Razón y Revolución In English

Argentine labor reform under Milei's rule.

Back to the 19th Century. Labor reform by Javier Milei In this episode, Marina Kabat summarizes the most relevant aspects of the labor reform bill that was approved in the Senate and points out that during the se...

In this paper on transnational telework in Latin America, Marin aKabat explains the logic of a new international división of labour and its impact on the region.
Free access for a limited time: https://journals.sagepub.com/share/U42YUFFKZRYYKKG65ZUA?target=10.1177/0094582X241311825

Marina Kabat analyses recent Venezuelan elections and mass demonstrations (July and August 2024) from a left-wing perspective. She claims Maduro’s regime is a Bourgeoisie nationalist dictatorship and that unions and left political solidarity should be with workers in the street, who are being murdered by Maduro’s military forces and parastate organizations. She also explains how other political actors, like Corina Machado, are trying to institutionalize the conflict, avoiding direct action from the working class.

Internacional. Elections and protests in Venezuela Marina Kabat analyses recent Venezuelan elections and mass demonstrations (July and August 2024) from a left-wing perspective. She claims Maduro’s regime is ...

The Venezuelazo
Venezuela has woken up. The Venezuelan working class has stood up and is fighting the Chavista dictatorship. At this moment, there are popular uprisings all over the country against the fraud, repression and hunger to which the regime subjects the population. They march to the headquarters of the authorities, bang pots and pans in the streets, and confront the police and paramilitary forces. Every main avenue is now a trench. From the depths of the poorest neighbourhoods, this uncontrollable anger springs forth. Those who were bastions of Chavismo are now the flame of rebellion. Unlike the Caracazo, all the country's cities are in revolt here. From Caracas to Barquisimeto, from Valencia to Yaracuy. The governorates are being attacked. Venezuela is witnessing its 2001: the Venezuelazo.
The elections on Sunday were, in reality, a simulation. The leftist parties are banned and intervened. Hundreds of labour leaders were imprisoned and disappeared. A third of the population was denied the right to vote. The few who were eligible were threatened with fi****ms. To top it all off, only 59% of the electoral roll voted, and the results were not delivered table by table.
The opposition participated in this farce because it called for a peaceful fall of the dictatorship; it wanted to avoid a popular uprising and be part of the new “dialogue.” The Venezuelazo is also a setback for it, which will surely want to channel this anger. The discussion between Maduro and Corina Machado is not about what to do but who does it.
In 2015, the Chavista regime imposed a true anti-worker dictatorship. It subjected the population to brutal austerity, surpassing any Latin American government: salaries of 5 dollars and poverty that is around 98%. It expelled a third of the population in record time. It imprisoned 150 labour leaders and made thousands of workers disappear. It formed paramilitary groups to persecute the population. It banned any party that declared itself “socialist,” while the pro-Yankee opposition campaigned and continues to campaign wherever it wants. It supports the entire business community: the Chavista and the “squalid.” As if this were not enough, the country has the worst crime rates on the continent, and Maduro handed over the security of Caracas to drug gangs in an official agreement and broad daylight. Venezuela has been, for years, heading towards social decomposition and its working class is humiliated and trampled like no other.
The Venezuelan population does not have to put up with such a horror for one more second. He must throw out Maduro, Diosdado, Padrino and all that gang of murderers and criminals who took the lives and money of the workers. Worse still, they trampled on the name of Socialism in an adventure that Milei must envy. Between the expulsion of the population, the repression, the handouts, the help of Chinese imperialism and the business fraternity, Maduro found the strength that popular support did not give him. It is time for him and his gang of wretches to feel the repudiation and anger of people who put up with everything.
Maduro responds to the mobilisations with fierce repression. Every person who calls themselves leftist, socialist or even democrat or progressive must support this uprising and denounce the repression of the regime. The people have to settle accounts with the butchers. And with their own hands.
We call on all workers' organisations to form a committee to support the Venezuelan popular uprising, denounce the repression and ensure that the workers themselves in struggle take the lead.
👉Long live the Venezuelazo!
👉Out with Maduro NOW.
👉Jail for the murderers and criminals.
👉Release all political prisoners.
👉For a free and genuinely socialist Venezuela.
Via Socialista

https://youtu.be/ZegQvBZFmocWho’s Milei, the outsider who has just won the primary elections in Argentina?
, and celebrated Milei's triumph. Just like them, he’s a far-right politician who’s promoting strong austerity measures as well as conservative policies.
Has Milei already secured the presidency?
How did Milei come to win the primary election?
Why are so many people from the working class voting for Milei?
Are abortion rights at stake in Argentina?
What´s happening in the primary election aftermath?
Ph.D. Marina Kabat, a college history professor and activist of Vía Socialista answers all these questions

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Who is Milei? Who’s Milei, the outsider who has just won the primary elections in Argentina? , and celebrated Milei's triumph. Just like them, he’s a...

