Writings of Rosa Luxemburg

Writings of Rosa Luxemburg
(Coordinator Comment)

Rosa Luxemburg, leader of the revolutionary struggles in Germany, was in prison when the Russian Revolution took place. Her analysis of it, written from prison only a few months before she was assassinated by German authorities, has always been recognized as a very important revolutionary statement.

In the second and third chapters, she deals with important issues of land reform and nationalism that any revolution will have to face.

Luxemburg demands that the revolution promote representative democracy and in chapter four she criticizes Lenin and Trotsky for having abolished the elected Constituent Assembly immediately after the October Revolution: "To be sure, every democratic institution has its limits and shortcomings, things which it doubtless shares with all other human institutions. But 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 alone can come 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." And in the following chapter she expands her criticism to include the right to vote and freedom of the press.

Dictatorship of the proletariat? Yes, says Luxemburg in her final chapter, "but this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination, ... this dictatorship must be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class -- that is, it must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses; it must be under their direct influence, subjected to the control of complete public activity; it must arise out of the growing political training of the mass of the people."

In summary, Rosa Luxemburg makes a strong case for the principles of a culture of peace: education, democratic participation, transparency and the free flow of information. Without these the Soviet Union fell into the trap of a socialist culture of war which led eventually to its bankruptcy and death.