Executed People

"Bourgeois class domination is undoubtedly an historical necessity, but, so too, the rising of the working class against it. Capital is an historical necessity, but, so too, its grave digger, the socialist proletariat."

"From the moment when the workers of our country and of Russia began to struggle bravely against the Czarist Government and the capitalist exploiters, we notice more and more often that the priests, in their sermons, come out against the workers who are struggling. It is with extraordinary vigour that the clergy fight against the socialists and try by all means to belittle them in the eyes of the workers. The believers who go to church on Sundays and festivals are compelled, more and more often, to listen to a violent political speech, a real indictment of Socialism, instead of hearing a sermon and obtaining religious consolation there. Instead of comforting the people, who are full of cares and wearied by their hard lives, who go to church with faith in Christianity, the priests fulminate against the workers who are on strike, and against the opponents of the government; further, they exhort them to bear poverty and oppression with humility and patience. They turn the church and the pulpit into a place of political propaganda."

"The Russo-Japanese War now gives to all an awareness that even war and peace in Europe – its destiny – isn’t decided between the four walls of the European concert, but outside it, in the gigantic maelstrom of world and colonial politics. And its in this that the real meaning of the current war resides for social-democracy, even if we set aside its immediate effect: the collapse of Russian absolutism. This war brings the gaze of the international proletariat back to the great political and economic connectedness of the world, and violently dissipates in our ranks the particularism, the pettiness of ideas that form in any period of political calm. The war completely rends all the veils which the bourgeois world – this world of economic, political and social fetishism – constantly wraps us in. The war destroys the appearance which leads us to believe in peaceful social evolution; in the omnipotence and the untouchability of bourgeois legality; in national exclusivism; in the stability of political conditions; in the conscious direction of politics by these “statesmen” or parties; in the significance capable of shaking up the world of the squabbles in bourgeois parliaments; in parliamentarism as the so-called center of social existence. War unleashes – at the same time as the reactionary forces of the capitalist world – the generating forces of social revolution which ferment in its depths."

"The self-discipline of the Social Democracy is not merely the replacement of the authority of bourgeois rulers with the authority of a socialist central committee. The working class will acquire the sense of the new discipline, the freely assumed self-discipline of the Social Democracy, not as a result of the discipline imposed on it by the capitalist state, but by extirpating, to the last root, its old habits of obedience and servility."

"The law of conservation of mass was first put into definite form by Lavoisier, in the eighties of the eighteenth century. In considering the fermentation of fruit-juices, wherein carbonic acid gas and alcohol are produced, Lavoisier said:—"We must evidently have a complete knowledge of the analyses and the nature of the substances which can be fermented; for nothing is created, either in the operations of art, or in those of nature, and it may be laid down as a principle that, in every operation there is an equal quantity of matter before and after the operation; ...there is nothing but certain changes, certain modifications. The whole art of experimenting in chemistry rests on this principle; in all experiments one is obliged to assume an actual equality between the principles [that is, elements] of the substances examined and those obtained by the analysis of these substances. Thus, inasmuch as grape-juice yields carbonic acid gas and alcohol, I can affirm that grape juice=carbonic acid gas+alcohol.""

"The extension of Black's method by the physicist Lavoisier led to the downfall of the purely qualitative theory of phlogiston, and gave to chemistry the true methods of investigation, and its first great quantitative law—the law of conservation of matter."

"We are... bound to attach the greatest importance to the preliminary step taken by Lavoisier, who is even more justly called the father of modern chemistry than Kepler is called the father of modern astronomy. The exact claims of Lavoisier to this important place in the history of chemistry have been variously stated: ...since his time, and greatly through his labours, the quantitative method has been established as the ultimate test of chemical facts; the principle of this method being the rule that in all changes of combination and reaction, the total weight of the various ingredients—be they elementary bodies or compounds—remains unchanged. The science of chemistry was thus established upon an exact, a mathematical basis. By means of this method Lavoisier, utilising and analysing the results gained by himself and others before him, notably those of Priestley, Cavendish, and Black, succeeded in destroying the older theory of combustion, the so-called phlogistic theory."

"In 1774 he [ Joseph Priestley ] thought he had obtained nitrous oxide... in 1775 he saw the gas as dephlogisticated air... If we refuse the palm to Priestley, we cannot award it to Lavoisier for the work of 1775... Lavoisier insisted that oxygen was an atomic "principle of acidity"… formed only when that "principle" united with "caloric"... Ignoring Scheele, we can safely say that oxygen had not been discovered before 1774, and we would probably say that it had been discovered by 1777 or shortly thereafter. But... any attempt to date the discovery must inevitably be arbitrary because discovering a new sort of phenomenon is necessarily a complex event, one which involves recognizing both that something is and what it is."

