{"id":13258,"date":"2024-08-28T10:11:20","date_gmt":"2024-08-28T14:11:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/?p=13258"},"modified":"2024-08-31T10:03:20","modified_gmt":"2024-08-31T14:03:20","slug":"luxemburgs-lessons-and-the-roots-of-stalinism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2024\/08\/luxemburgs-lessons-and-the-roots-of-stalinism\/","title":{"rendered":"Luxemburg\u2019s lessons and the roots of Stalinism"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span> thank Helen Scott and Paul Le Blanc for their intervention<\/a>. It is an opportunity for me to clarify my stance, address my critics\u2019 concerns, while once again setting matters in a broader historical perspective.<\/p>\n

Early in 1922 Trotsky wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In the course of these last few years, all of us have had to clear up many things in our own minds and to learn a great deal under the direct blows of events. Rosa Luxemburg accomplished this ideological work more slowly than others because she had to observe events from the side lines, from the pits of German prisons.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My essay<\/a> was about just what, exactly, Luxemburg learned from the German Revolution, from the moment she was freed from prison on November 9, to her heinous murder on January 15,1919, a 64-day period in which she quickly accomplished much \u2018ideological work\u2013work that implicitly<\/em> brought her closer to Bolshevism.<\/p>\n

In a comparative study of her writings on the Russian Revolution in the summer of 1918, on the one hand, and her unknown (to the Anglophone world) writings on German Revolution, appearing six months later, on the other\u2013I tracked the evolution in Luxemburg\u2019s thinking.\u00a0 I showed how Luxemburg developed<\/em> her views on the relationship between socialism, revolution and democracy, decisively breaking with Kautskyism and the parliamentary road to socialism under a bourgeois-democratic state, in favor of a transition to socialism under the aegis of a workers\u2019 state, represented in Russia by the soviet or, in Germany, by workers\u2019 councils\u2013a workers\u2019 state in embryonic form.<\/p>\n

But Le Blanc and Scott apparently think my argument is not worthy of consideration since they say nothing about it. If that is the case, then Luxemburg\u2019s On the Russian Revolution<\/em>, which they copiously cite, remains Luxemburg\u2019s and my critics\u2019 last word on that topic, and the newly translated material, which they do not cite, adds nothing new.<\/p>\n

Instead, Scott and Le Blanc veer off-topic, focusing on the first, introductory paragraphs of my piece where I very briefly called into question the traditional interpretation, (ostensibly) drawn from Trotsky\u2019s writings, and which my critics share.\u00a0 Specifically, I said many on the Left thought Lenin\u2019s partisans\u2013and here is the quote from the editors\u2013\u201chelped create precedents and preconditions for what became known as Stalinism.\u201d\u00a0 My critics are dismayed because they think I am \u201cattacking\u201d Lenin. Instead they counterpose their position, namely, that<\/p>\n

Luxemburg and Lenin were close comrades in the revolutionary Marxist wing of international socialism throughout their politically active lives, including during the period of the Bolshevik revolution.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The editors\u2019 counter-position is a non-sequitur. Maybe I expressed myself clumsily, but I never contested the editors\u2019 mundane truth that Lenin and Luxemburg were \u201cclose comrades\u201d fighting for a common cause. On the contrary, I specified, in concrete political terms, just how Luxemburg revised and updated her views. I would even venture to hypothesize this: Had Luxemburg escaped her assassins and found temporary refuge in Moscow, there is little doubt in my mind that Lenin would have immediately parachuted Luxemburg into the Russian Politburo, as he had done with Trotsky.\u00a0 Indeed, Luxemburg was probably the ideal candidate to assume the presidency of the Third International. Certainly, once freed she would not have limited herself to mere \u2018critical support\u2019 for the Bolsheviks, pleadingly voiced \u2018from the outside\u2019.<\/p>\n

What I did<\/em> contest in my opening remarks was the conventional interpretation, which Le Blanc and Scott espouse, locating the \u2018origins\u2019 of Stalinism in the ostensibly anti-democratic \u201cemergency measures\u201d taken in Lenin\u2019s time, measures that set \u201cprecedents and preconditions\u201d promoting the victory of Stalinism, which I identify with forced collectivization and forced industrialization, and not mere political dictatorship to which Stalinism is often reduced. Depending on who you ask, people will posit a proto-Stalinism by mentioning the ruthless repression of the Kronstadt revolt in 1921, or the ban on factions in the same year, or the formation of the Cheka in the summer of 1918, or the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, or the suppression of the Left Revolutionaries, or some other Bolshevik infringement on democracy, understood conventionally as rule of the majority. \u00a0 But the majority are made up of peasants, not workers. And there\u2019s the rub.<\/p>\n