An institution with such vast importance in many fields should have a minimum budget corresponding to its activities and maintenance necessities. In 2013, the federal government transferred an amount of 1.3 million BRL (US\$ 355,774.49 at 2018 exchange rates),23 but in 2017, the transferred sum only amounted to 643,000 BRL (US\$ 175,971.54 at 2018 exchange rates), a reduction of 49.5 % in nominal values. From January to August 2018, the federal government transferred only 98,000 BRL.24 This is a reflection of the economic, social, and political crisis in the country after 2013, but it also has its long-term causes since even 1.3 million BRL was not enough for an institution of this size. The technical report produced after the fire in 2018 by the Lower House of Congress says that the National Museum spent money on equipment and permanent materials, consumable goods, and outsourced services from 2014 to 2018. The total amount spent on outsourced services diminished from 367,000 BRL in 2014 to 44,000 BRL (planned) in 2018, marking an 88 % reduction.25 This

24 This budget is comprised of three different sources from federal institutions. See Lucas Vettorazzo et al.: Repasse federal ao Museu Nacional cai à metade nos últimos cinco anos (2018), online: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/cotidiano/2018/09/ repasse-federal-ao-museu-nacional-cai-a-metade-nos-ultimos-cinco-anos.shtml.

22 Dominichi Sá/Magali Sá/Nísia Lima: O Museu Nacional e o seu papel na história das ciências e da saúde no Brasil, in: Cadernos de Saúde Pública 34/2018, no. 12.

23 The numbers here were calculated according to the Extended National Consumer Price Index (IPCA) for 2018, which is why the exchange rates are also from 2018. Reference numbers were taken from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, online: https://data.oecd.org/conversion/exchange-rates.htm.

25 Câmara dos Deputados: Informativo técnico 172/2018 – CONOF/CD, online: https://www2.camara.leg.br/orcamento-da-uniao/estudos/2018/informativo-172\_ 2018-museu-nacional.

kind of service includes small infrastructure jobs, cleaning and maintenance teams, and technical support for academic activities, which perhaps means that the institution was also short of staff, not only money. In 2018, this kind of resource was no longer available since the institution did not have the budget needed to fully contract and execute basic maintenance works. According to the rector of UFRJ, Robert Leher, 2.5 million BRL (US\$ 684,181.72 at 2018 exchange rates) would have been enough to avoid the tragedy.26

Just after the fire, the museum started a campaign to raise funds to rebuild it. The project is estimated to cost 380 million BRL (US\$ 73,586,367.16 at 2022 exchange rates), but by June 2022, it had raised only 65 % of it.27 The project aims to reconstruct and restore the building destroyed in 2018, restore the garden, develop a new museography, implement new exhibitions, reform the library, and implement a Research and Education Campus in the museum. Of the total amount obtained, 59 % was transferred directly by the government and 41 % was donated by two private companies (Bradesco and Vale), all through Culture Incentive Laws.28 These laws allow companies and people to donate to projects they are interested in and to reduce partially or totally the value of the donation from their income tax; therefore, it is also funds for the government invested by private actors.

This global picture of the National Museum's recent history shows that the state is the major financer, protector, and diffuser of national heritage, which is not an uncommon situation around the world. However, it also shows that the money invested was historically insufficient. Following the history of cultural politics in Brazil with its ups

26 UOL: Com orçamento reduzido.

27 Jaqueline Frizon: Museu Nacional comemora 204 anos com pedido de ajuda para captação de recursos (2022), online: https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/nacional/mu seu-nacional-comemora-204-anos-com-pedido-de-ajuda-para-captacao-de-re cursos/.

28 Museu Nacional Vive: Report 2020–2021, online: https://museunacionalvive.org. br/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/sanitize\_report-mnv\_2020-2021.pdf\_240222- 031646.pdf.

and downs, it is clear that even in the most glorious times, so to speak, the money was not enough. A catastrophe was needed, the almost total destruction of one of Brazil's biggest collections, with more or less only 15 % remaining, for the state to act and transfer money to rebuild it. After that, how will it be maintained?

The National Museum's situation was not directly connected to the crisis that arose after 2013, but it got worse after that, indicating a more long-term problem exacerbated by the crisis. The Brazilian Cinematheque's problems in 2020 and the fire in one of its warehouses in 2021, on the other hand, were directly connected to the fascist government of Jair Bolsonaro. The Brazilian Cinematheque dates back to 1940 with the creation of the first film club in Sao Paulo, and it was officially established in 1949 with its installation as a film library at the Museum of Modern Art in Sao Paulo (MAM-SP). It eventually became the Brazilian Cinematheque in 1956. Over the decades, the Cinematheque created a significant collection, the biggest in Brazil, with more than 40,000 movie titles and a great archival center. The institution's history may reflect the history of Brazilian heritage too. First allocated to a building in the center of Sao Paulo, it then moved to a house in a park, then to another park, until finally it was transferred to an old slaughterhouse in the Vila Mariana neighborhood in 1992. This last address resulted from an agreement between the city government and the involved unions. As the collection grew bigger and bigger, another place was granted to the institution so it could expand its storage facilities: a warehouse in the Vila Leopoldina neighborhood. This district is known for its history of flooding, and the location itself was in a miserable state. However, the institution needed more space to store its movies, and the idea was to rebuild the whole place and give it reasonable conditions to safeguard the country's audiovisual heritage. This was never done, though, because the money invested was insufficient. As an example of this long-term situation, the institution only employed its first permanent staff in the 1980s; until then, employees held the status of civil servants.

According to a study done by the government in 2020, the Cinematheque cost 22.5 million BRL per year between 2008 and 2013 (US\$ 10,435,992.58 at 2013 exchange rates). The crisis initiated in 2013 caused contracts between the government, the institution, and its partner (Sociedade Amigos da Cinemateca) to be dissolved; almost all workers were fired, and only a few civil servants remained. Between 2014 and 2017, annual expenditure was down to 12 million BRL (US\$ 3,760,576.62 at 2017 exchange rates; civil servants are not included in this value). In those years, after a lot of talks and negotiations, the government, led by Michel Temer at that time, decided to transfer the institutional administration to a non-profit organization through a public bidding tender; the organization chosen was the Associação de Comunicação Educativa Roquette Pinto (ACERP). Many problems surrounded the assignment of ACERP's contract with the government to manage the Cinematheque. For one, ACERP already had a contract with the Ministry of Education, and Brazilian law prohibited it from holding two contracts with two different ministries (the Cinematheque is a federal institution and, at the time, was assigned to the Ministry of Culture). A solution was nevertheless found: the Cinematheque contract was transformed into a subcontract, added to the principle one with the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Culture would regulate the institution's activities. The administrational contract of the Cinematheque was supposed to last until 2020. However, the contract between ACERP and the Ministry of Education ended in 2019. Since the Cinematheque contract was now related to this one, it ended with it accordingly. The contract could have been renewed, but, due to problems created by disputes between different factions of Bolsonaro's government, it was not.

When Bolsonaro took office in 2019, different factions of the far-right gained influence under his rule. A faction affiliated with right-wing guru Olavo de Carvalho took office in the Ministry of Education, and some people from this group tried to take over the Cinematheque through leading positions in ACERP. In this new political context, ACERP appointed a director who was closer to the

new federal government, Francisco Campera. However, it seems that the Cinematheque was more difficult to run and use as a propaganda front than they had expected. The staff resisted some forms of interference, and audiovisual heritage proved not so easy to handle. It is not clear what really happened those days. In 2019, the Minister of Education was Abraham Weintraub, and it seems he wanted to take over ACERP to control a television channel to which the association had access. As Campera resisted pressure to leave his position, Weintraub did not renew the contract. Instead of warning the staff about the situation, Campera kept administrating the institutions until the association ran out of money and stopped paying all costs, including those for the employees. Cinematheque workers mobilized themselves and went on strike, but the government did not come to an agreement and took the keys of the institution in a scene that could have come from Hollywood: federal police, armed with big guns, arrived to confront a demonstration in front of the institution. After that, ACERP fired all Cinematheque workers, and each one had to look for justice in individual court cases. As of the time of writing, there is no news about anyone who has received four months of unpaid salary and other fees. After expelling workers from the Cinematheque, the federal government decided to close the institution, continuing basic cleaning and maintenance jobs without any specialized technicians. In the following months, the Cinematheque workers' movement issued many warnings about the risks this situation represented to the collection, which had already faced four fires in its history. On 29 July 2021, it suffered its fifth fire, caused by a shorting in the Vila Leopoldina warehouse. It is still not clear what was lost in this disaster, but workers knew that there were archives of different Brazilian audiovisual institutions dating from the 1970s onward in the most heavily affected storage locations.29

29 As the documentation has not been analyzed yet, this date might change, but no public statement from the government or the institution has been made about the losses as of today, 12 July 2023.

Soon after the fire, the government decided to accelerate the process of contracting another administration organization in a contract that prescribed a transfer of 10 million BRL (US\$ 1,936,483.35 at 2022 exchange rates) per year from the respective union vault. However, a government study pointed out that operational costs were already at 8 million BRL, and the total estimate stated that 22.5 million BRL (US\$ 4,357,087.53 at 2022 exchange rates) per year were required for the following years. According to this study, the new administration could raise another 12.5 million BRL from selling services and so on. This had already been tried by ACERP, and the Cinematheque had started selling its production services before 2020, but the income was never close to the necessary level because the costs to preserve audiovisual heritage are too high. Also, the producers of films, i.e., consumers of this kind of service, were not happy to pay for it since the institution is a public one. Today, some workers have retaken their positions. The new staff are trying to get the Cinematheque on track again, but they have not given much information to the general public about how things are going. Additionally, no one cares about public accountability for what happened with the collection and paying what is due to former employees.

In the case of the Cinematheque, it appears on the surface that cultural heritage was not very important to the formation of the Brazilian State. The institution's history is one of small budgets, inadequate salaries (if any), being short-staffed, and fires. More significant investments happened in a short period between 2008 and 2013, but even then, they were not enough to build and reform everything that was necessary. Another point is that the audiovisual sector in Brazil is historically closely related to the bourgeoisie because it was an expensive form of art production. It is still expensive nowadays, but there are public funds and ways of making it cheaper. That is why the foundation of the Cinematheque is connected with an intellectual elite in Sao Paulo. Some of them have dedicated their lives to building and keeping the institution alive, but the bourgeois class as a whole did not really invest in giving the place some dignity. The State did so

occasionally, and in the worst times, the bill was paid by workers with dismissal and unpaid salaries, even though a large part of the Cinematheque collections are private and cannot be used by the institution itself without the authorization of the owners, who, incidentally, do not pay a dime to have their films stored there.30 So, what has been preserved, by whom, and who is paying for it? It is a complex question involving many Brazilian laws with regard to the audiovisual sector. But what is to be stressed here is that even in collections related mostly to bourgeoisie history, the costs are paid by the working class.

In both cases, i.e., the National Museum and the Brazilian Cinematheque, cultural heritage is subject to political and economic changes. When the conjuncture becomes difficult, it is one of the first sectors to be eliminated from the budgets as it is seen as an accessory, not a right. In Brazil, it is consequently not a socially anchored state policy. Access to culture, to national history, is not universalized because the State never needed to invest in convincing people – in fact, quite the opposite sometimes. In some moments, the State's policy was to stress the differences between people living in the same territory, classifying citizens into first, second, and even third classes.31

One can argue that there are statues in the cities honoring colonizers, which could be seen as a form of building a history that praises the oppressor so as to justify the domination and exploitation. These statues have a negligible impact on the general population; most of them do not know who those people were since history is not open to broader or general access. They have an impact, it seems, on higher strata of society that come to their rescue at the first sight of harm, such as after the Borba Gato statue fire in 2021. A political group of non-white workers set fire to it to destroy the statue of an op-

30 They are protected by copyright law, even when the film was produced by open calls and public money.

31 For example, after the Proclamation of the Republic in 1889, when former enslavered people were excluded from society and white people were brought in to serve as workers; between 1945 and 1964, when illiterate people could not vote; and before 1989, when people did not have access to a public health system.

pressor and set up a public debate on what society wants to honor in public monuments. Two days later, the mayor of Sao Paulo announced that an entrepreneur had already stepped forward to pay the restoration costs.32 Conversely, seven months after the fire in the National Museum, a campaign to rebuild it had only collected 1.1 million BRL (US\$ 278,904.66 at 2019 exchange rates), but 800.000 BRL (US\$ 202,839.75 at 2019 exchange rates) came from the German government and 150.000 BRL (US\$ 38,032.45 at 2019 exchange rates) from the British consulate.33 Why is that so? What is the difference between the statue and the National Museum? What is the symbolic difference between the statue and the collection or the building itself? These questions are not intended to be answered here, but they need to be asked. One hypothesis is that the statue is in a public place that everybody passes through while the museum is distant even from part of society's higher strata because, in general, they do not need to be educated or to have some sense of bourgeois culture in Brazil. The bourgeoisie just exercise power through the economy and violence.

