Letters from Tomis

The ‘Subjective Factor’ in Marxist Theory: Will and Consciousness Unchained

What did Rosa Luxemburg mean by the “subjective factor,” and why did she insist on preparing it for revolution? In Marxist terms, the subjective factor refers to the human element in historical change – the consciousness, organization, and initiative of the working class – as opposed to the “objective” conditions of economics and crisis. For many socialists of her era, it was an article of faith that capitalism’s internal contradictions would inevitably lead to socialism, as if history were an automatic process guaranteed by iron laws of economics. One socialist fatalist even proclaimed that “the victory of our programme is as inevitable as the birth of the sun tomorrow,” a comforting creed that led its believers to a politics of passive waiting. Luxemburg would have none of this mechanical optimism. Her famous slogan – “socialism or barbarism” – was a direct challenge to the notion that progress was preordained. History, she argued, is not a serene march towards a foregone conclusion but a series of bifurcations where conscious action becomes decisive. Either the working class seizes the initiative to remake society, or the crisis of capitalism will degenerate into barbarism – war, reaction, and social collapse. In short, the future hinges on the subjective factor: the will, awareness, and readiness of the proletariat to fight for an alternative.

Luxemburg’s emphasis on the subjective factor put her at odds with both the revisionists and the rigid “orthodox” Marxists of her day. Eduard Bernstein – the leading revisionist – rejected Marx’s prediction of capitalist collapse and treated socialism as a mere ethical choice or gradual policy, “the movement is everything, the final goal nothing.” Luxemburg bristled at this abandonment of revolution. In her 1900 polemic Reform or Revolution, she argues that even reforms and trade-union struggles matter only insofar as they prepare the proletariat – “that is to say, create the subjective factor of the socialist transformation” – for the task of realizing socialism. Parliamentarism and unions have value, not because they automatically “socialize” capitalism as Bernstein fancied, but because they raise the awareness and organization of workers as a class. By engaging in daily struggles, workers learn the limits of reforms under capitalism and steel themselves for the conquest of power. Thus, for Luxemburg, the road to socialism runs through the subjective development of the proletariat – its class consciousness and fighting spirit – rather than any gradual smoothing-out of capitalism’s contradictions.

Against the determinists on the orthodox side, Luxemburg was equally unsparing. The chief theoretician of German Social Democracy, Karl Kautsky, had originally welcomed her ideas but remained wedded to a passive, wait-and-see strategy. He treated revolution as something that would arrive when objective conditions were ripe, discouraging any premature “adventurism.” His strategic wisdom, as later summarized in one critique, boiled down to: “Await your enemy’s mistake, prepare for zero hour by purely organizational means, be careful to leave the initiative to the enemy.” This flaccid centrism, essentially sidestepping initiative and the subjective factor, was anathema to Luxemburg. She regarded it as an abdication of leadership – “a poor leader and a pitiful army that only goes into battle when victory is already in the bag,” as she acidly remarked. History does not pamper the timid. If socialists simply “swim with the current” of events, she warned, they will be swept into disaster along with the old order. Preparing the subjective factor means sharpening the minds and wills of the oppressed in advance, so that when crises erupt the masses are ready to push for revolution rather than passively trust in “natural laws” to do the job . Luxemburg’s Marxism, then, restored the balance between structure and agency: objective conditions furnish the possibility of revolution, but only conscious mass action realizes it.

