Rosa Luexmburg.

[white_wolf]

Has anyone her read anything about her works or ideas and how they stand in relation to the more well known people of the era such as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, etc. I've heard she proposed a more democratic form of socialism than the form that came about in the USSR, but I'm not sure. So any opinions on her?

[TBF]

1. I don't know much about Rosa - but there is a new

collection of her letters out that I'm sure would shed light:


The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg

Georg Adler, Peter Hudis, and Annelies Laschitza, editors

London: Verso, 2011

609 pages • $39.95

REVIEW by HELEN SCOTT

THE LETTERS of Rosa Luxemburg is the first installment of a valuable ongoing endeavor to publish all her collected works in English; it makes available a wealth of letters, including many that were not previously available in English.

The letters on their own do not provide a complete account of Luxemburg’s life and politics. Many of the most personal were clearly never intended to be made public, and this window in to Luxemburg’s inner world has led some reviewers to make outlandish claims about her relationships and motivations. The picture is distorted because Luxemburg was most prolific when sedentary—during periods of political reaction and of course during the enforced isolation and inactivity of her many years in prison. Luxemburg’s most important achievements—her involvement in the “hurly-burly” of the socialist movement, as she puts it, and the periods of intense creativity when she developed her most lasting theoretical contributions—appear “off stage.” This partly explains why Margaretha von Trotta’s heartbreaking film, “Rosa Luxemburg,” which draws heavily on the letters, portrays a contemplative, lonely, sensitive woman with a tendency towards depression, whose bleak life culminates in tragedy.

When imprisoned, and facing counter-revolutionary violence, Luxemburg was sometimes lonely, isolated, and despairing. But her public speeches, articles, and books—and accounts from her contemporaries—suggest that the tremendous revolutionary energy and resilience displayed in many of the other letters were more definitive characteristics. Read alongside the biographies and, more importantly, Luxemburg’s own publications, the Letters provide invaluable insights into the personal development of this great revolutionary.

More here: http://www.isreview.org/issues/81/featrev-luxemburg.shtml

[shakai shugi]

2. Excellent Reply

Think you for the information in your reply. I too have being looking for some more information on Rosa.

Thank you.

[joshcryer]

3. She stongly condemned Lenin and Trotsky's closure of the Constituent Assembly.

The Bolsheviks are in part responsible for the fact that the military defeat was transformed into the collapse and breakdown of Russia. Moreover, the Bolsheviks themselves have, to a great extent, sharpened the objective difficulties of this situation by a slogan which they placed in the foreground of their policies: the so-called right of self-determination of peoples, or - something which was really implicit in this slogan - the slogan of the disintegration of Russia.

The formula of the right of the various nationalities of the Russian Empire to determine their fate independently, "even to the point of the right of governmental separation from Russia," was proclaimed again with doctrinaire obstinacy as a special battle cry of Lenin and his comrades, during their opposition against Miliukovist, and then Kerenskyan imperialism. It also constituted the axis of their inner policy after the October Revolution. And it constituted the entire platform of the Bolsheviks at Brest-Litovsk, all they had to oppose to the display of force by German imperialism.

One is immediately struck with the obstinacy and rigid consistency with which Lenin and his comrades stuck to this slogan, a slogan which is in sharp contradiction to their other wise outspoken centralism in politics as well as to the attitude they have assumed toward other democratic principles. While they showed a quite cool contempt for the Constitutuent Assembly, universal suffrage, freedom of press and assembly, in short, for the whole apparatus of the basic democratic liberties of the people which, taken all together, constituted the "right of self-determination" inside Russia, they treated the right of self-determination of peoples as a jewel of democratic policy for the sake of which all practical considerations of real criticism had to be stilled. While they did not permit themselves to be imposed upon in the slightest by the plebiscite for the Constituent Assembly in Russia, a plebiscite on the basis of the most democratic suffrage in the world, carried out in the full freedom of a popular republic, and while they simply declared this plebiscite null and void on the basis of a very sober, critical evaluation of its results, still at Brest they championed the "popular vote" of the foreign nationalities of Russia on the question of which land they wanted to belong to, as the true palladium of all freedom and democracy, the unadulterated quintessence of the will of the people, and as the court of last resort in questions of the political fate of nations.

The contradiction that is so obvious here is all the harder to understand since the democratic forms of political life in each land, as we shall see, actually involve the most valuable and even indispensable foundations of socialist policy, whereas the famous "right of self-determination of nations" is nothing but hollow, bourgeois phraseology and humbug.

http://libcom.org/library/nationalities-question-in-the-russian-revolution-luxemburg

She did not propose a democratic form of socialism so much she condemned the overt rejection of democracy by the Vanguard.

At the Congress Trotsky rounded on the Workers' Opposition:

"They have come out with dangerous slogans. They have made a fetish of democratic principles. They have placed the workers' right to elect representatives above the Party. As if the Party were not entitled to assert its dictatorship even if that dictatorship temporarily clashed with the passing moods of the workers' democracy!"

Trotsky spoke of the "revolutionary historical birthright of the Party":

"The Party is obliged to maintain its dictatorship...regardless of temporary vacillations even in the working class...The dictatorship does not base itself at every given moment on the formal principle of a workers' democracy..."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/brinton/1970/workers-control/06.htm#h1

[Fantastic Anarchist]

4. She became disillusioned with Soviet style communism ...

... after the Bolsheviks turned reactionary (which was happening during the October Revolution).