Some researchers point out this instability of cultural policies in Brazil, indicating that it began in 1930 with Getulio Vargas and the Revolution. The tendency of this kind of policy in Brazil has accordingly been a result of developments stimulated by the existence of authoritarian dictatorships. Antonio Rubim wrote that, in democratic periods, cultural policies tended to be depreciated. After 1945, for example, the State did not invest in it, which led to the private sector founding museums such as the Sao Paulo Museum of Modern Art (MAM-SP) and the Museum of Art of Sao Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP). Rubim assessed that the neoliberal policies of the 1990s

32 Priscila Mengue: Restauro da estátua Borba Gato será pago por empresário, diz prefeito de SP (2021), online: https://noticias.uol.com.br/ultimas-noticias/agen cia-estado/2021/07/26/restauro-da-estatua-a-borba-gato-sera-pago-por-empresa rio-diz-prefeito-de-sp.htm.

33 Mirthyani Bezerra: Baixas doações a Museu Nacional geram críticas e comparação com Notre-Dame (2019), online: https://noticias.uol.com.br/cotidiano/ulti mas-noticias/2019/04/17/museu-nacional-doacoes-catedral-de-notre-dame.htm.

demolished institutions in the State that financed and structured the cultural sector, giving the administration of public funds through Culture Incentive Laws to private entrepreneurship.34 The Workers' Party (PT) continued this policy, complementing it with direct administration. As per this party's form of government, they conciliated public and private interests and gave a big impulse to the cultural sector in Brazil, maybe one of the biggest in the country's history. However, it was not transformed into a State policy, into something that would be continued no matter the government.35 Even during PT governments, the budget was not enough to really safeguard Brazilian heritage. Research conducted by one Brazilian newspaper, *Folha de S.Paulo*, found 11 cases of cultural heritage fires between 2007 and 2021 in the Southeast Region of Brazil alone.36

Data publicized by the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (IBGE) in 2020 show that in 2009, the federal government spent 0.08 % of its total budget on culture, but in 2020, this dropped down to 0.04 %; that is, even at its height, the cultural budget did not reach 1 % of the total federal funds. In relation to workers, this same research shows that in the cultural sector, workers have a higher education level than other sectors but also have a higher level of job instability, and the average monthly wage was 3,595.26 BRL in 2019.37 For December 2019, the Inter-union Department of Statistics

34 Antonio Albino Canelas Rubim: Políticas culturais no Brasil: tristes tradições, in: Revista Galáxia 13/2007, pp. 101–113.

35 Since 2016, the year of the coup d'état against Dilma Roussef, the culture sector has lost 85 % of its budget coming directly from the federal government, while the National Culture Fund has been reduced by 91 %, according to a report publicized by the transition office of Lula's third mandate.

36 2007 – Centro Cultural São Paulo; 2008 – Museu do Tropeiro; 2009 – Acervo Hélio Oitica; 2010 – Instituto Butantã; 2013 – Memorial da América Latina; 2016 – Cinemateca Brasileira; 2015 – Museu da Língua Portuguesa; 2018 – Museu Nacional; 2020 – Museu de História Natural da UFMG; 2021 – Cinemateca Brasileira; 2021 – Galpão Alke.

37 Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística: Sistema de Informações e Indicadores Culturais 2009–2020, online: https://biblioteca.ibge.gov.br/visualizacao/ livros/liv101893\_informativo.pdf.

and Socio-economic Studies (DIEESE) calculated that the minimum necessary monthly wage in Brazil should be 4,342.57 BRL, but the established minimum monthly wage by then was only 998 BRL.38 In short, it seems that the money invested in culture in Brazil is minimal, and workers receive much less pay than highly educated professionals in other areas.39

Stemming from these examples and data and reducing the analysis to cultural heritage specifically, questions arise from two perspectives. First, from the bourgeoisie's perspective, what is the role of cultural heritage in Brazil? Second, from the workers' perspective, it seems that, in a broad sense, they pay for heritage preservation since the greatest part of the money comes from taxes. But this class is underrepresented in collections, and most decisions on what is to be preserved are made by higher economic strata. Furthermore, workers in this sector are underpaid and susceptible to instability in the national economy and within companies. It is, therefore, logical to ask what interests the working class has in preserving heritage in traditional institutions. What are the effects of this sphere on capitalist society? What are the struggles in this sector? How does it intertwine with structural economic reproduction methods: militarism, loans, commercial policies?

#### Cultural Heritage in Brazil: A Luxemburgian Perspective

Let us return to Luxemburg's text on Adam Mickiewicz, in which she criticized his statue in Warsaw because it was permitted by the Czar and consequently, from her perspective, was not an expression of the people but of the dominant power. She also pointed out that

38 Departamento Intersindical de Estatística e Estudos Socioeconômicos: Pesquisa Nacional da Cesta Básica de Alimentos: salário mínimo nominal e necessário, online: https://www.dieese.org.br/analisecestabasica/salarioMinimo.html#2019.

39 However, in comparison with all Brazilian workers, this salary is about 80 % higher than the average.

artists professionalize in capitalist development like any other worker. In relation to the Brazilian examples presented here, Borba Gato's statue is different since it does not honor an important legacy for the people but a murderer, an executioner. This raises the question of what is important in terms of cultural heritage to the dominant class and the working class in Brazil. The above examples also shed light on the situation of workers in Brazil in the cultural heritage preservation sector: capitalist development in Brazil tends toward more and more precarious conditions, with no rights, low salaries, and no perspective of retiring. This condition is historical in Brazil. It is not something new but dates back to the colony; the "inorganic worker," as Caio Prado Jr. named them, is structural in our society and has been part of Brazil's working class since the first traces of capitalism arrived on Cabral's ship. The inorganic worker is outside of society's dynamic center, that is to say, the relationships that move any society politically and economically; in the case of the Brazilian colony, it was the enslaved person-master relationship that was essential for the productions related to the foreign market.

According to Prado, Brazil's history and development is one of pure exploitation, with capitalist relationships implemented since the beginning of the colonization period with mercantile capital and exploitation through enslavement. These relations developed over the centuries, and when imperialism became a new form of capital in the international division of labor, overexploitation and many other factors remained from colonial society in Brazilian society after independence. For Prado, the Brazilian revolution means overcoming these relations and conquering a new place in the international market that would not be subdued but independent.

In *The Accumulation of Capital*, Rosa Luxemburg stated:

"In reality, political power is nothing but a vehicle for the economic process. The conditions for the reproduction of capital provide the organic link between these two aspects of the accumulation of capital. The historical career of capitalism can only be appreciated by taking

them together. 'Sweating blood and filth with every pore from head to toe' characterises not only the birth of capital but also its progress in the world at every step, and thus capitalism prepares its own downfall under ever more violent contortions and convulsions."40

In this quotation, Luxemburg summarizes what she developed in this chapter. Capitalism survives off two different relations: one with non-capitalist areas and another inside the pure system. Inside the production of surplus value, relationships are based in the economic process; violence is concealed behind this economic process because it appears as a pure transaction between equals adhering to the law. On the other hand, when it comes to relationships that allow the realization of surplus value – that is, with non-capitalist areas – pure, explicit violence prevails: "Force, fraud, oppression, looting are openly displayed without any attempt at concealment, and it requires an effort to discover within this tangle of political violence and contests of power the stern laws of the economic process."41 In a way, it is the other way around; within colonies, violence concealed the economic process.

In relation to economic processes implemented in Brazil, let us recall what Prado wrote about it: this land was created as a provider of whatever the Global North needed; the meaning of Brazil's colonization and birth as a State was an external demand. And the same happened with museum objects. It was very different in European countries since they were the external demand, and what prevailed there were "pure economic processes." In those countries, the empowerment process of the bourgeoisie demanded the creation of a nation and its identity, the creation of a people. For that, museums had a major role and were, in this sense, in the dynamic center of that society. Cultural heritage, as it is, was hoarded by the Europeans to show power over other societies and unify their people against

40 Rosa Luxemburg: The Accumulation of Capital, London 2003, p. 433

41 Ibid., p. 432.

the other. This prompted the pillaging of numerous objects from other parts of the world, leading to the great museum collections of Europe. But center-periphery differences also appear here, so the role this kind of heritage has in the periphery is different from that in the center. In Brazil, the dominant class, the agrarian aristocracy, did not need to justify its power by convincing people they had the same origin, dating it back to centuries ago in an attempt to unify everybody despite social differences and oppression. Brazilian society was forged in violence, and so it remains. It created centers, such as museums and libraries, to emulate the European bourgeoisie, but they never had the same importance – for instance, a major role in mass education.

#### Conclusion

From the examples and data presented here, it is possible to see two different relations: one showing institutions/collections that present a national heritage and another centering around an attacked statue. The attacked statue is a symbol against the domination process as it was and as it is. It demanded a quick reaction to restore its centrality and deny the opposition. On the other hand, the so-called 'accidents' in heritage institutions seem to be part of the dynamics of the State. It created uproar between people related to the areas of those institutions but did not generate accountability. It is like the fires were natural incidents akin to hurricanes; therefore, there is no need to investigate and identify the ones who neglected the seriousness of each situation. The answer is: let us try to raise money to rebuild, 'restore,' wherever possible. The outrage about the considerable losses of cultural and historical knowledge seems to evaporate in a celebration of new buildings and projects, a resumption (*retomada*), a term very much in vogue these days in Brazil. Why is that? Is the bourgeoisie itself concerned about the collections its predecessors gathered? Who loses here? As can be seen, the history of traditional institutions is

closely related to the history of the dominant class in Brazil. What is the difference, then?

In Brazil, and maybe in the majority of the peripheral States created in the 19th century, a nation was to be created after independence. But even maintaining the integrality of this territory was questionable: it was done by force and by the common interest in maintaining slavery while keeping a distance from what happened after former Spanish colonies gained their independence. According to Caio Prado Jr., this nation was never accomplished, and this should be the aim of the Brazilian revolution: "the constitution of a country and its population [should be] essentially turned in on themselves and organized economically, socially and politically according to their own needs and aspirations."42 In this sense, it is possible to say that no former colony really became a nation; they are territories delimited by cartographic frontiers with no political and economic independence from international disputes and interests. One could also say that a nation is created by a unified territory, language, and people. The first two were accomplished through oppression to some extent, but the last one is in some way questionable. What is it to be Brazilian? What is the national identity? Nowadays, it makes no sense to talk about *a* national State but rather of a multinational State, considering that there are a lot of different indigenous nations in the territory. In any case, historically, the elite in Brazil's territory never needed to create this national identity; as said before, on many occasions, their policy was actually to stress the differences, dividing people who were forced to live together in that same space. In this aspect of cultural heritage, museums were not needed as instruments for ruling. They served the curiosity of some foreigners and sometimes native persons, but they were not designed for mass education. But despite the way objects and knowledge were gathered, they constitute an important part of our sources for Brazilian history, the elite's history, and the working class' history. Losing this means losing part of humans' production

42 Caio Prado Junior: A Revolução Brasileira, São Paulo 1966, p. 211.

and knowledge on the formation of our working class, which is essential to understand the features of the Brazilian revolution or the tasks ahead. Based on the history of cultural heritage preservation in Brazil, it is a task for the working class and, in this sense, a frontof-the-class struggle to defend Brazilian society's historical vestiges and heritage and fight the relationships established by this mode of production.

Here, it is possible to see the aspects of culture in Luxemburg's thought stressed in the second part of this article and the history of cultural heritage preservation in Brazil. As a sector of society subjected to the capitalist mode of production, cultural heritage represents an area of labor exploitation and possible accumulation of capital since recent ways of financing and even so-called tragedies such as the National Museum fire represent areas of investment. These constructions are financed by public money and executed by private companies specialized in such services. This makes a lot of sense of the mentioned idea expressed by Luxemburg in the text *The Militia and Militarism*. Another point in this same aspect is the use of public money for private heritage preservation. Many institutions have been created in recent years with money from Culture Incentive Laws that are responsible for safeguarding bourgeois heritage (dishes, furniture, houses, and so on). Meanwhile, workers' heritage struggles to survive on extremely low budgets and voluntary work. Even so, it cannot be seen as a solid policy of the bourgeois class; if, at this moment, it is creating such institutions to preserve its own heritage, it is just because it is convenient. As seen in the examples, when it comes to major policies, the budgets for safeguarding the big institutions are far from the minimum.

