Antonio Gramsci’s critical evaluation of Rosa Luxemburg, specifically her theory of the mass strike, found in his Prison Notebooks is an important element in his discussion of hegemony and revolutionary political strategy. For Gramsci, the power of the ruling class in any social formation was not based simply on its control of the means of production or the coercive power of the state, but on that class’s ability to construct a cultural ‘common sense’ through which it can exercise intellectual and moral leadership; this applies just as much to the proletariat coming to power through a socialist revolution as it does to the bourgeoisie. It is in this context that Gramsci made reference to Rosa Luxemburg and her theory of the mass strike. For Gramsci, such a strategy was an example of a ‘war of maneuver’ (that is, a direct assault against capital and the state), a revolutionary strategy that was no longer relevant in the advanced capitalist social formations; instead, he argued, a more protracted hegemonic struggle — a ‘war of position’ — was necessary. In making this distinction, however, Gramsci articulated an understanding of the mass strike considerably different than the one offered by Luxemburg herself. Far from identifying the mass strike with an underdeveloped capitalism, she saw it as especially relevant for revolutionary strategy in the capitalist core. The purpose of this paper is to present a critical analysis of Gramsci’s reading of Luxemburg and to argue that her theory of the mass strike, far from being a model of the war of maneuver, is consistent with Gramsci’s analysis of the war of position.

Luxemburg on the Mass Strike

Rosa Luxemburg’s argument that the mass strike lay at the center of revolutionary strategy was a major element in her critique of the leadership of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). She rejected Eduard Bernstein’s argument that ‘the movement is everything, the final goal nothing.’ Capitalism will not grow into socialism, as Bernstein argued, through the transformation of capitalist property effected by trade unions and cooperatives, but instead must be won through the revolutionary activity of the proletariat itself. In this regard, Luxemburg argued, the transition from capitalism to socialism will be unlike that from feudalism to capitalism:

all previous class struggles can be traced to the economic fact that every new ascendant class also created a new form of property on which it finally based its class dominance…. Now I ask: can this model be applied to our situation? No. Precisely those people who prattle on about the economic power of the proletariat overlook the huge difference between our struggle and all previous class struggles. The assertion that the proletariat, in contrast to all previous classes, leads a class struggle not in order to institute the rule of one class, but to do away with the rule of any class, is no empty phrase. It has its basis in the fact that the proletariat creates no new form of property, but only extends the form of property created by the capitalist economy by turning it over to the possession of society. Thus, it is an illusion to believe that the proletariat could create economic power for itself within current bourgeois society; it can only take political power and then replace capitalist forms of property” (Luxemburg [1899] 1971a: 45—46).

Bernstein’s strategy, she argued, represented the abandonment of socialism, as it is the goal of winning political power by the proletariat “which constitutes the spirit and the content of our socialist struggle, which turns it into a class struggle” (Luxemburg [1898] 1971b: 38—39) and which “constitutes the only decisive factor distinguishing the social democratic movement from bourgeois democracy and from bourgeois radicalism” (Luxemburg [1900] 1970b: 36). In making this critique of Bernstein, Luxemburg was not suggesting that struggles to improve wages and working conditions or to democratize the state are insignificant; she insisted, for example, on the indispensability of democracy for the development of proletarian revolution. These struggles, however, are simply means of reforming capitalism if they are not embedded in a broader strategy for the seizure of political power.

Once revolution is reaffirmed as the goal of the workers’ movement, it follows for Luxemburg that “the mass strike is inseparable from the revolution” (Luxemburg [1906] 1970a: 185). Although it is the Russian Revolution of 1905 that established, for Luxemburg, the significance of the mass strike for revolutionary strategy, she was careful to point out that the first mass strikes began not in what Gramsci refers to as ‘the East’ but in ‘the West,’ beginning first in Belgium in the 1890s and then extending to Austria, France, Spain, Sweden, Holland, Italy and the United States through 1910. Mass strikes, arising unexpectedly and without prior organization, were for Luxemburg a spontaneous expression of the latent class consciousness of the proletariat. As such, they called into question, if only in a preliminary manner, the capitalist social formation in a way that smaller-scale strikes seeking specific demands did not and could not.

The mass strike, according to Luxemburg, emerged in the context of a specific stage of capitalist development, one characterized by large-scale capitalist development, bourgeois parliamentarism, and imperialism; it was for this reason that she saw the mass strike as being of particular relevance for revolutionary strategy in Germany. As industrial capitalist development proceeded apace in Germany in the late nineteenth century, it simultaneously created a larger and increasingly militant proletariat capable of the sustained political and economic struggles which made the defeat of capitalism possible. At the same time, Luxemburg argued that “[b]ourgeois parliamentarism has…completed the cycle of its historical development and has arrived at the point of self-negation” (Luxemburg [1904] 1974b: 110). While parliamentary struggle is still “one of the most powerful and indispensable means of carrying on the class struggle” (Luxemburg [1904] 1974b: 110), Luxemburg had a keen awareness of the structural forces leading to ‘parliamentary cretinism’ within the SPD. In that light, she argued that the

...foundations of parliamentarism are better and more securely protected in proportion as our tactics are tailored not to parliament alone, but also to the direct action of the proletarian masses…. [T]he real power of Social Democracy by no means rests on the influence of its deputies in the Reichstag, but that it lies outside, in the people themselves, ‘in the streets’” (Luxemburg [1904] 1974b: 114)

Finally, the mass strike is increasingly relevant for the workers’ movement due to the emergence of imperialism:

The whole development, the whole tendency of imperialism in the last decade leads the international working class to see more clearly and more tangibly that only the personal stepping forward of the broadest masses, their personal political action, mass demonstrations, and mass strikes which must sooner or later open into a period of revolutionary struggles for the power in the state, can give the correct answer of the proletariat to the immense oppression of imperialistic policy (Luxemburg [1913] 1971c: 320).

