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       Mujeres Libres/Free Women on the Russian Revolutions of 1917
       We support feminism, democratic socialism, and human rights
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Mujeres Libres/Free Women is a revolutionary sisterhood of women
coming from the traditions of inclusive radical feminism, democratic
socialist feminism, and anarchafeminism. In the year 2018, we look
back to the achievements of the two Russian Revolutions of 1917, with
women of central importance. At the same time, we must address the
tragedies of Leninism and Stalinism, ideologies which in the name of
workers' democracy built a police state based on arbitrary killings
and exercised an increasingly brutal dictatorship over the
proletariat.

This brutality, befitting a state capitalist system, sadly mirrors
that of capitalism in general, including the neocolonialist capitalism
of the 21st century, which in the USA has legalized arbitrary killings
by drone strike and night raid conducted by remote control from
thousands of miles away.  At the same time, the system attempts to
rationalize and justify the deaths of unarmed civilians inflicted by
militarized police acting as an internal army of occupation,
especially against People of Color and other members of marginalized
communities. Examples include the shootings of Jean Charles da Silva e
de Menezes in the UK, and a multitude of tragedies (e.g. Rekia Boyd,
Philando Castile, Freddie Gray, Scout Schultz) in the USA as
documented by the Black Lives Matter movement and other groups.

In understanding both the triumphs of the Russian Revolutions of 1917
and the swiftly ensuing tragedies of bureaucratic hegemony over the
workers and peasants, and the building of a lethal secret police
apparatus, we turn to the wisdom of our revolutionary sister Rosa
Luxemburg in 1918. We are also informed by the writings of Alexandra
Kollontai in 1921, and Emma Goldman after her experience in Russia in
1920-1922: these women and others have valuable perspectives to
contribute to our feminist analysis a century later.

Additionally, the views of two other socialists can help to clarify
the nature of these events in which the triumph of the Russian people
became a tragedy of state capitalism and tyranny. In 1918, the
democratic socialist Julius Martov defended human rights by speaking
out against the first legal execution after the October Revolution.
And Leon Trotsky, writing as a democratic socialist in 1904,
ironically sketched out the dangers of party centralization and a
"Jacobin" enthusiasm for state-sponsored terrorism in the name of
socialism: the very policies he would himself help implement along
with Lenin in 1917-1923.

By no means do we attempt a full analysis of the many feminist aspects
of the Russian Revolution. For one radical feminist perspective on
developments in Russia from 1917 to the middle of the 20th century,
see Kate Millett, _Sexual Politics_ (Doubleday & Co., 1970,
pp. 168-176).

Our approach here will be first to sketch the general outlines of the
Russian Revolutions of 1917 and the surrounding context, and then to
present Rosa Luxemburg's critique, with some references also to Emma
Goldman's later experiences in Russia of 1920-1922, and her
reflections on those experiences.


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1. The Russian Revolutions and Leninist Counterrevolution, 1917-1921
--------------------------------------------------------------------

In the year 1917, Russia saw two revolutions, whose very dates can be
expressed in two manners because the country at the time still
observed the Julian calendar, at this point 13 days behind the
Gregorian calendar adopted by the Catholic portion of Europe in 1582,
and by other Western European countries over the succeeding centuries
(e.g. Great Britain in 1752).[1] 

Thus the February/March Revolution, with a mass demonstration on
International Women's Day, February 23/March 8, as a catalytic event,
resulted in the abdication of Czar Nicholas II. At the Women's Day
demonstration, women demanded the vote as well as bread and an end to
the war -- one might say "Peace, Bread, and Suffrage." On February
25/March 10, the Czar prohibited popular assemblies and gave orders to
fire on demonstrators. The next day, the people nevertheless came out
on the streets: 200 were shot, while some soldiers fired into the
air. On February 27/March 12, soldiers refused to fire, quickly
leading to the Czar's abdication and the formation of a Provisional
Government,

The October/November Revolution of October 25/November 7, a popular
uprising in the city of Petersburg or Petrograd for "Peace, Bread, and
Land," might have led to some form of democratic socialism based on
power sharing among a coalition of leftist parties, and was shortly
followed (November 12/25) by elections with universal adult suffrage
for a Constituent Assembly in which women enthusiastically
participated not only as voters but as candidates, some of whom won
election. This was at a time when national enactment of women's
suffrage in the USA through the Nineteenth Amendment (26 August 1920)
was still almost three years in the future.

However, the forms that socialist democracy was taking in the world of
revolutionary Russia went beyond the merely electoral triumphs of
socialist parties to a quest for economic democracy. The Soviets
("Councils") were grassroots organizations representing communities of
workers, peasants, and also soldiers -- these last, as some writers
have aptly observed, being essentially peasants in military uniforms.
In 1917, the Bolsheviks under Lenin, the Bolsheviks literally meaning
the "majority" faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in
a controversy of 1903, called both for the election of a Constituent
Assembly and for a policy of "All Power to the Soviets."

Immediately after the October/November Revolution, it appeared that
both of these very popular goals might be achieved. One of the first
actions of the interim revolutionary authority was the abolition of
the death penalty for all crimes, including the military offenses at
the front for which it had alone been retained during the previous
Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky. The progressive
Menshevik leader Julius Martov, the Mensheviks being the "minority"
faction in the 1903 split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor
Party, likewise supported total abolition of the death penalty and
sought some kind of democratic powersharing arrangement with Lenin and
the Bolsheviks.

Tragically, by the middle of 1918, the aspiration of the Russian
people to peace, democracy both political and economic, and human
rights would be defeated by oppression from within the revolution
itself. A critical step in this counterrevolution from within by Lenin
and the Bolshevik leadership, taken by the end of 1917, was the
creation of a Cheka ("Extraordinary Commission") or secret police, by
February 1918 authorized not only to arrest and detain but to kill,
despite the total abolition of the death penalty. There followed the
dissolution of the popularly elected Constituent Assembly in January,
raids on anarchists, and by June the resumption of legal executions.
The Soviets, once revolutionary instruments of workers' democracy in
action, were subjugated by the Bolshevik hierarchy, with members of
other socialist parties and factions increasingly excluded.

Surveying some of these Russian developments from her prison cell in
Germany, Rosa Luxemburg recognized that the unfolding tragedy was not
entirely the fault of Lenin and his colleagues. A critically important
factor was the brutality of the Great War of 1914-1918 (now known as
the First World War), and the opportunism of many socialist
politicians and parliamentary members in supporting rather than
resisting this mutual slaughter of workers who should be allies in the
struggle for emanicipation from capitalism. Further, she saw the
failure of the German proletariat or working class either to stop the
war or to achieve power as a contributing factor to backward
conditions for labor in Russia, which made the task of revolution more
difficult there. Luxemburg herself had been imprisoned since 1916 for
her militant opposition to the war.

Indeed the imperialism which helped make the Great War possible also
led seventeen nations, including the USA, to engage in military
interventions within Russian borders during 1918-1920. These invasions
placed principled Russian democratic socialists in the difficult
position of opposing both Leninist dictatorship over the proletariat,
and foreign forces intervening to oppose socialism in general, not
only its distortion by the Bolshevik leadership.

However, the Leninist reign of authoritarian state capitalism and
state-sponsored terrorism was not only a reaction to these foreign
interventions and also, by mid-1918, a civil war in which Bolshevik
forces clashed with White forces, ranging from reactionary elements to
some disgruntled socialists. Rather, it reflected two elements of
Leninist thought going back long before 1917.

The first of these elements was a commitment to rule by a centralized
party of professional revolutionaries acting in the name of the
proletariat -- as opposed to the popular and democratic socialist
governance of the workers themselves, termed in Marxist theory "the
dictatorship of the proletariat." Actually the phrase "sovereignty of
the proletariat" might be better, since, as Luxemburg discusses, the
term "dictatorship" tends to suggest the kind of authoritarian
dictatorships imposed by various exploitative rulers and privileged
minorities.[2]

The second element was a ready acceptance and even celebration of
state terrorism -- as opposed to the individual acts of assassination
and other forms of terrorism common in the tradition of Russian
radicalism. Thus Narodnaya Volya, "The People's Will," had exemplified
an ethos of ruthless terrorism at the individual or small group level,
embracing the "propaganda of the deed": for example, the assassination
in 1881 of Czar Alexander II.[3]

In Lenin's view, such individual deeds of terror were in effect a
futile form of "single combat" with the Czarist state -- as opposed to
organized, mass, revolutionary terror. He states this contrast in an
article from 1908 curiously entitled "The Happening to the King of
Portugal" -- this "happening" being the assassination of King Carlos I
of Portugal and his heir apparent Lui/s Filipe (1 February 1908), also
known as the Lisbon Regicide.