As an expression of a spiritual/intellectual aspect of human society, culture, and specifically cultural heritage is a front in the class struggle, where workers should play a role not as the exploited but as stakeholders in deciding what is to be preserved and what is not, debating where the tax money should be employed, by whom, and in which conditions. This is in line with Frigga Haug's affirmation

that in relation to struggle, "Luxemburg is oriented toward the connection between the different media, i.e., fighting in Parliament, in the factory, in the street, in the cultural sphere."43 No front should be undermined as not worthy of class struggle because the world's power belongs to this class and the oppressed in all its aspects and forms.

#### Works Cited

43 Frigga Haug: Rosa Luxemburgo y el arte de la política, Buenos Aires 2020, p. 186.

Vettorazzo, Lucas; Fabrini, Fábio; Carneiro, Mariana; Pamplona, Nicola: Repasse federal ao Museu Nacional cai à metade nos últimos cinco anos (2018), online: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/cotidiano/2018/09/repassefederal-ao-museu-nacional-cai-a-metade-nos-ultimos-cinco-anos.shtml.

## 7 Let Rosa Luxemburg Speak Chinese

The Project of Issuing *The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg* in Chinese

*Xinwei Wu*

#### Introduction

In October 2021, the first volume of the Chinese version of *The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg* was officially published by the People's Publishing House in Beijing.1 The Chinese version of *The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg* has eventually become a reality and also marks a new stage in the study of Rosa Luxemburg's thought in the 21st century: Rosa Luxemburg can finally tell us her own thoughts in Chinese. This important event means that Chinese scholars can now have a more comprehensive understanding of the development of her ideas.

From the official launch of editing and translating the Chinese version of *The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg* in 2014 to the publication of the first volume in 2021, the editing team of the Chinese version of *The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg* has worked hard. The reason for the long time span and the fact that only one volume has been published so far is that editing a Chinese version of Rosa Luxemburg's works is indeed a challenging task.

This challenge is mainly due to the difficulty of the work itself. As a symbolic figure in the history of international communism and Marxism, Rosa Luxemburg has been of concern for the theoretical circles dealing with her ideas for a long time. Since the 1950s, Chinese scholars have collated, translated, and published many of Luxemburg's im-

1 Ping He & Ren'e Deng (Ed.): 罗莎·卢森堡全集 (The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg), Volume 1, Beijing 2021.

portant works, such as *The Accumulation of Capital* 2 and *Introduction to Political Economy*. 3 In the 1980s, after the reform and opening up of China toward the West, the People's Publishing House also published *The Selected Works of Rosa Luxemburg.*4 However, due to various reasons, namely, a lack of funding and researchers, *The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg* did not appear in Chinese before the 2020s.

Now, the editing and publishing of the Chinese translation has been successfully started, the first volume has been published, and the editorial team is preparing the publication of subsequent volumes. In light of this difficult project, this chapter intends to analyze the challenges faced in the process of editing and publishing the Chinese version of the *Complete Works*, explore the ideas and plans for editing and publishing further volumes, and take the first volume of the *Complete Works* as an example to explain the latest contributions of Chinese scholars to the study of Luxemburg's thought.

#### Facing Challenges

Rosa Luxemburg was a prolific Marxist theorist who left a considerable body of theoretical work in her lifetime. There are eight volumes of *The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg*5 and six volumes of *The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg*6 in German. Internationally, the English version has established an overall editing program of 14 volumes, and several volumes have been published,7 and a Polish version is also being compiled and published. From the perspective of China, the

2 Chenshun Peng & Jixian Wu (Trans.): 资本积累论 (The Accumulation of Capital), Beijing 1959.

3 Chenshun Peng (Trans.): 国民经济学入门 (Introduction to Political Economy), Beijing 1962.

4 Central Bureau of Compilation and Translation of Marxist Leninist Works (Trans.): 卢森堡文选 (The Selected Works of Luxemburg), Beijing 1984.

5 Rosa Luxemburg: Gesammelte Werke, Berlin 1970–1975.

6 Rosa Luxemburg: Gesammelte Briefe, Berlin 1982.

7 Peter Hudis(Ed.): The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, New York 2014–2021.

China New Literary Society published Luxemburg's *New Economics* as early as 1927, translated by Shouseng Chen and revised by Hanmin Hu.8 After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, more works of Luxemburg were translated and published, such as *The Accumulation of Capital* (Sanlian Bookstore, 1959),9 *Introduction to Political Economy* (Sanlian Bookstore, 1962),10 *Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital* (Heilongjiang People's Publishing House, 1982),11 *On Literature* (People's Literature Publishing House, 1983),12 *The Selected Works of Luxemburg* (People's Publishing House, 1984),13 *On the Russian Revolution. Letters* (Guizhou People's Publishing House 2001),14 *Letters from Prison* (Huacheng Publishing House, 2007),15 *The Selected Works of Luxemburg* (People's Publishing House, 2012),16 etc.

Considering these Chinese and foreign materials, the major problem the Chinese scholars involved in the current project of publishing a Chinese version of the *Complete Works* have to solve is how to make effective use of these documents. In order to compile the *Complete Works*, the Chinese scholars initially worked on a detailed classification of the existing editions of Luxemburg's works. The process of collating these works, on the one hand, can complete the collection and arrangement of the *Complete Works* and, on the other, can deepen the study of Luxemburg-related research literature and complete Luxemburg's historiography.

8 Shouseng Chen & Hanmin Hu (Ed.): 新经济学 (New Economics), Shanghai 1927.

9 Chenshun Peng & Jixian Wu (Trans.): 资本积累论 (The Accumulation of Capital), Beijing 1959.

10 Chenshun Peng (Trans.): 国民经济学入门 (Introduction to Political Economy), Beijing 1962.

11 Jinru Chai (Trans.): 帝国主义与资本积累 (Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital), Heilongjiang 1982.

12 Yizhu Wang (Trans.): 论文学 (On Literature), Beijing 1983.

13 Central Bureau of Compilation and Translation of Marxist Leninist Works (Trans.): 卢森堡文选 (The Selected Works of Luxemburg), Beijing 1984.

14 Xuyi Yin (Trans.): 论俄国革命·书信集 (On the Russian Revolution. Letters), Guiyang 2001.

15 Weici Fu (Trans.): 狱中书简 (Letters from Prison),Guangzhou 2007.

16 Zongyu Li (Ed.): 卢森堡文选 (The Selected Works of Luxemburg), Beijing 2012.

First of all, Luxemburg's letters, manuscripts, and notes are the focus of the collection. In China, the published literature is first and foremost Rosa Luxemburg's own works, and almost all important works are published in the form of single volumes, while the large number of letters, manuscripts, and notes left by Luxemburg are rarely translated into Chinese. These letters, manuscripts, and notes are no less important than Luxemburg's writings, and a reading of them can deepen our understanding of her thoughts. Therefore, the scholars involved in the preparation of the Chinese edition of her *Complete Works* systematically collated and edited these documents and, in the process, examined the development of Luxemburg's thought in relation to published works.

Secondly, attention has been paid to the study of literature about Luxemburg. Since 2015, Chinese scholars have regularly held academic seminars on the research and publication of Rosa Luxemburg's works at Wuhan University, inviting experts from Germany, the United States, Poland, and China to conduct in-depth exchanges and discussions on the global dissemination and evolution of relevant literature. The conferences organized by Chinese scholars reflect a new trend in the current study of Luxemburg's thought in China as they attach importance to the research on Luxemburg, namely, her works and impact. For a long time, due to the influence of Lenin's criticism of Luxemburg, this work has been neglected by researchers in China. Today, the Chinese academic community hopes to rediscover the contemporary influence of Luxemburg's thought through the study of the history of her activity, the history of her ideas, and the circulation of her works. When editing the Chinese version of her *Complete Works*, Chinese scholars also follow this practice and pay attention to her life and the global translation history of her published works.

Thirdly, the editorial team closely follows contemporary developments in the study of Rosa Luxemburg. The importance of Luxemburg's thought is realized through the discussion and interpretation of her successors. When editing the *Complete Works*, Chinese scholars keep pace with the times and keep an open attitude to the study of Luxemburg in the contemporary international theoretical circle. In recent years, Chinese scholars have done a lot of work in this field, not only by holding relevant academic conferences but also by organizing and researching the literature and even keeping an eye on unpublished Polish sources and related research. Chinese scholars have consequently incorporated these new developments and achievements into the editing of the Chinese version of the *Complete Works*. Newly discovered documents served as additional material for the Chinese version, and new research results are also recognized and used accordingly in the volumes.

Publishing *The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg* is nevertheless a very difficult task. The leading editor of the English edition, Peter Hudis, emphasized this as well:

"What we have learned in the course of this work is that there is much that we still do not know about Rosa Luxemburg, since at least 80 percent of her writings have never appeared in English. These include dozens of articles, essays and speeches that appeared in the five-volume German *Gesammelte Werke* that have yet to be translated into English. Moreover, even with the issuance of the 600-page *Letters of Rosa Luxemburg* in 2011 – the most comprehensive collection of her correspondence in English – less than 20 percent of the letters in her six-volume *Gesammelte Briefe* have so far been translated. Yet even this does not exhaust the amount of material by her that has yet to be absorbed."17

In the process of editing the Chinese version, Chinese scholars also paid attention to this problem and combined the translation, sorting, and editing of Luxemburg's documents to achieve the goal of publishing a truly complete version of her works in China.

17 Peter Hudis: Rediscovering the Totality of Rosa Luxemburg's Contribution, in: Xinwei Wu (Ed.): Research and Publication of the Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Beijing 2017, pp.331–346, here p.333.

## The Editorial Ideas Behind the Chinese Version of the *Complete Works*

After Chinese scholars made the problem of how to make use of Luxemburg's documents clear, the next problem to be solved was how to edit the *Complete Works*. Faced with this problem, the Chinese scholars involved18 have made use of the existing international versions of *The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg*. At present, there are two international editions: one in German and one in English. Chinese scholars take the above two versions of the complete works as a reference and fully absorb the advantages of the two versions at hand into their own work.

First, both editions seek to accommodate the entire literature of Rosa Luxemburg. In the German version, the complete works and Luxemburg's letters are divided into two parts. The first five volumes, published in the 1970s, are chronological collections of Luxemburg's writings, speeches, notes, and manuscripts from 1889–1919. Volumes 6 to 8 were later published as supplementary volumes containing newly discovered texts. The sixth volume contains Luxemburg's unpublished works from 1893 to 1906,19 volume 7 contains unpublished works written between 1907 and 1918, and volume 8 is devoted to the entire literature written in Polish by Rosa Luxemburg. The arrangement of the *Complete Letters* is similar to that of the *Complete Works*, with the first five volumes arranged chronologically and the sixth volume being a supplement to the newly discovered letters. As a result, the German edition contains almost all of Luxemburg's works in 14 volumes. From the point of view of the English version, the editing work of the English version is behind that of the German version, and it is not yet complete. According to the plan, the English edition of the *Complete Works* will count a total of 14 volumes, which will

18 The most important representatives among these scholars are Ms. Ping He from the School of Philosophy at Wuhan University and Ms. Ren'e Deng from the People's Publishing House.

19 Rosa Luxemburg: Gesammelte Werke, Berlin 1970–1975.

include both works and letters. The arrangement of the English version inherits the classification consciousness of the German version and implements it into the overall arrangement idea of the *Complete Works*. The whole collection is divided into three main categories: the first is political economy (volumes 1 and 2), which contains Luxemburg's major political economy works from the early *The Industrial Development of Poland*, and the second is political science (volumes 3 to 9), which contains works on political, national and imperialist issues. The third category, epistles (volumes 10 to 14), contains the entire epistolary work of Rosa Luxemburg. As of the time of writing, the full English edition has not been published and is still being edited.

Second, both versions are structurally unique. The German edition was published earlier, and the newly discovered documents could not be added to the published volumes, so the format of the supplementary volume was specially adopted to facilitate the reader's understanding of the circulation of Luxemburg's documents. The later publication of the English version allowed the editors to maximize their knowledge of the texts and thus arrange them chronologically as much as possible. Moreover, the English version edited the works and letters in a unified manner and added a large number of background introductions as annotations so that the complete collection has literary unity as well as reading and research convenience. Of course, in comparison, the German edition also has its own advantage, that is, the common practice of editing the *Complete Works* strictly in chronological order, highlighting the development of Luxemburg's thoughts. The English version is not as good as the German version in this respect because it basically classifies Luxemburg's texts according to their thematic model and completely separates her political economy and political literature, thus presenting a less comprehensive picture of Luxemburg's thought than the German edition.