It was in the context of this ‘historical inevitability’ that the spontaneous action of the proletariat reflected in mass strikes must be understood.

While the mass strike became a historical possibility only in the context of what came to be known as the monopoly stage of capitalism, it was the organic development of the mass strike during the Russian Revolution of 1905 that highlighted for Luxemburg the significance of the mass strike for contemporary revolutionary struggles. The mass strike represents in its fullest form the necessity for revolution to be the self-emancipation of the proletariat. She referred to the mass strike as “the method of motion of the proletarian mass, the phenomenal form of the proletarian struggle in the revolution” (Luxemburg [1906] 1970a: 182). Rather than being an event that proclaims the revolution, it emerges out of the revolution:

It is absurd to think of the mass strike as one act, one isolated action. The mass strike is rather the indication, the rallying idea, of a whole period of the class struggle lasting for years, perhaps for decades (Luxemburg [1906] 1970a: 182)

It is a protracted, organic process in which economic struggles and political struggles stimulate and reinforce each other:

Every new onset and every fresh victory of the political struggle is transformed into a powerful impetus for the economic struggle, extending at the same time its external possibilities and intensifying the inner urge of the workers to better their position and their desire to struggle. After every foaming wave of political action a fructifying deposit remains behind from which a thousand stalks of economic struggle shoot forth. And conversely. The workers’ condition of ceaseless economic struggle with the capitalists keeps their fighting energy alive in every political interval; it forms, so to speak, the permanent fresh reservoir of the strength of the proletarian classes, from which the political fight ever renews its strength, and at the same time leads the indefatigable economic sappers of the proletariat at all times, now here and now there, to isolated sharp conflicts, out of which public conflicts on a large scale unexpectedly explode (Luxemburg [1906] 1970a: 185).

These struggles, however, are not simply the means by which the proletariat challenges and, ultimately, overthrows the bourgeoisie. Luxemburg argued that “the whole educational effect of the rapid capitalist development and of social democratic influences” (Luxemburg [1906] 1970a: 198) is revealed in revolution. The class consciousness of the proletariat is at first only

...theoretical and latent…, [but] when the masses themselves appear upon the political battlefield this class consciousness becomes practical and active. A year of revolution has therefore given the Russian proletariat that ‘training’ which thirty years of parliamentary and trade-union struggle cannot artificially give to the German proletariat (Luxemburg [1906] 1970a: 199)

The principle that it is only through these struggles that the proletariat learns how to become the ruling class of a new mode of production was at the center of Luxemburg’s political theory and practice until the very end of her life; in the midst of the Spartacist uprising that would ultimately lead to her death, she reaffirmed that “[t]he masses must learn how to use power by using power” (Luxemburg [1918] 1971d: 406). It was for this reason that she was so critical of the argument, most notably articulated by Bernstein, against ‘premature’ attempts by the working class to seize power. While rejecting adventurist attempts to launch a mass strike absent “a definite degree of maturity of economic and political relations” (Luxemburg [1900] 1970b: 82), she also rejected the need for a guarantee of certain victory before the SPD could commit to a revolutionary course:

...these ‘premature’ attacks of the proletariat constitute a factor and indeed a very important factor, creating the political conditions of the final victory. In the course of the political crisis accompanying its seizure of power, in the course of the long and stubborn struggles, the proletariat will acquire the degree of political maturity permitting it to obtain in time a definitive victory of the revolution. Thus these ‘premature’ attacks of the proletariat against the state power are in themselves important historic factors helping to provoke and determine the point of the definite victory. Considered from this viewpoint, the idea of a ‘premature’ conquest of political power by the laboring class appears to be a polemic absurdity derived from a mechanical conception of the development of society, and positing for the victory of the class struggle a point fixed outside and independent of the class struggle (Luxemburg [1900] 1970b: 82—83).

It was a fundamental strategic error to wait until the organized workers’ movement, both in the trade unions and in the SPD, was ‘strong enough’ to launch the revolutionary struggle: “the organization does not supply the troops of the struggle, but the struggle, in an ever growing degree, supplies recruits for the organization” (Luxemburg [1906] 1970a: 198). The proletariat should, to the extent possible, not accept the spatial and temporal terms of struggle dictated by the bourgeoisie but rather strive to define those terms to its own maximum advantage — but even if this is successful it by no means guarantees success. Waiting for such guarantees is to abandon the very process through which the proletariat develops it revolutionary power, both in terms of its challenge to the bourgeoisie and in terms of preparing for its role as the first truly democratic ruling class. Rather than wait for a revolutionary situation to arise as if by magic, it is the party’s responsibility to “hasten the development of things and endeavor to accelerate events” (Luxemburg [1906] 1970a: 200). Luxemburg’s critique of the SPD was an assertion of the need for a fighting party organized in such a way as to maximize action from below rather than from above.