     We regret that in the happening to the king of Portugal there is
     still clearly visible the element of conspiratorial,
     i.e. impotent, terror, one that fails to achieve its purpose and
     falls short of that genuine popular, truly regenerative terror
     for which the Great French Revolution became famous.[4]

In September 1917, writing in the exciting period between the February
and October Revolutions, Lenin again made clear his approval of mass
terror while engaging in a bit of political irony. Many Russian
socialists at this time argued that a full socialist revolution was
not yet possible, because the proletariat was not yet sufficiently
developed for this. Rather, they favored a combination of
parliamentary democracy, a heritage of earlier bourgeois revolutions,
with continued struggles by the workers and peasants for economic
democracy. To this common line of thought, Lenin had this reply:

    It seems to say that we are not ripe for socialism, that it is too
    early to "introduce" socialism, that our revolution is a bourgeois
    revolution and therefore we must be the menials of the bourgeoisie
    (although the great bourgeois revolutionaries in France 125 years
    ago made their revolution a great revolution by exercising terror
    against all oppressors, landowners and capitalists alike!).[5]

From a feminist perspective, Lenin's endorsement of the "truly
regenerative terror" of the French Revolution may seem overly sanguine
when it is remembered that the victims of this terror included Olympe
de Gouges, a revolutionary feminist and playright who in 1791 wrote a
"Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen"
(guillotined 4 November 1793) as well as 16 peaceful Carmelite nuns of
Compiegne (guillotined 17 July 1794).

Another victim, who died in prison under unclear circumstances in
March 1794, was the Marquis Nicholas of Condorcet, a feminist ally who
wrote in 1790 "On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship"
in favor of women's suffrage. Like Tom Paine, Condorcet favored the
trial of Louis XVI or Louis Capet as he was now called, but opposed
his execution. Paine, who had called for the abolition of the death
penalty, was condemned to the guillotine, and would have been executed
but for an error in the marking of his cell door so that he was not
among those led to the place of execution.

In contrast to Lenin's endorsement of state terrorism, Rosa Luxemburg
sees it as a mark of minority-led bourgeous movements which the
movement for socialism must reject:

     During the bourgeois revolutions, bloodshed, terror, and
     political murder were an indispensable weapon in the hand of the
     rising classes.

     The proletarian revolution requires no terror for its aims; it
     hates and despises killing. It does not need these weapons
     because it does not combat individuals but institutions, because
     it does not enter the arena with naive illusions whose
     disappointment it would seek to revenge. It is not the desperate
     attempt of a minority to mold the world forcibly according to its
     ideal, but the action of the great massive millions of the
     people, destined to fulfill a historic mission and to transform
     historical necessity into reality.[6]

Luxemburg's words were notably published in December 1918, only a
month or so before she was herself to become a victim of political
murder on 15-16 January 1919. She links the rejection of terror,
including mass or state terror, to the principles of proletarian
democracy as opposed to past minority dictatorships -- both themes
that are central, as we shall see, to her criticism of the Bolshevik
Revolution.

Interestingly, Luxemburg's analysis and affirmation of human rights
was anticipated in the age of bourgeois revolutions by certain
advocates such as Tom Paine, who had ardently supported the deposition
and trial of Louis XVI, but just as strongly opposed his execution, in
a statement read before the French National Convention on 15 January
1793:

     Monarchical governments have trained the human race, and inured
     it to the sanguinary arts and refinements of punishment; and it
     is exactly the same punishment which has so long shocked the
     sight and tormented the patience of the people that now, in their
     turn, they practice in revenge upon their oppressors. But it
     becomes us to be strictly on our guard against the abomination
     and perversity of monarchical examples: as France has been the
     first of European nations to abolish royalty, let her also be the
     first to abolish the punishment of death, and to find out a
     milder and more effectual substitute.[7]

The Russian Revolutions of 1917 might have led to a democratic and
increasingly socialist outcome if the values of Rosa Luxemburg,
foreshadowed by such advocates of human rights as Olympe de Gouges and
Tom Paine, had prevailed. The Constituent Assembly provided the forum
of a democratic parliament, elected by universal suffrage, where
socialist parties predominated and women were members; the Soviets
served as centers for direct workers' democracy, and might, for
example, have led to workers' control of many factories, a form of
economic democracy championed by Alexandra Kollontai.

If such an outcome had obtained, the October Revolution might have
been viewed retrospectively as a "popular coup" in which the
Bolsheviks had momentarily seized power in order to share it with
other progressive forces, with the prompt elections for the
Constituent Assembly as a landmark of this intention. Sadly, however,
it was the dissolution of this Assembly in January 1918, an important
focus of Rosa Luxemburg in her critique of Lenin, that would provide a
better gauge as to the future.

By the summer or fall of 1918, Lenin and his Bolshevik supporters had
established what might be described as a "dictatorship over the
proletariat." In 1920, as Alexandra Kollontai would observe, dissent
from within the party itself was increasingly viewed as "heresy." And
in 1921, both the suppression of the revolutionary Kronstadt uprising
(despite Emma Goldman's offer to mediate for a peaceful solution) and
the murder of the anarchist Fanya Baron[8], shot by the Cheka on 29
September of that year, exemplified the kind of dictatorship that now
prevailed. The decisive suppression within the Bolshevik Party of
Kollontai's Rabochaya Oppositsiya or Workers' Opposition by 1922
confirmed that the end of the civil war would not mean a return to
democracy.

While Kollontai gives a vivid view of the situation within the party
in 1920-1921, Emma Goldman gives a view of the larger picture,
surveying the variety of socialist and anarchist views that prevailed
at this time in Russia, and painting portraits of what might now be
termed early Soviet dissidents. The tragedy, Goldman emphasizes, is
that the crimes of the Bolshevik leadership, including the slaughter
at Kronstadt, were committed in the name of socialism.


-------------------------------------------------
2. Rosa Luxemburg (1918): Socialism and Democracy
-------------------------------------------------

As the opening sentence of her analysis, Rosa Luxemburg declares: 

     The Russian Revolution is the mightiest event of the World War.[9]

She continues, with a special message for those of her own country:

     Its outbreak, its unexampled radicalism, its enduring
     consequences, constitute the clearest condemnation of the lying
     phrases which official Social-Democracy so zealously supplied at
     the beginning of the war as an ideological cover for German
     imperialism's campaign of conquest. I refer to the phrases
     concerning the mission of German bayonets, which were to
     overthrow Russian Czarism and free its oppressed peoples.[10]

Thus she sees the revolutionary movement of the Russian people
themselves as the most forceful refutation of the German war
propaganda devised and disseminated by some of her socialist
colleagues that the Kaiser's invasion of Russia was somehow what might
now be styled a "humanitarian intervention" against Czarist
oppression.

The failure of the European socialist movement, as represented by the
Second International, to prevent or stop the First World War through
workers' strikes and other methods of nonviolent direct action as well
as resolute opposition by socialist representatives in parliamentary
bodies, was one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century. This
failure occurred despite the courageous resistance of many socialists,
including Luxemburg in Germany and Eugene V. Debs in the USA, that led
to their imprisonment; and Jean Jaures in France, assasinated by a
nationalist fanatic in July 1914, during the weeks leading to the
outbreak of war, because of his advocacy for peace.

While Luxemburg rightly focuses on the failings of many of her own
German comrades, such an admirable thinker as the Russian anarchist
Peter Kropotkin was not immune to the illusions of war, in his case
championing in 1914 the French heritage of civilization and revolution
against the German threat: "Don't let these heinous conquerors wipe
out the Latin civilization and the French people again... Don't let
them impose on Europe a century of militarism..."[11] 

Like socialism and anarchism, feminism was often associated with
pacifism and antimilitarism, but this did not make all feminists
immune from an impetus to support the war. Events such as the
International Women's Conference for Peace and Freedom at the Hague in
1915 represented the spirit of feminist antiwar resistance; as the
Zimmerwald Conferences of 1915-1917 represented the socialist antiwar
struggle. Women played a vital role in both movements.[12] 

At the same time Luxemburg sees the liberation of the Russian people
by themselves, not by an invading German army, as a powerful rebuttal
of her own pro-war comrades, she is ready to examine the policies of
the Bolshevik leadership which, by the time she is writing in 1918,
have already served fatally to compromise the democracy she holds
essential to any true socialism, substituting "dictatorial force of
the factory overseer" and "rule by terror."[13]

From the vantage point of the early 21st century, the failure of the
internationalist socialist movement to prevent or halt the First World
War in 1914 may be linked to a comparable tragedy. In 1917, the
Russian Revolutions represented at once a catalytic social experiment
on a vast scale which would help shape the entire century, and a
deadly counterrevolution from within in which the announced Bolshevik
goals of "Peace, Bread, and Land" yielded to an agenda of militarism
and mass terror rivalling that of traditional capitalism.