Mass Strike and Spontaneity: Luxemburg’s Vision of Mass Action

Nowhere did Luxemburg develop her theory of the subjective factor more vividly than in analyzing the Russian Revolution of 1905. That upheaval – a dress rehearsal for 1917 – was for her a living laboratory of mass action, spontaneity, and revolutionary consciousness. In 1906, she penned The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, drawing out the lessons of 1905 for the international workers’ movement. Her core argument was that the mass strike in Russia had not been “called” or engineered by any party directive; it was not an artificial product of premeditated tactics by socialist leaders, “but a natural historical phenomenon” erupting from the social conditions of the revolution. Against labor leaders who spoke of general strikes as if they were a technical weapon one could issue or withhold at will, Luxemburg insisted that such a view was utterly “abstract and unhistorical.” A revolution cannot be scheduled by bureaucratic fiat like a pocket-knife kept in one’s pocket “ready for any emergency.” Nor could it be forbidden by resolution, as the cautious German trade-union officials imagined. The 1905 mass strikes in Russia broke out “in spite of” the complete lack of official agitation for them – indeed, “in no country in the world was the mass strike so little ‘propagated’ or even discussed as in Russia.” Yet within days of the infamous Bloody Sunday massacre in St. Petersburg (January 22, 1905), a general strike wave swept the entire empire, from Warsaw to Siberia. This tidal wave of struggle was truly spontaneous in the sense that it arose organically from the outrage and aspirations of the workers themselves, not from any preconceived plan.

Crucially, however, “spontaneous” did not mean chaotic or purposeless. Luxemburg portrayed the 1905 mass strike movement as highly fluid, creative, and responsive – “a ceaselessly moving, changing sea of phenomena,” she wrote, one that wove together economic and political demands in novel ways. In her pamphlet she shows how political demonstrations for democratic rights could quickly give way to strikes for better wages and shorter hours, and vice versa, in a continuous dance of struggle. Far from being a “mistake” or sign of weakness, this interweaving of economic and political fights was, in Luxemburg’s eyes, the very motor of revolution. When the January 1905 general strike for political reform receded, it did not simply dissipate – it “changed, or rather broke, into economic action” across the country. Millions of workers, having been awakened by the initial clash with Tsarist absolutism, immediately turned to tackle the miserable conditions in their factories and fields. The result was a vast wave of strikes: workers threw out abusive foremen, struck for the eight-hour day , and rebelled against wage cuts and landlord tyranny. What appeared to some doctrinaires as a retreat (“the economic struggle” versus the “real” political fight) was in fact a natural and necessary evolution of the revolutionary process. Each economic battle drew new layers of the proletariat into active engagement, raised their confidence, and “made up for their previous neglect” by ventilating long-suppressed grievances. As Luxemburg put it, the “apparent ‘order’” of the old autocratic society had to be turned into “chaos” before a new order could emerge. The mass strikes achieved exactly that: they “undermined the soil of society,” upset all habitual relations, and brought dormant social forces into motion.

Luxemburg’s enthusiasm for this spontaneity was not the romantic infatuation critics alleged, but rooted in what the events revealed about revolutionary consciousness. She observed that the January mass strike “for the first time awoke class feeling and class-consciousness in millions upon millions [of workers] as if by an electric shock.”  Within a few explosive weeks, masses of downtrodden people, even backward “provincial” workers and peasants, had discovered in themselves a new political awareness. They “quite suddenly and sharply came to realise how intolerable” their social conditions were under capitalism, Luxemburg reports, and this realization immediately spurred them to action. Here is the subjective factor – class consciousness and resolve – coming into being in real time, through the experience of struggle. No amount of socialist lecturing or pamphleteering, she believed, could have achieved this feat in isolation. “All these conditions cannot be fulfilled by pamphlets and leaflets, but only by the living political school, by the fight and in the fight, in the continuous course of the revolution,” Luxemburg insists. The 1905 Revolution itself was the great educator. It taught workers more in a month of combat than years of propaganda could: it taught them their power, their enemies, and their own needs. In this way, mass action and the growth of consciousness were inseparable. The spontaneous strike movement was not a substitute for organization; it was the means by which the proletariat organized itself on a higher level. “The working class must educate itself, marshal its forces, and direct itself in the course of the revolutionary struggle,” Luxemburg wrote, for only thus can it overcome its atomization and forge itself into a mass force . The mass strike was the “natural means” to recruit, unite, and prepare the widest layers of workers for the battles to come. In other words, the mass strike was simultaneously a weapon and a school: it struck blows at the old regime while tempering the subjective factor – consciousness and organization – needed to ultimately overthrow that regime.

