In her critique of the Russian Revolution, Luxemburg writes of the challenge facing the working class movement and warns of the resulting totalitarian state that usurps the momentum and struggle of the people to bring about an end to oppression and the staggering discrepancy between those who rip power from the people and the people themselves.
In Germany under Bismarck, she writes, the Anti-Socialist Law intended "only to place the working class beyond the bounds of the constitution," and the government did this, Luxemburg continues, "in a highly developed bourgeois society where class antagonisms had been laid bare and fully exposed in parlimentarism" ("Organizational"). Whereas in Russian, she writes, "social democracy must be created in the absence of the direct political domination of the bourgeoisie."
Luxemburg continues:
For the social democratic movement even organization, as distinct from the earlier utopian experiments of socialism, is viewed not as an artificial product of propaganda but as a historical product of class struggle, to which social democracy merely brings political consciousness. ("Organizational")
In Russia, she argues, we have the development of centralism, and she points to Comrade Lenin's One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, in which he warns against "ultracentralism" of the Blanquist but nonetheless, defends a form of centralism that leads to the Central Committee, which has, as Luxemburg explains, "the right to organize all the local committees of the party and thus also to determine the membership of every individual Russian local organization"to provide them with a ready-made local statue, to dissolve and reconstitute them by fiat and hence also to exert indirect influence on the composition of the highest party organ, the congress." Thus, "the Central Committee emerges as the real active nucleus of the party; all the remaining organizations are merely its executive instruments."
Organization with a socialist perspective is "radically different," Luxemburg argues, in that it "operates within the dialectical contradiction that here it is only in the struggle itself that the proletarian army is itself recruited and only in the struggle that it becomes conscious of the purpose of the struggle."
Luxemburg continues:
From this it follows that social democratic centralization cannot be based either on blind obedience or on the mechanical submission of the party's militants to their central authority and further, that an impenetrable wall can never be erected between the nucleus of the class conscious proletariat that is already organized into tightly knit party cadres and those in the surrounding stratum who have already been caught up in the class struggle and are in the process of developing class consciousness.
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