Rosa Luxemburg, in the midst of the drama of 1918, voices values which
are profoundly human, socialist, democratic, and feminist.


-----------------------------
2.1. The Constituent Assembly
-----------------------------

In addressing the tragic failure of Bolshevism to fulfill the promise
of 1917, Luxemburg gives much attention to the dissolution of the
Constituent Assembly. She notes Trotsky's argument that the October
Revolution was necessary to achieve "the salvation of the Constituent
Assembly," promised but never delivered by the Kerensky government
that had succeeded the Czar and some interim leaders soon after the
February Revolution. She then ironically notes that "Lenin's first
step after the October Revolution was ... the dissolution of this same
Constituent Assembly, to which it was supposed to be an entrance."[14]

She next addresses the argument of Trotsky that the "peasant masses"
voting in November 1917 "had little notion of what went on in
Petrograd and Moscow," and cast their votes for slates of candidates
who did not reflect the leftward shift in the current political
situation. 

Finding Trotsky's statement of the facts "very fine and quite
convincing," she adds: "But one cannot help wondering how such clever
people as Lenin and Trotsky failed to arrive immediately at the
conclusion that follows from the above facts." For her, this
conclusion is that "without delay, new elections to a new Constituent
Assembly should have been arranged."[15]

Luxemburg observes that Trotsky, from the specific shortcomings of the
Constituent Assembly elected in 1917, "draws a general conclusion
concerning the inadequacy of any popular representation whatsoever
that might come from universal popular elections during the
revolution."[16]

Indeed, she follows with a larger argument which might apply to the
Constituent Assembly actually elected in 1917, whatever its flaws, as
well as the body which might have been elected a few months later.
Trotsky has argued, with Russia especially in mind: "The bigger the
country and the more rudimentary its technical apparatus, the less is
the cumbersome mechanism of democratic institutions able to keep pace"
with the "political experience" and "political development" of "the
laboring masses."[17]

Her response to Trotsky's reasoning is particularly powerful coming
from a militant revolutionary position as opposed to a merely
reformist one. First, she invokes a fascinating analogy with astronomy
to describe his evident viewpoint that a parliament is bound to the
views of its members at the moment they were elected:

     According to Trotsky's theories, every elected assembly reflects
     once and for all only the mental composition, political maturity
     and mood of its electorate just at the moment when the latter
     goes to the polling place. According to that, a democratic body
     is the reflection of the masses at the end of the electoral
     period, much as the heavens of Herschel always show us the
     heavenly bodies not as they are when we are looking at them but
     as they were at the moment they sent out their light-messages to
     the earth from the measureless distances of space. Any living
     connection between the representatives, once they have been
     elected, and the electorate, any permanent interaction between
     one and the other, is hereby denied.[18]

To this static concept of parliamentary representation, Luxemburg
opposes her own experience, by no means in terms totally complimentary
to all the Social-Democratic representatives she has known:

     Yet how all revolutionary experience contradicts this! Experience
     demonstrates quite the contrary: namely, that the living fluid of
     the popular mood continually flows around the legislative bodies,
     penetrates them, guides them. How else would it be possible to
     witness, as we do at times in every bourgeois parliament, the
     amusing capers of the "people's representatives," who are
     suddenly inspired by a new "spirit" and give forth quite
     unexpected sounds; or to find the most dried-out mummies at times
     comporting themselves like youngsters and the most diverse little
     Scheidemanns suddenly finding revolutionary tones in their
     breasts -- whenever there is rumbling in factories and workshops
     on the street.[19]

Philipp Scheidemann doubtless received mention here because of his
support for war credits in 1914, although later he advocated the
compromise formula of a peace without annexations or reparations. 
However, a decisive moment came in 1917, when the German Social
Democratic Party split on the issue of funding the war effort, and he
held with the majority in continuing to support the war, while the
minority (including Rosa Luxemburg) were expelled from the Party.

Without any illusions as to the perfections of parliamentary democracy
and its politicians, German or otherwise, Luxemburg nevertheless finds
it preferable to the alternatives, while emphasizing that its virtues
are inextricably bound to the militant activism of the masses:

     And is this ever-living influence of the mood and degree of
     political ripeness of the masses upon the elected bodies to be
     renounced in favor of a rigid scheme of party emblems and tickets
     in the very midst of revolution? Quite the contrary! It is
     precisely the revolution that creates by its glowing heat that
     delicate, vibrant, sensitive political atmosphere in which the
     waves of popular feeling, the pulse of popular life, work for
     [the] moment on the representative bodies in most wonderful
     fashion. It is on this very fact, to be sure, that the well-known
     moving scenes depend which invariably present themselves in the
     first stages of every revolution, scenes in which the old
     reactionaries or extreme moderates, who have issued out of a
     parliamentary election by limited suffrage under the old regime,
     suddenly become the heroic and stormy spokes[people] of the
     uprising.[20]

To illustrate this point, Luxemburg cites as examples the English Long
Parliament of 1640-1648 and its increasingly radical stance during the
upheavals immediately preceding and accompanying the English Civil
Wars[21]; then asking:

     And was not the same wonderful transformation repeated in the
     French Estates-General, in the censorship-subjected parliament of
     Louis Phillipe, and even -- and this last, most striking example
     was very close to Trotsky -- even in the fourth Russian Duma
     which, elected in the Year of Grace 1909 under the most rigid
     rule of the counter-revolution, suddenly felt the glowing heat of
     the impending overturn and became the point of departure for the
     revolution.[22]  

To conclude her rebuttal to Trotsky on the question of the Constituent
Assembly, Luxemburg affirms her confidence both in the institutions of
democracy, and in the leavening influence and power of the masses
under conditions of political freedom:

     All this shows that "the cumbersome mechanism of democratic
     institutions" possesses a powerful corrective - namely, the
     living movement of the masses, their unending pressure. And the
     more democratic the institutions, the livelier and stronger the
     pulse-beat of the political life of the masses, the more direct
     and complete is their influence - despite rigid party banners,
     outgrown tickets (electoral lists), etc. To be sure, every
     democratic institution has its limits and shortcomings, things
     which it doubtless shares with all other human institutions. But
     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 alone can
     come 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.[23] 

Here, writing in 1918, Luxemburg describes the policy of Lenin and
Trotsky as involving "the elimination of democracy as such." Surely we
can agree with her that this "remedy... is worse than the disease it
is supposed to cure," a conclusion confirmed by the subsequent history
of Russia.

---------------------------------------
2.1.1. Luxemburg's later change of view 
---------------------------------------

While Luxemburg's views in _The Russian Revolution_ were written in
Breslau Prison during September and October 1918[24], she later took a
different view of national parliamentary bodies such as the Russian
Constituent Assembly, prompted by the new revolutionary situation in
Germany. As Tony Cliff explains, she rejected the call of some German
Social Democrats for "Workers' Councils _and_ a National Assembly,"
writing on 20 November 1918:

     Whoever pleads for a National Assembly is consciously or
     unconsciously depressing the revolution to the historical level
     of a bourgeois revolution; [they are] a camoflagued agent of the
     bourgeoisie or an unconscious representative of the petty
     bourgeoisie ...

     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.[25]

She thus asserts that, at least in the context of Germany in 1918,
Workers' Soviets or Councils, without the need additionally for a
National Assembly, could realize "the dictatorship of the
proletariat," meaning "democracy in a socialist sense." As we have
seen (Section 1, n. 2 above), the dictatorship (or sovereignty) of the
proletariat, in a democratic socialist perspective like that of
Luxemburg, implies a society where proletarians make up the large
majority of society, so that their will and that of an overwhelming
majority of the population are synonymous. Germany, as one of the most
industralized nations in the world at the time, would be a place where
such conditions would be most likely to prevail.

Even under these German conditions, Luxemburg while seeing a National
Assembly as superfluous nevertheless "urged participation in the
elections to a National Assembly" when it became clear that these
elections would take place.[26]

Her desire was to use both electoral politics and direct action in
order to thwart what she saw as the design of Friedrich Ebert, a
pro-war member of the Social Democratic Party, to make the National
Assembly a stronghold of bourgeois rule and counterrevolution. She
expresses her views powerfully in an article of 23 December 1918:

     Now we are in the middle of the revolution and the National
     Assembly is a counter-revolutionary stronghold erected against
     the revolutionary proletariat. The time has come, then, to
     assault and demolish this stronghold. The elections, the tribune
     of the National Assembly, must be utilized to mobilize the masses
     against the National Assembly and to rally them to the most
     exacting struggle. Our participation in the elections is
     necessary not in order to collaborate with the bourgeoisie and
     its shield-bearers in making laws, but to cast out the
     bourgeoisie and its shield-bearers from the temple, to storm the
     fortress of the counter-revolution, and to raise above it the
     victorious banner of the proletarian revolution.