"One of the most fundamental principles of Lavoisier's chemistry was the use of numbers, notably in relation to what we often call today the principle of conservation of mass... The principle implies that the experimenter must not only keep account of all the reacting solids and liquids, but also the gases—that is, all of the products. ...This rule led to quantitative experiments. Lavoisier was not the first person to use numbers in chemistry but he was a pioneer in using such numerical measurements as the basis of his system of chemistry. ...When Lavoisier first announced this law, chemists generally believed in... "phlogiston" which supposedly entered into chemical reactions (such as combustion) but had no weight. It was a radical step, therefore, for Lavoisier to base a system of chemistry on a balance of weights and to maintain that chemistry is not concerned with weightless "substances." ...this was indeed a chemical revolution."

"Though Lavoisier generally gets credit for the authorship of this principle [ conservation of mass ], others had conceived it before him, The seventeenth century chemists, notably Helmont, Starkey, and Boyle, had a dawning awareness of the importance of weighing and measuring materials before and after an experimental process, though their methods and measurement devices were not so precise. In 1623, Francis Bacon declared, "..when they perceive that a body which was before manifest to the senses has escaped and disappeared, they should not admit or liquidate the account before it has been shown to them where the body has gone to and into what it has been received." And as early as 450 B.C., Anaxagoras argued, "Wrongly do the Greeks suppose that aught begins or ceases to be; for nothing comes into being or is destroyed; but all is an aggregation or secretion of preexisting things; so that all becoming might more correctly be called becoming mixed, and all corruption, becoming separate.""

"Now Mayow, like Boyle, conceived the air as made up of minute particles, while he restricted himself to two varieties, those, namely, which are necessary to life, called by him "spiritus igno-aereus," and those incapable of supporting respiration or combustion, which are left after the removal of this "spiritus." Since a mixture of saltpetre and sulphur continued burning even under water, he assumed that his igno-aereal particles must also be contained in the salt. Acids too contained the new principle. ...Mayow died in 1679 at the age of thirty-four years; had he lived but a little longer, it can scarcely be doubted that he would have forestalled the revolutionary work of Lavoisier, and stifled the theory of phlogiston at its birth. As it was, his work, though rendered in one of the most luminous and convincing scientific publications of the period, was immediately forgotten, and so proved of little effect on the evolution of our modern chemical system."

"We may lay it down as an incontestible axiom, that, in all the operations of art and nature, nothing is created; an equal quantity of matter exists both before and after the experiment; the quality and quantity of the elements remain precisely the same; and nothing takes place beyond changes and modifications in the combination of these elements. Upon this principle the whole art of performing chemical experiments depends: We must always suppose an exact equality between the elements of the body examined and those of the products of its analysis."

"We must trust to nothing but facts: These are presented to us by Nature, and cannot deceive. We ought, in every instance, to submit our reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation."

"It is a maxim universally admitted in geometry, and indeed in every branch of knowledge, that, in the progress of investigation, we should proceed from known facts to what is unknown. ...In this manner, from a series of sensations, observations, and analyses, a successive train of ideas arises, so linked together, that an attentive observer may trace back to a certain point the order and connection of the whole sum of human knowledge."

"Thus, while I thought myself employed only in forming a Nomenclature, and while I proposed to myself nothing more than to improve the chemical language, my work transformed itself by degrees, without my being able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the Elements of Chemistry."

"When I began the following Work, my only object was to extend and explain more fully the Memoir which I read at the public meeting of the Academy of Sciences in the month of April 1787, on the necessity of reforming and completing the Nomenclature of Chemistry. While engaged in this employment, I perceived, better than I had ever done before, the justice of the following maxims of the Abbé de Condillac, in his System of Logic, and some other of his works. "We think only through the medium of words.—Languages are true analytical methods.—Algebra, which is adapted to its purpose in every species of expression, in the most simple, most exact, and best manner possible, is at the same time a language and an analytical method.—The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged.""

"Here, then: a revolution [in science and chemistry] has taken place in an important part of human knowledge since your departure from Europe... I will consider this revolution to be well advanced and even completely accomplished if you range yourself with us. ...After having brought you up to date on what is happening in chemistry, it would be well to speak to you about our political revolution. We regard it as done and without any possibility of return to the old order."

