Lenin, continues Luxemburg, declares that the bourgeois state is "an instrument of oppression of the working class; the socialist state, of the bourgeoisie." But this is too simple. Why would the bourgeois rule have any need of political training and education? For the proletarian dictatorship, on the other hand, "political training and education" is the "life element, the very air without which it is not able to exist."
Trotsky, she continues, gives praise to the "laboring masses" for accumulating, "in short time," a considerable amount of political experience while advancing "quickly from one state to another of their development." But the leadership has "blocked up the fountain of political experience and the source of this rising development by their suppression of public life!"
Whose narrative is this?
The giant steps taken by the Bolsheviks necessitated "intensive" political training not Lenin and Trotsky's "ready-made" formula for the socialist transformation, Luxemburg exclaims. Was the Bolsheviks revolution for the elites to pursue power at the expense of those who fought in the revolution?
Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party--however numerous they may be--is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.
Luxemburg continues: The socialist system of society is "an historic produce," born out of its own experiences, "born in the course of its realization." Its development is living history, Luxemburg exclaims. It is of an "organic nature." It always "has a fine habit," she writes, of producing along with any real social need "the means to its satisfaction along with the task simultaneously the solution."
Socialism cannot be decreed from above! "The whole mass of the people must take part in it. Otherwise, socialism," Luxemburg argues, "will be decreed from behind a few official desks by a dozen intellectuals." Do not think that Lenin does not know that socialism demands "a complete spiritual transformation of the masses degraded by centuries of bourgeois class rule." Overseers in the factories, "draconic penalties," rule by terror are "but palliatives." And rule by terror demoralizes!
When the rights of the people are "eliminated," asks Luxemburg, "what really remains?"
Luxemburg concludes: "The basic error of the Lenin-Trotsky theory is that they, too, just like Kautsky, oppose dictatorship to democracy. That is, they oppose the dictatorship of the proletariat and prefer the democracy of the bourgeois society. The favored "dictatorship" for Lenin and Trotsky is modeled on the "dictatorship of the bourgeois." Once again, only the chosen few shall rule! The 1%--not the 99%!
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