Comparing the German and English editions of the *Complete Works*, we can see that the two editions do have their own merits. The two editions, although different in editorial style, have one thing in common: the editor invariably sees Rosa Luxemburg as a political economist and political strategist rather than as a Marxist philosopher. Guided by this view, both editions adopted a categorical approach to the editing of Luxemburg's texts, separating works on political economy from those on politics. In doing so, her thoughts as a whole were effectively severed. Historically, Rosa Luxemburg was never a purely intellectual scholar but a theoretical thinker in practice and revolution. She studied at the University of Zurich, where she obtained a doctorate and received good academic training but also systematically studied Marx's and Engels' thoughts. Therefore, when she considered political economy and political science, it is inevitable that she used philosophical thinking, especially Marxist philosophy. Her analysis of the economic phenomena of imperialism and her criticism of Bernstein belong superficially to political economy and politics, but at a deeper level, they rather refer to philosophy. These texts resonate in today's society because they embody Luxemburg's philosophical wisdom. Since the new century, international studies of Rosa Luxemburg have paid great attention to exploring the philosophical implications of her thoughts. Contemporary scholars have reevaluated many ideological debates in Rosa Luxemburg's life from the perspective of the history of Marxist thought, such as the relationship between her thoughts and Karl Marx, the polemics between Luxemburg and Lenin, and Luxemburg's influence on Western Marxism. A symbolic evaluation is made by Jörn Schütrumpf, who argues that Rosa Luxemburg and Antonio Gramsci have something in common: "they never had to exercise state power themselves, nor did they have to tarnish their name by participating in a dictatorial or totalitarian regime."20 These new assessments show in many ways the profound influence of Rosa Luxemburg as a Marxist philosopher on the course of history since the 20th century. It is on this basis that Luxemburg should not be considered simply as a political economist or political scientist but as a Marxist philosopher.

To study her as a Marxist philosopher means that we should take Luxemburg's political economy, politics, literature, etc. as the content

20 Jörn Schütrumpf: Rosa Luxemburg or: The Price of Freedom, Berlin 2008, pp. 9–10.

of her philosophical thoughts when we organize her works. Since the Chinese version of the *Complete Works* started to be edited rather late, Rosa Luxemburg's texts' publication has basically been completed, so Chinese scholars can adopt different editing ideas from the German and English versions. This approach draws on the strengths of the first two versions but is not constrained by conventions.

First of all, Luxemburg's thought as a whole, as well as the *Complete Works*, can be edited without a rigid separation of political economy and politics. The Chinese edition arranges the texts and letters in chronological order. At the same time, the method of classified editing is adopted in some details. For example, the articles and speeches of the debates between Rosa Luxemburg and Eduard Bernstein are arranged together so that we can have not only an overall grasp of the development of the former's thought but also a clear understanding of the important issues that concerned Luxemburg in a certain period.

Secondly, the latest results of international Luxemburg studies are incorporated into the editing of the *Complete Works*. The latest work here is twofold: the first is a newly discovered Polish text. According to the scholar and expert on Luxemburg's Polish works Holger Politt, Luxemburg wrote almost 6,000 pages in German and almost 3,000 pages in Polish: "In the most cases Rosa Luxemburg wrote her articles for the illicit Polish papers anonymously. An important source to identify the authorship are the preserved letters of Rosa Luxemburg, especially to the editor Leo Jogiches which were found by the Polish historian Feliks Tych in the archive in Moscow in the 1950s. The main topics in the Polish part of the works of Rosa Luxemburg are the Polish question, the relationship between the democratization of the internal political conditions in the Russia Empire and the social revolution which finally broke out in January 1905 in St. Petersburg, and last but not least problems of the development in the social-democratic workers' movement."21

21 Holger Politt: Some Aspects about the Polish Work of Rosa Luxemburg, in: Xinwei Wu (Ed.): Research and Publication of the Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Beijing 2017, pp. 245–247, here p. 246.

The Polish works of Rosa Luxemburg will be properly included in the Chinese version. The second advantage of the latter is the inclusion of new perspectives from recent international research. Since 2000, the international study of Luxemburg's thought has made great progress, not only through the republishing of her works but also by providing new interpretations of *The Accumulation of Capital* and related letters.22 In addition, new topics in the study of Luxemburg's thought have developed, for example, in the field of political economy, e. g., the study of Luxemburg's pre-capitalist theory, modern monetary theory, and world-system ideas. In the aspect of political philosophy, a rethinking of the relationship between Luxemburg and Lenin can be considered a breakthrough,23 and researchers have provided in-depth studies of Luxemburg's socialist democratic thought, party theory, and relationship with other contemporary thinkers.24 "Luxemburg discussed the problems of her time, i.e. politics and economic questions alike, and even kept track of the Russian Revolutions in 1917 while she was in prison."25 All the problems she discussed have somehow become the subject of contemporary research. These new achievements are organically integrated into the editing of the *Complete Works*: newly discovered documents can be incorporated into the anthology, and new research results can be incorporated into *The Chronology of Rosa Luxemburg* or in the form of annotations to the *Complete Works*.

Third, the compilation of the Chinese version highlights Luxemburg's Polish background and her embeddedment in German Marxist philosophical tradition. Because she became famous in Germany, people have long tended to pay attention first and foremost to

22 Riccardo Bellofiore (Ed.): Rosa Luxemburg and the Critique of Political Economy, London 2009.

23 Paul Le Blanc (Ed.): Rosa Luxemburg: Reflections and Writings, New York 1999.

24 Joke J. Hermsen: A Good and Dignified Life: The Political Advice of Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxemburg, New Haven 2022.

25 Frank Jacob: Rosa Luxemburg: Living and Thinking the Revolution, Berlin 2021, p. 10.

Luxemburg's German background and ignore her Polish origin and this particular influence on her theory. The newly discovered Polish texts and the new findings on the spread of Luxemburg's theories in Poland flesh out this content. In addition, a focus on her study of German philosophy and the philosophy of Marx and Engels demonstrates the tradition of German Marxist philosophy.

On the basis of absorbing the above-named advantages, the editorial idea of the Chinese scholars is to divide all of Luxemburg's texts into three categories for the editing of the *Complete Works* in Chinese. The first is the published works, including articles, notes, speeches, and manuscripts. The second category is letters, including all epistle documents. The third category consists of unpublished works, mainly newly discovered Polish texts that are being collated.26 In terms of the editing style, the Chinese version thereby absorbs all the advantages of the German and English versions. On the one hand, it edits all documents in chronological order; on the other, it does not rigorously pursue chronological order but fully explores the deep correlations between documents and ideas and concentrates on displaying the phased changes of Luxemburg's thoughts.

#### The Latest Contributions of Chinese Scholars

In accordance with the editing ideas of the Chinese version of the *Complete Works*, the editorial team launched the first volume of *The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg* at the end of 2021. The time span of this volume is September 1893 to November 1899, reflecting two extraordinary experiences in Luxemburg's ideological growth process: between September 1893 and May 1898, she studied at the University of Zurich and became a thought leader in the Polish workers' movement; between June 1898 and November 1899, Luxemburg entered

26 The arrangement scheme is as follows: the first category will be covered in volumes 1–8, the second in volumes 9–14, and the third in volume 15.

Germany after receiving her doctorate and developed her experience as a thought leader in the German Social Democratic Party. These two experiences mark the epitome of her transition from Poland's to Germany's Rosa Luxemburg and the prelude to her transition from Germany's to the world's Rosa Luxemburg. The original documents of volume 1 of the Chinese version of *The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg* are congruent with volumes 1 and 6 of the German version of the *Complete Works*. Of the 800,000 words of literature, 16 articles have been translated into Chinese before (some in excerpts), but the rest have been published in Chinese for the first time. The publication of the first volume of the Chinese version of the *Complete Works* marks a historic moment as well – on the 150th anniversary of Rosa Luxemburg's birth, she could finally tell the full story of her early thought in Chinese! Not only that, but by listening to her story, as Professor Ping He, chief editor of the Chinese edition, said, we can "grasp the ideological context of Luxemburg's theoretical creation during this period from the depths of history, and understand the internal connection between her and Marx's historical dialectics and the intrinsic consistency between her theory of the nation and the workers' movement and Marx and Engels' theory of the nation and the workers' movement."27

With regard to the first volume of the Chinese version of the *Complete Works*, we can see that Chinese scholars have made two new contributions to the study of Luxemburg's thought, namely, (1) a further discussion of Luxemburg in Poland and (2) a reacquaintance with her, a theoretical novice in the German Social Democratic Party who became the thought leader of the German Social Democratic Party.

First of all, the Polish Rosa Luxemburg is represented in the first half of the first volume of the Chinese edition. These documents focus on her Marxist academic research and revolutionary activities during her time in Zurich. These documents can be roughly divided

27 Ping He: Preface, in: Ping He & Ren'e Deng (Ed.): 罗莎·卢森堡全集 (The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg), Volume 1, Beijing 2021, pp.12–44, here p. 43.

into two parts: political papers, mainly published from August 1893 to December 1896, and academic papers, written in the period between 1897 and 1898. Of these two parts, the first begins with Luxemburg's attendance at the Zurich Congress of the Second International in her capacity as a representative of the Workers' Cause and her presentation on this issue to the Congress of the Second International, drafted by her, which essentially deals with the fundamental questions of the Polish workers' movement. The latter part of the texts contains papers related to her doctoral degree, *The Treaty of States*, *Wage Fund Theory* and *Wage Fund Theory and Industrial Reserve Army Theory*, and Luxemburg's doctoral dissertation, *The Industrial Development of Poland*. Her treatise on the historicist approach to the socialist movement and the historical formation of the bourgeoisie in Poland is also included. The subject matter of these papers is also related to the Polish question, which is a scientific demonstration of the political views of the previous part.

The documents of the two parts are intrinsically related: the documents of the first part express Luxemburg's political position and viewpoint on the Polish question and the national question. The latter part of the texts expresses Luxemburg's theoretical scheme and method of thinking about Poland. During this period, she emphasized the position of the Polish Social Democratic Party to answer the fundamental questions of the Polish workers' movement. As a theorist of the Polish Social Democratic Party, Luxemburg adhered to the party's positions and views; however, she was not satisfied with stating its views but tried to give theoretical proof of these views. She criticized the Polish Socialist Party's idea of "rebuilding Poland" and believed that national liberation should be dialectically combined with the Polish class struggle and that independence should be fought on the platform of the class struggle of the modern proletariat against the bourgeoisie. This is her historical dialectic point of view in solving the problem of Polish socialism. She elaborated the basic principles of Marx and Engels concerning the Polish national liberation and combined these principles to examine the industrial and class bases of the Polish socialist movement. Finally, Luxemburg proposed a theoretical scheme to solve the problem of Polish national independence and national liberation. This scheme was to combine the basic principles of the *Communist Manifesto* with industrial development and the socialist movement in Poland in the 1880s and 1890s, solidify class struggle as the program of the Polish socialist movement, and unite with the working classes of the three annexed countries in the struggle for Polish independence and national liberation.

Secondly, Luxemburg, a theoretical novice of the German Social Democratic Party, became the thought leader of that party, which is reflected in the second half of the first volume of the Chinese version. Since criticism of Bernstein's revisionism was the main line of theory in German social democracy at that time, Luxemburg entered Germany and actively engaged in the work of German social democracy, fighting at the forefront of the criticism of Bernstein's revisionism and writing *Reform or Revolution.*28 She also became a leading figure and prominent theorist of the German Social Democratic Party. From this point on, Luxemburg acquired her second identity as a revolutionary and Marxist theorist in the German context of her life. This part of the texts consequently focuses on Luxemburg's criticism of Bernstein. In addition to *Reform or Revolution*, this volume includes a series of articles written after *Reform or Revolution*. These articles analyzed and criticized Bernstein's opportunist views on the practice of the trade union movement and the participation of German Social Democrats in bourgeois governments and parliaments. The volume also contains theoretical articles written by Luxemburg on the successful holding of the Hannover Congress of the German Social Democratic Party and her speech there.

In these texts, Luxemburg makes it clear that the participation of social democracy in bourgeois governments or parliaments is nothing more than a tactic for the class struggle, its aim being to make social

28 Rosa Luxemburg: Reform or Revolution, in: Ping He & Ren'e Deng (Ed.): 罗莎·卢森堡全集 (The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg), Volume 1, Beijing 2021, pp. 480–560.

reform a part of the whole social revolution, to make social reform serve the ultimate goal of the proletariat in overthrowing bourgeois rule and establishing a working-class state of its own. This constitutes Luxemburg's answer to the question of the Social Democratic practice of social reform. In theory, by refuting the theory of Marxist crisis, she stressed that the revisionist theory of Bernstein should not replace Marx's revolutionary theory and proved that the theoretical basis of social democracy can only be Marxist theory. These documents show that Luxemburg, both in theory and in the practical struggle, had been integrated into German social democracy at this time and that a theoretical recruit of the movement had now turned into a thought leader. At this point, Luxemburg achieved a major identity change in her life, transitioning fully from a Polish to a German context.