Appeal to all organizations of the left
For a Committee for the restitution of political and trade union freedoms to workers in Venezuela.

A few days ago, in Venezuela, five comrades, union leaders of notable importance, were sentenced to 16 years in prison, after having spent a year in the regime's prisons without any conviction. Their only crime was belonging to socialist parties, organizing strikes in their unions and marches in their states.
These cases are a small sample of the violations of the dictatorship against the elementary rights of the working class. More than 200 union leaders are in jail. Socialist political parties are prohibited. The PCV, a historic party of the working class, is being intervened and its leaders are being persecuted.
In Venezuela you cannot have a march, you cannot go on strike, you cannot organize politically without endangering the freedom and lives of the people. The Maduro government uses a large number of state and parastatal detachments to attempt against the lives of worker leaders: Bolivarian National Police, FAES, DGCIM, SEBIN...
Meanwhile, Latin American governments continue to look the other way or, worse still, support these outrages. At the time, international worker solidarity helped hundreds of disappeared comrades and was a very important factor in the fight against the Latin American dictatorships in the '70s and '80s.
It is necessary to rebuild those worker ties, release the imprisoned compañeros and ensure the restoration of all worker liberties. A victory of the Venezuelan workers against the dictatorship will undoubtedly be a great stimulus for the Argentine and Latin American revolutionaries. Not only because it will prevent a liberal and pro-Yankee solution to the crisis of the dictatorship, but because it will be the first great worker victory against the governments of the "populist" bourgeoisie that came to expropriate the uprisings.
We call, then, all socialist, left and revolutionary organizations to form a committee to discuss a course of action and get to work to achieve the release of all worker political prisoners and the restoration of political and trade union freedoms of Workers.

China raises the stakes. The war in Ukraine and the misery of trotskyist social democracy