1905: Revolution as a Living Laboratory of the Subjective Factor

Rosa Luxemburg saw the Revolution of 1905 as a confirmation of her dialectical view of history – a view in which objective crisis and subjective agency interact to ignite social transformations. In classic Marxist terms, 1905 presented a ripe objective situation: Russia’s feudal absolutism was cracking under the strain of rapid capitalist development, military defeat by Japan, and popular discontent. But crucially, it took the initiative of the masses to transform that crisis into a revolutionary challenge. From the first protest that set things off – the march of January 22 in Petersburg – it was the direct intervention of hundreds of thousands of working people that propelled events forward . Luxemburg underscores that Social Democracy in Russia “had taken part in the revolution but had not ‘made’ it,” and even the party leaders often found themselves scrambling to catch up with the spontaneously unfolding movement. This was not a put-down of the party but a recognition that the driving force of revolution was the proletariat itself in motion. The Marxist parties could influence and guide, but they could not dictate the timetable or form of the struggle – reality was richer and more unruly than any schema.

One of Luxemburg’s most striking insights from 1905 was the way the proletariat assumed a leading role beyond what orthodox theory expected. Formally, the Russian Revolution of 1905 was a bourgeois-democratic revolution – its immediate aim was to abolish Tsarist absolutism and win a constitutional order like those of Western Europe. Classical Marxism had predicted that the bourgeoisie would lead such a democratic revolution. Yet in Russia, the capitalist class proved timorous and compromising. It was the industrial working class, concentrated in the factories of Petersburg, Warsaw, Łódź, and Moscow, that emerged as the backbone of the revolutionary upheaval. Luxemburg marveled at this paradox: “the bourgeois revolution [in Russia] will be carried out by a modern class-conscious proletariat,” she observed, at a time when the bourgeoisie itself had either recoiled in fear or lapsed into liberal half-measures. In the great revolutions of 1789 and 1848, workers and peasants had often been cannon fodder for liberal bourgeois leaders; in 1905, by contrast, the proletariat was in the vanguard, while the big bourgeoisie largely betrayed or opposed the revolution. This meant that even as Russian workers fought for “bourgeois” goals like a parliament or civil liberties, they did so with their own class interests and ultimate socialist aims in view. The class antagonism between labor and capital suffused the revolution from the start, giving it a dual character. As Luxemburg notes, the Russian proletariat entered the struggle “free from all illusions of bourgeois democracy, with a strongly developed consciousness of their own specific class interests.” So the fight for political freedom was from day one intertwined with the fight for economic justice – the eight-hour workday, the right to organize, an end to cruel exploitation. This convergence was not a hindrance but a strength: it ensured that the push for democracy did not fizzle into polite reform, but rather pressed onward with revolutionary energy on behalf of the toiling majority.

The 1905 “laboratory” thus vividly demonstrated why the subjective factor is decisive. Without the conscious intervention of the workers, the objective “revolutionary situation” in Russia might have led only to a watered-down reform or even reaction. Indeed, later in 1905 the Tsar conceded a parliament (the Duma) in the face of mass strikes – but when the workers’ movement ebbed, he swiftly undermined those concessions. Luxemburg was keenly aware of this dynamic. At the 1907 Congress of the Russian Social Democrats, as the tide of revolution receded, she cautioned against despair and against the illusion that victory was assured. Revolution is a risk, she argued, but a risk that must be taken. “I find that it is a poor leader and a pitiful army that only goes into battle when victory is already in the bag,” she declared, skewering the overly cautious mentality. The Russian proletariat had dared greatly in 1905 – and though that round ended in setback, it had transformed the workers themselves. Luxemburg noted that by faithfully executing their “historical duty” in 1905, the Russian workers had in fact acted as the vanguard of the global proletariat. They had shown workers everywhere the possibilities of mass action. The experience they gained – the “education” in organization and struggle  – would not be in vain. True, the 1905 Revolution did not immediately triumph; reaction followed, and some might say the effort was premature. But had the workers done nothing, had they passively waited for an automatically “certain” victory, history would have been robbed of this tremendous advance in consciousness. Luxemburg’s point was that even defeats can be invaluable, if they raise the subjective preparedness of the class. When the next revolutionary opportunity came in 1917, the lessons and spirit of 1905 would prove essential. In a real sense, those “dress rehearsal” battles were how the working class prepared itself for the decisive struggles later on.

