V. I.

Lenin

Reply by N. Lenin to Rosa Luxemburg [5]

Comrade Rosa Luxemburg’s article in Nos. 42 and 43 of the
Neue Zeit is a criticism of my Russian book on the crisis in our

Party. [1]

I cannot but thank our German comrades for their attention to our Party literature and their
attempts to acquaint German Social-Democrats with it, but I must
point out that Rosa Luxemburg’s Neue Zeit article does not acquaint the reader with my book, but with something
else. This may be seen from the following instances. Comrade
Luxemburg says, for example, that my book is a clear and
detailed expression of the point of view of “intransigent
centralism”. Comrade Luxemburg thus supposes that I defend
one system of organisation against another. But actually that is
not so. From the first to the last page of my book, I defend the
elementary principles of any conceivable system of party
organisation: My book is not concerned with the difference
between one system of organisation and another, but with how
any system is to be maintained, criticised, and rectified in a
manner consistent with the party idea. Rosa Luxemburg further
says that “according to his [Lenin’s] conception, the
Central Committee has the right to organise all the local Party
committees”. Actually that is not so. What my views on this subject are can be documentarily proved by the draft Rules
of Party Organisation which I proposed. In that draft there is
nothing about any right to organise the local committees. That
right was introduced into the Party Rules by the commission
elected by the Party Congress to frame them, and the Congress adopted the commission’s text. But besides myself and one other
majority adherent, the commission included three members of the
Congress minority, so that in this commission which gave the
Central Committee the right to organise the local committees, it
was my opponents that had the upper hand. Comrade Luxemburg has
confused two different things. In the first place, she has
confused my organisational draft with the modified draft of the
commission and with the Rules of Organisation as actually
adopted by the Congress; secondly, she has confused the defence
of a specific point relating to a specific clause of the Rules
(in that defence I was by no means intransigent, for I did not
object at the plenary session to the amendment made by the
commission) with the defence of the thesis (truly “ultra-centralist”, is it not?) that Rules adopted
by a Party congress must be adhered to until amended by a
subsequent congress. This thesis (a “purely
Blanquist” one, as the reader may readily observe) I did
indeed defend in my book quite “intransigently”. Comrade Luxemburg says that in my
view “the
Central Committee is the only active nucleus of the
Party”. Actually that is not so. I have never advocated
any such view. On the contrary, my opponents (the Second Party
Congress minority) charged in their writings that I did not
sufficiently uphold the independence of the Central Committee,
that I made it too subordinate to the editorial board of the
Central Organ and the Party Council, bodies located abroad. To
these charges I replied in my book that when the Party majority
had the upper hand in the Party Council, the latter never made
any attempt to interfere with the Central Committee’s independence, but that when the Party council became a weapon of
the minority, this did immediately hap pen. Comrade Rosa
Luxemburg says that there are no two opinions among the Russian
Social-Democrats as to the need for a united party, and that the
whole controversy is over the degree of centralisation. Actually
that is not so. If Comrade Luxemburg had taken the trouble to
acquaint her self with the resolutions of the many local Party
committees that constitute the majority, she would readily have
seen (which incidentally is also clear from my book) that our
controversy has principally been over whether the Central
Committee and Central Organ should represent the trend of the majority of the Party Congress, or whether they should
not. About this “ultra-centralist” and “purely
Blanquist” demand the worthy comrade says not a word, she
prefers to declaim against mechanical subordination of the part
to the whole, against slavish submission, blind obedience, and
other such bogeys. I am very grateful to Comrade Luxemburg for
explaining the profound idea that slavish submission is very
harmful to the Party, but I should like to know: does the
comrade consider it normal for supposed party central institutions to be dominated by the minority of the Party
Congress?—can she imagine such a thing?—has she ever seen it in any party? Comrade Luxemburg fathers on me the idea
that all the conditions already exist in Russia for forming a
large and extremely centralised workers’ party. Again an error
of fact. Nowhere in my book did I voice such an idea, let alone
advocate it. The thesis I advanced expressed and expresses
something else: I insisted, namely, that all the conditions
already existed for expecting Party Congress decisions to be
observed, and that the time was past when a Party institution
could be supplanted by a private circle. I brought proof that
certain academics in our Party had shown themselves inconsistent
and unstable, and that they had no right to lay the blame for
their own lack of discipline upon the Russian proletarians. The
Russian workers have already pronounced repeatedly, on various
occasions, for observance of the Party Congress decisions. It is
nothing short of laughable when Comrade Luxemburg proclaims such
a view “optimistic” (should it not rather be considered “pessimistic”?) without uttering a single word
about the factual basis of my thesis. Comrade Luxemburg declares that
I glorify the educational influence of the factory. That is not
so. It was my opponent, not I, who said that I pictured the
Party as a factory. I properly ridiculed him and proved with his
own words that he confused two different aspects of factory
discipline, which, unfortunately, is the case with Comrade
Luxemburg too. [2]