The clashes between the US and China display a new episode. This time, with the worsening of the armed conflict in Ukraine, which threatens to spread to the heart of Europe. The Ukrainian people is about to suffer a new massacre and a new destruction of their country. No one has lifted a finger and the revolutionaries, who should put their internationalism into practice, decided to look the other way and dilute the responsibility of the aggressor.
Despite the wealth of information available, the conclusions drawn are ridiculous. That the media tosses headlines to capture attention is understandable. That the left, once again, buys into with the sole purpose of displaying the usual one-for-all canned-food-style type of response, used for any occasion, irritates.
First of all, during all this time there was speculation about the possibility of the "start" of a war. In fact, Altamira called to "fight it” (the war). Well, Ukraine has been at war for at least seven years. In the Donbas region, separatists and the central state are clashing. The former, financed by Russia, want to establish two “independent republics” in the Lugansk and Donetsk provinces. The latter, financed by Europe and the United States, seeks to maintain territorial unity and integrate the territory into the EU. What is being immediately discussed is not the war, which was in place before the invasion, but the definitive annexation of these territories by Russia, which do not cover even half of those provinces. In other words: Russia is not invading now but rather intensifying its military presence with its own contingents and extending the aggression further beyond Donbas.
Secondly, there is talk of NATO. The truth is that Europe is divided on the issue. The US and France are pushing for a more aggressive policy. In contrast, Germany, Spain and Italy depend on Russian gas supplies. In particular the first, who built together with Russia the Nordstream2 gas pipeline, which crosses the Baltic. It is true that Olaf Sholz announced the suspension of the certification, but it amounts to just that, a brief impasse. It does not occur to anyone that Germany is going to cancel a work that doubles the supply.
Thirdly, it is of a more comical nature and concerns, guess whom, the left, which has been shouting all this time "NATO out". The one that is invading is Russia. The US called to "pray" for the victims. In light of the facts, it is not only a shame, but we should be grateful that there are no trotskyists in the conflict zone.
Our socialdemocracts (known as "trotskyism") tries to expel those who had not even entered, while closing its eyes to the real invader which, we repeat, was already there seven years ago. It is not about vindicating an imperialist and reactionary organization like NATO. We are not going to discover anything from that. It is about looking at the real and concrete situation. Ukraine was not invaded by any "western" army but by Russia. And not on one front, but two. Russia indirectly occupies the eastern region of Donbas and directly the Crimean peninsula, since 2014. The Crimean annexation left Ukraine without Sevastopol, the second largest port in the Black Sea and forced passage to the Sea of Azov. In 2013, when the population rose up against Putin's stooge, Viktor Yanukovych, the paramilitary troops commanded by Russia had no better idea than to take the lives of 100 demonstrators in one afternoon. Therefore, the first thing that must be demanded, and the first thing that the masses of the region must organize for, is the expulsion of the real invader, the one they have today. Looking the other way, in the name of whatever reason, is simply criminal. But the left has us already accustomed to that: in Venezuela it acts distracted on Maduro. Why does it do that? Because it doesn't care about the problems of the working class in other countries. It writes for the “progressive” public, the local, kirchnerist public. The one which believes in the "anti-American" alliance with Russia, China, Venezuela, Nicaragua and so on...
Finally, an actor that no one (or very few) talk about: China. Everyone points to Biden behind NATO, but few can see Xi Yinping behind Putin. The fact that his statements have been mild does not mean that he is the main party interested in Russia's deployment to the West and in the occupation of the routes to the East (the Black Sea). According to Spain's El País, Chinese businessmen bought 9% of Ukraine's arable land.
By losing sight of the whole picture, the magnitude of the problem and its recurrence are not properly calibrated. It is not a specific conflict but yet another on the board between the US and China. At the other end, Taiwan is in a reverse scenario (it is the US that supports the separatists) and is in direct collision with one of the contenders (China). For the left, Putin is a “bonapartist” who confronts “imperialism”. Putin is a reactionary, of course, but an "imperialist" is always worse, they think. Since for them there is only American imperialism, they always end up on the side of the other oppressor.
As we can see, the war in Ukraine is only one of the problems that concerns the states of Eastern Europe and an episode in the confrontation between the US and China. After the fall of the USSR, this region remained in an impasse within the Russian Federation until the most important states fell into the military orbit of NATO, as they projected their entry into the EU. The problem with the bordering countries (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia) is their low economic viability and their strategic importance. They are countries that never managed to establish their own state and that live on the assistance of Russia/China, in many cases. For example, Ukraine, with a population similar to that of Argentina, has a third of our GDP. Its importance lies in the production of wheat (which employs only few hands) and in being a reservoir of cheap labor for Russia, since Europe receives contingents from almost all over the world. Now, this entire region constitutes a "ring" that separates Russia from western Europe and is, in any case, a shelter in military terms. But, just as it separates, it unites: to the south, it is the access route to the East and the Mediterranean, through the Black Sea; to the north, the route to the West and the Americas through the Baltic. Therefore, its control is essential. The rise of China and its alliance with Russia carries diplomatic, economic and military combat for control of the area. Until now, the US intervened in alliance with “pro-western” political movements, in response to which Russia resorted to direct intervention or balkanization (Georgia, Ukraine).
The case breaks out in Ukraine because it is about to lose its most important economic card: the passage of the gas pipeline that feeds Europe. The commissioning of the gas pipeline that connects Russia with Germany through the Baltic (that is, bypasses the Ukraine and Belarus region) will leave it without one of its main sources of financing and forces it, logically, to look at other financiers. The ruling party changed the constitution in 2019 speculating on joining the EU, which would force a strong orthodox economic adjustment (Ukraine couldn't issue currency), but also would provide financing so as to not let a member fall down. China and Russia do not want to lose control of the other passage of gas. In turn, the US is interested in the sale of liquefied gas, taken to Europe on ships, which still has a very high price. In that intersection of interests this conflict breaks out. The limits to the worsening of the situation are set by Germany, which mediates between both parties and does not want to break ties. But so does the economy itself: American companies in Europe and Russia, as well as the need to keep gas prices at bay in an inflationary scenario, do not make the task of putting words into action easy. An open war between the US and Russia would cause a catastrophe within Europe, which is rejected by all the powers of the continent. Also, Biden already has experience on fighting so far from home. If he couldn't do against small or non-existent armies (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan), you don't have to be a military genius to know how he would fare against the second most powerful one on the planet. That is the reason why Biden, faced with bombings, massacres and deployment of troops beyond the Donbas, appeals, for the moment, to economic measures and prayers. If the escalation increases, we could be facing with the prospect of a process that could lead to a destruction with an impact not seen since the end of World War II.
An adequate and realistic way out for the masses of the region does not lie in supporting one imperialism or the other. It calls for, first of all, the expulsion of the Russian invasion and balkanization of the country. Workers must organize themselves into military committees independently. Committees that must carry out not only military action but the administration of daily needs. Along this path, they must seize and expropriate whatever is necessary to ensure the integrity and health of the population. Secondly, to call on all comrades from all the neighboring territories, subjected to the same pressures and facing the same problems. Georgia is already invaded and balkanized, Belarus intervened with a criminal regime and the Baltic republics are the target of the next conflict. Thirdly, a call to workers' internationalist solidarity, to make Putin feel the heat and weaken both his domestic and international fronts.
We revolutionaries must speak out immediately and outline actions of solidarity. That carries the repudiation of Alberto, his clique and Putin's meeting along the economic and military agreements with China. We revolutionaries do not fight an imperialism to support its rival, nor do we salute our assassins just because they do not carry the starry flag.

