What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarising it.

VI Lenin

Lenin was famously not endowed with much hair, but, as compensation, he was struck from time to time by foresightedness. When he wrote the lines we opened with, in State and Revolution - by far the best thing he wrote - he never dreamt that a cult of icons and the dumping of revolutionary theory would become a yearly duty for the left. Same procedure every year - early in the morning and sometimes with arctic temperatures the remnants of the left gather under the motto “LL-Demo” (Liebknecht and Luxemburg) for a procession of anachronisms. Whoever has the courage to attend, receives a mass of offers. While the Sado-Maoists of the MLPD (Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany) undauntedly threaten “Jobs for Millions”, all sorts of disputing Trotskyists outbid each other in missionary eagerness, to baptise anybody interested into the mysteries of the transitional demands. The Old School Stalinists of the DKP (German Communist Party) have an ever more droll effect, with their usual hoarse promotion of milk, Cuba’s children and the promise of Caribbean state capitalism. The bad music dedicated to the occasion is usually provided by the initiators of a so-called “Anti-Fascist Block”, who, in addition, have so many truisms stored up:

The short-cut between the “objective” social position and the “subjective” constitution of a politically conscious active agent belongs to the kind of concepts which have been thoroughly wrecked by reality.

Commemorating is good, thinking is better

Alongside the ostentation of this sort of certainty and all sorts of crude party lines, the “Memory of Rosa and Karl” is the officially announced reason for the event. Less thought is clearly expended on the comrades and nothing at all on the relevance to the present-day and vividness of their theories. The assembled people seem to find Rosa and Karl’s primary virtue in the fact that they allowed themselves to be murdered, so that they can have the pretext of a “commemoration” and give their most perverse projections full scope. As a result, the announcements of the mourners made Rosa and Karl out to be what they, as communists, never wanted to be: according to taste, “politicians engaged for peace and justice”, “heroes”, “martyrs” and even “the heroic leaders of the German proletariat”.

In necrophilic unity, the column of (Russian) zone-zombies, Stalinists and “post-leftists” dragged themselves to the point where the wreathes were deposited in the “socialist graveyard” in order to practice the art of throwing carnations, in what, in some ways, was the high point of the event. All in all, an extremely grotesque ritual, redolent of the occult, which the Dalai Lama would certainly enjoy.

The conformist character of this business could also be seen by the fact that, amongst others, of all things, the PDS [Party of Democratic Socialism] “Left Party”, which is aiming at participation in government and cutting social spending, was allowed to make a not inconsiderable contribution to disturbing the peace of the dead, without anyone objecting.

With Rosa against the “Left” - everything else is rubbish!

Despite her limp and her dodgy haircut, Rosa’s sex appeal is undisputed among the remnants of the left. Social democrats seize upon her faux pas of the “freedom of those who think differently”, Stalinists mystify her role as the “great party leader”, the populist left distort her theory of spontaneity in order to legitimise post-modern arbitrariness. All in all a sad fate which Rosa can do nothing about.

Anyone who moves from throwing carnations to busying themselves with her theories will discover that these still represent a tried and tested antidote to the most common “promises of bliss from the left”. As an uncompromising opponent of capitalism, she was against the glorification of the state and laid down standards lasting until today in her debates and polemics with reformism. The same is true of her rejection of statism and representation, her standing up for an emancipating socialism and the principle of self-liberation. As a proletarian internationalist, she stood against war and nationalism, and never tired of stressing that the empty phrases of national self-determination had not the least to do with the revolutionary politics of the proletariat.

All this might seem at first sight to be a banality, but, given the intellectual impositions circulating in the left, it is not by any means.

Nothing is further from our intentions than declaring Rosa to be a superstar and ignoring her errors which today probably have the most to teach us. Her break from the SPD came to late, the delayed founding of a communist organisation turned out to be unfavourable. Marked by the organisations of the Second International, she was also not completely in a position to free herself from the tactics of Social Democracy, which aided opportunistic tendencies, particularly in the debate over parliamentarism. Calling these errors and bearing them in mind may help us to resist the left’s favourite fetish, its pointless chumming up or even its search for its fortune in principleless unification.

Clarity before unity

“A league with traitors means defeat” is something that was know as far back as Karl Liebknecht. The communist programme is not compatible with people to whom Stalinism’s stink of corpses clings or who have written the reinvention of Social Democracy on their banners. Real liberation is to be had not with, but only against such figures. A “left” for which the affirmation of wage-labour, the state and the nation has almost become second nature, should not be strengthened but split! The yearly LL-ritual virtually urges us to build a Marxist organisation which is in a position to go beyond abusing the public to action.

In the light of capitalism’s depredations which are confirmed daily, the relevance of the slogan “Socialism or Barbarism” is evident. We stand in front of the choice: either running the risk, in harmony with the remnants of the left, of falling back in theory and practice under some kind of blessing of the “basic liberal democratic order”, or of smashing this in a communist manner in favour of something better. The latter may perhaps sound like something difficult, but it is not, if we bring to mind what Rosa said in the turmoil of World War I:

We have not lost, and we will win, if we have not forgotten how to learn.

For a stateless and classless society!