Bernstein’s concern about the ‘premature’ launching of revolutionary struggle was shared by Karl Kautsky, who made explicit the connection between this concern and the critique of the mass strike. Kautsky argued that while the mass strike “was very well suited to the conditions of the Russian Revolution” (Kautsky [1910] 1983: 60), it was less so to those of Germany. As a result, the mass strike was at best a matter of tactics than one of strategy. This is reflected in the distinction Kautsky made between the “strategy of overthrow” and the “strategy of attrition” (Kautsky [1910] 1983: 54). Kautsky defined the former as a strategy of “bold attack with a few decisive blows” (Kautsky 1983: 55) and argued, using Engels’ foreword to Marx’s Class Struggles in France (Marx [1895] 1964) as his foundation, that developments in military organization and weaponry had rendered this strategy moot. In these new conditions, a more gradual strategy was required to build the forces of the proletariat and to sufficiently weaken those of the bourgeoisie. Kautsky defined a process of “growing into socialism” (Kautsky [1909] 1996: 17) as consisting of two contradictory forces: 1) the growing concentration of capital, which provides the material foundation on which socialism can emerge, and 2) the growing strength, both in terms of numbers and organization, of the proletariat. In contrast to the evolutionary model of the transition to socialism articulated by Bernstein, Kautsky saw this process very differently; for him,

... the growing into socialism means growing into great struggles that will convulse the entire political system, that must continually become more powerful and can end only with the defeat and expropriation of the capitalist class (Kautsky [1909] 1996: 18).

The mass strike as an offensive weapon becomes relevant for Kautsky only at the point at which the decisive revolutionary struggle to overthrow the bourgeoisie begins. Until then, the mass strike can only be a defensive weapon. This more tactical understanding of the mass strike was reflected in the SPD’s approval, at its 1905 Congress, of the use of the mass strike in certain limited circumstances, primarily as a means to protect universal suffrage against a renewed challenge by the state. Even this defensive understanding of the mass strike, though, was too much for the SPD and trade union leadership. In February 1906 they reached a secret agreement ensuring that the resolution would have no concrete impact; it would, in Paul Frölich’s words, “remain a dead letter” (Frölich [1939] 1972: 125).

Luxemburg presented a stinging rebuke to the SPD’s interpretation of the mass strike. She rejected Kautsky’s fundamental premise that the mass strike was an appropriate strategy in relatively ‘backward’ Russia but not in the more ‘advanced’ Germany:

It was not economic retardation, but precisely the high development of capitalism, modern industry, and commerce in Russia which made that grandiose mass strike action possible, and which caused it. It was just because the urban industrial proletariat was already so numerous, concentrated in the great centers, and so strongly moved by class consciousness, just because the genuine modern capitalist contradiction had progressed so far, that the struggle for political freedom could be decisively led by this proletariat alone. But because of this it could be no purely constitutional struggle after the liberal formula, but a genuine modern class struggle in all its breadth and depth, fighting for the economic as well as the political interests of the workers – against capital as well as Tsarism, for the eight-hour day as well as a democratic constitution. And only because capitalist industry and the modern means of commerce bound to it had become a condition of existence for the state’s economic life, could the mass strikes of the proletariat in Russia realize such a staggering, decisive effect: that the revolution celebrated its victories with them, and with them went down in defeat and grew silent (Luxemburg [1910] 1980: 33).

While there were significant differences in terms of capitalist development between Russia and Germany, they were not so great as to negate the significance of the mass strike for revolutionary strategy in Germany. If anything, the more advanced capitalist the level of capitalist development (see above), the more relevant is the mass strike for revolutionary strategy.

In addition, she argued that the mass strike is not “a purely technical means of struggle…—a kind of pocket-knife which can be kept in the pocket clasped ‘ready for any emergency,’ and according to the decision, can be unclasped and used” (Luxemburg [1906] 1970a: 159). Mass strikes “cannot be made on command” (Luxemburg [1906] 1974a: 181), but “can only take place when the historical preconditions for them are at hand” (Luxemburg [1906] 1974a: 181). It would be one thing if the SPD and the trade unions were building and preparing their forces with an explicit eye toward the moment when the conditions exist for this final, decisive struggle, but this is precisely what the reformist leadership of the German workers’ movement was avoiding at all costs. “How can that great and ‘final,’ that apocalyptic mass strike,” Luxemburg wrote,

...in which the stoutest oaks crack, the earth bursts asunder and the graves open actually come to pass in Germany, if the mass of the proletariat has not previously been prepared, schooled, and aroused by the entire lengthy period of mass strikes, of economic or political mass struggles?... [How are workers] suddenly, with one leap, to be ready for a ‘final’ mass strike ‘to the death’ unless a preceding period of tempestuous mass struggles, demonstration strikes, partial mass strikes, giant economic struggles, etc., loosens them little by little from their paralysis, their slavish obedience [using Kautsky’s words], their fragmentation, and incorporates them among the followers of Social Democracy? (Luxemburg [1910] 1980: 46)

It is not the party’s responsibility to call for a mass strike at the desired moment, nor would such a call be successful in the context of a party that failed to develop or actively undermined extra-parliamentary struggle; a narrowly defined focus on making technical preparations for a mass strike when called for in the future would be to “begin at the wrong end” (Luxemburg [1913] 1974a: 185).