     . . .

     According to the plan of the Ebert crowd, the National Assembly
     will create a dam against this revolutionary deluge. So it must
     be a question of directing this deluge right into and through the
     National Assembly to wash the dam away. The electoral action and
     the floor of this counter-revolutionary parliament should be a
     means of training, rallying and mobilizing the revolutionary
     mass, and a stage in the struggle for the establishment of the
     dictatorship of the proletariat.

     An assault by the masses on the gates of the National Assembly,
     the clenched fist of the revolutionary proletariat raised from
     the middle of the assembly and waving the banner upon which glow
     the fiery letters: All power to the councils - this is our
     participation in the National Assembly![27]  

At the end of 1918, as Luxemburg's Spartacus League was transformed
into the Communist Party of Germany, the question of how to relate to
the coming National Assembly elections (scheduled for 19 January 1919)
became a point of division:

     The new Party decided not to take part in the coming elections to
     the German National Assembly, and to seek to prevent by force the
     holding of the elections. In vain Rosa Luxemburg warned them:
     "Machine-guns against universal suffrage is a very bad
     slogan."[28]

Does Luxemburg's negative appraisal of the German National Assembly --
whose election took place a few days after her murder by reactionary
military elements (the proto-fascist Freikorps) with the connivance of
some of her own Social Democratic comrades -- imply a change of view
about Lenin's dissolution of the Russian Constituent Assembly?

In a discussion of this question, some scholars of socialism assert
that Luxemburg did change her view on this specific question.[29]
However, no specific quotation or passage is stated in which she says
that she now agrees with the dispersal by the Bolsheviks of the
Constituent Assembly. It is possible that there is such a passage to
be found in the fourteen volumes of her complete works, now in process
of being released in an English translation.

However, I will here argue that whatever view she may have taken after
the beginning of the German Revolution in November 1918, and however
one may view her assessment of the German National Assembly, she was
correct in _The Russian Revolution_ to oppose the dissolution of the
Russian Constituent Assembly as it had happened on 6/19 January of
that year.

Tony Cliff, in presenting a defense of Lenin's action that seeks to
respond to Luxemburg's criticism in _The Russian Revolution_, may
actually be pointing to the facts which made the dissolution of the
Constituent Assembly both ethically and politically wrong. On the
reasons for dissolving this popularly elected body, he writes:

     It was first of all a result of the fact that, while the Soviets
     were largely working-class organizations, the Constituent
     Assembly was based mainly on the votes of the peasants. It was
     therefore no accident that the Bolsheviks, who had the
     overwhelming majority in the Second Congress of the Soviets (8
     November 1917) which were elected by some 20 million people, did
     not command the support of more than a quarter of the Constituent
     Assembly elected by all the people of Russia. The peasant,
     devoted to private property, could not identify [themself] with
     Bolshevism, even if [they were] happy to have Bolshevik support
     for land distribution and the fight for peace. The Soviets were
     therefore a much more reliable support for workers' rule than the
     Constituent Assembly ever could be.[30] 

Whether we take a democratic socialist, anarchist, or feminist
perspective (these three being by no means mutually exclusive!), Cliff
here alludes to a critically important fact: in the Russia of
1917-1918, peasants rather than proletarians or urban workers made up
the large majority of the population. Sarah Badcock, in a brief survey
of "The 1917 Peasant Revolutions," observes that "more than 80 percent
of Russia's population lived in non-urban areas in 1917,"[31] a
population represented in the Constituent Assembly, but not so much in
the Congress of the Soviets.

Thus the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, whose election the
Bolsheviks had demanded along with other Russian socialist parties and
then brought about within three weeks of the October Revolution,
denied the peasant majority a forum they had been promised by the
Bolsheviks themselves. This was a different situation than that in
Luxemburg's Germany at the end of 1918, a highly industrialized
country where she and the Spartacus Bund had not first
enthusiastically campaigned for a National Assembly based on universal
suffrage and then sought to dissolve it because of dissatisfaction
with the election returns.

Cliff continues with a point that carries furthers the first, focusing
on Soviets as "the specific form of rule of the working class":

     But there is an even more basic reason - one that has nothing to
     do with the peasant predominance in the Russian population - for
     not having a Constituent Assembly (or Parliament) side by side
     with Soviets. Soviets are the specific form of rule of the
     working class, in the same way as parliament was the specific
     form of domination of the bourgeoisie.[32]

Indeed this statement agrees with Luxemburg's statement of the case
against a German National Assembly, in which she asserts that
"Workers' Councils" (synonymous with Soviets) are the natural forums
for democratic self-governance of workers in Germany, as in Russia --
which Cliff promptly quotes.

However, this reasoning leads to the question, under the conditions of
Russia in 1917-1918, as to whether an ideal form of self-government
for workers can bring a democratic "dictatorship of the proletariat"
in a country where 75% or more of the people are actually not
proletarians but peasants. We must recall, as Luxemburg emphasizes,
that a Marxist "dictatorship of the proletariat" must in fact
represent or include an overwhelming majority of the people -- not
only that of a minority, even a proletarian minority.

Thus the combination of a Congress of Soviets with predominantly
proletarian influence, and a Constituent Assembly representing the
large peasant majority, however untidy it might sound, might best or
at least better represent the people of Russia in early 1918 than the
suppression of the Constituent Assembly.

Indeed, the Constituent Assembly during the single day and night
between its convening and dissolution passed a radical land reform
act, the Fundamental Agrarian Law, which evoked much resistance from
Siberian landowners.[33]

Thus however it might or not apply to Germany at this same epoch,
Luxemburg's critique of the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in
_The Russian Revolution_, and her stirring language as to how direct
action in the streets and workplaces exerts its influence on
parliamentary debates and actions, very much fits Russia in 1918.


-----------------------
2.2. Suffrage and Class
-----------------------

Luxemburg next turns to the question of suffrage under the Bolsheviks,
showing her sympathy with some of the dilemmas of Lenin and Trotsky,
but using the critique of political pragmatism to show that their
narrow definition of their constituency is unrealistic and does not
reflect the economic conditions in Russia prevailing in 1918.

A balanced view of her critique must recognize that in certain
passages, one of them quoted below, she is prepared at least in theory
to admit stern measures and use of an "iron fist" (a somewhat
Bismarckian image) in order to defend a revolution; yet when it comes
to practical specifics, she is on the side of democracy and human
rights.  

Luxemburg takes a Marxist approach, in which the question of suffrage
must be framed within the setting of a given society:

     Every right of suffrage, like any political right in general, is
     not to be measured by some sort of abstract scheme of "justice,"
     or in terms of any other bourgeois-democratic phrases, but by the
     social and economic relationships for which it is designed. The
     right of suffrage worked out by the Soviet government is
     calculated for the period of the proletarian dictatorship. But,
     according to the interpretation of this dictatorship which Lenin
     and Trotsky represent, the right to vote is granted only to those
     who live by their own labor and is denied to everyone else.[34]

Here Luxemburg is evidently referring not to the universal suffrage
which applied to the election in November 1917 of the Constituent
Assembly, but to a Bolshevik doctrine of restricted suffrage in 1918.
John Reed, writing as an advocate of the Bolsheviks, describes this
restriction:

     Until February 1918 anybody could vote for delegates to the
     Soviets. _Even had the bourgeoisie organised and demanded
     representation in the Soviets, they would have been given it._
     For example, during the regime of the Provisional Government
     there was bourgeois representation in the Petrograd Soviet - a
     delegation of the Union of Professional Men [_sic_] which
     comprised doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc.

