Theodor Bergmann speaks on Rosa Luxemburg

Last night I heard a lecture at the Brecht Forum in NYC on "Rosa Luxemburg and the Russian Revolution" by Theodor Bergmann, the co-editor of the journal Sozialismus. He was a member, along with Brandler and Thalheimer, of the German Communist Party Opposition during the Weimar Republic.. He has written a history of this organization and also has written a number of books on agrarian questions. His introduction to farming matters came about in a most unusual manner. He went into exile in Sweden after the rise of Hitler and became a farm laborer. Hence his interest in agrarian questions! The lecture was an analysis of an unfinished article by Rosa Luxemburg on the Russian revolution. Bergmann argued that many of Luxemburg's criticisms of Bolshevik rule anticipated the subsequent rise of Stalinism and the recent collapse of the Soviet Union. What he was also anxious to make clear was that Luxemburg's criticisms were offered in the context of support for the revolution and in solidarity with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union itself. Bergmann cites Leo Jogiches, a German Communist leader and close ally to Luxemburg, as having even more sympathy for the Bolshevik project than was indicated by this late article. If she had lived, there is little doubt that she would continued to deepen her understanding of the Soviet experiment and play a critical role in the fight against Stalin. Bergmann stated that Luxemburg resisted Kremlin control when the Communist Party of Germany was formed.

Now this was in the period that Trotsky was barking orders to the infant French Communist Party from his desk in the Comintern. It would have been interesting to see what Luxemburg would have told the Comintern brass around the time Zinoviev put through his "Bolshevization" measures at the 5th Congress.

This was the question I in fact put to him. I asked if there had ever been a critique of the "organization" question within the ranks of the German Communist Party Opposition. Since the Opposition was strongly influenced by Luxemburg's ideas, wasn't there resistance to the super-centralist model put forward by Zinoviev? He replied that indeed there was and that Thalheimer had written a lengthy criticism of the "Boshevization" turn. This is just the item I was looking for to complete my research on how Lenin's free-wheeling Bolshevik party became turned into the grotesque "Marxist-Leninist" model adopted by Stalinist, Maoist and Trotskyist alike.

Louis Proyect