In contrast to criticisms of Luxemburg as a spontaneist, it is clear that the party plays an essential role in the mass strike, that of analyzing the objective possibilities for revolution provided by the existing social formation and developing the subjective forces through which the mass strike will emerge organically from below. She recognized the need for a party organized on principles of centralism, not a bureaucratic, “mechanical transposition of the organizational principles of Blanquisim into the mass movement of the socialist working class” (Luxemburg [1904] 1970c: 118) but rather “[c]entralism in the socialist sense…, which becomes real in proportion to the development and political training acquired by the working masses in the course of their struggle” (Luxemburg [1904] 1970c: 120).¹ The party is likely to face pressures, both internal and external, that carry the potential for increased bureaucratization; in such cases, “[t]he revolutionary movement itself must always be the corrective” (Kitschelt and Wiesnthal 1979: 157). The result is an affirmation of a dialectical understanding of the relationship between party and mass action (Bronner 1997; Geras 1976; Molyneux 1978) that mirrors her earlier assertion of the dialectic of reform and revolution.

Gramsci, Hegemony, and Revolutionary Strategy

Gramsci’s principal and essential contribution to Marxism was his concept of hegemony, which he developed between 1929 and 1935 in his Prison Notebooks. The foundation of Gramsci’s work was his critique of an economic determinism in which politics and culture (the ‘superstructure’) are seen as simply reflections of the economic ‘base.’ While Gramsci accepted as a given that what was “essential…[was] the decisive nucleus of economic activity” (Gramsci [1930—32] 1971: 161), he also argued that the superstructures have a historically specific relative autonomy from the economic base. Gramsci identified two major superstructural levels: political society and civil society. Political society refers to the coercive apparatus of state power which the ruling class uses to enforce its rule. Should the economic coercion arising from the proletariat’s lack of control over the means of production be insufficient to ensure its compliance with the needs of capital accumulation, the ruling class can make use of its command of the means of institutionalized violence (police, courts, military) to impose its domination. Civil society, in turn, refers to the network of voluntary social institutions through which consent for the existing mode of production is organized. By itself, the domination of subordinate classes by the ruling class is insufficient to ensure its position. The ruling class must also exercise intellectual and moral leadership, and this requires that it construct and reproduce a fusion of interests of both dominant and subordinate classes into a “national-popular collective will” (Gramsci [1930—32] 2007: 248), a “determinate system of moral life” (Gramsci [1930—32] 2007: 373) capable of reproducing the existing mode of production. In this process, the ruling class must take into account the interests and needs of the subordinate classes; it must make some sacrifices to the subordinate classes, but these are “sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind” (Gramsci [1930—32] 1996: 183) which are specific to particular social formations at particular periods of time and which do not call into question fundamental social relations. In addition to these economic concessions, the ruling class must also be prepared to make concessions to the popular-democratic struggles of the subordinate classes. Any ruling class must, according to Gramsci, be able to look beyond its immediate class interests if it is to become the leading or ‘hegemonic’ class.

The fact that these compromises are necessary in order to win the consent of subordinate classes to the power of the ruling class is evidence that this power is never absolute but rather relative. As a result, it is very likely that this class will experience historical periods in which its leadership is called into question by the subordinate classes. These are, for Gramsci, moments of hegemonic crisis. Such crises are not likely to be conjunctural disruptions relating to “the ensemble of the immediate and transitory peculiarities of the economic situation,” but rather are more likely to be organic - that is, referring to “the most fundamental and enduring characteristics of the situation itself” (Gramsci [1930—32] 2007: 105) - in nature. Such moments carry within them possibilities for a change in the balance of forces, a change so dramatic that the ruling class can no longer secure the consent of the subordinate classes:

If the ruling class has lost consensus, that is, if it no longer ‘leads’ but only ‘rules’ – it possesses sheer coercive power – this actually means that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, they no longer believe what they previously used to believe, etc. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum, morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass (Gramsci [1930] 1996: 32—33).

If there is another class that has the capability to generate a new national-popular collective will, this class will become the new leading, hegemonic class: “A class can, and must, ‘lead’ even before assuming power; when it is in power it becomes dominant, but it also continues to ‘lead’” (Gramsci [1929] 1992: 136—137). In other words, revolutionary strategy requires more than the seizure of state power; it requires the production and reproduction of a counter-hegemonic ‘national-popular collective will.’ It must take into account what Gramsci calls a “dual perspective” in which “force and consent, domination and hegemony, violence and civility” (Gramsci [1930—32] 2007: 284) are related dialectically.