Comrade Luxemburg says that I characterised my stand point more
acutely, perhaps, than any of my opponents could have done when I defined a revolutionary Social-Democrat as a
Jacobin who has identified himself with the organisation of the
class-conscious workers. Yet another error of fact. It was
P. Axelrod, not I, who first started talking about
Jacobinism. He was the first to liken our Party trends to those
of the days of the great French Revolution. I merely observed
that the parallel could only be allowed in the sense that the
division of present-day Social-Democracy into a revolutionary
and an opportunist wing corresponded to some extent to the
division into Montagnards and Girondists. The old
Iskra , which the Party Congress endorsed, often drew such a parallel. Just because it recognised this division, the
old Iskra fought against the opportunist wing in our
Party, against the Rabocheye Dyelo trend. Rosa
Luxemburg here confuses comparison of the two revolutionary
trends of the eighteenth and the twentieth century with
identification of those trends. If I say, for example, that the
Jungfrau stands in the same relation to the Little Scheidegg as a
house of four storeys to one of two, that does not mean I
identify a four-storey house with the Jungfrau. Comrade
Luxemburg leaves completely out of sight the factual analysis of
the different trends in our Party. Yet the greater half of my book
is devoted precisely to this analysis, based on the minutes of
our Party Congress, and in the preface I call special attention
to the fact. Rosa Luxemburg sets out to talk about the present
position in our Party while totally ignoring our Congress, which
was what really laid our Party’s foundation. A rash enterprise,
it has to be said! Particularly since I point out a hundred
times in my book that my opponents ignore our Party Congress and
by so doing leave all their assertions devoid of all foundation
of fact.

Comrade Luxemburg commits exactly the same basic error. She
repeats naked words without troubling to grasp their concrete
meaning. She raises bogeys without informing herself of the
actual issue in the controversy. She puts in my mouth commonplaces, general principles and conceptions, absolute
truths, and tries to pass over the relative truths, pertaining
to perfectly definite facts, with which alone I operate. And
then she rails against set formulas and invokes the dialectics
of Marx! It is the worthy comrade’s own article that consists of
nothing but manufactured formulas and runs counter to the ABC of dialectics. This ABC
tells us that there is no such thing as abstract truth, truth is
always concrete. Comrade Rosa Luxemburg loftily ignores the
concrete facts of our Party struggle and engages in grandiloquent declamation about matters which it is impossible
to discuss seriously. Let me cite one last example from Comrade
Luxemburg’s second article. She quotes my remark that the way
the Rules of Organisation are formulated can make them a more or
a less trenchant weapon against opportunism. [3]

Just what formulations I talked about in my book and all of us talked
about at the Congress, of that she does not say a word. What the
controversy at the Party Congress was, and against whom I
advanced my theses, she does not touch on in the slightest. Instead, she favours me with a whole lecture on
opportunism ... in the parliamentary countries!! But about the
peculiar, specific varieties of opportunism in Russia, the
shades which it has taken on there and with which my book is
concerned, we find not a word in her article. The upshot of all
these very brilliant arguments is:

“Party Rules are not meant in themselves [?? understand
this who can!] to be a weapon of resistance to opportunism, but
only an outward instrument for exerting the dominant influence
of the actually existing revolutionary-proletarian majority of
the Party.” Quite so. But how this actually existing majority
of our Party was formed Rosa Luxemburg does not say, yet that is
exactly what I talk about in my book. Nor does she say what
influence it was that Plekhanov and I defended with the help of
this outward instrument. I can only add that never and nowhere
have I talked such nonsense as that the Party Rules are a weapon
“in themselves”.