     Last March, the Constitution of the Soviets was worked out in
     detail and applied universally. It restricted the franchise to:
     citizens of the Russian Socialist Republic of both sexes who
     shall have completed their eighteenth year by the day of the
     election; all who have acquired the means of living through
     labour that is productive and useful to society and who are
     members of labour unions. Excluded from the right to vote were:
     employers of labour for profit; persons who lived on unearned
     increment; merchants and agents of private business; employers of
     religious communities; former members of the police and
     gendarmerie; the former ruling dynasty; the mentally deficient;
     the deaf and dumb; and those who had been punished for _selfish
     and dishonourable misdemeanours_.[35] 

Luxemburg shows how restricting suffrage "to those who live by their
own labor" is inconsistent with the goal of building an inclusive
socialist society:

     Now it is clear that such a right to vote has meaning only in a
     society which is in a position to make possible for all who want
     to work an adequate civilized life on the basis of one's own
     labor. Is that the case in Russia at present? Under the terrific
     difficulties which Russia has to contend with, cut off as she is
     from the world market and from her most important source of raw
     materials, and under circumstances involving a terrific general
     uprooting of economic life and a rude overturn of production
     relationships as a result of the transformation of property
     relationships in land and industry and trade - under such
     circumstances, it is clear that countless existences are quite
     suddenly uprooted, derailed without any objective possibility of
     finding any employment for their labor power within the economic
     mechanism.[36]

As Luxemburg makes it clear, these hardships and dislocations apply
not only to the former ruling classes, but to many workers and poorer
peasants, etc.

     This applies not only to the capitalist and land-owning masses,
     but to the broad layer of the middle class also, and even to the
     working class itself. It is a known fact that the construction of
     industry has resulted in a mass-scale return of the proletariat
     to the open country in search of a place in rural economy.[37]

She brings out the paradoxes of a test for suffrage that would
disenfranchise many members of the proletariat, at the same time as
the Bolsheviks are delegating managerial positions to former members
of the ruling classes -- an approach to management which will become a
central concern of Alexandra Kollontai and the Workers' Opposition in
1920-1921.

     Under such circumstances, a political right of suffrage on the
     basis of a general obligation to labor, is a quite
     incomprehensible measure. According to the main trend, only the
     exploiters are supposed to be deprived of their political
     rights. And, on the other hand, at the same time that productive
     labor powers are being uprooted on a mass scale, the Soviet
     government is often compelled to hand over national industry to
     its former owners, on lease, so to speak. In the same way, the
     Soviet government was forced to conclude a compromise with the
     bourgeois consumers' cooperatives also. Further, the use of
     bourgeois specialists proved unavoidable. Another consequence of
     the same situation is that growing sections of the proletariat,
     for whom the economic mechanism provides no means of exercising
     the obligation to work, are rendered politically without any
     rights.[38]

Luxemburg thus finds that Leninist practice, which is supposed to be
consistently and even ruthlessly attuned to revolutionary necessity,
is in fact "utopian" (or, we might today say, rather dystopian):

     It makes no sense to regard the right of suffrage as a utopian
     product of fantasy, cut loose from social reality. And it is for
     this reason that it is not a serious instrument of the
     proletarian dictatorship. It is an anachronism, an anticipation
     of the juridical situation which is proper on the basis of an
     already completed socialist economy, but is not in the transition
     period of the proletarian dictatorship.[39]

Now comes the passage, mentioned above, where Luxemburg shows sympathy
for Lenin and Trotsky in confronting the difficulties they faced, and
is in principle ready to admit the use of an "iron fist" to defend the
revolution:

     As the entire middle class, the bourgeois and petty bourgeoisie
     intelligentsia, boycotted the Soviet government for months after
     the October Revolution and crippled the railroad, post and
     telegraph, and educational and administrative apparatus, and, in
     this fashion, opposed the workers government, naturally all
     measures of pressure were exerted against it. These included the
     deprivation of political rights, of economic means of existence,
     etc., in order to break their resistance with an iron fist. It
     was precisely in this way that the socialist dictatorship
     expressed itself, for it cannot shrink from any use of force to
     secure or prevent certain measures involving the interests of the
     whole.[40]

She adds, however, that such coercive measures must seek the
integration of the people being coerced into the new and democratic
system, not their permanent exclusion, much less an involuntary
exclusion because the social system can provide no place for the
excluded people:

     But when it comes to a suffrage law which provides for the
     general disenfranchisement of broad sections of society, whom it
     places politically outside the framework of society and, at the
     same time, is not in a position to make any place for them even
     economically within that framework, when it involves a
     deprivation of rights not as concrete measures for a concrete
     purpose but as a general rule of long-standing effect, then, it
     is not a necessity of dictatorship but a makeshift, incapable of
     being carried out in life. This applies alike to the soviets as
     the foundation, and to the Constituent Assembly and the general
     suffrage law.[41]

For Luxemburg, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the
restrictive Bolshevik suffrage law are aspects of a larger
picture: 

     But the Constituent Assembly and the suffrage law do not exhaust
     the matter. We did not consider above the destruction of the most
     important democratic guarantees of a healthy public life and of
     the political activity of the laboring masses: freedom of the
     press, the rights of association and assembly, which have been
     outlawed for all opponents of the Soviet regime. For these
     attacks (on democratic rights), the arguments of Trotsky cited
     above, on the cumbersome nature of democratic electoral bodies,
     are far from satisfactory. On the other hand, it is a well-known
     and indisputable fact that without a free and untrammeled press,
     without the unlimited right of association and assemblage, the
     rule of the broad masses of the people is entirely
     unthinkable.[42]

Quite in contrast to her view linking socialism and "the political
activity of the laboring masses" inextricably with basic democratic
rights, Lenin in 1920 expressed his approach to Emma Goldman during an
interview in which she supported a resolution of the Moscow Anarchist
Conference held in March (a few days before) seeking freedom of speech
and the press:

     "But as to free speech," he remarked, "that is, of course, a
     bourgeois notion. There can be no free speech in a revolutionary
     period."[43]

Luxemburg expands upon these concluding remarks in her discussion of
suffrage in her following chapter, on "The Problem of Dictatorship."


---------------------------------
2.3. The Critique of Dictatorship
---------------------------------

In focusing on the nature of the dictatorship or sovereignty of the
proletariat, and comparing it to actual developments in Russia,
Luxemburg begins with a memorable and prophetic statement:

     Lenin says in _The State and Revolution_ [Chapter 5, "The
     Transition from Capitalism to Communism"]: the bourgeois state is
     an instrument of oppression of the working class; the socialist
     state, of the bourgeoisie. To a certain extent, he says, it is
     only the capitalist state stood on its head. This simplified view
     misses the most essential thing: bourgeois class rule has no
     need of the political training and education of the entire mass
     of the people, at least not beyond certain narrow limits. But for
     the proletarian dictatorship that is the life element, the very
     air without which it is not able to exist.[44]

The view of Lenin which Luxemburg paraphrases, that the socialist
state can at least to a degree be described as only the capitalist
state stood on its head, seems grimly to anticipate a joke which was
evidently current in Poland or Russia around 1958, and has been
attributed to sources ranging from the economist John Kenneth
Galbraith (one of its publishers) to, allegedly, Premier Nikita
Khrushchev. Here is one possible version:

     Under capitalism, human oppresses human. Under socialism, the
     relationship is reversed.[45]

For socialist feminism, of course, the purpose of democratic socialism
is not to oppress anyone, but rather to end oppression. This means
that people who formerly enjoyed unjust privileges -- which, for an
intersectional feminist, includes a sizable majority of a population
-- must be persuaded to relinquish these privileges, and if necessary
be restrained by various social forces from continuing to exercise
them. However, what a truly socialist society offers to the formerly
privileged is not more "oppression" but equal rights through truth and
reconciliation.

In this discussion, what especially concerns Luxemburg is the impact
of a Leninist form of "dictatorship" on the masses of workers and
peasants themselves, whom this revolutionary "dictatorship" is
supposed to benefit. She takes as one point of departure a quotation
from Trotsky earlier invoked in her discussion of the Constituent
Assembly:

     "Thanks to the open and direct struggle for governmental power,"
     writes Trotsky, "the laboring masses accumulate in the shortest
     time a considerable amount of political experience and advance
     quickly from one stage to another of their development."

     Here Trotsky refutes himself and his own friends. Just because
     this is so, they have blocked up the fountain of political
     experience and the source of this rising development by their
     suppression of public life! Or else we would have to assume that
     experience and development were necessary up to the seizure of
     power by the Bolsheviks, and then, having reached their highest
     peak, become superfluous thereafter. (Lenin's speech: Russia is
     won for socialism!!!)
     
     In reality, the opposite is true! It is the very giant tasks
     which the Bolsheviks have undertaken with courage and
     determination that demand the most intensive political training
     of the masses and the accumulation of experience.[46] 

Luxemburg's parenthetical comments, like the reference to "Lenin's
speech" at the end of the second paragraph of this passage, reflect
the unfinished state of her manuscript, written while she was in
prison because of her resistance to the First World War. However, her
point is exquisitely clear: political freedom must prevail _through_
the revolutionary process, as opposed to its destruction by the
Leninist leadership.

