> I'm happy to say that socialist democracy is liberal.
[...]
> Limitation of rights in Russia, in retrospect, didn't
> turn out so well. In prospect some foresaw this. Rosa
> Luxemburg was right. So I'm not real hasty to say, oh
> yeah, one party state, censored press, death to
> enemies of the people -- just until we get the
> situation under control of course. Probably I'd end up
> with the left oppositionists who got shot by people
> like you......overall, I
> have a principled _political_ commitment to
> liberalism.
=========================================
If, as you say, you'd have been a left oppositionist, then you too would
have had anarchist blood on your hands and would have presided over the
repression of the Mensheviks and the liberal parties as well as the
reactionary forces with whom they were aligned. Being holier-than-thou is a
relative thing, isn't it? My early political formation was in the Trotskyist
movement, incidentally, and, despite my subsequent disagreements, I have a
lot of respect for the tradition and those who sacrificed for it, so I don't
appreciate your jibe.
In any case, none of us - including yourself - can know from our comfortable vantage point how we would have acted in those life-and-death circumstances. I suspect many of us, attracted by temperment and sharing the same broad historical understanding as the Bolsheviks, would have probably responded to the crisis and the possibilities of world revolution in the aftermath of WWI pretty much as they did. I include here the left Bolsheviks you admire such as Lunacharsky, Bukharin and Kollontai, as well as Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Stalin, and the rest of the leadership. All were responsible for the Red Terror. In retrospect and even at the time, most regretted having to implement it, but few would have pretended as you do that "a principled political commitment to liberalism" would have been the better way to respond to the White Terror. Hah!
Rosa Luxemburg, whom you draw on for support, was herself a victim of White Terror in Germany at the hands of the freikorps, abbetted by the social democratic government of Scheidemann, Ebert, and Noske. I must confess that were it possible for me to travel back in time and fully repress the civil liberties of those social democrats and paramilitaries responsible for the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht and their followers in order to save them, I would gladly do so.
Much as I admire RL for her courage, integrity, and political wisdom, I think she was wrong in her criticisms of the Bolshevik Revolution - in opposing the distribution of land to the peasantry, the need to recognize the right to national self-determination, and, most of all, in believing that the turbulent dual power situation which existed at the time between the Bolshevik-dominated Soviets and the Constituent Assembly, where the opponents of the working class Soviets were concentrated, could be resolved peacefully - through free elections and other democratic means. In fact, it could only be settled between left and right by force, and the haplessness of the Mensheviks and the other centre parties were testimony to that.
Shortly before she was killed, and in the context of the abortive Spartacist uprising in Germany, Luxemburg seemed to recognize her error when she argued against German leftists who were calling for coexistence between the Workers Councils' and a National Assembly. "Whoever pleads for a National Assembly is consciously or unconsciously depressing the revolution to the historical level of a bourgeois revolution", she wrote. "The alternatives before us today are not democracy and dictatorship. They are bourgeois democracy and socialist democracy. The dictatorship of the proletariat is democracy in a socialist sense."
After 70 years of what turned out to be a truncated historical experiment resulting from the failure of the Russian revolution to spread to the advanced capitalist west, Luxemburg was arguably right in anticipating the consequences of a party seizing power too prematurely and on too narrow a base. She proposed instead that the Bolsheviks bide their time and and use Russia's embryonic democratic insitututions to continue broadening their appeal. Who can say? It's equally or more likely they would have been repressed, as Allende was, following this advice more than a half century later.
The important point is that these differences between Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks were tactical ones, not differences of principle over liberal values, as you suppose. Of the Bolsheviks, she wrote: "Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the first, those who went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world; they are still the only ones up to now who can cry with Hutten: "I have dared!...In this sense theirs is the immortal historical service of having marched at the head of the international proletariat with the conquest of political power and the practical placing of the problems of the realisation of Socialism, and of having advanced mightily the settlement of the score between Capital and Labour in the entire world ... And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to "Bolshevism".
Ringing words, which never came to pass. But a far stronger and more authentic voice than the smug one you give to Luxemburg in attempting to claim her for "liberalism": "oh yeah, one party state, censored press, death to enemies of the people -- just until we get the situation under control of course." That's your voice, my friend, not hers.