"The art of concluding from experience and observation consists in evaluating probabilities, in estimating if they are high or numerous enough to constitute proof. This type of calculation is more complicated and more difficult than one might think. It demands a great sagacity generally above the power of common people. The success of charlatans, sorcerors, and alchemists—and all those who abuse public credulity—is founded on errors in this type of calculation."

"she was the outstanding personality in the international labor movement after Marx and Engels; and that her work has not lost its political relevance despite the changes the capitalist system and the labor movement have undergone since her death...Despite some false notions, with respect to theory and some illusions regarding socialist practice, her revolutionary impulse yielded the essential elements required for a socialist revolution: an unwavering internationalism and the principle of the self-determination of the working class within its organizations and within society. By taking seriously the dictum that the emancipation of the proletariat can only be its, own work, she bridged the revolutionary past with the revolutionary future. Her ideas thus remain as alive as the idea of revolution itself, while all her adversaries in the old labor movement have become part and parcel of the decaying capitalist society."

"It is characteristic of the unity of theory and practice in the life work of Rosa Luxemburg that the unity of victory and defeat, individual fate and total process is the main thread running through her theory and her life. As early as her first polemic against Bernstein’s she argued that the necessarily ‘premature’ seizure of power by the proletariat was inevitable. She unmasked the resulting opportunist fear and lack of faith in revolution as “political nonsense which starts from the assumption that society progresses mechanically and which imagines a definite point in time external to and unconnected with the class struggle in which the class struggle will be won”. It is this clear-sighted certitude that guides Rosa Luxemburg in the campaign she waged for the emancipation of the proletariat: its economic and political emancipation from physical bondage under capitalism, and its ideological emancipation from its spiritual bondage under opportunism. As she was the great spiritual leader of the proletariat her chief struggles were fought against the latter enemy – the more dangerous foe as it was harder to defeat. Her death at the hands of her bitterest enemies, Noske and Scheidemann, is, logically, the crowning pinnacle of her thought and life. Theoretically she had predicted the defeat of the January rising years before it took place; tactically she foresaw it at the moment of action. Yet she remained consistently on the side of the masses and shared their fate. That is to say, the unity of theory and practice was preserved in her actions with exactly the same consistency and with exactly the same logic as that which earned her the enmity of her murderers: the opportunists of Social Democracy."

"a great woman, a great revolutionary"

"This was Luxemburg’s single most impor­tant insight: The revolutionaries must re­main human throughout their struggle. Oth­erwise, what kind of revolution would these angry, repressed people make? Whom would it serve? And how would life be better after­wards? These thoughts never left her. They are there, year after year, in her letters to Leo, in the reasons she gives for wanting them to be close and to love each other freely. Out of these thoughts comes her op­position to war, her criticism of Lenin, her description of why she reads Tolstoy instead of Marx in prison. In Rosa Luxemburg, the line between emotion and intelligence re­mained strong and direct. All her life it was the task of her intellect to explain what her gut told her was true."

"Her writing is distinguished by a knowledge of art, histo­ry, and literature, her speech made vivid by strength and immediacy of feeling. Her criticism of party writing is amazing. “I think that with every new article,” she advises her comrades back in Poland, putting out The Workers’ Cause, “one should experience the subject matter through and through, get emotionally involved, every single time, every single day. Only then will the old, familiar truths, expressed in words new and bright, go from the writer’s heart to the reader’s heart… The goal I set for myself is never to forget to reach deep into my own self, to be enthusiastic, inspired every time I put pen to paper.” Because she never failed to “reach deep into her own self,” Luxemburg’s sense of the revolution remained remarkably whole and alive to the touch. She never lost sight of what she was fighting for, what socialism meant to her, what price she was willing to pay for it. Her position was often lonely but always independent. She thrived on the independence. Then suddenly it turned to isolation."

"The only way that inviolability has maintained its force overtime has been through the forces of organized violence standing between that concept of property and everybody else. That is it...the forces of organized violence, while very much tied to military uniforms, weapons, industrialized killing in that way, what Rosa Luxemburg called organized murder"

"The most interesting women in modern European history appear in the ranks of radical political movements. It is difficult to find conservative or traditional counterparts equal to Louise Michel, Emma Goldman, and Rosa Luxemburg. Even Isadora Duncan, creator of modern dance, flirted with communism. More thoughtful and articulate and certainly as politically active as any of these women is the lesser known Spanish anarchist, Federica Montseny. On asking what attracted these women to radical politics, one discovers in each a commitment to feminism. No person, not even Emma Goldman, explored this necessary relationship between feminist and socialist principles more provocatively than did Federica Montseny."