In her next paragraph, Luxemburg makes a more general point about
democracy:

     Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the
     members of one party - however numerous they may be - is no
     freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the
     one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept
     of "justice" but because all that is instructive, wholesome and
     purifying in political freedom depends on this essential
     characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when "freedom"
     becomes a special privilege.[47]

She focuses on the unpredictable nature of revolutions, and the known
fallibility of humans, as reasons why political freedom is required in
revolutionary times:

     The Bolsheviks themselves will not want, with hand on heart, to
     deny that, step by step, they have to feel out the ground, try
     out, experiment, test now one way now another, and that a good
     many of their measures do not represent priceless pearls of
     wisdom. Thus it must and will be with all of us when we get to
     the same point - even if the same difficult circumstances may not
     prevail everywhere.[48]

The unpredictability of the revolutionary process, which must be
navigated by a politically free society, is especially central for
Luxemburg:

     The tacit assumption underlying the Lenin-Trotsky theory of
     dictatorship is this: that the socialist transformation is
     something for which a ready-made formula lies completed in the
     pocket of the revolutionary party, which needs only to be carried
     out energetically in practice. This is, unfortunately - or
     perhaps fortunately - not the case. Far from being a sum of
     ready-made prescriptions which have only to be applied, the
     practical realization of socialism as an economic, social and
     juridical system is something which lies completely hidden in the
     mists of the future.[49]

This creative uncertainty leads her to a sense of humility:

     What we possess in our program is nothing but a few main
     signposts which indicate the general direction in which to look
     for the necessary measures, and the indications are mostly
     negative in character at that. Thus we know more or less what we
     must eliminate at the outset in order to free the road for a
     socialist economy. But when it comes to the nature of the
     thousand concrete practical measures, large and small, needed to
     introduce new socialist principles into economy, law and all
     social relationships, there is no key in any socialist party
     program or textbook. This is not a shortcoming but rather the
     very thing that makes scientific socialism superior to the
     utopian varieties.[50]

Here "scientific socialism" seems to mean a pragmatic socialism,
informed by the inevitable trial and error that will occur in a
revolutionary period -- and by the public debate and dissent that are
invaluable in assessing the ongoing experiments. Luxemburg expresses
at once a confidence that each problem will have a solution, and the
caution that one cannot predict very much in advance:

     The socialist system of society should only be, and can only be,
     an historical product, born out of the school of its own
     experiences, born in the course of its realization, as a result
     of the developments of living history, which - just like organic
     nature of which, in the last analysis, it forms a part - has the
     fine habit of always producing along with any real social need
     the means to its satisfaction, along with the task simultaneously
     the solution. However, if such is the case, then it is clear that
     socialism by its very nature cannot be decreed or introduced by
     _ukase_.[51]

Luxemburg's choice of the word _ukase_, a Russian imperial edict with
the force of law, is perhaps meant to caution against the
reintroduction of Czarist authoritarianism in the name of socialism, a
situation which Emma Goldman and some of the early Soviet dissidents
she met during her two years in Russia (1920-1922) document at
length. Above all, Luxemburg counsels, flexibility and the space
for open political life are absolutely essential in coping with the
realities of a socialist revolution:

     It has as its prerequisite a number of measures of force -
     against property, etc. The negative, the tearing down, can be
     decreed; the building up, the positive, cannot. New Territory. A
     thousand problems. Only experience is capable of correcting and
     opening new ways. Only unobstructed, effervescing life falls into
     a thousand new forms and improvisations, brings to light creative
     new force, itself corrects all mistaken attempts.[52]

In diametrical opposition to this creative spontaneity is any
dictatorship of a minority which, unlike the correctly understand
"dictatorship of the proletariat," excludes the conditions for such
spontaneous problem-solving and learning:

     The public life of countries with limited freedom is so
     poverty-stricken, so miserable, so rigid, so unfruitful,
     precisely because, through the exclusion of democracy, it cuts
     off the sources of all spiritual riches and progress. (Proof: the
     year 1905 and the months from February to October 1917.) There it
     was political in character: the same thing applies to economic
     and social life also. The whole mass of the people must take part
     in it. Otherwise, socialism will be decreed from behind a few
     official desks by a dozen intellectuals.[53]
     
Luxemburg's parenthetical note on "the year 1905 and the months from
February to October 1917" may refer to the creativity of the workers
and peasants in the 1905 Revolution as well as the Revolutions of
1917.[54] These periods represent intervals of freedom and open
political dialogue in a country where the Czarist autocracy had often
sought to censor and suppress dissent. The lesson Luxemburg draws is
that free discussion is a cardinal revolutionary method both in
solving new problems and in critiquing the acts of whatever
necessarily fallible and sometimes overreaching leadership may exist
at a given time.

She now states the dangers of a leadership unchecked by freely
expressed public opinion:

     Public control is indispensably necessary. Otherwise the exchange
     of experiences remains only with the closed circle of the
     officials of the new regime. Corruption becomes
     inevitable. (Lenin's words, Bulletin No.29) Socialism in life
     demands a complete spiritual transformation in the masses
     degraded by centuries of bourgeois rule. Social instincts in
     place of egotistical ones, mass initiative in place of inertia,
     idealism which conquers all suffering, etc., etc. No one knows
     this better, describes it more penetratingly; repeats it more
     stubbornly than Lenin. But he is completely mistaken in the means
     he employs. Decree, dictatorial force of the factory overseer,
     draconian penalties, rule by terror - all these things are but
     palliatives. The only way to a rebirth is the school of public
     life itself, the most unlimited, the broadest democracy and
     public opinion. It is rule by terror which demoralizes.[55]

While I have been unable to find "Lenin's words" in "Bulletin No. 29"
to which she is referring, Luxemburg's statement is exceptionally
eloquent as to the integral role of free public discourse and "mass
initiative" in a true revolution, and the sadly contrasting practices
of the Bolsheviks which had already become clear by the time she was
writing in 1918 (according to Tony Cliff, during September and
October). Her warning that "[i]t is rule by terror which demoralizes"
speaks to the fact that such terror is not only cruel and inhumane,
but destroys the social space for freedom that it presumably is
attempting to defend.

She concludes with an all too accurate prediction that the repression
of democratic life will affect even the Soviets, institutions which
quickly grew out of the 1905 Revolution and took a leading role in
1917.

     When all this is eliminated, what really remains? In place of the
     representative bodies created by general, popular elections,
     Lenin and Trotsky have laid down the soviets as the only true
     representation of political life in the land as a whole, life in
     the soviets must also become more and more crippled. Without
     general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and
     assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in
     every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in
     which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.[56]  

Having predicted the destruction of the Soviets as independent organs
of popular government and open discussion, she paints a portrait of
the kind of rule of which Alexandra Kollontai will write in 1920-1921
from her vantagepoint within the Party, and Emma Goldman will
chronicle during her stay in Russia of 1920-1922.

She concludes the chapter with a grim portrait of what this government
by "bureacracy" might look like:

    Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of
    inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. 
    Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the
    leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to
    time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the
    leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously - at
    bottom, then, a clique affair - a dictatorship, to be sure, not
    the dictatorship of the proletariat but only the dictatorship of a
    handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois
    sense, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins (the postponement
    of the Soviet Congress from three-month periods to six-month
    periods!) Yes, we can go even further: such conditions must
    inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted
    assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc. (Lenin's speech on
    discipline and corruption.)[57] 
     
Luxemburg's reference to "attempted assassinations, shooting of
hostages, etc." may allude to the assassination attempt on Lenin by
Socialist Revolutionary Fanya Kaplan on 30 August 1918, and the
previous assassination of Moisei Uritsky, head of the Cheka in
Petrograd, on 17 August.[58] 

The response of the Bolshevik leadership was indeed the "shooting of
hostages," often innocents chosen simply because of their class
origins or misfortune to be in a place where the authorities were
seeking to take hostages. Thus at the beginning of September, 500
hostages were shot, described according to one source as
"representatives of the overthrown classes."[59] A statement in
_Krasnaya Gazeta_ ("Red Gazette") on 1 September 1918 brings home the
indiscriminate nature of the waves of terror being launched:

     We will turn our hearts into steel, which we will temper in the
     fire of suffering and the blood of fighters for freedom. We will
     make our hearts cruel, hard, and immovable, so that no mercy will
     enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a
     sea of enemy blood. We will let loose the floodgates of that
     sea. Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in
     scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands; let them drown
     themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and
     Uritsky, Zinovief and Volodarski, let there be floods of the
     blood of the bourgeois - more blood, as much as possible.[60]

This kind of "justice" is explained more dispassionately by Martin
Latsis, a Ukrainian leader of the Cheka, in the advice he gave in a
newspaper appropriately itself named _Red Terror_:

     Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether
     or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or
     words. Ask [them] instead to which class [they] belong, what is
     [their] background, [their] education, [their] profession. These
     are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. 
     That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.[61]

In warning against the "brutalization of public life" already
happening in the Russia of 1918, Luxemburg cautions that "It is rule
by terror which demoralizes." This demoralization applied, not least
of all, to the members of the Cheka itself. Thus Latsis noted that the
work of the Cheka, "conducted in conditions deeply affecting the
nervous system, leaves its mark."[62]

     As a result of this relentless violence more than a few Chekists
     ended up with psychopathic disorders, which Nikolai Bucharin said
     were "an occupational hazard of the Chekist profession." Many
     hardened themselves to the executions by heavy drinking and drug
     use. Some developed a gangster-like slang for the verb to kill in
     an attempt to distance themselves from the killings, such as
     "shooting partridges"...[63] 

From a current perspective, the Cheka's work of killing and sometimes
torturing prisoners induced among those charged with it the
predictable consequence of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This
situation is by no means, of course, unique to Leninist terror in the
name of "socialism." The administration of the death penalty in the
USA notably causes the executioners to resort to the coping mechanism
of "moral distancing" or "moral disengagement," as they, like members
of the Cheka, attempt to distance themselves from the killings they
are ordered to carry out.[64]

For Luxemburg, to suppress free speech and creative dissent, and to
launch a demoralizing campaign of mass terror, is to destroy the
conditions for any realization of socialist democracy. A century
later, her critique speaks as powerfully as ever. 


-----------------------------------------------------------------
2.4. Feminist appreciations: Democracy, spontaneity, and humanity
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Rosa Luxemburg has attracted great interest and admiration in feminist
circles, with certain themes of special importance which might be
summed up as democracy, spontaneity, and humanity.

For Jacqueline Rose, a feminist scholar who focuses on Luxemburg as
one of the main figures in her book _Women in Dark Times_ (2014)[65],
democracy is a central value for Luxemburg both in _The Russian
Revolution_ and in her critique of capitalism. In reviewing the
publication of Luxemburg's letters in English[66], Rose focuses on the
issue of the Constituent Assembly (see Section 2.1 above):

     The demand for a constituent assembly had been a central plank of
     Bolshevist agitation, but in 1917, on the point of seizure of
     power, the demand was dropped. There is always a risk that
     democracy will throw up the wrong result - that surely is the
     point. For Lenin, the elections following the October Revolution,
     in which `the peasant masses' had returned Narodnik and Kerensky
     supporters to the assembly, indicated the limits of democracy in
     a revolutionary situation. For Luxemburg, this was a betrayal of
     everything the Bolsheviks had been fighting for, and risked
     strangling the Revolution at birth. `As Marxists,' she cites
     Trotsky, `we have never been idolisers of formal democracy.'
     `Nor,' she snapped back, `have we ever been idolisers of
     socialism or Marxism.'[67]

At the same time, Rose emphasizes Luxemburg's critique of "formal
democracy" under capitalism:

     In fact she had always insisted that in conditions of rampant
     inequality, formal democracy was a hoax. Only under socialism
     would true democracy have a chance to be born. Without democracy,
     no socialism. It is the non-negotiable political aim:

          The remedy which Lenin and Trotsky 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 alone 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.[68]

Luxemburg's own commentary on Trotsky's remark about "formal
democracy" nicely expands on Rose's analysis:

     "We have never been idol-worshippers of formal democracy." All
     that really means is: We have always distinguished the social
     kernel from the political form of _bourgeois_ democracy; we have
     always revealed the hard kernel of social inequality and lack of
     freedom hidden under the sweet shell of formal equality and
     freedom - not in order to reject the latter but to spur the
     working class into not being satisfied with the shell, but
     rather, by conquering political power, to create a socialist
     democracy to replace bourgeois democracy - not to eliminate
     democracy altogether.[69]

For feminist and anarchist Aileen O'Carroll of Ireland (Eire),
Luxemburg's emphasis on revolutionary spontaneity and what was termed
"participatory democracy" in the USA during the 1960's[70] give her
interpretation of Marxist socialism a quality that can appeal to
anarchists also. As O'Carroll stated in a talk to the Dublin branch of
the Workers Solidarity Movement (WSM) in 1994, regarding Luxemburg's
chapter in _The Russian Revolution_ on "The Problem of Dictatorship"
(Chapter 6):

     The main thrust of her argument in this excellent section is that
     socialism requires mass participation to succeed. To ensure mass
     participation there must be political training, education, free
     exchange of ideas and debate. Dictatorship prevents this process
     from occurring.

     She also makes the argument, which is also made by anarchists
     that it isn't possible to prescribe exactly how the revolution is
     going to progress before it begins. She argues that there is no
     set of textbook rules that can be followed in order to introduce
     socialism. Socialism can not be built by decree, by orders from
     the top down. It can only be created by mass involvement in
     public life. Political repression stifles debate and involvement
     until inevitably the bureaucrats end up with political power
     instead of the proletariat.[71]

It seems to O'Carroll that "the logic of her arguments would place her
in the Anarchist camp," an observation which may suggest a convergence
of many values and ideas between communitarian anarchism and
democratic socialism, Marxist or otherwise. Thus, like Luxemburg, Emma
Goldman sees free speech and mass democratic participation during a
revolutionary period as absolutely essential.

An additional theme central to Luxemburg is her humanity and
compassion, elements which patriarchy and its ethos of militarism both
negate and devalue. Her warnings against the "brutalization of public
life" that results from the suppression of democracy and dissent, and
that "It is rule by terror which demoralizes," reflect this sense of
humanity.

One of Luxemburg's most powerful statements of these values occurs in
an article of 18 November 1918, immediately after the beginning of the
German Revolution and the exile of Kaiser Wilhelm II. As a result, she
was released from prison, and published a piece entitled "A Duty of
Honour" to reflect on her liberation.

She begins in this celebration of her liberation, and recommitment to
struggle, by emphasizing that it was not the pro-war Social-Democratic
parliamentarians, nor "their bourgeois cronies" who brought about this
liberation: "it was the proletarian revolution that burst open the
gates of our cells."[72]

She turns her thought to another group of prisoners:

     However, one other group of wretched inmates who still languish
     in these gloomy dwellings has been forgotten completely. Until
     now no one has thought of the thousands of pale, emaciated
     figures who have been incarcerated for years behind the walls of
     the gaols and penitentiaries in expiation for petty offenses.

     And yet they are also unfortunate victims of the infamous social
     order against which the revolution was directed, the victims of
     an imperialist war which increased distress and misery into
     unbearable torture and which, with its bestial human slaughter,
     unleashed all evil instincts in weak and congenitally tainted
     natures.[73]

She illustrates the nature of capitalist justice by focusing again on
the tragedy of the war just concluded (Armistice of 11 November 1918):

    Bourgeois class justice is again proved to be a net through whose
    meshes predatory pikes may easily wriggle, while little
    sticklebacks thrash about helplessly in it. The millionaire war
    profiteers largely escaped judgement or got off with ridiculously
    small fines, but the petty thieves were given drastic gaol
    sentences. Starving, shivering from the cold in their barely
    heated cells, emotionally depressed by the horrors of the
    four-year war, these step-children of society are waiting for
    pardon, for relief.[74]

Noting that the Kaiser, now fled from Germany, "forgot their suffering
amid the international blood-bath and the erosion of the crown's
power," so that since the opening of the war with "the conquest of
Liege" (the German invasion of neutral Belgium in 1914) "there has
been no amnesty worthy of the name" -- not even on the Kaiser's
Birthday! -- she urges that the emerging new society must do better:

    Now the proletarian revolution must brighten their gloomy
    existence in the gaols by a small act of mercy; it must shorten
    the Draconian sentences, eliminate the barbaric disciplinary
    system (detention in chains, corporal punishment!), and improve to
    the best of its ability the treatment, medical provisions, the
    food supply and conditions of work. This is a duty of honour![75] 

Recognizing that a general reform of criminal justice will be a
complex task, Luxemburg offers what may be taken as a commentary on
her remark in _The Russian Revolution_ on socialism as an "economic,
social, and juridical system"[76], here with a focus on the juridical
aspect:

    The existing penal system, which is permeated through and through
    with the brutal class spirit and barbarism of capitalism, must be
    extirpated root and branch. A thoroughgoing reform of the system
    by which sentences are executed must be undertaken. A completely
    new system, corresponding to the spirit of socialism, can
    admittedly be established only upon the foundation of a new
    economic and social order. All crimes, as all punishments, are
    indeed always rooted ultimately in the economic conditions of
    society.[77]

