The struggle is a permanent struggle--in this Luxemburg agreed with Trotsky. With Marx, she concurs: revolutionaries continue their "education" as they continue the struggle. But the struggle cannot be manipulated by "leaders." It is not the task of the "leaders" to --anticipate the process of revolutionary development'" and seize power --as an enlightened and conspiratorial minority,'" writes Alex Callinicos, paraphrasing Marx (The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx).
What I am in favor of, in general, is that things should proceed slowly and thoroughly rather than hastily and superficially. It is an entire process of political schooling that must be gone through by the masses of our people, and that requires time. In such times of transition, patience is the duty of a political person and a leader, even if it is not a pleasant duty. And you too must practice this patience, but as calmly and cheerfully as possible"I know, dearest, all the things that disturb your peace, but I also know that you are above all a person with a strong sense of responsibility who gets consumer with worry at the thought of not being able to lend a hand when the labor seems so urgently necessary. It is precisely this false notion of yours that I would like to clear away" [It is] my strongest inner conviction"not to want to do too much; a few, calm, well-aimed steps--that's what is now necessary but also completely sufficient (from a letter to Clara Zetkin, [Sudende,] March 9, 1916, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg)
"Leaders" do not undermine a revolution!
But here are the leaders displaying, writes Luxemburg, a --quite cool contempt" for the Constituent Assembly, universal suffrage, freedom of press and assemblage--"the whole apparatus of the basic democratic liberties of the people which, taken together, constitutes the "right to self-determination' inside Russia"--but they hold the "right to self-determination of nations." Inside Russia, limitations on civil liberties, outside Russia, bordering nations have the "right to self-determination."
Luxemburg continues: Since socialism opposes "every form of oppression, including also that of one nation by another," what is the point of this slogan but "hallow, petty-bourgeois phraseology and humbug" ("The Russian Revolution"). Consequently, bordering nations sought the protection of German imperialism against "the Russian Revolution." What class resided over these nations, Luxemburg asks, and she answers: the bourgeois classes who "preferred the violent rule of Germany to national freedom." People divided into nations are best for the capitalist class.
Nations also justify military forces and, of course, imperialist aspirations.
Luxemburg charges that Lenin's position with regard to the separation of nations brought the "greatest confusion" into "socialist ranks and"actually destroyed the position of the proletariat in the boarder countries."
To be sure, in all these cases, it was really not the "people' who engaged in these reactionary policies, but only the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois class, who--in sharpest opposition to their own proletarian masses--perverted the "national right of self-determination' into an instrument of their counter-revolutionary class policies. .
Luxemburg also charges Lenin's construction of the Central Committee, complete with its language of rigidly and discipline, rules and regulations for the continuation of "the revolution"--of stifling of the peoples free participation of spontaneous or organized protests. Indeed, the stifling of the very freedoms the people fought to gain. [2]
And did we consider, she writes, "the destruction of 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, which have been outlawed for all opponents of the Soviet regime." Why are the "soviets" the "only true representation" offered to the laboring masses? Luxemburg asks. Look to the suits, the gentlemen leaders.
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