One of the problems with evaluating Luxemburg's position before her death in January 1919 is that the jumble of contemporary events often intersected with her existing writings on the course and direction of a proletarian revolution. Thus tactical moves and reactions after the outbreak of the November Revolution gain an ideological gloss while her own writings and exhortations during this period had an eye towards immediate events. This intellectual ouroboros is tangled and it is easy for a historian of the November Revolution to fall down a rabbit hole of competing theory.

Without getting too much into the weeds of Luxemburg's theories, her championship of democracy at first seems at odds with her strident advocacy of the need for a proletarian revolution and the need to triumph over capitalism. This is not as contradictory though as it first appears. Even though she shared some ideological affinities with Lenin, one point of departure between the two revolutionaries was over the role of the party in the revolution. over the course of 1917-18, it was becoming clear that Lenin's favored a more central organization by a smallish party apparatus. Lenin, it should be stressed, was more than capable of making tactical compromises and fit ideology to emergent conditions, and both the onset of civil war and the continued problem of the Germans made a central organization a greater likelihood for the Bolsheviks. For Luxemburg, centralization not only opened up the likelihood of dictatorship by a leadership clique, but more importantly denuded the potential for a proletariat revolution to reach the proletariat. This is why both Luxemburg and Liebknecht championed democracy over a vanguardist revolution in late-1918. A mass-party for her had the greatest potential to reach the disaffected German proletariat and give shape to a revolution. The party and its leadership would not function as an executive, but rather as an agitator that could make the proletariat step outside its halo and destroy the capitalist order. In her view, isolated pockets of revolution could not succeed and create a truly mass movement.

Luxemburg's championship of a democratic road to communism was not really an abandonment or dilution of her rather strident brand of Marxism. She still unwilling to compromise with SPD democrats and both the KPD and the Spartacists had an intransigence and hostility towards bourgeois democracy. In more than a few ways, her support for liberal democracy was a way of using the tools of bourgeois society against it. Luxemburg's critique of the Bolsheviks' centralizing tendencies assumed an air of prophecy after Stalin, but this obscures some of her own commitment to an immediate radical restructuring of German society. This puts her opposition to the Bolsheviks in late-1918, if it can be termed opposition, into sharper relief. It is not that Luxemburg was against communism, but rather that she championed a different sort of communism than that which was emerging in Russia.

Sources

Epstein, Catherine. The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and Their Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Weitz, Eric D. Creating German Communism, 1890-1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997.

White, James D. Lenin: The Practice and Theory of Revolution. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001.