Another interesting aspect of the arrangement of this volume is that the editor has added an appendix at the end of the main text. This appendix contains six articles that were not written by Luxemburg herself but extracted from newspaper reports about her views.29 The editor of the Chinese version considered it inappropriate to include these articles, which were not written by Luxemburg, in the text corpus itself. However, these articles reported her views accurately and, at the same time, reflected their social influence at that time, which both is a window for us to understand Luxemburg's thoughts and an important form of research on them. From this point of view, the publication of these documents in the form of an appendix is quite appropriate.

29 These six articles are as follows: Defense of the Representative Status of the Social Democratic of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP) at the International Socialist Workers' Congress in Zurich (August 8, 1893), Speech on the Election of the Imperial Parliament (June 5, 1898 in Breslau), Current Policy and the Social Democratic Party (February 9, 1899, speech at a mass rally in Charlottenburg), Regarding the Tasks of the Party Congress (speech at the 12th and 13th district Party Congress of the Saxony Empire, August 29, 1899, in Leipzig), Speech at the Social Democratic Election Union's Third District Congress of the Berlin Empire, Discussion on the Upcoming Party Congress (September 5, 1899), and The Current Political Situation (speech at a rally in Magdeburg on November 22, 1899).

#### Conclusion

To sum up, the publication of the first volume of *The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg* in Chinese is a new beginning. It shows the academic circle that Chinese scholars have bravely met the challenge and seized the opportunity when editing the *Complete Works*, further strengthened the innovations of the existing German and English versions, and connected the editing and publishing of the *Complete Works* with the promotion of Marxist philosophy research. The work of these Chinese scholars shows that it is not enough to have thought alone to study Luxemburg's thought in the context of ideological history but also to have sufficient support from primary sources and documents. Only by organically combining the study of thought with the collation and examination of documents can the study of Luxemburg's thought be established on a reliable basis. This is the goal of the Chinese version of *The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg*.

The publication of the Chinese version of *The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg* will present her intellectual journey through a wealth of literature, which will undoubtedly deepen the academic research on her thoughts. In the past, many scholars had a one-sided understanding of her ideas, mainly due to the lack of research literature. For example, on the issue of her opposition to Polish national independence, we have long relied solely on her early limited literature on the Polish issue to understand. As a result, we only know that she opposed the use of the slogan of Polish independence in the Polish workers' movement; we do not know why she opposed the use of this slogan, nor do we know the basis for her own views. However, if we read her literature on the history of the Polish socialist movement, the history of the Polish bourgeoisie, and the history of Polish industrial development, we will see that she was using Marx's materialist view of history and dialectics to analyze Poland's history and reality. Now, these documents are presented in the Chinese version. With the help of these documents, we will have a better understanding of Luxemburg, a new understanding of Luxemburg, and, following Luxemburg's footsteps, develop Marxist philosophy in the 21st century.

#### Works Cited

Luxemburg, Rosa: Gesammelte Werke, Berlin 1970–1975.

# PART II PERCEPTION

## 8 The Good, the Baden and the Ugly

Rosa Luxemburg and the SPD in 1910

*Ben Lewis*

The mass strike has a long and rich history in the workers' movement. It forms a strategic anchor for much far-left practice today – from anarchism through to various strands of Trotskyism – and continues to provide inspiration for many an activist at a time when prospects for the advance of the cause of international labor occasionally seem rather bleak. Activists can seek motivation by reflecting on the past glorious struggles, successes and some of the pioneers associated with the theory of the mass strike – Rosa Luxemburg, Daniel de Leon, Henriette Roland-Holst and others.

Much ink has been spilled on the strategic place and role of the mass strike, particularly in terms of the debate that erupted within German and international social democracy in 1910. And there is certainly much at stake in revisiting this controversy both in terms of our historical understanding of what was unfolding at the time and its implications for revolutionary political organization over a century later. In her edited volume on the mass strike debate, for instance, Antonia Grunenberg claims that the controversy in 1910 should serve to undermine the notion that the German social democracy of August Bebel, Frederick Engels, Karl Kautsky and Clara Zetkin was initially a "revolutionary organization" that "'betrayed' its originally revolutionary character" in 1914.1 For her, it is out of the question that the SPD was a revolutionary organization at *any* stage in its evolution. Notions

1 Antonia Grunenberg (Ed.): Die Massenstreikdebatte. Beiträge von Parvus, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky und Anton Pannekoek, Frankfurt 1970, p.5.

#### 184 Ben Lewis

of the "betrayal" or "renegacy"2 of its radical heritage were merely a ruse by pro-capitalist social-democratic SPD leaders after World War II to distance the party from its past and to portray it as the safe pair of hands for capitalism that it has represented for over a century.3

This chapter will draw on newly translated contributions to the mass-strike debate to challenge Grunenberg's view that the SPD was never a revolutionary organization.4 In fact, the nature of the debate within the SPD party press was – despite manifestations of bureaucratism, confusion over fundamental aspects of political strategy among leading SPD thinkers and the stunning advance of reformism within the German south in particular – generally reflective of a radical mass party. Based on its revolutionary Erfurt program, the SPD was getting to grips with an increasingly precarious political situation at home and abroad. Moreover, this chapter will demonstrate how Grunenberg's homogenizing and teleological assertion that "all of the factors that led the political collapse of the SPD in 1914 become more or less visible" within the 1910 controversy is reflective of a stale Cold War historiographical consensus that continues to dominate discussions of the pre-1914 SPD today.5 Finally, this contribution will make the case that this dominant historical narrative has created a skewed un-

2 This claim overlooks the obvious fact that contemporary figures on the far left of the international workers' movement such as Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg and Grigory Zinoviev spoke of the SPD's betrayal of its earlier values. This is also true of a certain Vladimir Ilych Lenin, as we will see below.

3 In this regard, Grunenberg cites Erich Matthias's essay "Kautsky und der Kautskyanismus," which she views as having "analytical value" despite its barely concealed anti-Marxist character (ibid., p. 6). As such, it is slightly odd that Matthias's essay has emerged as a dominant point of reference for discussions of German social democracy on the left; Erich Matthias: Kautsky und der Kautskyanismus. Die Funktion der Ideologie in der deutschen Sozialdemokratie vor dem ersten Weltkrieg, in: Marxismus Studien, vol. 2, Tübingen 1957, pp.151–197. For more on the peculiar reception of Kautsky's political legacy, see Ben Lewis, Introduction, in Ben Lewis (Ed.), Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism, Leiden 2019, pp.5–17.

4 In recent far-left historiography, there has been something of a "primary source turn" to the original (German) source material to challenge such grand narratives. This paper is part of these endeavors.

5 Grunenberg (Ed.): Die Massenstreikdebatte, p. 6.

derstanding of what was actually at stake politically in the polemical clashes of 1910, with the mass strike question often viewed in abstraction from two other controversies: to wit, the issue of coalitionism in (local) capitalist administrations and the relationship between Marxism and republicanism. By concentrating on some of Luxemburg's writings on these matters that have been marginalized due to scholarship's overwhelming focus on the mass strike, these issues clearly come back into focus and allow for a more rounded appreciation of the controversy of 1910. Let us now set the scene by outlining what was unfolding in Germany in that year.

#### Prussia 1910: The "Center of Political Life"

The spring of 1910 saw a wave of radicalization among the Prussian masses, with a swathe of demonstrations and mobilizations against the hated three-tier suffrage system. This electoral setup effectively disenfranchised the working class by tying the weight of an individual's vote to the amount of tax he paid, i.e., how much property he owned. Under pressure from the masses, Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg produced a suffrage bill in February 1910. This tweaked the voting arrangements in this or that respect but actually retained the three-tier system. Luxemburg was scathing: "When this bill appeared in parliament, Homeric laughter could be heard across the entirety of the cultured world. Because, party comrades, it is impossible to imagine a more genuinely Prussian-bureaucratic mockery of the demands of the mass of the people on the suffrage question than what was passed off as electoral reform here."6 The reactionary three-tier suffrage was decreed following the victory of the counterrevolution in March 1849, and Luxemburg was adamant that the forces of liberalism – some of

6 Rosa Luxemburg: Der preußische Wahlrechtskampf und seine Lehren, in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Berlin 1972, p.310. All my translations of the Luxemburg texts cited here will appear in the next volume of her English-language Collected Works, published by Verso Books.

which were making noises about opposing the bill and even joining the protests in 1910 – were ultimately responsible for this law coming into being: "The current Prussian electoral system is thus not a right that came into existence through legal channels, by legal means. No, it is a product of naked, brutal violence, a product of the *coup d'etat* and of [General Friedrich von] Wrangel's bayonets – *a product of the cowardly betrayal of German liberalism in German freedom's very hour of birth*'*.*"7

Since then, so Luxemburg, the National Liberals and the so-called Free Thinkers in Germany had only degenerated further by becoming stooges of Otto von Bismarck in Prussia and happily waving through all reactionary legislation relating to militarism and colonialism. Here, Luxemburg was emphasizing how the fight for the expansion of democracy, as well as the struggle against war, fell to the revolutionary working class and its party in the form of the SPD. It was the fate of this party in particular that would decide the outcome of the struggles in Prussia and beyond.

And while Luxemburg and her mentor Karl Kautsky certainly sang from the same hymn sheet when it came to the need for the working class to pioneer the struggle for democracy, their differing responses to the Prussian suffrage struggle led to their estrangement as allies, with Luxemburg eventually breaking off working relations with him. The occasion for this split revolved around the question of "What next?" In short, could the growing movement be accelerated to find new expressions of struggle in mass, rolling and generalized strikes, which would perhaps lead to a widespread strike movement along the lines of Russia in 1905, or should the main strategic focus remain on the SPD's tried-and-tested strategy of implacable opposition and building the party to win clear majority support? The latter would imply prioritizing the upcoming Reichstag elections that the government was seeking to postpone "just as the guilt-ridden sinner tries to postpone the enforcement of his sentence as much as possible."8

7 Ibid., p.318. Emphasis in the original.

8 Rosa Luxemburg: Rede am 28. Mai 1911 in öffentlichen Versammlungen in Eisleben und Hettstedt (1911), in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7.2, Berlin 2017, pp. 674–677.

#### Luxemburg and Kautsky

The polemical exchanges between Kautsky and Luxemburg have gone down in history as the "strategy of attrition" (or strategy of wearing out one's opponent – *Ermattungsstrategie*), as (broadly) propounded by Kautsky, and the strategy of overthrow (*Niederwerfungsstrategie*) supported by Luxemburg. These catchwords are useful to serve as orientation in the debate, but they also tend to blur some of the concrete discussion points, with both Luxemburg and Kautsky making the case for elements of both in their respective approaches.

Luxemburg, for instance, never denied the importance of elections or the need to win a majority for support to overthrow the existing order. By equal measure, Kautsky would not deny the significance of mass strikes and demonstrations in facilitating working-class power. Where they differed on the mass strike was over the exact nature of the situation in Germany at the time and how this related to a revolutionary situation. For his part, Kautsky viewed such a situation as one in which the rulers are unable to rule in the old way, the masses are not willing to be ruled in the old way, and there is a party dedicated to revolutionary upheaval that enjoys the support of the overwhelming majority (a description adopted by Lenin, it should be stressed).9 Luxemburg thought in similar terms, contending, however, that something approaching a revolutionary situation was potentially on the cards if the party could organize increasingly radical actions and bolder slogans. For her, the tragicomedy of the Prussian suffrage bill and the increasing threat of militarism and war reflected a new era of bitter struggle and a decline in the relevance of parliament and elections. Kautsky broadly agreed with this assessment but felt that the situation did not require a shift in the party's underlying strategy. These questions were of fundamental significance both at the time and in subsequent developments within the German left, with judgment

9 On this, see Lars T. Lih: Lenin, Kautsky and 1914, in: Weekly Worker 784/9 September 2009, online: https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/784/lenin-kautsky-and-1914/.

calls about the extent to which social struggles can be "pushed forward" or "escalated," having occasionally fatal consequences for the revolutionary workers' movement, as in January 1919 and March 1921. Luxemburg was initially opposed to the (so-called) Spartacus Uprising of January 1919 precisely because – unlike Karl Liebknecht, in this instance – she was committed to majority revolution and rightly worried that the Berlin masses had "rushed ahead" of the German population at large.10

Luxemburg became increasingly frustrated with the "Pope of Marxism" Kautsky for three overriding reasons. First, in the course of the polemic, she felt that he was making it rather difficult for her to publish her views within the pages of *Die Neue Zeit*, the main SPD theoretical weekly that he edited. That said, while Kautsky could certainly be accused of a brusque bureaucratic response to Luxemburg, evasively explaining that he would not publish her views until *after* the SPD's Magdeburg Congress in September 1910, he did not *ban* or *censor* Luxemburg – nor could he have. Indeed, he even noted that he had devoted almost the entirety of one issue of his journal to her extended polemic "The Theory and the Practice."11 But *Vorw*ä*rts*, the party's main daily newspaper, also refused to publish Luxemburg's ideas on the mass strike, forcing her to express her views in other party publications, not least *Die Leipziger Volkszeitung*. 12 Second, she noted a distinct softening of Kautsky's attitude toward the mass strike

10 For more discussion, see Ben Lewis: Rosa and the Republic, in: Weekly Worker No. 981/10 October 2013 On the issues involved with "rushing ahead" in relation to the Communist Party of Germany in 1921, see Ben Lewis: Before, During and After March, in: Weekly Worker No. 1346/6 May 2021, pp. 6–8.

