Luxemburg witnessed the capitulation of the leaders in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)--opportunistic leaders, she called them, who revised Marxism to advance to powerful, controlling positions, and, who, as opportunists, betrayed the struggle of the poor and working class.
As a thinker, Rosa Luxemburg was greatly feared by the leadership in Germany. When Luxemburg turned her attention to the Russia revolution and its leaders, she was consistent in her criticism because consist in her convictions. No compromise! The struggle is for and by the people! The government is for and by the people! A government that decrees that the people have no right to protest injustice is not a government for and by the people! A government that even permits injustice to flourish is not a peoples' democratic government!
Written while Luxemburg was serving a prison term for her opposition to World War I, the essay, "The Russian Revolution," never published in her lifetime, [1] is her plea for the creation of a "revolutionary democracy after the seizure of power" (The Rosa Luxemburg Reader). It is critical of the Bolshevik leadership for their establishment of a Central Committee resulting in a vanguard of leaders after what she describes as the "mightiest event of the world war,"--the peoples' revolution ("The Russian Revolution").
"Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat" (Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program , 1875)--not a dictatorship of the vanguard.
Against a Karl Kautsky counter-revolution in the rear of the peoples' struggle in Russia, Luxemburg writes, one that influences the Mensheviks' "utopian and fundamentally reactionary character" and its determination to cling to "a coalition with the bourgeois liberals," Lenin's party is the "only one in Russia which grasped the true interest of the revolution in that first period." His party, she continues, "really carried on a socialist policy" ("The Russian Revolution").
It is this which makes clear, too, why it was that the Bolsheviks, though they were at the beginning of the revolution a persecuted, slandered and hunted minority attacked on all sides, arrived within the shortest time to the head of the revolution and were able to bring under their banner all the genuine masses of the people: the urban proletariat, the army, the peasants, as well as the revolutionary elements of democracy, the left wing of the Socialist-Revolutionaries.
During the internal scrabble between fractions, she continues, the Russian revolution continues on, advancing at a rapid, "stormy and resolute tempo," breaking down "all barriers with an iron hand," and placing its "goals ever farther ahead."
Luxemburg reiterates: "The party of Lenin was the only one which grasped the mandate and duty of a truly revolutionary party and which, by the slogan--"All power in the hands of the proletariat and peasantry'--insured the continued development of the revolution." And, in turn, the Bolsheviks won the first goal: the majority of the protesters "became a "majority'" of the citizenry. The Bolsheviks, she explains, offered a "far-reaching revolutionary program"--"a dictatorship of the proletariat for the purposes of realizing socialism."
Whatever a party could offer of courage, revolutionary far-slightness and consistency in an historic hour, Lenin, Trotsky and the other comrades have given in good measure.
Luxemburg continues: "Their October uprising was not only the actual salivation of the Russian Revolution, it was also the salvation of the honor of international socialism."
However---there is a bottom line with Rosa Luxemburg!
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