Thebest way to answer this kind of presentation of my views will be
to set forth the concrete facts of our Party struggle. Anyone will
then be able to see how ill Comrade Luxemburg’s abstract commonplaces
and formulas sort with the concrete facts.

Our Party was founded in Russia in the spring of l898 at a congress
of representatives of several Russian organisations. It was named the
Russian Social-Democratic Labour

Party, Rabochaya Gazeta [6] was made the Central Organ, and the
Union of Russian Social-Democrats Abroad became the Party’s
foreign representative. Very soon after the congress, the
Central Committee of the Party was arrested. Rabochaya Gazeta had to cease publication after its second issue. The
whole Party became a shapeless conglomeration of local Party
organisations (known as committees). The only bond between these
local committees was an ideological, purely spiritual one. A
period of disunity, vacillation, and splits was bound to set in
again. The intellectuals, who in our Party made up a much larger
percentage than in the West-European parties, had taken up
Marxism as a new vogue. This vogue very soon gave place to
slavish acceptance of the bourgeois criticism of Marx, on the
one hand, and an infatuation for a purely trade-unionist labour
movement (strike-ism—Economism), on the other. The divergence between the intellectual-opportunist and proletarianrevolutionary trends led to a split in the Union Abroad. The
newspaper Rabochaya Mysl , and the Rabocheye
Dyelo magazine published abroad, expressed (the latter in somewhat lesser degree) the standpoint of Economism, they
belittled the importance of political struggle and denied the
existence of a bourgeois-democratic element in Russia. The
“legal” critics of Marx—Messrs. Struve, Tugan-Baranovsky, Bulgakov, Berdyaev, and the rest—swung
all the way to the Right. Nowhere in Europe do we find
Bernsteinism arriving so speedily at its logical consummation—the formation of a liberal group—as was
the case in Russia. There, Mr. Struve began with “criticism” in the name of Bernsteinism and ended by
setting up the liberal magazine Osvobozhdeniye , liberal
in the European sense of the term. Plekhanov and his friends,
who broke away from the Union Abroad, met with support from the
founders of Iskra and Zarya. These two publications waged (even Comrade Luxemburg has heard something
about that) a “brilliant three-year campaign” against the
opportunist wing of the Party, a campaign of the Social
Democratic “Mountain” against the Social-Democratic “Gironde” (the expression belongs to the old
Iskra ), a campaign against Rabocheye Dyelo (Comrades Krichevsky, Akimov, Martynov, and others), against the
Jewish Bund, against the organisations in Russia that eagerly
espoused this trend (notably the St. Petersburg so-called Workers’ Organisation and the
Voronezh Committee).

Itbecame more and more obvious that the purely ideological
bond between the committees was not enough. The need to create a
really united party, that is, to effect what was only foreshadowed in 1898, asserted itself more and more
insistently. Finally, at the end of 1902 an Organising Committee
was formed to convene the Second Party Congress. This
Organising Committee, which was largely set up by the
Iskra organisation in Russia, also included a representative of the Jewish Bund. In the autumn of 1903 the
Second Congress was at last held; it ended, on the one hand, in
the Party’s formal unification, and on the other, in a split
into “majority” and “minority”. That division did not exist before the Congress. Only a detailed
analysis of the struggle at the Congress can explain this
division. Unfortunately, the sup porters of the minority
(including Comrade Luxemburg) shy away fearfully from any such
analysis.

