I never said that Luxemburg was a liberal, just that she was right about the direction the Russian revolution was taking. I never presumed to compare my eloquence with hers. I'm not a "beautiful soul" who disdains to make moral compromises, but I repeat that at present I do not think it is useful to think about who we would shoot if we had power. Please explain why you think otherwise. Or don't, actually, please; I think it is positively harmful to meditate on that unlikely eventuality. If being snide about defenders of terror makes me smug, call me smug. I don't mind. Sticks and stones are for the cellars of the Lubyanaka. My use of "left oppositionist" was misleading, I didn't mean to say I identified with the Bolshevik left opposition. Right now the compromises on the table for us involve how much to cooperate with the Democrats, who have lots of blood on their hands, as you will no doubt remind me in excessively tedious detail, as well as the any Republicans who still care about the Bill of Rights.
--- Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> Andie writes:
>
> > 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.
>
>
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