"Rosa Luxemburg, brave woman Socialist of Germany, who was later brutally murdered by the militarists, sounded the alarm against a World War in 1913. She called upon the workers to make May Day a mighty demonstration for peace and socialism. “Workers of the world, Unite!” became the insistent cry on May Day. Every vital issue was pressed, more and more militant slogans raised in each country and internationally."

"What’s refreshing about Luxemburg is that she never loses sight of the fact that capitalism – exploitation of one human by another, facilitated by the abstractions of the money system – is the root cause of the problem. Although she feels the desperation of the exploited and the oppressed very keenly, she’s clear that it’s only by dismantling capitalism that that oppression can be ended."

"Rosa Luxemburg was a revolutionary. Her great services to the movement and what Trotsky called her luminous mind will always remain the indestructible heritage of the Fourth International. Precisely for this reason, however, it has been necessary to disentangle the error she has committed on the theory of accumulation from her revolutionary activity and her fight against reformism."

"the unsung hero of postcolonial theory...By giving detailed accounts of the British economic atrocities in India, and French colonialism in Algeria, Rosa Luxemburg anticipated the more detailed accounts of postcolonial theories by decades. By bringing the presumed margins of self-centering Europe to global consciousness, she enabled the postcolonial theorist a veritable voice at the worldwide gathering of critical Marxist thinking."

"During a period when so many who consider themselves Marxists sap Marxism of its deep humanistic content, no one can do more to release us from the chains of lifeless mechanistic materialism than Rosa Luxemburg. For Marx communism (or socialism) was "real humanism", "a society in which the full and free development of every individual is the ruling principle"."

"A passion for truth made Rosa Luxemburg recoil from any dogmatic thought. In a period when Stalinism has largely turned Marxism into a dogma, spreading desolation in the field of ideas, Rosa Luxemburg's writings are invigorating and life-giving. Nothing was more intolerable to her than bowing down to "infallible authorities". As a real disciple of Marx she was able to think and act independently of her master."

"Franz Mehring, the biographer of Marx, did not exaggerate when he called Rosa Luxemburg the best brain after Marx. But she did not contribute her brain alone to the working-class movement; she gave everything she had — her heart, her passion, her strong will, her very life."

"As the second decades of the new millennium nears completion we are beginning to truly understand what Rosa Luxemburg meant when she said: Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism."

"no one would claim that the revolt of a few hundred insurgents in the Warsaw ghetto in April 1943 influenced the course of the war in any way. The immense importance of this event was in another dimension: a symbol, as is often said, the manifestation par excellence of the will to attest by struggle 'despite everything' - the famous trotz alledem of Heinrich Heine, found also from the pens of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and again in the famous song of Wolf Biermann. It embodied the will and capacity of human resistance in the face of adversity, despite the extreme disproportion of forces."

"The articulation of universalism with the sense of Jewish identity took varying forms depending on the different revolutionary currents: for internationalists such as Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Karl Radek and Rosa Luxemburg, the assimilation of a Jewish revolutionary into the concrete universal party, the dissolution of the 'little difference' into the status of equality of the militant, anticipated the society for which they fought; they did not consider the little difference' as called on to crystallize one day in terms of national identity. Were they blind? Blinkered, certainly, in the sense that they underestimated the national dimension of the Jewish problem in Eastern Europe."

"The Eastern-European born revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Emma Goldman, the most famous examples, marched onto the pages of radical history and represented a new kind of Jewish woman, at odds with the balebuste of old."

"I remembered at this time the brilliant critical analysis of the German Social Democracy which Rosa Luxemburg had written in gaol in 1914, after her arrest for anti-militarist activity. The pamphlet had been signed by the pseudonym "Junius" and it was a confirmation of prophecies I had heard her make at a German Congress in Hanover many years before when she had engaged in a brilliant polemical duel with the German Revisionist, Edward Bernstein. Even then she had foreseen the development of that pernicious opportunism which was to result in the tragedies of the post-war years."

"In retrospect, Jean Jaurès and Rosa Luxemburg seem to me the only delegates who, like Adler, realized fully the inevitability of the World War and the horrors it entailed."