Inmy book, presented to the German reader by Comrade Luxemburg in
such a singular manner, I devote over a hundred pages to a close
study of the Congress minutes (which make up a volume of some 400
pages). This analysis caused me to divide the delegates, or rather
votes (we had delegates with one vote and with two), into four main
groups:
1) majority Iskra -ists (adherents of the trend of the old
Iskra ) —twenty-four votes;
2) minority
Iskra-ists—nine votes;
3) “Centre” (also referred
to ironically as the “Marsh”)—ten votes; and, lastly,
4) anti-Iskra-ists—eight votes, making fifty-one votes in
all. I analyse the part played by these groups in all the
voting at the Congress, and prove that on all issues (of programme,
of tactics, and of organisation) the Congress was an arena of
struggle between the Iskra -ists and the anti-Iskra-ists,
with the “Marsh” making various zigzags. Anyone even slightly familiar with our Party’s history is bound to see that it
could not have been other wise. But all supporters of the minority
(including Rosa Luxemburg) modestly close their eyes to this
struggle. Why? Because this struggle makes manifest the utter
falsity of the minority’s present political position. Throughout
the struggle at the Party Congress, on dozens of questions, in
dozens of votes, the Iskra -ists fought the anti-Iskra-ists and the “Marsh”, which sided the more definitely
with the anti-Iskra-ists, the more concrete the matter at issue,
the more positively it affected the fundamentals of Social-
Democratic activity, the more tangibly it involved putting into
practice the old Iskra’s long-standing plans. The ant i-Iskra -ists (particularly Comrade Akimov and the
St. Petersburg Workers’ Organisation delegate, Comrade
Brouck re, who always agreed with him, and nearly always Comrade
Martynov and the five delegates of the Jewish Bund) were against
recognising the trend of the old Iskra. They defended the old separate organisations and voted against their
subordination to the Party, their fusion into the Party (the
Organising Committee incident, the dissolution of the Yuzhny Rabochy group—the leading group of the
“Marsh”, and so on). They fought against centralistic Rules of Organisation (14th sitting of the
Congress) and accused all the Iskra -ists at that time of wanting to introduce “organised
distrust”, “emergency laws”, and other such horrors. All the Iskra -ists, without
exception, laughed at it then; it is remarkable that Comrade
Rosa Luxemburg should now take these bogeys seriously. On the
great majority of questions the Iskra -ists carried the
day; they predominated at the Congress, as is clear from the
figures given above. But during the second half of the Congress,
when less fundamental issues were being decided, the anti-Iskra-ists had the better of it—some of the
Iskra -ists voted with them. That was the case, for example, with regard to proclaiming equality to all languages
in our programme; on this point the anti-Iskra-ists nearly
succeeded in defeating the Programme Committee and getting their
formulation carried. It was also the case over Paragraph I of
the Rules, when the anti Iskra -ists and the “Marsh” put through Martov’s formulation. According
to this formulation, Party members are not only those who belong
to Party organisations (the formulation defended by Plekhanov
and myself), but also all persons working under the control of
Party

organisations. [4]

Thesame thing happened in the elections to the Central
Committee and the editorial board of the Central Organ. The
compact majority consisted of 24 Iskra -ists, and they put through the long since planned reconstitution of the
editorial board; of the six former editors, three were elected. The minority consisted of nine Iskra -ists, ten
members of the “Centre”, and one anti-Iskra-ist (the other seven anti Iskra -ists, representing the Jewish
Bund and Rabocheye Dyelo , had withdrawn from the
Congress by then). This minority was so displeased with the
elections that it decided to take no part in the rest of the
elections. Comrade Kautsky was quite right when he said that the
reconstitution of the editorial board was the main cause of the
struggle that followed. But his view that I (sic! )
“expelled” three comrades from the editorial board can only be attributed to his being totally uninformed about our
Congress. In the first place, non-election is far from the same
thing as expulsion, and I certainly had no power at the Congress
to expel anyone; and secondly, Comrade Kautsky seems to have no
inkling that the fact of a coalition between the anti-Iskra-ists,the “Centre”, and a small section of
the Iskra adherents had political implications too and could not fail to influence the outcome of the elections. Anyone
who does not wilfully close his eyes to what happened at our
Congress is bound to see that our new division into minority and
majority is only a variant of the old division into a proletarian-revolutionary and an intellectual-opportunist wing
of our Party. That is a fact, and there is no explaining or
laughing it away.