Russia out of Ukraine
For an international workers' action in solidarity with the Ukrainian proletariat and the countries invaded or threatened by Putin's dictatorship.
For an international conference of socialist parties against the war and for the expulsion of Russia from Ukraine.

Razón y Revolución

Rosa Luxemburg, the Mass Strike Debate, and Latin America Today

How can Luxemburg’s ideas inform our understanding of contemporary political unrest in the region?
Marina Kabat

Some contemporary authors have resorted to using Rosa Luxemburg’s thought as a means of analyzing the political experiences they have combined under the notion of twenty-first century socialism. In my view, this operation a simplification of Rosa Luxemburg’s political conceptions along with an acritical and apologetic perspective on Latin American bourgeois nationalist governments of the last decade.
From my perspective, Luxemburg’s writings have much to offer contemporary thinkers who wish to understand the present political process. Much of this legacy is condensed in Luxemburg’s contributions to the debate over mass strikes. At first, in developing her position on this matter Rosa Luxemburg dared to question the orthodox standpoint of the social-democratic movement, which claimed that slow progress towards partial parliamentary advances was the best tactic to reach socialism. This dogma was misleadingly attributed to Engels, thus Luxemburg had to claim that even Engels’s stance should be questioned. I consider this attitude to be fundamentally correct: revolutionaries should each study their own era, analyze the development of capitalism and class struggle in the specific period, and consciously place where they develop their political action rather than simply repeating political dogmas or methods from previous revolutionary processes that took place in other historical contexts.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the mass strike debate implied a discussion regarding strikes with political goals as being a tactic available to the working class. After the frustrated 1905 Russian Revolution it also led to an assessment about the possibility of reproducing the Russian experience in Western countries. Yet in deeper terms, the debate involved an evaluation of what the relation between parties, trade unions, and mass movements should be—in other words, it encompassed the problems inherent in trying to achieve spontaneity and organization within a revolutionary process.
The mass strike debate was invigorated during 1905–06 as political life in Germany was simultaneously rocked by the impact of the Russian Revolution and by the local upheaval of class struggle manifested in a proliferation of economic strikes which tended to incorporate political demands too. In this context, a leftist faction of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) emerged, with Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, and Karl Liebknecht as its leaders. They battled not only against the revisionist current expressed by Bernstein but also against trade union leaders who were the more decisive opponents of mass strikes, as the 1905 trade union Congress of Cologne showed. Rosa Luxemburg then wrote “The Mass Strike”. Her essay’s main contributions to the discourse were the links she built between economic and political fights and the assertion that it was not indispensable to have a perfect and complete organization before launching a mass class strike, and that instead the mass action could help to forge new working-class institutions. This was especially true regarding the most precarious occupations, such as where female work or homeworking prevailed. This perspective is especially worth revisiting in the present moment as we witness a worldwide rebellion of the relative surplus population (expressions of this rebellion can be seen in the yellow vest protests in France, the Occupy movement in the US, or the unemployed movement in Argentina). Dogmatic left-wing parties and overly bureaucratic trade unions turn their backs on these political expressions of the working class. This mistake is particularly dangerous in Latin America, where the relative surplus population is larger than in other countries and has shown more radical political behaviour.
In my view, so-called “twenty-first century socialism” is merely bourgeois nationalist governments that have appropriated previous mass movements and established Bonapartist regimes with a personalist and authoritarian nature. The measures they have taken are reformist ones, thus under their rule the crisis of capitalism has only grown, which explains the election defeats and mass opposition they have faced. Here, once more, Rosa Luxemburg’s approach to the problems of spontaneity, democracy, mass action, reform, and revolution are a very valuable asset to sharpen our political analysis.