11 Rosa Luxemburg: Die Theorie und die Praxis, in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, pp.378–420. An English translation by David Wolff is also available online https://www.marxists.org/archive/Luxemburg/1910/theory-practice/index.htm.

12 I believe that this misleading impression of "censorship" originates with Carl Schorske: German Social Democracy, 1905–1917. The Development of the Great Schism, Cambridge, MA 1983, p. 196. He speaks of the "censorship" of the massstrike question in *Vorw*ä*rts* and *Die neue Zeit*, but as we will see, a whole range of articles were published on this question in the pages of *Die Neue Zeit* – including from a radical pro-Bolshevik perspective.

when compared with his writings on the same subject in 1905. Third, and most significantly given its near complete disappearance in discussions of the mass strike, Luxemburg pointed out that Kautsky was turning away from the distinctly Marxist form of republicanism and the democratic republic as the "form for the dictatorship of the proletariat."13 While Kautsky accused her of "dressing up" passages by Engels on the question of Marxist republicanism, Luxemburg countered that, as we will see in detail below, Kautsky was undermining the revolutionary spirit of Engels's comments.14

#### Luxemburg Travels to Baden (1910)

Meanwhile, in the South of Germany, there was a furor sparked by the SPD's parliamentary faction in the Baden state parliament voting for a budget that would have passed without its votes anyway. In Kautsky's words, this represented a "revolt against the party majority" from the right.15 What is worse, some of the leading parliamentarians there had accepted courtly invites to the silver wedding anniversary of the Duke and Duchess of Baden, genuflecting before them dutifully. Conscious of the controversy surrounding the state budget in particular, the Baden SPD passed a motion banning any public discussion of the action of its deputies.16

13 Engels's phrase; Frederick Engels: A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891, in: Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 27, London 1990, p. 217. Marx described the democratic republic as "the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour"; Karl Marx: The Civil War in France, Paris 2021, p. 67.

14 On this, see Rosa Luxemburg: Zur Richtigstellung, in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, pp. 443–448.

15 Karl Kautsky: Der Aufstand in Baden, in: Die Neue Zeit: Wochenschrift der deutschen Sozialdemokratie 28/1910, no. 2, p. 613.

16 This obviously amounted to a genuine, albeit unsuccessful, attempt to ban discussion in the party.

In August, in the extended run-up to the Magdeburg Congress, Luxemburg embarked on a speaking tour of Baden. Purportedly, this tour was a series of lectures on "Social Democracy and the Monarchy," i.e., a critique of Kaiser Wilhelm II's recent inflammatory and saber-rattling speeches, during which he stressed how his authority flowed from the divine right of kings, not parliament, assemblies or elections, and that peace in Europe could only be achieved by continued huge spending commitments to Germany's army and navy. But the title of Luxemburg's speaking tour was largely a pretext with which she could circumvent the Baden SPD's gagging order and publicly lampoon the Baden deputies.

Interestingly, in terms of how the 1910 debate has been (mis)remembered in historiography, which we will explore below, Luxemburg's argumentation against the Badenite rightists was not dissimilar to Kautsky's. Both viewed the malaise in the party as an expression of the failure of the so-called "Political Bloc" policies, which entailed the SPD joining forces with the Liberals in opposition to the Catholic Center Party. This policy was developed and fronted by Wilhelm Kolb, whom Lenin later described as "an exceedingly consistent, honest and avowed enemy of the revolution."17 The Bloc was justified with reference to "positive" work, moving from "abstract" theory to concrete political action and creating a "party capable of governing" – a most familiar refrain among those seeking to join capitalist administrations at the time and ever since.

Today, Kautsky is often remembered as a fuddy-duddy reformist who had little or nothing in common with others within the wing of "revolutionary social democracy" in the Second International like Lenin, Luxemburg and Zetkin in 1910.18 But it is worth recalling that at

17 Vladimir Ilych Lenin: Wilhelm Kolb and George Plekhanov, in: Lenin: Collected Works, vol. 22, Moscow 1974, p. 142.

18 According to Tony Phillips, for instance, Kautsky apparently not only "opposed mass strikes" but also refused to print an article by Luxemburg in *Die Neue Zeit*, the SPD's theoretical journal, "because it urged the use of the mass strike in the fight for democracy;" Tony Phillips: What Can we Learn from Kautsky Today?,

that time – before Kautsky *reneged* upon his earlier views on democracy and the state and provided centrist ideological cover for the SPD's support for the German war effort – he was absolutely unequivocal on the necessity of strategic opposition to the Kaiser state:

"Our party feels so strongly about this that in its resolution at the Dresden Congress [1903], it barred its MPs from taking up posts in the Reichstag Presidium if they were associated with courtly obligations, although it did note that the obligations bound up with being Vice-President of the Reichstag must not yet be regarded as a form of voluntary homage to the monarchy, but a mandatory aspect of the position. Kolb and [Baden deputy Ludwig] Frank also voted for this resolution, which still applies today. Today they are in favor of Social Democratic deputies taking part, without any kind of reason to do so, in events which do not merely acknowledge the monarchy as an existing factor in political life, but which revolve either around honest personal enthusiasm for the monarch or abject hypocrisy – events which a democrat should have nothing to do with."19

Moreover, leaving aside the issue of the mass strike, both Luxemburg and Kautsky actually agreed on how the party should respond to the advance of the right within the party: they were both in favor of a split in principle but also recognized that the rot went far deeper than the small number of wayward deputies. Formal exclusions were therefore simply insufficient and may even have run the risk of the SPD being cleaved in two as a national organization. After all, the actions of these deputies had won majority support among the members of their state party and even from other "Southern" states. Such forces often asserted that the chasm between the authoritative

in: International Socialism 167/13 July 2020, online: http://isj.org.uk/what-canwe-learn-from-kautsky-today/. My emphasis. As I demonstrate in this chapter, both claims are highly misleading and uncritically take their cue from Schorske.

19 Karl Kautsky: Der Aufstand in Baden, in: Die Neue Zeit: Wochenschrift der deutschen Sozialdemokratie 28/1909–1910, no. 2, pp. 617–618.

political conditions of Prussia and the more relaxed political environment in the South occasioned a different approach.20 This does not imply that Luxemburg and Kautsky were not incensed or even fearful of the possible repercussions of such behavior in Baden. Far from it. Luxemburg warned: "From the social-democratic point of view, after all, parliamentarians are mere servants, mere obedient implements of the educated masses of the workers, and the fact that a dozen people with a parliamentary mandate can have such a decisive influence on the masses of the party, that they are able to corrupt them in such a systematic fashion, is already a sure sign of relations in the party having become highly bourgeois."21

She was adamant: "If the Baden approach is generalized across the country then social democracy will have ceased to exist."22 And although even the generally pro-Luxemburg Günter Radzcun argues that her "faulty conception of the party … tied her hands in the party struggle" and prevented her from "achieving the leading role of the party that she saw as necessary in the proletarian struggle for liberation," 23 it must be noted that Luxemburg's response was distinctly *partyist* in nature. She lambasted the party leadership for failing to implement the will of the party majority, as expressed at various congresses, and for its inability or unwillingness to crack down on such patent violations of the party's program, discipline and basic "self-respect" witnessed in Baden. She also had a long and proud record of actively intervening against all manifestations of opportunism at party congresses, in pamphlets, on speaking tours (like the one in

20 It cannot be denied that there were profound differences between socio-political relations in the North and South, of which this was just one manifestation. For the purposes of this article, the implications of this state of affairs for the national strategy of the SPD must be left to one side.

21 Rosa Luxemburg: Die badische Budgetabstimmung, in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, p. 429.

22 Ibid., p. 431.

23 Günter Radczun: Vorwort, in: Ibid., p.31. Apparently, Lenin stood alone in understanding this by developing the concept of a "party of a new type." Ibid. We will return to this stubbornly persistent Stalinist fabrication below.

Baden) and in her regular column "Aus der Partei" (Party News). In fact, she expressed the desire that all party bodies should follow her lead on this:

"The party as a whole never concerns itself with the daily goings-on of the party leadership in the South, its parliamentary fraction or its press. When it comes to such crass violations of social-democratic politics as the neglect of all mass agitation to fight the reactionary reform of municipal suffrage in Baden, or the deferment of social-democratic demands during the discussion of the school law in the Baden state parliament, then our party press is silent and neither bothers itself with obtaining sufficient information on party life in the South nor with pertinent criticisms or counter-measures."24

In the end, the party censured the Baden deputies and passed a resolution declaring "that the fight for suffrage in Prussia can be waged to victory only through great, determined mass actions in which all means must be employed, *including the political general strike* if necessary."25 This motion has not prevented historiography on both sides of the Cold War divide from making the issue of the mass strike – as opposed to the question of the republic, which we will soon discuss – into the great dividing line within the radical Marxist wing of social democracy that led to the estrangement between the "left" and the "center," as personified by Luxemburg and Kautsky respectively. But this is wrong. Indeed, reflecting on the Magdeburg Congress, none other than Lenin was delighted to report that "in Magdeburg … differences of opinion among the revolutionary Social Democrats of Germany did not play any appreciable role. The opportunists however gloated too soon. The Magdeburg Congress *adopted* the first part

24 Rosa Luxemburg: Die badische Budgetabstimmung, in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, pp. 432–433.

25 Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Ed.): Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands abgehalten in Magdeburg vom 18. bis 24. September 1910, Berlin 1910, p. 489. My emphasis.

#### 194 Ben Lewis

of the resolution proposed by *Rosa Luxemburg*, in which there is direct reference to the mass strike as a means of struggle."26 Moreover, Lenin cited the uncompromising remarks made by veteran party leader August Bebel: "I believe that we are a party of Social Democrats, and if there are National Liberals here among us, then they ought to go, they cannot remain in the party."27

Here, a brief aside is necessary to explore a further aspect of the 1910 debate that has disappeared within subsequent history: the assessment of the situation in Germany at that point within *Russian* social democracy. This has been twisted beyond recognition, particularly by those for whom "Marxism-Leninism" represented their political or even state ideology. Revealingly, in 1932, Luxemburg's close comrade Clara Zetkin was disgusted by the attempts of Stalinist ideologues to portray Lenin as advocating a "party of a new type" within the Second International that was fundamentally different to the supposedly out-and-out reformist SPD. By contrast, Zetkin made clear how – whether right or wrong – she, Lenin and others were actually patiently trying to organize its revolutionary wing and make it the dominant force within the International.28 The term "party of a new type" was never used by Lenin but has nonetheless become synonymous with his name. In GDR historiography, the term acquires the status of a religious incantation and is therefore omnipresent in East German publications on party history. It appears to have its origins in Joseph Stalin's 1939 *History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Short Course*, 29 which Lars Lih refers to as "the canonical expression of the now widespread 'party of a new type' interpretation of Lenin's career."30

26 Lenin: Two Worlds, in: Lenin: Collected Works, vol. 16, Moscow 1974, p.313. In hindsight, Lenin's optimism was slightly misplaced.

27 Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Ed.): Protokoll, p. 251.

28 See Ben Lewis: Clara Zetkin's Spicy Letter on Party History, online: https://marx ismtranslated.com/2023/02/clara-zetkins-spicy-letter-on-party-history-1932/.

