviks for allegedly rejecting democratic institutions - in particular, by dissolving the Constituent Assembly at its first session in January 1918. The Assembly was elected immediately after the October Revolution, but the revolution has already given full power to the workers', peasants' and soldiers' councils. However, at the time Luxemburg wrote her brochure, the circumstances in Germany were different. The First World War was still going on and Kaiser Wilhelm was still Emperor of Germany. In November 1918, the Kaiser was overthrown and the German army disintegrated, leading to the end of World War I. At this point, workers and soldiers created their own councils, mainly in Berlin, but also in other cities and states of Germany. These soviets were still under the leadership of two Social Democratic parties (just as the Russian soviets were under the leadership of the Russian opportunist Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries between the February and October revolutions). However, under revolutionary leadership, they could well have formed a counter-pole to the bourgeois government in Germany.
Luxembourg spent most of the last years of her life criticizing the reformist and opportunist positions of Germany's two Social Democratic parties, the SPD. (Social Democratic Party of Germany) and NSDP (Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany), both of which essentially supported Germany during World War I. She, together with Karl Liebknecht, Wilhelm Pieck, Leo Jogic, Paul Levy and others, formed the Spartacus League, and then the Communist Party of Germany. The league and party worked for the proletarian revolution following the war.
The leaders of the Spartak League, and in particular Rosa Luxemburg, opposed the calls for the elections of the National Assembly (analogous to the Constituent Assembly of Russia) in Germany and directed all their energies to calling on the masses to give "All power to the workers and soldiers' councils!" In January 1919, an unsuccessful uprising of soldiers took place in Berlin, initially supported by the Independent Social Democratic Party and revolutionary workers' deputies. The Communist Party supported it as a massive uprising in defense of the democratic gains of the November revolution, although it clearly understood that this uprising could not lead to a successful seizure of power by the working class. The bourgeoisie, together with the Social Democratic government, was able to suppress the uprising,and Luxemburg and Liebknecht were arrested and killed on January 15, 1919 by soldiers on the instructions of the Social Democratic government. This was a serious blow to the workers' revolution in Germany.
Clara Zetkin in her book, especially in the fourth chapter, shows in detail how R. Luxemburg in her articles in Rote Fahne (Red Banner) in practice adheres in Germany to the same principled attitude towards the National Assembly as the Bolsheviks to the Constituent Assembly in Russia. Clara Zetkin points out that although R. Luxemburg and other members of the Spartacus League did not manage to write a political treatise on this issue, they raised the same question as the Bolsheviks - that the choice exists only between proletarian and bourgeois democracies.
Various Social Democrats and other opportunist and reactionary forces have always tried to use Luxembourg against Lenin and the Bolsheviks. For example, Bertram D. Wolfe is a former leader of the US Communist Party, and later a supporter of Loveston and, in the end, an outspoken anti-communist who worked for the US State Department. In the early 1960s, Wolfe republished, under his own reactionary foreword, two of Rosa Luxemburg's pamphlets: the 1904 pamphlet mentioned above under the distorted title Marxism against Leninism, and the pamphlet The Russian Revolution. In an article in 1907, Lenin criticized forces trying to play on differences between revolutionaries - for example, the criticism to which he subjected some of the mistakes of the German revolutionary Social Democrats. Lenin ends with the famous saying: “Eagles sometimes fly lower,than chickens, but chickens can never fly as high as eagles! Clara Zetkin in her book shows that the revolutionary positions and practice of R. Luxemburg stand out against the background of other members of the communist movement - especially in the last months of her life. At the very end, Rosa Luxemburg's eagle really flew very high.
George Gruenthal