Meanwhile, Luxemburg urged her German comrades to learn from the Russians’ bold example. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Germany was the most powerful workers’ party in the world, but it had grown timid and overly bureaucratic. Many German socialist leaders treated mass strikes and extra-parliamentary action as anathema – they were fixated on elections and slow organizational growth. Luxemburg’s Mass Strike pamphlet was a clarion call to break out of that conservatism. She stressed that the “fundamental change” wrought by the Russian events had opened a new phase for the international workers’ movement. If German Social Democracy truly aspired to lead a socialist revolution, it had to show “its power of adaptability to the new demands” of class struggle. In practical terms, this meant cultivating the initiative of the masses instead of fearing it. The SPD did pass a resolution in 1905 (at Jena) acknowledging mass strikes as a possible response if the ruling class attacked voting rights . But to Luxemburg this was a bare minimum, a timid nod. What she really wanted was for the party to embrace the spirit of 1905 – the willingness to launch “stormy political struggles” when circumstances called, even at risk of uncertainty. Kautsky and others demurred, worried about losing votes or provoking repression. By 1910, as Luxemburg later lamented, Kautsky had retreated to a purely electoral focus, placing the mass strike idea “on the backburner” in deference to parliamentary routine. This divergence foreshadowed a deeper split: when World War I broke out, the SPD majority lapsed into chauvinism and class collaboration, exactly the “barbarism” Luxemburg had foreseen if the subjective factor was neglected. In that fateful moment, Luxemburg’s worst warnings came true – the leaders who had preached patient gradualism proved impotent or treacherous when crisis hit, and the result was catastrophe.

Preparing the Subjective Factor: Conscious Revolution versus Mechanical Evolution

To Rosa Luxemburg, the moral of 1905 and the crises that followed was clear: one must actively prepare the subjective factor for revolution. It is not enough to wait for capitalism to collapse under its own weight or for some “perfect storm” to spontaneously produce socialism. The working class must make itself ready – politically, organizationally, spiritually – to seize historic opportunities. This preparation does not mean concocting a rigid plan for the day of revolution; it means fostering class consciousness and combativity continually, in advance of and through the struggle. “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves,” wrote Marx decades earlier, and Luxemburg’s whole career was an impassioned elaboration of that dictum. She fought against tendencies that reduced the proletariat to a passive spectator of history, whether it was Bernstein’s vision of peaceful evolution or Kautsky’s deterministic wait for “ripe” conditions. Both, in her view, relegated the proletariat from a protagonist to a patient. Against this, she upheld a revolutionary humanism: only through self-activity and self-education can the masses prepare to overturn the old order.

Why is the subjective factor so essential to “prepare?” Because without it, even the sharpest objective crisis will not lead to emancipation. Capitalism, left to itself, can indeed collapse – but it can also regenerate monstrosities. Barbarism was not a metaphor for Luxemburg; it was already reality in the slaughter of World War I, and she foresaw worse to come if socialism did not prevail. The difference between a crisis leading to revolutionary breakthrough or to reactionary horror lies in whether the proletariat has the consciousness and organization to act decisively. History is full of “failed” revolutions and missed chances where the objective conditions were ripe but the subjective factor lagged. Luxemburg herself pointed to the tragedy of the German Revolution of 1918–19: a profound revolutionary situation emerged at the end of the war, but the leadership and preparedness of the working class were insufficient to carry it through (a failure that cost Luxemburg her life). In contrast, the Bolsheviks in 1917 Russia provided an example – much admired by Luxemburg in some respects – of how having a resolute party and class consciousness can turn a crisis (the First World War, the collapse of Tsardom) into a successful revolution. The timing and initiative of a far-sighted leadership can help the masses take power when the moment is right . Conversely, hesitation or disorganization can squander even a favorable situation, delaying liberation for decades. Preparing the subjective factor is thus a matter of life and death for any revolutionary movement.