The Emergence of the Mass Strike Debate
The debate on the mass strike has its epicentre in Germany where, after the elimination of the anti-socialist laws in 1890, the SPD had significant successes in parliament. The slow accumulation of parliamentary seats was considered at the end of the nineteenth century to be the tried and tested tactic of Social Democracy. Socialists believed that Engels himself had supported this idea, as his prologue to the German edition of Marx’s The Class Struggles in France supposedly showed. The leadership of the Social Democrats saw in this text a sacrosanct endorsement of their political positions. Indeed, the prologue as it was understood supported the idea that socialists would attain power gradually through peaceful means. But in reality, this text was largely the product of Kautsky’s pen, who had retouched Engels’s piece of writing before publishing it. This unwanted collaboration angered Engels, who complained that his text was “arranged in such a way that I appear as a mild worshipper of legality at all costs”.
The leftist faction of the SPD, instead of confronting the prologue, limited themselves to affirming that it was misinterpreted. Just after the frustrated German Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg would attack the old Engels-Kautsky writing head-on, which constitutes one of her many merits.
The opponents of mass strikes saw in them a new tactic which was in complete opposition to the tried and tested one. Meanwhile, mass strike supporters at first presented the mass strike as a new weapon in the service of the old tactic: the mass strike was conceived as a mechanism through which the working class could win or defend its right to universal suffrage. This point of view was held by Alexander Parvus and Rosa Luxemburg. In this way, in the beginning, the mass strike does not appear as a drastic alternative to parliamentarism, but as a complement to it.
In the middle, centrists claimed that the workers had to join the SPD en masse before a general strike could be considered. They did not reject absolutely the idea of a mass strike, but they pointed towards many prerequisites. Parvus and Luxemburg argued that it was not necessary to wait for all workers to join the SPD before carrying out a mass strike.
Before the First Russian Revolution, Belgium appeared as the main laboratory for the mass strike. In fact, to a large extent the close relationship between parliamentarism and the mass strike coalesces around the basis of the Belgian example. The strikes carried out in Belgium in 1893 and 1902 in defence of universal suffrage were, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the quintessential example of the mass political strike to which all participants in the debate referred. With the strike of 1892, a significant expansion of suffrage had been achieved. But when the same tactic was attempted in 1902 to further expand those rights, the movement failed. After this defeat, many concluded that the mass strike was an inefficient tactic. For Luxemburg, on the contrary, the failure was due to the socialists’ commitment to the liberals, who determined the programme and the means of the struggle.
Luxemburg also concludes that “if such elementary, purely bourgeois parliamentary forms that do not in any way exceed the framework of the existing order, such as universal suffrage, cannot be conquered by peaceful means, then if the ruling classes appeal to brutal violence to resist a reform purely bourgeois and very natural in the capitalist state, all speculations about a peaceful parliamentary abolition of the power of the capitalist state, of class domination, are nothing more than a ridiculous and childish fantasy.”
In this way, the discussion on the mass strike is linked to the debate on reformism, but it does not imply that the acceptance of this instrument or its rejection divided reformists and revolutionaries. One section of revisionist thought, in which Bernstein participated, accepts the political general strike. In effect, this group conceives the measure as being a support for parliamentarism, provided that it is controlled with a firm hand within legal channels. Instead, the union leaders were the ones who opposed the mass strike most vigorously.
At the International Socialist Congress in Amsterdam in August 1904, the general strike was accepted as a means of struggle to win or defend the suffrage and it was distinguished from the anarchist general strike. Workers were also warned not to be tempted by the acratic propaganda that seeks to solve everything in a single strike movement, separating fellow workers from their daily work. The congress also rejected the absolute general strike as unfeasible. Despite this timid and limited approval of the mass strike, trade unionists strongly opposed this resolution.
In short, the mass strike appears at this time as being opposed to the anarchist general strike. While for anarchism the general strike constituted the antipode of parliamentary politics, for social democracy it was a complement to it. From this last perspective, the mass strike is understood as a means to conquer or defend political rights and, in that sense, revisionist sectors support it. The most reactionary position was held not by the most prominent revisionists, such as Bernstein, but by the union leaders. With a narrow corporate perspective, they demanded peace and quiet for their organizations to prosper. In contrast, consistent reformers like Bernstein understoood the need for forceful measures to defend or expand suffrage and thereby unleash the potential of the parliamentary tactic they advocate. For this reason, both Luxemburg and Bernstein were targets of union criticism.
It is necessary to clarify that the similarities between them end in the recognition of the usefulness of the general strike to complement parliamentary tactics. The difference lies elsewhere: the most radical faction of the SPD did not rule out the possibility that the events unleashed after a mass strike would lead to the seizure of power by the workers, especially if the bourgeois reaction promoted more radical actions. Hence the discussions between this faction—represented by Parvus, Mehring, and Luxemburg—and the leadership of the SPD, who wanted any possible strike to be confined within bourgeois legality.