29 Joseph Stalin: History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Short Course, Moscow 1939.

30 Lars T. Lih: Review of The Non-Geometric Elwood, by Carter Elwood, in: Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue Canadienne Des Slavistes 54/2012, no. 1–2, p. 213.

But a closer look at the debate within *Die Neue Zeit* provides a much better understanding of how Lenin and the Bolsheviks responded to the crisis of 1910. This controversy was sparked by an article written by the Menshevik Julius Martov, who dismissed Luxemburg's approach as typical of the Bolshevik "putschism" he allegedly witnessed among the Bolsheviks in 1905. He added that while nobody thought of the idea of a "strategy of attrition" in 1905, this is exactly what the Mensheviks were pursuing at the time, and the Bolsheviks had grudgingly been forced to adopt it in 1910.31 In response, Luxemburg's close comrade Julian Marchlewski (Karski) defended the Bolsheviks: "Martov spoofs Kautsky's thought by claiming that Kautsky wants the 'strategy of attrition' to be applied always and under all circumstances! That is pure unadulterated opportunism. And when he refers to Kautsky in this regard, it really leads to a dreadful misunderstanding."32

I describe this fascinating clash between the contending factions of Russian social democracy in the pages of the main German-language journal of Marxism as the "international invocation of authority debate," with both warring wings appealing to Kautsky's intellectual esteem in the international movement to justify their contrasting approaches. This notwithstanding, Western historiography has, like its counterpart in the Eastern bloc, generally attempted to create an unbridgeable gulf between the forces of "revolutionary social democracy" in Germany and Bolshevism in Russia. This partly accounts for some of the misleading claims surrounding the 1910 controversy

GDR historiography distorts not only Lenin's view of the party but also Luxemburg's. There is emerging evidence of her overly authoritarian and even sectarian maneuvers as a leader within Polish social democracy. See Eric Blanc, The Rosa Luxemburg Myth. A Critique of Luxemburg's Politics in Poland, in: Historical Materialism, 25/2018, no. 4, pp.3–36.

31 See Julius Martov: Die preußische Diskusion und die russische Erfahrung, in: Die Neue Zeit: Wochenschrift der deutschen Sozialdemokratie 28/1910, no. 2, pp. 907–919.

32 Julian Karski: Ein Mißverständnis, in: Die Neue Zeit: Wochenschrift der deutschen Sozialdemokratie, 29/1910, no. 1, p. 101. Both articles by Martov and Karsi, as well as others by Mehring and Kautsky cited here, have been translated into English for the first time on my website: www.marxismtranslated.com.

in the SPD. Carl Schorske's study of the "great schism" in the SPD, for instance, maintains that the mass-strike discussion heralded the SPD's collapse into the politics of "civil peace" in 1914. And while Schorske concedes that "in 1910 the principal conflict was still one over tactics" and that a "new crisis on the international scene to transform the *tactical* conflict into an *organizational* struggle, and thus to usher in the penultimate phase in the development of the schism," there are two problems with his approach. First, there is an undeniable teleology, a "reading backward" from the historic split in the SPD in 1914 onto previous conflicts and polemical disputes that are the outgrowth of a perceived shortcoming or "original sin."33 The contingency and open-endedness of day-to-day political life is thereby lost in a preordained meta-narrative where the 1910 dispute prefigures, and maps onto, the party's crisis in 1914.34 Schorske's account does not account for the fact that in summer 1914, the SPD leadership, which was then largely dominated by the right and not the left of the party, was engaged in clandestine operations to prepare a *general strike in favor of free suffrage in Prussia*. Jens Uwe-Guttel explains that

"by the early summer of 1914, at least in Berlin, a significant number of SPD leaders were willing to give serious consideration to extraparliamentary actions – with a mass strike as the most powerful weapon at their disposal – in order to democratize the Prussian voting system. This argument runs counter to claims expressed in both recent and older studies of domestic politics in Imperial Germany, which often portray the SPD as an essentially harmless organization integrated within the empire's political structure."35

33 This holds true of historiography on the Second International more generally. For a refreshingly different recent approach, see Mike Taber (Ed.): Revolution, Reform and Opportunism, Chicago 2023.

34 A left-wing variant of this can be found in David Wolff: Introduction to Rosa Luxemburg's 'Theory and Practice', in: News and Letters, April 1980, online: https://www.marxists.org/archive/Luxemburg/1910/theory-practice/index.htm.

35 Jens Uwe Guettel: Reform, Revolution, and the 'Original Catastrophe'. Political Change in Prussia and Germany on the Eve of the First World War, in: The Jour-

Second, when it comes to the mass-strike debate, Leon Trotsky – an avowed opponent of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1910 – also recalled the differences between the Russian party and Luxemburg in a letter to none other than Kautsky himself. Trotsky wrote that there was no support for Luxemburg's assessment within the Russian party, "not even among the Bolsheviks." And while Trotsky expressed his admiration for what he called Luxemburg's "noble impatience," he deemed it absurd to elevate the mass strike to "a *leading principle* for the party."36 Yet this is *exactly* what left-wing historiography has tended to do – particularly among the supporters of a certain Lev Trotsky! *Left Voice* writer Nathaniel Flakin, for instance, wonders whether Marxists can diagnose a revolutionary situation "like a meteorologist determines whether it is raining or not." The fact that his reading of 1910 is diametrically opposed to that of Trotsky does not prevent Flakin from invoking the authority of that same Lev Davidovich Bronstein to provide his readers with the supposedly ground-breaking insight that "revolutionary situations are based on the reciprocal effects of objective and subjective factors. They do not simply fall from the sky." But, as we saw above with the example of Kautsky and Lenin's shared definition of a revolutionary situation, a statement of this kind is a mere banality that all revolutionaries in the Second International would have agreed on. But for Flakin, as for much of modern-day Trotskyism that has increasingly morphed into a kind of voluntarist syndicalism, the real problem of the subjective factor of the SPD was that it did not call for the general strike and instead was "focused on the elections."37 Given how seriously Russian social democracy participated in, and responded to, electoral campaigns up to and in-

nal of Modern History 91/2019, no. 2, p.312.

36 See Richard B. Day/Daniel Gaido (Eds.): Witnesses to Permanent Revolution. The Documentary Record, Chicago 2011, p.53. My emphasis.

37 Nathaniel Flakin: Kautsky, Luxemburg, and Lenin in Light of the German Revolution, in: Left Voice, 17 April 2019, online: https://www.leftvoice.org/kautsky-Luxemburg-and-lenin-in-light-of-the-german-revolution/.

cluding in 1917, this assertion is all the more baffling.38 After all, there is nothing innately opportunist about retreating from mobilizing for street and strike demonstrations in order to focus one's political resources on elections. What surely matters is the *politics* presented, the strategy that is championed.

And here we arrive at the more fundamental political-strategic question that came to light in 1910. Overemphasizing the *tactical/ organizational* conflict by focusing on the issue of the general strike is to fail to see the strategic wood for the tactical trees in Luxemburg's critique of party relations at the time: namely her conviction that Kautsky's disingenuousness on the need to foreground revolutionary republicanism was grist to the mill of the rightward drift in the party. Given the significance of this often overlooked contribution, let us conclude by turning our attention to this matter.

#### "Honest Opportunism" and Republican Reluctance

Just as Lenin later held up, word for word, what Kautsky used to say about "the revolution of our time'39 before 1914 in order to compare it with Kautsky's later positions where he moved away *from* his erstwhile revolutionary perspectives, Luxemburg compared and contrasted what Kautsky said on the mass strike in 1910 with 1905/6. She undoubtedly scored some good points in this regard. We will now proceed in a similar fashion but shift the focus onto the issue of what Luxemburg had to say about Kautsky's attitude toward republicanism,

38 In this sense, Flakin's position is closer to that of Luxemburg in 1910, not Lenin's or Trotsky's. See Rosa Luxemburg: Die badische Budetabstimmung, pp. 432–433. The best study of Bolshevik electoral strategy and its place within Marxism is August H. Nimtz: The Ballot or the Streets or Both?, 2 vols., Chicago 2019.

39 "Make sure of getting and rereading (or get someone to translate to you) Kautsky's Weg zur Macht [Road to Power, 1909 – BL] what he wrote there about the revolution of our times!!  Lenin to Alexander Shlyapnikov, 31 October 1914, in: Collected Works, vol.35, p. 172.

as well as how she felt this entailed him moving away from the basic tenets of Marxist political strategy.

There were indeed several signs – most of which are picked up by Luxemburg in her polemics – that Kautsky was moving away from the standpoint of revolutionary Marxism in 1910: not (yet) in the 1918 sense of viewing the Weimar Republic as a form of working-class rule, which amounted to a radical departure from his earlier outlook, but in his soft-pedaling of the centrality of republicanism to Marxist strategy.40 In 1905, for instance, Kautsky could claim that: "We are republicans for the very reason that the democratic republic is the only political form which corresponds to socialism. The monarchy can only exist on the basis of class differences and antagonisms. The abolition of classes also requires the abolition of the monarchy."41

Just five years later, by contrast, when he was pressed on the matter by Luxemburg, he wrote in an evidently more guarded and cautious tone:

"It is true that our program does not explicitly mention the republic. But there is no doubt that one cannot be a good social democrat if one is not a good republican. We can have different opinions about the most appropriate way to express our republican point of view. But precisely because republican propaganda encounters so many obstacles in Germany, we must all the more carefully avoid anything that might awaken in the masses the belief that we have abandoned our republican convictions or even that we expect the monarchy to promote proletarian aims."42

40 Karl Kautsky: Guidelines for a Socialist Action Programme, in Weekly Worker No. 889/10 November 2011 and Ben Lewis: From Erfurt to Charlottenburg, in: Weekly Worker No. 889/10 November 2011, online: https://weeklyworker.co.uk/ worker/889/.

41 Karl Kautsky: The Republic and Social Democracy in France, in Lewis (Ed.): Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism, pp. 157–158.

42 Karl Kautsky: Der Aufstand in Baden, in: Die Neue Zeit: Wochenschrift der deutschen Sozialdemokratie 28/1910. no. 2, p. 614.

'This is clear evidence of a move from revolutionary republicanism to a more platonic republicanism. When Luxemburg argued, with reference to Engels's "Critique of the Draft Programme of Social Democracy" (1891), that Kautsky was downplaying the significance of republicanism in social-democratic thought, Kautsky accused her of "dressing up" the Engels quotations and removing them from the specific context in which the latter had developed his thoughts. In her reply, "A Correction," Luxemburg painstakingly showed how this was not the case and that what was actually at stake was far more than her "citation methods": arriving at clarity on this question was essential "because it is most important that comrades discover exactly what Engels's actual opinion on the matter was."43 Convincingly, she demonstrated how Engels's insistence that the question of the republic be urgently discussed in the party in the 1890s was no fleeting concern but inseparable from the struggle against the rise of what he called "honest opportunism."44 She correctly noted that the refusal of the party to foreground this issue was aiding and abetting the worrying rise of reformism in Baden that the party seemed either unwilling or unable to counteract.

Kautsky was not alone in soft-pedaling the significance of republican thought to Marxism in the pages of *Die Neue Zeit*. Franz Mehring, who would become one of Luxemburg's closest political allies during World War I, leaped to Kautsky's defense in July in the article "The Struggle against the Monarchy."45 For Mehring, Luxemburg was suffering from "republican illusions," similar to those entertained by the "1848er" Karl Heinzen, who felt that the republic represented a

43 Rosa Luxemburg: Zur Richtigstellung, in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, pp. 445. For my discussion of the related issue of how in 1905 Kautsky was certainly aware of the full implications of Engels's critique for the development of a distinctly Marxist republicanism, see Lewis (Ed.), Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism, pp.30–37.

44 Frederick Engels, A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891, in: Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 27, p. 217.

45 Franz Mehring: Der Kampf gegen die Monarchie, in: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 15, Berlin 1977, pp. 498–501.

panacea for all social ills and who was pilloried by Marx for this view in a feisty polemic entitled "Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality."46 Of course we are republicans, added Mehring, but we are no longer in 1848, and so the issue of the day is not the republic, which is a mere "side issue," but rather the social revolution itself. As such, it was quite right for the SPD newspapers to focus on the increased costs associated with the "Civil List" – i.e., public funding for the monarchy – as a way of tapping into widespread discontent and anger with the existing system.