For Luxemburg, preparing the subjective factor did not mean blithely rushing into battle at any moment; it meant diligently building up the class capacity to fight. This happens on multiple levels. It involves spreading political education – not abstract dogma, but education through struggle, through encouraging workers to fight for their interests and draw broader lessons. It involves organizational work – creating democratic structures (parties, unions, councils) that can coordinate mass actions and formulate clear demands. It involves cultivating the will to change society – breaking the habit of submission and instilling confidence in the proletariat’s own strength. Rosa Luxemburg believed that revolutionary consciousness develops dialectically: through a continual interplay of action and reflection. Every partial struggle – even for a wage increase or against a single injustice – could become a “living political school” for workers, so long as socialists linked these fights to the broader vision of emancipation. Therefore, rather than dismiss “reforms” or economic struggles, Luxemburg embraced them as training grounds for the coming revolution, provided one never lost sight of the final goal. In her eloquent formulation, it is the growth of the workers’ conscious understanding and organization that bridges the gap between daily struggles and the ultimate socialist revolution. This is precisely the subjective factor in motion: the transformation of the proletariat from a class “in itself” (defined by its conditions) to a class “for itself” (aware of its mission). Preparing it means accelerating this transformation.

Luxemburg’s focus on the subjective factor also meant championing democracy and freedom within the working-class movement. Unlike some later authoritarians, she did not think the revolutionary will could be generated by diktat from above. It had to be nurtured by open debate, by what she called “the freedom of the dissenters,” and by the active participation of the masses in deciding their course. Stifling internal dissent, she warned, would “cut off the living sources of all spiritual riches and progress,” crippling the movement’s intellectual life. In this, too, we hear Hitchens-like notes of fierce libertarian spirit: a revolt must not devour the very freedom of thought that gives it energy. The subjective factor flourishes in an atmosphere of democracy – workers learning to think and act for themselves – and it withers under authoritarian tutelage. Luxemburg famously rebuked the Bolsheviks on this point, insisting that “freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently.” Her polemical barbs were always aimed at invigorating the conscious agency of the rank-and-file, not at creating blind obedience.

Finally, the reason the subjective factor must be prepared beforehand is because history will not wait. By the time an objective crisis hits – a war, an economic collapse, a revolutionary uprising – it is too late to improvise a class consciousness that has not been cultivated. One cannot snap one’s fingers and produce, overnight, the kind of steeled, enlightened, and unified proletariat that can remake the world. Luxemburg understood this with crystal clarity. “It is no longer a question of waiting for the fruit to ‘ripen’… but of acting before it is too late,” she insists, for if the workers fail to act, the “other branch of the alternative” is a plunge into darkness. Her words ring out as both challenge and warning. The subjective factor is nothing mystical – it is simply ourselves, our class, our consciousness. To prepare it means to take responsibility for our own future. Rosa Luxemburg’s legacy, forged in the fires of 1905, is the insistence that we are the authors of the next chapter of history. If we have the courage and clarity to act, we may yet see the socialist dawn; if not, we risk descending into night. As she stood at the crossroads of the early 20th century, Luxemburg bequeathed to us an image of history as “an open process,” where at each turning the flame of human will can light the way to a new world. That flame – the subjective factor – is the spark we must keep alive, for on it the fate of civilization hangs.