The Mass Strike Debate after the 1905 Russian Revolution
In this particular period, external conditions such as the 1905 Russian Revolution converged with the internal situation of Germany. In the latter case, important strikes for economic purposes were combined with mobilizations for democratic demands. In Prussia, a census voting system was enacted that divided the population into three castes, favouring representation by the wealthiest sectors. The influence of the Russian Revolution of 1905 fuelled the agitation for universal suffrage. The possibility of resorting to the mass strike was widely discussed even outside social-democratic circles.
At the 1905 Social-Democratic Free Trade Union’s fifth congress, held in Cologne, Theodor Bömelburg, leader of the construction trade union and one of the most conservative unionists, spoke out against the anarchist general strike, against the mass strike, and against strikes in solidarity. He complained about the aforementioned resolution from the 1904 Amsterdam International Congress. Bömelburg based his rejection of the general strike on the need to ensure political calm for the union organizations to grow. In the end, the congress resolved to consider any attempt to fix a certain tactic through the mass political strike as disposable and strongly recommended that organized workers firmly reject any such attempts.
At the Jena Congress, also held in 1905, August Bebel himself, the highest leader of the social-democratic movement, gave a report on the mass political strike and proposed a resolution stating that, should the political rights of the German working class be curtailed, the party would appeal to the political general strike as a means of defence. In his report, Bebel harshly criticized the apoliticism of the unions. He defended the need to act in order to obtain political rights and to improve the conditions of the party in the parliamentary field. The Jena Congress declared that, in the case of an attack on the right to suffrage or on the right of association, it was the obligation of the working class to decisively use any means necessary to defend itself.
Luxemburg’s initial assessment of the Jena Congress was very positive. In a letter to Leo Jogiches, she affirmed that the congress had followed her intervention and that Jena had been a great victory for them. But, a few days later, she wrote to Henriette Rolland Holst regarding the limitations of the resolution. Luxemburg agreed with her Dutch comrade that the resolution was unilateral, since it tied the mass strike to parliamentarism, and at that time only considered it viable in case of needing to defend rights using force. In any case, Luxemburg’s strategy was to take the slogan which had been voted for in the congress, and give it a more radical interpretation in her propaganda activity.
After the Jena Congress, the Party leadership met in secret with the main trade union leaders and undertook not to call any strike without their consent. Although they later denied having made such an agreement, the Mannheim Congress resolved exactly what had been previously agreed: that it was up to the unions exclusively to decide on the mass strike.
Even at its most progressive moment, the SPD believed that the triumph of strikes by disorganized workers is impossible and flatly rejects solidarity strikes. The SPD conceived of strikes as being limited, peaceful acts, disconnected from other actions. As Carl Legien said, workers must not be seen in the street, they must not show themselves. In turn, the fear that the action of the masses generated in the party leadership was manifested. Not only Legien considered the mere discussion of the mass strike to be “dangerous”. He expressed a set of ideas deeply rooted in the ideology of the German social democracy, that Luxemburg’s text The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions came to discuss.

The Mass Strike and Luxemburg’s Contributions
Rosa Luxemburg wrote The Mass Strike for German readers, with the intention of intervening in the disputes that had agitated social democracy. She studied the Russian Revolution of 1905, concerned with learning tactical lessons which could be applied to the German movement.
Luxemburg questioned the anarchist vision of the general strike as being the only tool for access to power, but at the same time she argued that social democracy had fallen to the opposite extreme by erecting parliament as the only possible means of struggle. She argued that both those who most fervently oppose the mass strike (Bömelburg) as well as those who defend it as a limited means to sustain parliamentarism (Bernstein) shared an anarchist vision of the mass strike. This was an abstract and ahistorical perspective, namely the belief that a mass strike can be decreed or forbidden at will.
Moreover, Luxemburg affirmed that an anarchist conception also underlay the decisions of congresses that believed it is plausible to decree or prohibit a mass strike. Even so, despite the limitations of the Jena resolution, Luxemburg salvaged from this congress the fact that it had recognized that the German proletariat had much to learn from the Russian experience. Mass action did not represent a display of barbarism and political primitiveness, but a useful lesson for Western workers. For this reason, Luxemburg compared the respective situations of the Russian and German proletariat, showing that it was false that the material conditions of the whole German working class were superior to those of their Russian peers.
In this way, she took one of the assumptions of German social democracy and confronted it with the facts. In the same way, she proceeded with the prejudices regarding conflicts led by unorganized sectors: Luxemburg showed how these groups not only managed to triumph but how, as a result of their struggle, the trade unions were born. Thus, it was not necessary to first create a union in formal terms to only later be able to think of a measure of strength. A successful strike could give rise to organizational construction, attract the workers to the union, and force the bourgeoisie to recognize it.
Luxemburg opposed the definition—which a large part of the social-democratic movement then adhered to—of the mass strike as being a single act. For Luxemburg, the mass strike was the form of the revolutionary struggle, the movement of the proletarian masses, and the form in which their struggle manifested in the revolution.
It could be said that a period of mass strike is a revolutionary stage in which mass strikes follow one another by articulating economic and political demands, where particular local movements converge in large actions and then fragment again in a series of minor conflicts. This definition is similar to the one presented by Antonie Pannekoek. However, Luxemburg’s text maintains a certain dichotomy between, on the one hand, defining each of the strikes in the Russian process as a mass strike, and on the other, the conceptualization of the whole process as a “mass strike”. In turn, the mass strike understood in this latter definition is confused with the revolutionary process itself, pushing other possible tactical measures off the horizon or relegating them to the background.
Luxemburg hoped that a period of mass strikes could unfold in Germany. She imagined a scenario similar to the one Parvus had already outlined in his essays on the mass strike: from a movement which started in defence of parliamentary political rights, such a political and activist response can open up a period of broader struggles. In this way, the response in Germany to a coup against the elected government would not stop in its mere restoration. In Germany the struggle would be for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Therefore, trying in advance to limit the form and duration of a mass strike is equivalent to artificially limiting a means of struggle of the proletariat and castrating its potential. Ernest Mandel rightly points out that Luxemburg is the first to systematically raise the need for a change in tactics for the German social-democratic movement. Our perception of this merit is broadened by observing the stony conviction with which social democrats opposed such basic forms of struggle as the solidarity strike.
In summary, The Mass Strike represents a lucid response to the flagrant limitations and prejudices of the German social-democratic movement. In it, Rosa Luxemburg shows that the Western workers’ movement had lessons to learn from the Russian Revolution of 1905. The importance of mass strikes in this historical process was due not to Russian backwardness, but to the effectiveness of this form of struggle, both to obtain reforms and in a revolutionary process. This point, although perhaps obvious in Latin American countries like Argentina with a long tradition of general strikes, was not so clearly accepted or understood in the context of Germany at the turn of the twentieth century.

