The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism? (Ann Arbor Paperbacks) |  | Author: Rosa Luxemburg
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Category: Book
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Sales Rank: 452927
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 120
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.4 x 0.5
ISBN: 0472060570
Dewey Decimal Number: 947.0841
EAN: 9780472060573
ASIN: 0472060570
Publication Date: November 15, 1961
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Product Description
A controversial Marxist, Luxemburg here opposes the Bolsheviks' quest for power
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Important Work on Democracy, Socialism and Lenin November 27, 2005
An excellent book from a German Socialist and contemporary of Lenin and Trotsky. And in this she reflects some criticism against Lenin in comparison to Marxism and the question of censorship, the non-democratic take over of the Putsch and, the ideas of centralism verses opportunism and other activities.
"Lenin has dispersed by force of arms a democratically elected Constituent Assembly, proclaiming instead a "Government of the Workers' and Soldiers Councils," in actual fact, a government of his party." p. 17 Rosa tried to oppose their breaking of democratic faith. She rejected the idea of dictatorship of the Proletariat endorsing a more democratic and extension of freedom to the widest possible number of people. No party had a monopoly of wisdom.
"The true dialectic of revolutions, stands the wisdom of parliamentary roles on its head; not through a majority to revolutionary tactics, but through revolutionary tactics to a majority - that is the way the road runs." p. 39 and speaks of the October revolution as the salvation of the the honor the international revolution.. (p 40).
In this she comments on the land policies of transference from the bourgeois to the peasants, and the nationalities question, "the famous right to self determination of nations is nothing but hollow, petty-bourgeois phraseology and humbug." p. 49 "It is not really people who engaged in these reactionary policies but on the bourgeois and petty bourgeois classes who perverted the national right of self determination into an instrument of their country revolutionary classes. p. 50 but in a class society, each class strives to determine itself in a different fashion with so many variations, which makes it impossible to decide by a popular vote. And to use this instead of the international spirit, this created counter revolutions with bourgeois take overs.
The peasants lack of understanding brought them to vote for Kerensky and Avksentiev, a new constituent assembly was formed and Rosa questions the mechanism of democratic institutions. which contains rigid and schematic conceptions contradicted by historical experience in that here should be more democratic activity after the elections as the votes themselves do not represent the highest voice of majority to sit quiet in between, as the "living fluid of the popular mood continuously flows around the representative bodies, penetrates them and guides them. " p. 60 This should not be renounced in favor of rigid schemes of party emblems and tickets in the very midst of revolution. "The remedy which Trotsky and Lenin have found,the elimination of democracy as such, is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure; for it stops up the very living source from which along can come the correction of all the innate shortcomings of social institutions. that source is the active, untrammeled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people." p. 62
And in suffrage, "the dictatorship of Lenin and Trotsky represent the right to vote is granted only to those who live by their own labor and is denied to every else. . . this basis of a general obligation to labor, is a quiet incomprehensible measure." p. 64 "In reality, broad and growing sections of the petty bourgeoisie and proletariat, for whom the economic mechanism provides no means of exercising the obligation to work, are rendered politically without any rights, " p. 65 "The most important democratic guarantees of a healthy public life and of the political activity of the laboring masses; freedom of the press, the rights of association and assembly have been outlawed for all opponents of the Soviet regime. These attacks on democratic rights, the arguments of Trotsky cited above, on the cumbersome nature of democratic electoral bodies, are far from satisfactory. It is a well known and indisputable fact that without a free and untrammeled press, without the unlimited right of association and assemblage, the rule of the broad mass of the people is entirely unthinkable." p. 67
"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. Not because of any fanatical concept of "justice" but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when "freedom" becomes a special privilege." p. 69
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