In developing this argument, Mehring was doubtless looking to undermine Luxemburg "from the left" by referring to the social revolution that was on the agenda and by contrasting it with the "bourgeois revolution" of 1848. But as Luxemburg pointed out in her "The Struggle against Relics" – a wonderful demonstration of her keen sense of Marxist republicanism – the implications of Mehring's argument were both economistic and *right-wing* in nature. She was adamant that the struggle against the monarchy had nothing to do with economics but instead the strategic place of the republic within the struggle for working-class self-emancipation:

"We refuse to vote for the Civil List not because it is a rip-off but because we are opponents of the monarchy, even if it were to cost half as much as it does. Hell, we would not want it even if it were for free!  We prefer the most expensive republic to the cheapest monarchy, because for us this is not a matter of money: the monarchy is the most backward tool of class rule, whereas the republic is the most progressive one. And the more progressive the forms of class rule, the closer their terrible end."47

46 Karl Marx: Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality, in: Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 6, Moscow 1975, p.312.

47 Rosa Luxemburg: Der Kampf gegen Reliqiuen, in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, p. 425.

Most significantly in terms of the themes of this chapter, she sought to account for the reformist crisis in Baden, as well as for the Kautsky-Mehring team's concessions toward it, as being rooted in the glaring absence of republicanism in the party's day-to-day agitation and work:

"Until now we have done bugger all for the supposedly 'self-evident' cause of republicanism … If the slogan of the republic had been prioritized on all appropriate occasions, then systematic agitation would have sharpened the broadest party circles' understanding that a social democrat is simultaneously a republican as a matter of principle. Then either it would have been impossible for such a flagrant self-humiliation like that in Baden to have occurred, or it would have had to cause a storm of indignation in the Baden camp. But for decades we have completely neglected republican agitation."48

It is precisely this republicanism – unfortunately drowned out by the focus on the mass strike – that represents one of Luxemburg's major contributions to the controversy in 1910 and, indeed, that defines almost the entirety of her political career.49 At the time, she was almost alone within the SPD in highlighting how Marxism is a republican body of thought not simply in the trite sense of opposing the monarchy but in the sense that the democratic republic – the culmination of the political demands of the Erfurt minimum program – is the political framework within which the working class will come to power.

48 Rosa Luxemburg, Die badische Budgetabstimmung, in: Ibid., pp. 430–431.

49 For a discussion of the strategic problems involved in her shift away from some of the core pillars of her republicanism during the German Revolution of 1918–19, see Lewis: Rosa and the Republic.

#### Conclusion

The issue of republicanism provides a more useful lens through which to view the estrangement between Kautsky and Luxemburg, as well as the worrying signs of a rightwing drift in the party, than the mass strike issue does. This is particularly the case because, at least in hindsight, both figures were vindicated: Kautsky because of the fact that escalation would have been counterproductive at that point,50 and both of them because the fall of the three-tier suffrage system in Prussia did require a generalized revolutionary crisis within the state apparatus (i.e., the failure of the German war effort and the ensuing revolution). It is only in this changed emphasis on republicanism that we see *possible* foreshadowings of Kautsky's turn against the politics of revolutionary Marxism that he once brought to an audience of millions, *not* in his assessment of the role and place of the mass strike in 1910. After all, the forces of revolutionary social democracy internationally generally sided with his reading of the political situation back then and appear to have been vindicated in doing so. Contextualizing and critically approaching Luxemburg's contributions to the 1910 controversy actually makes it possible for us to call into question the stubbornly persistent distortions of Cold War historiography to discover what remains so insightful and enduring about her writings in 1910.

50 As such, Tony Phillips is wrong to claim that Kautsky here made the mistake of "exaggerating the strength of the Kaiser state." At least in the first few years of World War I, that state was strong enough to endure the societal stress test of that conflict, against which the social unrest of 1910 paled in comparison. Tony Phillips: "What Can we Learn from Kautsky Today?, in: International Socialism 167/13 July 2020, online: http://isj.org.uk/what-can-we-learn-from-kautsky-today/.

#### Works Cited

## 9 Rosa Luxemburg as a Republican Agitator

Shaping Social Democracy in Imperial Germany

*David Guerrero and Andrea Pérez-Fernández1*

Introduction

*Without doubt Marx was a republican, and without doubt German social democracy is republican-minded; from this, however, it does not yet follow that it must fight monarchy from the wrong end.* Franz Mehring, 19102

In the last decades, the relationship between socialism and republicanism has become a fruitful field of study. There are many good scholarly reasons to welcome this approach to socialist and republican history of political thought – chief among them, the need to fill in the

1 This chapter has benefited from original research shared by the members of the Rosa Luxemburg Working Group of the University of Barcelona (2020–2022). We want to thank the group for discussing an earlier draft of our text: Fina Birulés, Edgar Manjarín, Julio Martínez-Cava, Pau Matheu, Núria Sara Miras, Jordi Mundó and Pablo Scotto. The chapter also received relevant comments during the Rosa Luxemburg Conference held at Bodø in March 2023, especially by Ben Lewis. Frank Jacob commented on and thoroughly reviewed the text – we want to thank him for this in addition to his work as editor of this volume. This publication is part of the project of I+D+i MUVAN "Mujeres a la vanguardia del activismo entre siglos (XIX y XX): influencias en la filosofía femenina" (PID2020–113980GA-I00) and the project "Filosofía política, economía y ética de las relaciones fiduciarias: libertad, propiedad, bienes comunes y política pública" (PID2021–123885NB-I00), both funded by the Spanish Ministry of Research and Science. While working on this chapter, both authors held FPU doctoral contracts funded by the Spanish Ministry of Universities.

2 Franz Mehring: Der Kampf gegen die Monarchie, in: Die Neue Zeit 28/1910, vol. 2, p. 609.

apparent gap separating the 19th century from the earlier traditions of Western political thought. There are also good political reasons to welcome and contribute to this academic field. One is that studying the republican roots of socialism forces us to reconsider the real historical relationship between socialism and democracy. The democratic pedigree of the socialist tradition and the labor movement is not only often disregarded today in certain academic environments – where "democracy" is inaccurately attributed to the success of "liberalism" – but also in the public discourse – where the shadows of the Cold War and the Soviet Union also loom large in the definition of ideological camps.3 Another reason is that the recovery of republican insights within socialism can serve to develop the latter as what it has historically been: a program of democratization of economic and political life. This, we think, is a much-needed approach to broaden democratic political imagination in a context of rising reactionary movements in many western countries – movements that often agglutinate conservative sentiments around an uncritical or nostalgic defense of earlier capitalist societies.

Our contribution to this field traces some of these connections – between republicanism, socialism, and democracy – by focusing on the case of Rosa Luxemburg's calls for republican agitation during the struggle for the Prussian electoral reform (1909–1910). We analyze some of her texts during these years and, more concretely, her article "A Time for Sowing" – which caused a dispute with Karl Kautsky, who, representing the position of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) leadership, apparently prevented the publication of Luxemburg's thoughts on republican agitation. We will consider one of the main arguments behind Luxemburg's demand for socialist republican agitation. In her view, the party must make a "work of enlightenment" of

3 On the relationship between liberalism, socialism, the revival of republicanism in contemporary academia, and the lasting effects of Cold War conceptual frameworks, see David Guerrero and Julio Martínez-Cava: Between Tyranny and Self-Interest: Why Neo-republicanism Disregards Natural Rights, in: Theoria 69/171, 2022, pp. 140–171.

the masses, an especially important task whenever the social circumstances of conflict breed an overlap between political and economic struggles. In the Prussian context of 1909–1910, Luxemburg saw republican agitation as a way of concretizing this "work of enlightenment." That is, to prove the capitalist material roots of the monarchy and empire, and the other side of the coin: how the interests of the capitalist ruling class were protected and nurtured by the German imperial regime and its anti-democratic constitution.

In the following chapter, we point out, first, how the institutional architecture of the German Empire undermined political freedom and how, by the same token, it made the repeated electoral achievements of the SPD powerless. Second, we explain why the failed electoral reform in Prussia became, in Luxemburg's account, an opportune moment to expose the anti-democratic nature of the whole system – the mutually reinforcing trends of German capitalism and German absolutism. Third, we delve into Luxemburg's arguments about the relevance of republican agitation and show what her position could have meant for contemporary German socialists and her controversy with Kautsky. Fourth, we spell out Luxemburg's call for republican agitation through what she calls the "work of enlightenment" of the masses in the context of overlapping economic and political struggles.

### The German Empire: "A Princely Insurance Company against Democracy"

One of the greatest obstacles to political freedom in Germany was the institutional architecture of the Empire. In the famous premonitory words of the socialist parliamentarian Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the founders of the SPD and father of Karl Liebknecht, the Empire was "a princely insurance company against democracy."4 This was the

4 Quoted in Frank Lorenz Müller: The German Monarchies, in: Matthew Jefferies (Ed.): The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany, Surrey 2015, p.56.

case, even though elections to the Reichstag, the national parliament, were based on universal male suffrage for those over 25 years of age – a national-level egalitarian franchise that became a vanguard of democratic reform in the West.5

Despite the good electoral results of the SPD (consistently the most voted party since its return to legality in 1890), the constitutional and electoral system worked against representative democracy, and specifically against the socialists. For instance, the design of electoral districts went back to the population distribution of the largely rural Germany of the 1860s: their boundaries had not been updated to the demographic changes of the last decades, such as the mass migrations of eligible male voters to the emerging industrial centers.6 Take the illustrative example of Berlin, with more than 300,000 registered voters that chose one member of the Reichstag – one, the same amount of seats as the little constituency of Schaumburg-Lippe, with barely 10,000 voters. Therefore, the main urban strongholds of the SPD were extremely underrepresented in the imperial electoral results. Consider the 1907 Reichstag elections, the last ones before the events we will focus on. The SPD got almost 11 % of the seats with 29 % of the votes. The German Conservative Party, meanwhile, got 15 % of the seats with only 9.4 % of the votes.7

These tendencies against representative democracy were supported by lower-level institutions, as many Landtage (the legislative bodies of each of the states) still had limited franchise and anti-democratic electoral laws. Thanks to local coalitions with left liberals, the SPD brought about electoral reforms in some states over the years. However, in other cases, state-level electoral reforms went in the opposite direction, precisely to curb the achievements of the SPD in the ballots,

5 Margaret Lavinia Anderson: Practicing Democracy. Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany, Princeton, NJ 2000, pp. 4–8.

6 Volker R. Berghahn: Imperial Germany, 1871–1918. Economy, Society, Culture, and Politics, 2nd edition, Oxford and New York 2005, p. 200.

7 Wilhelm L. Guttsman: The German Social Democratic Party 1875–1933. From Ghetto to Government, London 1981, p. 80.

excluding the political base of the socialists from equal voting rights. In this sense, many states saw coalitions of conservatives and liberals setting up new limitations to the franchise, gerrymandering, passing additional tax and property qualifications to vote, or establishing second ballot systems that allowed for multi-party alliances on further voting rounds whenever the socialist candidate had any chances of winning.8 Additionally, since important legislative powers on taxation and property rights were only in the hands of the Landtage, the socialist legislative majority built upon the more democratic franchise of the Reichstag was ineffective on many issues of economic policy.

On top of all this, any of the electoral achievements and legal improvements that the SPD obtained since its legalization on an imperial level (and it got several, e. g., a reduction of the voting age, the secret ballot, salary for Reichstag members…) were indeed overshadowed by the imperial constitution itself. The institutional arrangement of the Empire rendered its legislative branch, the Reichstag, impotent vis-à-vis the executive, whose chancellor and cabinet were answerable only to the emperor.9 Thus, the monarchy was a matter of great political relevance for socialists: it represented the core of the imperial constitution and the reason for the legislative incapacity of the huge social democratic parliamentary group.

For all these reasons, the call for a republic – that is, to engage in republican agitation – could be turned into a powerful tool of critique. Significantly, as we will see, republicanism could be something other than a bourgeois demand to reform the absolutist vestiges in the imperial constitution. Republicanism could also serve to make a socialist point against the legal-political setting that protected German capitalism from the labor movement. This was, at least, Luxemburg's view in 1910, as we shall see below.

8 Thomas Kühne: Elections, in: Matthew Jefferies (Ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany, pp. 77–90; Berghahn: Imperial Germany, pp. 199–201.

9 Katharine Anne Lerman: Imperial Governance, in: Matthew Jefferies (Ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany, pp. 13–32.

### Electoral Reform in Prussia: An Opportunity for Republican Agitation?

As we explain below, the question of whether the SPD should engage in republican agitation – in other words, whether socialist propaganda should include demands for a more democratic constitution or even the abolition of imperial rule – was an old source of disagreement among European socialists. This debate, which especially affected the Germans as subjects of an imperial regime, reached one of its high points between 1909 and 1910 at the time of the change of chancellor and when the Prussian Landtag, which had one of the most anti-democratic electoral systems, was considering a very moderate reform.10