For Gramsci, revolutionary strategy can take on two broad forms: a ‘war of maneuver’ directed against political society and a ‘war of position’ directed against civil society. The former is an insurrectionary model of revolution, a relatively brief yet intense assault against the state, while the latter is more akin to protracted siege warfare; the ‘war of maneuver’ is identified as a conjunctural struggle and the ‘the war of position’ an organic one. Gramsci argued that revolution within ‘the West’ (more specifically, the capitalist core, in contrast to the peripheral ‘East’) had by the late nineteenth—early twentieth centuries shifted from a war of maneuver to a war of position. The political strategy of war of maneuver was associated with “[t]he question of so-called permanent revolution, a political concept that emerged around 1848 as a scientific expression of Jacobinism” (Gramsci [1930—32] 2007: 267) and was most relevant in the context of a relatively rudimentary state apparatus and underdeveloped civil society as well as considerable autonomy for nationally-based capitals from the world market. After 1870, however, the emergence of ever larger and more complex state institutions, mass political parties and trade unions, and imperialism led to the increasing marginalization of the war of maneuver as a revolutionary strategy; the “events of 1917 [i.e., the October Revolution] were the last instance” of such the political war of maneuver, marking “a decisive shift in the art and science of politics” (Gramsci [1930—32] 2007: 163). If the “the commanding heights” (Gramsci [1930—32] 2007: 285) of power within contemporary capitalism lie more in civil society than political society, then revolutionary strategy in the capitalist core must of necessity take the form of a war of position. This did not mean that the war of maneuver was no longer of any significance for revolution in the capitalist core, only that it had been reduced to a tactical matter in contrast to the strategic nature of the war of position.

Gramsci’s dual perspective, in the form of the dialectic of spontaneity and leadership, is also relevant for understanding the organizational form through which the war of position is to be waged. While understanding revolution as the self-emancipation of the proletariat, Gramsci argued that revolutionary struggles cannot be based solely on the spontaneous activity of the masses. That spontaneous activity expresses an incredible energy, but an energy that likely lacks analytic coherence or systematic application: “The popular element,” Gramsci wrote, “‘feels’ but does not understand or know” (Gramsci [1930—32] 1996: 173). As a result, spontaneity “cannot be long lasting; neither can it have an organic character. In almost every case, it typifies a restoration and reorganization; it is not typical of the founding of new states or new national and social structures…. It is a ‘defensive’ rather than creative type of action” (Gramsci [1930—32] 2007: 247). Instead, there must be among the revolutionary forces some entity “that contains the partial collective wills with a propensity to become universal and total” (Gramsci [1930—32] 2007: 247). This formation, for Gramsci, was the ‘modern prince,’ or the party. This party must be characterized by an organic relationship between masses and leaders, for just as the masses ‘feel’ but do not understand “the intellectual element ‘knows’ but does not understand and, above all, does not feel” (Gramsci [1930—32] 1996: 173). Rather than a bureaucratic centralist party organized to reproduce passivity among the rank-and-file membership and limit initiative to those relative few who occupy leadership positions, Gramsci argued that the party must be organized in such a way that “impassioned sentiment becomes understanding and knowledge (not mechanically but in a living manner)” (Gramsci [1930—32] 1996: 173). In other words, the role of the party is to educate rank-and-file members to take initiative and responsibility, to become ‘leaders’ themselves, thereby eliminating the distinction between leaders and led.² “This unity of ‘spontaneity’ and ‘conscious leadership,’ or ‘discipline,’” Gramsci argued, is precisely the real political action of the subaltern classes, insofar as it is mass politics and not a mere adventure by groups that appeal to the masses” (Gramsci [1930] 1996: 51).

Gramsci on Luxemburg

In his pre—Prison Notebooks writing Gramsci displayed great respect for Rosa Luxemburg as a revolutionary. He made reference to her approvingly as one of the “theorists of the IIIrd International” (Gramsci [1920] 1977a: 257) and, along with Karl Liebknecht, “greater than the greatest saints of Christ” ([1920] 1977b: 332). As editor of the newspaper L’Ordine Nuovo, which advocated the creation of soviets in Italy similar to those that emerged during the Russian Revolution, he rejected the argument that the factory council movement which shook Italy in 1919—1920 was syndicalist, writing that

[t]he syndicalizing tendencies of L’Ordine Nuovo are…a myth: we simply made the mistake of believing that only the masses can achieve the communist revolution, and that neither a party secretary nor a president of the republic can achieve it by issuing decrees. Apparently this was also the opinion of Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg, and is Lenin’s opinion” (Gramsci [1920] 1977c: 351).