Unfortunately,after the Congress the principles involved in this
division were obscured by squabbling over co-optation: the minority
would not work under the control of the central institutions unless
the three ex-editors were again co-opted. This fight went on for two
months. The weapons used were boycott and disruption of the
Party. Twelve committees (out of the fourteen that spoke out on the
subject) severely condemned these methods of struggle. The minority
would not even accept the proposal, made by Plekhanov and myself, that they should set forth their point
of view in Iskra. At the Congress of the League Abroad the thing was carried to the length of showering the members of
the central bodies with personal insults and abuse (autocrats,
bureaucrats, gendarmes, liars, etc., etc.). They were accused of
suppressing individual initiative and wanting to introduce
slavish submission, blind obedience, and so on. Plekhanov’s
attempts to characterise these minority methods of struggle as
anarchistic did not avail. After this Congress Plekhanov came
out with his epoch-making article against me, “What Should
Not Be Done” (in No. 52 of Iskra). In this article he said that fighting revisionism did not necessarily
mean fighting the revisionists; and it was clear to all that he
was referring to our minority. He further said that one should
not always fight the anarchistic individualism so deeply
ingrained in the Russian revolutionary, that at times some
concessions were a better way to subdue it and avoid a split. I
resigned from the editorial board as I could not share this
view, and the minority editors were co-opted. Then followed a
fight for co-optation to the Central Committee. My offer to
conclude peace on the basis of the minority keeping the Central
Organ and the majority the Central Committee was rejected. The
fight went on, they were fighting “on principle” against bureaucracy, ultra-centralism, formalism, Jacobinism,
Schweitzerism (I was dubbed a Russian Schweitzer), and other
such bogeys. I ridiculed all these accusations in my book and
pointed out that they were either just a matter of squabbling
about co-optation, or (if they were to be recognised, conditionally, as involving “principles”) nothing but
opportunist, Girondist phrases. The present minority are only
repeating what Comrade Akimov and other acknowledged opportunists said at our Congress against the centralism of all
the adherents of the old Iskra .

Thecommittees in Russia were outraged at the conversion of the
Central Organ into the organ of a private circle, an organ of
co-optation squabbling and Party scandal. A number of resolutions expressing the severest censure vere passed. Only
the so-called St. Petersburg Workers’ Organisation already
mentioned and the Voronezh Committee (both of them supporters of
Comrade Akimov’s trend)

pronounced their satisfaction in principle at the trend of
the new Iskra. Demands to have the Third Party Congress
summoned became ever more numerous.

Thereader who takes the trouble to make a first-hand study of
the struggle in our Party will readily see that, concretely and
practically, Comrade Rosa Luxemburg’s talk about “ultra-centralism”, about the need for
centralisation to be gradual, and the like, is a mockery of our
Congress, while abstractly and theoretically (if one can speak
here of theory at all) it is nothing but a vulgarisation of
Marxism, a perversion of true Marxian dialectics, etc.

Thelatest phase in our Party struggle is marked by the fact
that the majority members have in part been ousted from the
Central Committee, in part rendered useless, reduced to
nonentities. (This happened owing to changes in the Central
Committee’s composition, [7] etc.) The Party Council (which after the co-optation of the old editors like wise fell
into the minority’s hands) and the present Central Committee
have condemned all agitation for ummoning the Third Congress
and are taking the path of personal deals and negotiations with
some members of the minority. Organisations which dared to
commit such a crime as to agitate for a congress—as for
instance a certain agent body of the Central
Committee—have been dissolved. [8] A campaign against the summoning of the Third Congress has been pro claimed
by the Party Council and the new Central Committee all along the
line. The majority have replied with the slogan “Down with
Bonapartism !" (that is the title of a pamphlet by Comrade

Galyorka, [9] who speaks for the majority). More and more resolutions are being passed declaring
that Party institutions which fight against a congress are
anti-Party and Bonapartist. How hypocritical was all the
minority’s talk against ultra-centralism and in favour of
autonomy is obvious from the fact that a new majority publishing
house started by myself and another comrade (which issued the
above-named pamphlet by Comrade Galyorka and some others) has
been declared outside the

Party. [10]

This new publishing house affords the majority their only opportunity of
propagating their views, for the columns of Iskra are as good as closed to them. Yet—or rather just because of
it—the Party Council has made the above ruling, on the purely formal grounds that our publishing house has not been authorised by
any Party organisation.