Applying Luxemburg’s Lessons to Latin America
First of all, I believe that Rosa Luxemburg’s concern for the involvement of the most varied proletarian layers in the class struggle and her concern to achieve their political unity acquires today even greater importance than it did in the times of the Second International. The working class has been fragmented. It is divided, on the one hand, between employed and unemployed workers. On the other hand, the employed workers themselves are fragmented between legally registered workers and those not registered and subjected to greater precarity. This fragmentation has driven various theorists to misleadingly consider different layers of workers as separate social classes, such as the theorizing around the precariat. The differences between the working conditions of legally registered workers and those who work outside of any legal protections is so abysmal that some authors consider the latter workers not as proletarians but as “slaves”. Ultimately, this error is based on confusing what a proletarian actually is with the characteristics of a worker from the countries central to the post-war golden period, which saw the heyday of Fordism and the welfare state.
In Latin America many left-wing political parties still reproduce the error of German social democracy that Luxemburg rightly criticized. They tend to fluctuate between parliamentarism and a short-term corporatism. They usually privilege actions among formally employed workers, especially among classic blue-collar workers such as in the automotive or metallurgical industries, over the most precarious workers. But the formal industrial workers are today a minority in numerical terms and in political terms no longer constitute part of the political vanguard. In their place, the most precarious sectors of the working class, as well as the unemployed, state workers, teachers, and doctors have shown greater dynamism.
At this point, it is worth remembering Rosa Luxemburg’s remark that the most institutionalized sectors of the workers’ movement are not always the most active in a revolutionary process. In fact, current evidence shows us the “dead weight” of the union bureaucracy within the movement.
Secondly, it is convenient to highlight Luxemburg’s fights against the conception of Marxism as a religion, as a crystallized dogma that should not be permanently updated on the basis of the study of new concrete situations. At this point, Rosa Luxemburg’s ability and cunning—to question and confront what was considered to be the tried and tested social-democratic tactic—is a political attitude worth revisiting.
However, highlighting and trying to replicate the critical and creative approach of Rosa Luxemburg cannot throw us towards the opposite tendency, one that in the name of criticizing Marxist dogmatism embraces postmodern and relativist dogmatism. Postmodern dogmatism denies the core beliefs of Luxemburg, those being: the belief in the possibility of a definitive knowledge of reality, Marxism as a science, and social revolution as a political objective.
From a postmodern theoretical framework, Luxemburg has been singled out as an inspiration for the new social movements. As we saw, one of the axes of The Mass Strike is to point out the pre-eminence of the party over partisan organizations that represent particular objectives of the class (be they unions or cooperative movements). On the other hand, Luxemburg always spoke of proletarian masses, including in this group unemployed or disorganized workers’ groups, home-based workers, and women workers. But she downplayed everything related to the participation of non-worker sectors in the revolution. For this reason, she was opposed to the agrarian reform that the Bolsheviks promoted in Russia. Along the same lines, in Reform or Revolution one of her arguments against Bernstein invoked the tendency towards the progressive loss of importance of the middle classes, so that the action of the party should not be directed at them, but at the proletariat. For all this, it is difficult to present Luxemburg as a precursor of social movements defined in general by their polyclassism and the particularism of her political objectives.
The attempt to transform Rosa Luxemburg’s thought into a foundation of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra, MST) implies an even more acute contradiction and a selective “cutting” of her work. Isabel Loureiro performs this operation. For this, she neglects that Luxemburg observed with satisfaction the process of proletarianization of peasants and that she was opposed to all kinds of agrarian reform. Even when she rethinks some of her initial criticisms of the Russian Revolution, she remains critical about the negative consequences of the land reform.
