The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

mass strikes; the proletariat’s sole weapon at this point is street demonstrations for economic demands. The mass
strike in the West would better serve to rouse the workers’ enthusiasm in a period of economic prosperity: “...in
a period of crisis the proletariat shows less combativity, and in a period of prosperity less revolutionary élan [...]
In a period of crisis, it is easier to hold great street demonstrations than mass strikes. The proletariat’s
enthusiasm for the mass strike is more easily aroused in times of prosperity than in times of crisis.” 226
Kautsky was prepared to concede that there might be “local demonstration strikes”, but never generalised strikes.
At the most, a mass strike in the West would be purely defensive, and used as a “means of coercion” against the
government. The only possible strategy was a “strategy of exhaustion” of the established power, of ‘eating away’
at the positions of the bourgeoisie, and not a “strategy of annihilation” of capitalism. To support his arguments,
Kautsky referred not to the period of mass strikes before and after 1905, but to the history of... Hannibal and his
struggle against Rome. Pushed into a corner by Rosa Luxemburg and Pannekoek, Kautsky repeated the same
arguments that he had once denounced in the mouths of his old revisionist adversaries:
– parliamentary tactics are preferable to mass revolutionary action, and even to political strikes: “a political
victory produces a much stronger impression”; 227
– using the ‘crowd psychology’ of the reactionary Le Bon, Kautsky declared that “The actions of the mass can
just as well be reactionary, or even simply absurd”;
– finally, the use of unorganised mass action, outside the control of the trades unions and the Social democracy,
threatened the existence of the workers’ and revolutionary movement: “The unpredictable nature of unorganised
mass actions has often been fatal to opposition movements and parties, especially revolutionary ones”. 228
In answering Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg repeated the arguments she had put forward earlier in Mass Strike,
Party and Unions, but strengthened them. She showed the need for the proletariat to “go resolutely on the
offensive”, a decision which could only come from the masses themselves. Kautsky’s arguments were really
only designed to “hold back” the movements, 229 said Luxemburg in an article which was a whole programme in
itself: ‘Exhaustion or Combat?’.
She went to the bottom of the question in the article ‘Theory and Practice’, 230 emphasising three fundamental
points in the debate on the mass strike:
– Russia’s gigantic proletarian concentrations of Moscow and Petrograd prefigured the revolution in Europe. Far
from being backward, Russia demonstrated an “advanced level of capitalist development”;
– the mass strike neither disorganised nor weakened the workers’ movement. On the contrary, it paid: the
Russian mass strike had made possible “more victories on the economic, social, and political level than the
German union movement has achieved throughout its four decades of existence”;
– a vigorous strike movement was starting again in the West; the danger threatening it was the social
democracy’s ability to “paralyse the finest mass action by adopting an inconstant and feeble tactic”. Luxemburg
concluded optimistically that it was not a matter of leading a fight against the party leadership and the unions;
the masses would take care themselves of “pushing aside its leaders who go against the current of the tumultuous
movement”.
In fact, in the debate Rosa Luxemburg remained all too often on the terrain chosen by Kautsky and the SPD
leadership. She called for a mass strike to inaugurate a campaign of demonstrations and strikes in favour of
universal suffrage, proposing as a ‘transitory’, mobilising slogan the struggle ‘for the Republic’. On this terrain,
it was easy enough for Kautsky to reply that “it is absurd to try to inaugurate an electoral struggle with a mass
226 K. Kautsky, ‚Was nun?’, op. cit., p. 78.
227 K. Kautsky, Eine neue Strategie, in: Pannekoek–Kautsky–Luxemburg, op. cit., p. 153.
228 Gustave Le Bon’s sociology of crowds ‘indoctrinated by their leaders’ inspired Kautsky’s article ‚Massenaktion’, in:
Pannekoek–Kautsky–Luxemburg, op. cit., pp. 271 & 275.
229 R. Luxemburg, ‚Ermattung oder Kampf?’, Die Neue Zeit, 1910, in: op. cit., p. 216.
230 R. Luxemburg, ‚Die Theorie und die Praxis’, Die Neue Zeit, 1910 [pp. 564-578; 626-642], in: op. cit., p. 177-227.
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