Itneed hardly be said how greatly positive work has been neglected,
how greatly the prestige of Social-Democracy has suffered, how greatly
the whole Party is demoralised by this nullification of all the
decisions, all the elections made by the Second Congress, and this
fight which Party institutions accountable to the Party are waging
against the convening of the Third Congress.

---
Notes:
[1]
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back—pp. 203-425 of this volume.— Ed .

[2]
Cf. the Russian pamphlet Our Misunderstandings , the article"Rosa Luxemburg vs. Karl
Marx”.— Lenin

[3]
See p. 273 of this volume.— Ed .

[4]
Comrade Kautsky has sided with Martov’s formulation, and the
argument he pleads is expediency. In the first place, at our Party
Congress this point was not discussed from the standpoint of
expediency, but of principle. That was the way the question was
put by
Axel rod. Secondly, Comrade Kautsky is mistaken if he thinks that
under

the Russian police regime there is such a big difference between
belonging to a Party organisation and simply working under its
control. Thirdly, it is particularly misleading to compare the
position in Russia today to that in Germany under the Anti-Socialist

Law. [11]
— Lenin

[5]
This article, written in reply to Rosa Luxemburg’s article “Organ
isational Issues in the Russian Social-Democratic Movement”, was sent
to Kautsky for publication in the German Social Democratic journal Neue Zeit , but Kautsky would not print it.

[6]
Rabochaya Gazeta ( Workers’ Gazette ) was an illegal paper published
in 1897 by the Kiev group of Social-Democrats. Two issues appeared: No. 1 in August and No. 2 in December (dated November). The First
Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. adopted Rabochaya Gazeta as the official
organ of the Party, but the paper had to cease publication as a result of a
police raid on the printing press and the arrest of the Central
Committee. Concerning attempts to resume publication in 1899, see present
edition, Vol. 4, pp. 207-09.

[11]
The Anti-Socialist Law in Germany was promulgated in 1878. It
suppressed all organisations of the Social-Democratic Party, mass
working-class organisations, and the labour press; socialist literature was
confiscated, and many Social-Democrats were de ported. The law was annulled
in 1890 under pressure of the mass working-class movement.

[7]
The members elected to the Central Committee at the Second Party Congress
were Lengnik, Krzhizhanovsky, and Noskov. In October (New Style) 1903,
Zemlyachka, Krasin, Essen, and Gusarov were co-opted; in November, Lenin and
Galperin were coopted. In July- September 1904 further changes took place in
the Central Commit tee’s composition: Lengnik and Essen—supporters of
Lenin—were arrested; the conciliators Krzhizhanovsky and Gusarov
resigned; over Lenin’s protests, the conciliators Krasin, Noskov, and Galpe
rin unlawfully ousted the majority adherent Zemlyachka and co opted three
conciliators: Lyubimov, Karpov, and Dubrovinoky. As a result of these
changes, the majority oft he Central Committee now consisted of
conciliators.

[8]
Lenin is referring to the Central Committee’s decision to dissolve its
Southern Bureau, which had been agitating for the convening
of the Third Party Congress.

[9]
Galyorka—pseudonym of the Bolshevik M. S. Olminsky (Alexandrov).

[10]
This refers to the Bonch-Bruyevich and Lenin Publishing House of Social-Democratic Party
Literature, started by the Bolsheviks after the Menshevik editors of
Iskra closed the columns of the paper to them and refused to print
statements by Party oi anisations and members upholdimog the Second Party
Congress decisions and demanding the convening of the Third Congress. It
issued a number of pamphlets directed against the Mensheviks and
conciliators: Lenin, The Zemstvo Campaign and “Iskra’s” Plan; Galyorka, Down with Bonapartism!; Orlovsky, The Council Against the Party , and others.