The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism?

by Rosa Luxemburg

Book Overview

Rosa Luxemburg (1870-1919), one of the most remarkable and controversial personalities in the Marxist movement, opposes in this book not the Bolshevik's quest for power but the way they took power, the way they held power, the way they justified themselves in doing both. In the light of the soviet collapse her penetrating but not unsympathetic criticism becomes a grave indictment and her fears for the Communists uncannily prophetic of events to come...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0472060570
• ISBN13: 9780472060573
• Release Date: September 1961
• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.4" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Important Work on Democracy, Socialism and Lenin

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