It is in this context that Gramsci’s references to Luxemburg and the mass strike in Notebook 7 of the Prison Notebooks, written during 1930—1931, must be understood. In the first, entitled “Structure and Superstructure,” Gramsci wrote the following:

Take note of Rosa’s little book³ that was translated by Alessandri in 1919—20; its theory is based on the historical experiences of 1905. (Besides, it appears that the events were not analyzed correctly. The ‘voluntary’ and organizational elements are ignored, even though they were much more widespread than Rosa was inclined to believe; because of her ‘economistic’ prejudice, she unconsciously ignored them.) This little book, in my view, constitutes the most significant theory of the war of maneuver applied to the study of history and to the art of politics. The immediate economic factor (crises, etc.) is seen as the field artillery employed in war to open a breach in the enemy’s defenses big enough to permit one’s troops to break through and gain a definitive strategic victory — or, at least, to achieve what is needed for a definitive victory. Naturally, in historical studies, the impact of the immediate economic factor is seen as much more complex than the impact of field artillery in a war of maneuver. The immediate economic factor was expected to have a double effect: (1) to open a breach in the enemy’s defenses, after throwing him into disarray and making him lose faith in himself, his forces, and his future; (2) to organize in a flash one’s own troops, to create cadres, or at least to place the existing cadres (formed, up to that point, by the general historical process) at lightning speed in positions from which they could direct the dispersed troops; to produce, in a flash, a concentration of ideology and of the ends to be achieved. It was a rigid form of economic determinism, made worse by the notion that effects of the immediate economic factor would unfold at lightning speed in time and space. It was thus historical mysticism through and through, the anticipation of some sort of dazzling miracle” (Gramsci [1930—32] 2007: 161—162).

Furthermore, he argued,

The superstructures of civil society resemble the trench system of modern warfare. Sometimes, it would appear that a ferocious artillery attack against enemy trenches had leveled everything, whereas in fact it had caused only superficial damage to the defenses of the adversary, so that when the assailants advanced they encountered a defensive front that was still effective. The same thing occurs in politics during great economic crises. A crisis does not enable the attacking troops to organize themselves at lightning speed in time and in space; much less does it infuse them with a fighting spirit. On the other side of the coin, the defenders are not demoralized, nor do they abandon their defensive positions, even in the midst of rubble; nor do they lose faith in their own strength or their own future (Gramsci [1930—32] 2007: 162—163).

Gramsci’s other major reference to Luxemburg’s theory of the mass strike comes in the note entitled “War of position and war of maneuver, or frontal war,’ in the context of his critique of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. Gramsci argued that

One should determine whether Bronstein’s [i.e., Trotsky’s] famous theory about the permanence of movement is not a political reflection of the theory of the war of maneuver…; whether it is not, in the final analysis, a reflection of the general-economic-cultural-social conditions of a country in which the structures of national life are embryonic and unsettled and cannot become ‘trench or fortress.’ In that case, one might say that Bronstein, while appearing to be ‘Western,’ was in fact a cosmopolitan, that is, superficially national and superficially Western or European. Ilyich [i.e., Lenin], on the other hand, was profoundly national and profoundly European…. In my view, Ilyich understood the need for a shift from the war of maneuver that had been applied victoriously in the East in 1917, to a war of position, which was the only viable possibility in the West…. This, I believe, is the meaning of the term ‘united front’…. Ilyich, however, never had time to develop his formula on a theoretical level, whereas the fundamental task was a national one; in other words, it required a reconnaissance of the terrain and an identification of the elements of trench and fortress represented by the components of civil society, etc. In the East, the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state tottered, a sturdy structure of civil society was immediately revealed. The state was just a forward trench; behind it stood a succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements” (Gramsci [1930—32] 2007: 168—169).

Gramsci concluded his critique of Trotsky by stating that the latter’s theory “can be compared to that of certain French syndicalists on the general strike and to Rosa’s theory in the little book translated by Alessandri” (Gramsci [1930—32] 2007: 169).

Luxemburg’s theory of the mass strike thus played an important part in Gramsci’s articulation of revolutionary strategy in the capitalist core by serving as a foil to the war of position. The question that remains to be addressed is the extent to which this contrast is a valid one.

A Critique of Gramsci’s Critique

In identifying Luxemburg’s theory of the mass strike as a form of economism, Gramsci became enmeshed in the Third International’s critique of ‘Luxemburgism’ that emerged following the failed 1923 uprising in Germany and the death of Lenin in 1924 (Haro 2008). The Third International saw the mass strike as a major deviation from Leninism, especially in terms of

(a) the unbolshevik treatment of the question of ‘spontaneity’ and ‘consciousness,’ of ‘organization’ and ‘the masses.’ Their false ideas on this question . . . prevented them from appraising correctly the role of the party in the revolution; [and] (b) underestimation of the technical factor in preparing insurrections was, and is in part today, an obstacle to the correct treatment of the question of ‘organizing’ the revolution” (Zinoviev [1925] 1959: 191).

Stalin made a similar argument (Stalin [1931] 1954) regarding Luxemburg, one which was reinforced by his association of her with the concept of permanent revolution and, in turn, the bogeyman of ‘Trotskyism.’ If we take Gramsci’s argument that Trotsky’s work was ‘a political reflection of the theory of the war of maneuver’ at face value, he was clearly incorrect; Trotsky’s strong support of a united front strategy for the Third International is proof that such an argument must be rejected (Rosengarten 1985). If we, however, take Gramsci’s critical references to Trotsky as in fact an implicit challenge to the Third International under Stalin (Coutinho 2012; Saccarelli 2008; Spriano 1979), in particular its ‘third period’ position that capitalism was on the brink of collapse and that an immediate assault on capitalism was all that was needed to bring it crashing down, then Gramsci’s critique of Luxemburg should perhaps be seen in a similar manner. In other words, Gramsci’s comments on the mass strike might be seen as a kind of shorthand for his critique of Stalin and the Third International rather than an analysis of Luxemburg’s theory of the mass strike per se (Coutinho 2012).