"While she was speaking I realized why she was considered one of the greatest speakers and teachers of the movement. Her simplicity, her enthusiasm, and deep sincerity, together with her wit, combined to produce a profound effect upon her audience. She was extraordinarily endowed intellectually. While still a very young girl, a university student, she had impressed authorities on political economy with her precocious writings on this subject. She had an exceptionally keen critical mind, and at an age when most girls are interested in little except clothes, romantic novels, and dancing, she was already a regular and highly-respected contributor to the scientific Marxian journals. Rosa Luxemburg belonged to that generation of famous women who had to struggle against almost insurmountable obstacles to gain opportunities which the men of her day accepted as a matter of course. For a woman to acquire intellectual recognition at that time demanded an authentic thirst for knowledge, much tenacity and an iron will. Rosa Luxemburg had all of these qualities to an exceptional degree. But there was also a softer side to her nature. When, after her tragic death, some of her letters to her intimate friends were published, they were a revelation to the public-particularly perhaps to that section of it which read the conservative press, which usually referred to her as "the Red Fury." Those letters were poetic in the truest sense of the word. The intense political activity and scientific work of Rosa Luxemburg expressed but one aspect of her mind and personality."

"The international disputes which united and divided Luxemburg, Lenin, Lukács, Gramsci, Bordiga or Trotsky on these issues represent the last great strategic debate in the European workers’ movement. Since then, there has been little significant theoretical development of the political problems of revolutionary strategy in metropolitan capitalism that has had any direct contact with the masses. The structural divorce between original Marxist theory and the main organizations of the working class in Europe has yet to be historically resolved. The May-June revolt in France, the upheaval in Portugal, the approaching dénouement in Spain, presage the end of this long divorce, but have not accomplished it. The classical debates, therefore, still remain in many respects the most advanced limit of reference we possess today. It is thus not mere archaism to recall the strategic confrontations which occurred four or five decades ago. To reappropriate them, on the contrary, is a step towards a Marxist discussion that has the—necessarily modest—hope of assuming an ‘initial shape’ of correct theory today. Régis Debray has spoken, in a famous paragraph, of the constant difficulty of being contemporary with our present. In Europe at least, we have yet to be sufficiently contemporary with our past."

"Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee."

"But here is the "ego" of the Russian revolutionary again! Pirouetting on its head, it once more proclaims itself to be the all-powerful director of history — this time with the title of His Excellency the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Party of Russia."

"If we assume the viewpoint claimed as his own by Lenin and we fear the influence of intellectuals in the proletarian movement, we can conceive of no greater danger to the Russian party than Lenin's plan of organization. Nothing will more surely enslave a young labor movement to an intellectual elite hungry for power than this bureaucratic straightjacket, which will immobilize the movement and turn it into an automaton manipulated by a Central Committee. On the other hand there is no more effective guarantee against opportunist intrigue and personal ambition than the independent revolutionary action of the proletariat, as a result of which the workers acquire the sense of political responsibility and self-reliance."

"In the present situation, such an experiment would be doubly dangerous to the Russian Social Democracy. It stands on the eve of decisive battles against tsarism. It is about to enter, or has already entered, on a period of intensified creative activity, during which it will broaden (as is usual in a revolutionary period) its sphere of influence and will advance spontaneously by leaps and bounds. To attempt to bind the initiative of the party at this moment, to surround it with a network of barbed wire, is to render it incapable of accomplishing the tremendous task of the hour."

"Granting, as Lenin wants, such absolute powers of a negative character to the top organ of the party, we strengthen, to a dangerous extent, the conservatism inherent in such an organ."

"But what has been the experience of the Russian socialist movement up to now? The most important and fruitful changes in its tactical policy during the last ten years have not been the inventions of several leaders and even less so of any central organizational organs. They have always been the spontaneous product of the movement in ferment."

"The working class will acquire the sense of the new discipline, the freely assumed self-discipline of the Social Democracy, not as a result of the discipline imposed on it by the capitalist state, but by extirpating, to the last root, its old habits of obedience and servility."

"Social Democratic centralism cannot be based on the mechanical subordination and blind obedience of the party membership to the leading party center. [...] The Social Democratic movement cannot allow the erection of an air-tight partition between the class-conscious nucleus of the proletariat already in the party and its immediate popular environment, the nonparty sections of the proletariat."

"For Lenin, the difference between the Social Democracy and is reduced to the observation that in place of a handful of conspirators we have a class-conscious proletariat. He forgets that this difference implies a complete revision of our ideas on organization and, therefore, an entirely different conception of centralism and the relations existing between the party and the struggle itself."

"Lenin's thesis is that the party Central Committee should have the privilege of naming all the local committees of the party. It should have the right to appoint the effective organs of all local bodies from Geneva to Liege, from Tomsk to Irkutsk. It should also have the right to impose on all of them its own ready-made rules of party conduct. It should have the right to rule without appeal on such questions as the dissolution and reconstitution of local organizations. This way, the Central Committee could determine, to suit itself, the composition of the highest party organs. The Central Committee would be the only thinking element in the party. All other groupings would be its executive limbs."