Luxemburg hoped that the proletarianization of rural producers would reinforce the contingents of the working class. The consciousness that she sought to develop is the consciousness of the working class—and not a peasant consciousness and culture. A movement that takes landless rural workers, i.e. proletarians (if they are landless they do not own the means of production), many of whom already live in cities, and proposes that they return to rural production as smallholders and develop a kind of peasant consciousness, is at the antipodes of the political goals of Luxemburg. Of course, even Luxemburg’s ideas could be discussed. But it is one thing to discuss an idea and quite another to misrepresent it in order to use it as an endorsement of completely different standpoints.
Even more problematic is the attempt to present Luxemburg as a source of inspiration or theoretical justification for the pragmatic options taken by the so-called “twenty-first century socialism”. This nomenclature for the Venezuelan governments does not obey a real analysis of their politics—which does not go beyond bourgeois nationalism—but rather is an attempt to legitimize them. Chavism in Venezuela—like other similar governments of the last decades in Latin America—can be characterized as Bonapartism. Bonapartism describes regimes that, in the face of conflicts between social forces in the region, emerge not to boost the revolutionary potential of the masses, but to contain it.
To fulfil this function, the initial language of Bonapartism is more or less radical, and certain concessions are made to the working masses. However, most of these concessions do not transcend the symbolic plane. Even concrete politics which are propagandized as being more radical do not transcend the classic economic measures of bourgeois nationalism, this being the nationalization of certain key companies. These nationalizations do not imply anything other than the collective control of the entire bourgeoisie, through the state, over some natural resource: oil, or gas. Once consolidated in power, the Bonapartists began a shift to the right and promoted fiscal adjustment measures and austerity plans, which generated discontent among the masses. This discontent was then handled in different ways by the various governments, which in some cases leads them to lose elections (as in the cases of the Workers’ Party in Brazil, and Kirchnerism in Argentina). Venezuela manages to retain power by reinforcing authoritarianism. In order to achieve control of the press, the repression of the popular mobilizations of sectors that previously supported Chavism is added. Most of the repression has not been directed towards the bourgeoisie, but towards the working class. This repression is largely carried out by para-police militias such as the FAES (Special Action Forces) that have been deployed against various popular mobilizations including that of teachers who are mobilizing for salary increases. In Venezuela there is no freedom to negotiate collective bargaining agreements and parties or groups that use the word “socialism” in their name are prohibited. There are labour and social leaders who have disappeared, such as Alcedo Mora, and others have been unjustly incarcerated without trial, such as in the case of the union leader Rodney Álvarez, who has been in prison for more than seven years without his trial having yet begun.
Atilio Boron and Marta Harnecker have been the main defenders of Chavism. Both have turned to Rosa Luxemburg to justify their positions. Harnecker quotes Luxemburg to point out that the path to socialism has not been laid out beforehand, and that the Venezuelan path is a possible path. However, acts of repression against socialist organizations and leaders is never a plausible path to socialism, much less one that Rosa Luxemburg subscribed to.
Boron, for his part, quotes Luxemburg’s writings where she criticizes the elimination of the democratic discussion of ideas in the Russian revolutionary field after 1917, to vindicate in contrast the Venezuelan model as a democratic path to socialism instead of a typical revolutionary scheme. However, Boron has not turned to Luxemburg in order to denounce the absence of democratic practices in Venezuela or the repression of socialist leaders.
These same authors, and others who respond to the same theoretical framework, shy away from the analysis of mass demonstrations, mass strikes, and other protests against Bonapartist governments in the region, immediately assuming that they respond to the Right. However, if any of these movements have been capitalized on by the Right in any country (Macrism in Argentina, Bolsonarism in Brazil) it is only because the Left, for fear of confronting the Bonapartist regimes has—with a few honourable exceptions—turned its back on the masses. Thus, if Boron and Harnecker would like to insist on their support of the Chavist regime, it would be clarifying that they refrain from appealing to Rosa Luxemburg to provide a base for their own political affiliation. Once more we are forced to say: hands off Rosa Luxemburg!