In this context, it is important to note that Gramsci’s references to Luxemburg’s mass strike have more in common with Kautsky’s criticism of Luxemburg than with Luxemburg herself; Perry Anderson argues that while Gramsci was unaware of this connection, the formal and substantive similarities are “striking” (Anderson 1976: 62). Gramsci’s distinction between ‘West’ and ‘East’ and his argument that while the war of maneuver is still relevant in the ‘East,’ with its less fully developed civil society, it is no longer so in the ‘West’ recalls Kautsky’s argument that the strategy of overthrow was more appropriate for ‘backward’ Russia than ‘advanced’ Germany. The same conditions which, according to Luxemburg, open up the possibility of the mass strike are in fact those that, for Gramsci, make it of decreasing relevance for revolutionary strategy in the capitalist core. In addition, Gramsci’s distinction between the organic and the conjunctural and his association of the former with the war of position and the latter with the war of maneuver recalls Kautsky’s relegation of the mass strike to the realm of tactics, as an event that is subsumed within the more protracted and organic process of the strategy of attrition. As we have seen, Luxemburg rejected the restriction of the mass strike to a matter of tactics and instead understood it in strategic terms. Indeed, it is Kautsky’s version of the mass strike that fits better as an expression of the war of maneuver — and thus as a contrast to Gramsci’s war of position — than does that of Luxemburg. In the context of the attack against ‘Luxemburgism’ by the Third International it may have made sense for Gramsci to present his critique in this roundabout way, for in using Kautsky’s interpretation of the mass strike as his reference point Gramsci was in fact criticizing Third International ‘third period’ policies. In doing so, however, Gramsci mistakenly — if unintentionally — placed some distance between his interpretation of Marxism and one (i.e., Luxemburg’s) that was in fact closer to his than was Kautsky’s.

This is unfortunate, as there is considerable evidence to suggest that while Gramsci and Luxemburg each use their own language to express their understanding of revolutionary strategy, there is a considerable degree of convergence between the two. The argument that Luxemburg is guilty of economism is not an accurate representation of Luxemburg’s theory of the mass strike in that it ignores the unity of political and economic struggles which defined the mass strike for her. Indeed, since the logic of capital accumulation penetrates the entire breadth and depth of a capitalist social formation ([1913] 2015), Luxemburg’s mass strike necessarily encompasses a wide range of struggles over production and social reproduction, struggles which are simultaneously economic, political, and cultural. Yes, the mass strike may have political-economic goals, but it is simultaneously a challenge to the hegemony of the bourgeoisie. As such, the proletariat must win over the peasantry and progressive elements of the petty bourgeoisie in order for the mass strike to be successful. In contrast to the existing ‘national-popular collective will,’ one that legitimizes and facilitates exploitation and oppression, subordinate classes develop through the mass strike the seeds of a new, counter-hegemonic ‘national-popular collective will.’ They take control of their workplaces, create their own, non-commodified forms of social provision, build their own organizations for self-defense, and so on.⁴ In doing so, the subordinate classes contribute to the development, even if in rudimentary form, a ‘national-popular collective will’ based on solidarity and liberation. They also express forms of creativity and leadership which capitalism has marginalized or denied to them, traits which will be essential in a world in which they, and not the bourgeoisie, serve as the ruling class. Given the totalizing nature of Luxemburg’s mass strike, it is more appropriate to think of the mass strike as the culmination of a long, protracted struggle rather than a conjunctural ‘event’ —– in other words, as a form of Gramsci’s war of position rather than a war of maneuver.

This convergence of Gramsci and Luxemburg is also evident in their understanding of the party and its relation to mass action. Both Gramsci and Luxemburg argued that revolution was the self-emancipation of the proletariat and that new revolutionary strategies were necessary in the contemporary, monopoly stage of capitalism. They both experienced the existing socialist political parties — the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) in Italy, the SPD in Germany — as an obstacle to rather than a means of facilitating proletarian self-emancipation. The failure of the PSI to support the workers’ soviets during the bienno rosso of 1919—1920 confirmed for Gramsci the limits of spontaneity absent the leadership of a revolutionary political party and led him to break with the PSI and become one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party (Williams 1975). For her part, Luxemburg struggled within the SPD, despite its obvious weaknesses, up until her death to combat revisionism (Frölich [1939] 1972); her role in the development of the German Communist Party (KPD) was evidence of her recognition that spontaneity had its limits and that a new party form was necessary if proletarian revolution was the goal. If Gramsci emphasized the role of the party rather than mass action in his later work (i.e., in the Prison Notebooks), this is not because he abandoned his earlier concern for how soviets were an expression of proletarian self-emancipation, but rather that with the rise of fascism the survival of the party, not the construction of revolutionary soviets, was the order of the day. The mass strike was, on the other hand, on the agenda for Luxemburg, starting with the Russian Revolution in 1905 and continuing through the First World War as the possibilities for revolution in Russia and Germany became more concrete. In the end, both Gramsci and Luxemburg defined revolution as an organic, protracted struggle expressing the dialectic of party and mass action.

It is true that Luxemburg often spoke of the mass strike as a matter of historical inevitability, a point which seems to be in conflict with Gramsci’s anti—determinist Marxism:

If…the Russian Revolution teaches us anything, it teaches above all that the mass strike is not artificially ‘made,’ not ‘decided’ at random, not ‘propagated,’ but that it is a historical phenomenon which, at a given moment, results from social conditions with historical inevitability. It is not, therefore, by abstract speculations on the possibility or impossibility, the utility or the injuriousness of the mass strike, but only by an examination of those factors and social conditions out of which the mass strike grows in the present phase of the class struggle – in other words, it is not by subjective criticism of the mass strike from the standpoint of what is desirable, but only by objective investigation of the sources of the mass strike from the standpoint of what is historically inevitable, that the problem can be grasped or even discussed (Luxemburg [1906] 1970a: 161).

The fact that Luxemburg referred to ‘historical inevitability’ [my emphasis] is a significant qualification. The mass strike is ‘inevitable’ not in some abstract sense, but in the historically specific sense that it emerges out of a specific historical stage of capitalism. In other words, the objective conditions which make the mass strike possible are ‘inevitable’ in the monopoly stage of capitalism. This did not negate the significance of revolutionary agency, but rather made it more important: “History will do its work. See that you too do your work” (Luxemburg [1913] 1974a: 185). Read this way, it is clear that Luxemburg embraces the indeterminacy of history (Basso 1975; Nixon 2018) in a way similar to Gramsci; there seems to be little distance between the two in terms of their understanding of the dialectic of structure and revolutionary agency.

Conclusion

The intensification of class antagonisms associated with the forty year-long neoliberal project has made painfully immediate the choice between socialism or barbarism, and with the collapse of both social democracy and Soviet Marxism Luxemburg’s dialectic of reform and revolution and her vision of a socialism from below offer a meaningful and necessary path to social transformation that is ignored at our peril. Her work reminds us of the continued relevance of a political-economic analysis of capitalism and revolutionary strategy. Despite the enormous contributions made by Rosa Luxemburg to Marxist theory and practice, however, her work appears to be relatively marginalized in contemporary discussions of left political strategy compared to that of Gramsci.

There is no doubt that Gramsci and Luxemburg understood the transition to socialism in different ways. For Gramsci, the transition would be similar to that which occurred in the transition from feudalism to capitalism in that the proletariat, as the bourgeoisie did before it, must come to exercise leadership before it becomes the dominant class. For Luxemburg, there was an important difference in the two historical processes: while the rising capitalist class exercised control over social wealth before it became the dominant class, the proletariat will do so only after it achieves state power and can dispossess the bourgeoisie. On its face, these appear to be contradictory strategies, a conclusion supported by Gramsci’s reference to Luxemburg’s theory of the mass strike in making his case for the relevance of the war of position for contemporary revolutionary strategy.

In making this case, however, he articulated a very specific understanding of Luxemburg’s theory, one closer to that expressed by her opponents in the SPD than her own. Given the considerable influence which the Gramscian perspective has in contemporary Marxism, Gramsci’s choice is a significant one, if for no other reason than that an appreciation of Luxemburg’s political theory and practice reveals just how close the two are in their understanding of revolution. Both Gramsci and Luxemburg understood Marxism to be a creative, living method of revolutionary analysis and practice rather than a one-dimensional dogma to be applied in a mechanical fashion. They both in turn rejected social democratic reformism as well as what would come to be known as Leninist or Marxist-Leninist vanguardism, emphasizing instead the dialectical relationship between mass action and the party. More specifically, Luxemburg’s mass strike is not — to use Gramsci’s terms — a ‘conjuctural’ event but rather an ‘organic,’ protracted process in which the proletariat develops a revolutionary consciousness and its capabilities to serve as the new dominant class through its own activity; it is, to use Gramsci’s terms, a form of the war of position. In addition, despite criticism of Luxemburg for her supposed economism, her argument that the mass strike is a product of the logic of capital accumulation suggests that, to the extent which that logic has come to define all spheres of social life, the mass strike can be understood as a totalistic strategy akin to the counter-hegemonic strategy associated with Gramsci – that is, a strategy that rejects a narrow economic determinism in favor of a plurality of struggles which may have a certain relative autonomy from class but in the final analysis are grounded in a specific capitalist social formation.

This correspondence between the work of Luxemburg and Gramsci suggests the possibility of constructing a synthetic revolutionary strategy, one that in fact honors Gramsci’s dialectical understanding of hegemony and coercion more than one — often found among contemporary Gramscians (Egan 2017) — that assumes a more linear, stagist understanding of revolution that postpones the struggle for state power until after the counter-hegemonic revolution has paved the way. If Luxemburg’s mass strike is in fact a war of position, emerging from the same conditions on which Gramsci’s war of position is based, then the mass strike and the development of a revolutionary counter-hegemony should be seen not as counterposed to each other but rather as mutually reinforcing strategies.

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