While this is an open agenda, which only the experience of the
revolution can more fully reveal, Luxemburg sees one task as simple
and clear:

    Nevertheless, one decisive measure can be implemented at once. The
    death penalty, this great outrage of the utterly reactionary German
    Penal Code, must go immediately! Why is this being delayed by the
    workers' and soldiers' government? Ledebour, Barth, Dauemig, does
    not Beccaria, who two hundred years ago denounced the infamy of
    the death penalty in all civilized languages, exist for you?[78]

She voices her priorities and sense of urgency:

    You have no time, you say, you have constant cares, difficulties
    and tasks before you. Take your watches in hand and see how much
    time is needed to open your mouths and say: the death penalty is
    abolished! Or do you want a protracted debate, culminating in a
    vote among yourselves on this topic? Would you again, in this
    case, surround yourselves with layer upon layer of formalities,
    considerations of competence, questions of rubber stamps and
    rules, and similar rubbish?[79]

Here she takes a moment to poke fun at German formalism, by no means
limited to Germany (including its revolutionary sectors) in 1918:

    Alas, how German this revolution is! How prosaic and pedantic it
    is, how lacking in verve, in lustre, in greatness! The forgotten
    death penalty is only one small feature. But how often precisely
    such small features betray the inner spirit of the whole.[80]

In concluding her article, Luxemburg thinks of her sister prisoners
with whom she lived during much of the war, as well as her close
comrade Karl Liebknecht:

    In leaving the hospitable rooms where we recently resided,
    Liebknecht and I - he taking leave of his shorn prison comrades
    and I of my poor dear prostitute and thief with whom I spent three
    and a half years under the same roof - we promised them
    faithfully, as their morose glances followed us, that we would not
    forget them![81]

Her caring labor for these recent companions, as current feminists
might say, leads her and Liebknecht to make two immediate demands:

    We demand that the Executive Council of the workers' and soldiers'
    councils immediately alleviate the fate of the prisoners in all
    Germany's penal institutions!

    We demand that capital punishment be stricken from the German
    Penal Code![82]

She ends her article with a peerless affirmation of how the tragedy of
the World War, sadly facilitated by many of her socialist colleagues,
informs her revolutionary ethics:

    Rivers of blood have flowed in torrents during the four years of
    imperialist genocide. Now every drop of the precious fluid must be
    preserved reverently and in crystal vessels. Ruthless
    revolutionary energy and tender humanity - this alone is the true
    essence of socialism. One world must now be destroyed, but each
    tear that might have been avoided is an indictment; and a [person]
    who hurrying on to important deeds inadvertently tramples
    underfoot even a poor worm, is guilty of a crime.[83]

Thus making it clear that the abolition of the death penalty must be
the basis for any truly socialist revolution or free society, she
leaves open a challenging dialectic for any socialist feminism: the
tension between "ruthless revolutionary energy" and "tender humanity."
Here there may be at least two ways of resolving this tension.

One approach, eloquently stated by Emma Goldman, draws a line between
armed self-defense (which is itself a natural human right, although
those of us who are nonviolent revolutionaries voluntarily renounce it
for ourselves) and the legal death penalty or extrajudical killings of
unarmed prisoners. The latter are forms of terrorism, recognized today
as elementary human rights violations. As Goldman states:

    Yet it is one thing to employ violence in combat, as a means of
    defence. It is quite another thing to make a principle of
    terrorism, to institutionalize it, to assign it the most vital
    place in the social struggle. Such terrorism begets counter-revolution
    and itself in turn becomes counter-revolutionary.[84]

Another approach, perhaps yet more radical, is that advocated in the
later 20th century by Barbara Deming, a revolutionary Lesbian
feminist. In _Revolution and Equilibrium_ (1971).[85] In Deming's
approach, Luxemburg's "ruthless revolutionary energy" (a phrase which
Deming does not mention, but which I find very apt) is realized as
"radical and uncompromising action" which yet remains nonviolent. 

This approach raises issues of how to defend, by nonviolent or at
least nonlethal means, against the lethal force which at least some
members of the formerly ruling classes are likely to do their best to
unleash against the new society taking shape.

Luxemburg's critique of the Bolshevik Revolution leaves these
questions open, but points to a revolutionary feminism based on an
ethic of radical and uncompromising compassion in ends and means
alike.


-----
Notes
-----

1. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII and a group of scholars investigated
   calendar reform to correct for the error of approximately "a
   hundredth of a day" which Dante had noted in the early 14th century
   in the length of a year under the Julian calendar. This reform
   involved advancing the calendar by ten days in October of that year
   to bring the date in line with the seasons, and omitting a leap
   year day from centennial years which were not evenly divisible by
   400 -- so that 1600 would remain a leap year, but not 1700, 1800,
   or 1900. Thus by 1917, Russia still under the old Julian scheme was
   13 days behind countries following the new Gregorian style.

2. From a certain classical perspective, the term "dictatorship of the
   proletariat" might not be inaccurate for a democratic socialist who
   sees the first stages of socialism as not yet reflecting a fully
   communitarian society of the kind likely to emerge within a few
   generations. In the Roman Republic, a dictator was a ruler
   temporarily appointed to address some emergency situation, who
   would then step down so that normal republican government might
   resume. One might likewise see a democratic socialist government,
   however majoritarian and humane in its methods, as a temporary
   expedient eventually yielding to a yet more decentralized style of
   social organization. For example, while such a government would
   categorically reject the death penalty, it might still need to
   imprison those formerly in power who sought to restore that power
   by violence or terroristic methods. While a democratic socialist
   government would follow the ideals of restorative justice, these
   ideals might be more fully realized by people who had grown up in a
   feminist and socialist commonwealth, making the earlier compromises
   seem _relatively_ "dictatorial" by comparison. Thus, in a sense,
   the Roman idea of a temporary government to address an exigent
   situation would be fulfilled.

3. While the concept of the "propaganda of the deed" is often
   associated with terrorist acts, from the perspective of democratic
   socialism or nonviolent anarchism it equally fits such means of
   direct action, often carried out on a mass scale, as the strike and
   forms of nonviolent intervention -- for example, the lunch counter
   sit-ins for racial integration that began in Greensboro, North
   Carolina, USA, in February 1960, and rapidly spread to other
   localities.

4. V. I. Lenin, _Collected Works_, v. 13, p. 472. For Lenin's
   _Collected Works_ in various digital formats, see this site:
   <https://archive.org/details/LeninCW>.

5. V. I. Lenin, _Collected Works_, v. 25, p. 361.

6. Rosa Luxemburg, "What Does the Spartacist League Want?" (14
   December 1918), 
   <https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/14.htm>

7. Tom Paine, "Reasons for Preserving the Life of Louis Capet" (15
   January 1793), reproduced by the Thomas Paine National Historical
   Association
   <http://thomaspaine.org/essays/french-revolution/reasons-for-preserving-the-life-of-louis-capet.html>

8. Fanya Baron should not be confused with Fanya Kaplan, a young woman
   from a Ukrainian-Jewish peasant family who had joined the Socialist
   Revolutionary Party and in 1906 had taken part in a plan to
   assassinate a Czarist official, for which she was convicted and
   sentenced to penal labor in Siberia. After the February Revolution,
   she was released. On 30 August 1918, Kaplan shot and twice wounded
   Lenin, explaining to her captors that she did so because of the
   suppression of the Constituent Assembly. She was shot by the
   Bolsheviks on 3 September. One can oppose assassinations, including
   this attempt on Lenin, and embrace Rosa Luxemburg's opposition to
   individual as well as state terrorism, while recognizing that
   Kaplan represented a kind of revolutionary opposition to the
   Bolsheviks widespread in Russia at the time. For one brief account,
   see <http://spartacus-educational.com/RUSkaplan.htm>.

9. Rosa Luxemburg, _The Russian Revolution_ (1918), Chapter 1,
   "Fundamental Significance of the Russian Revolution."
   <https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/>.

10. Ibid.

11. World Revolution, "Anarchism and imperialist war (part I):
    Anarchists faced with the First World War," _International
    Communist Current_ (8 June 2009), available at:
    <http://en.internationalism.org/2009/wr/325/anarchism-war1>.
    Whatever may be said about Kropotkin's siding with France against
    Germany, many other anarchists such as Errico Malatesta, Emma
    Goldman, and Alexander Berkman staunchly maintained an
    internationalist position against militarism and the mutual
    slaughter of laboring peoples, as did such socialists as
    Luxemburg and Lenin among many others.

12. For a quick survey of feminist response to the First World War,
    see "Women and WW I - Feminist and Non-Feminist Women: Between
    Collaboration and Pacifist Resistance," available at
    <http://www.firstworldwar.com/features/womenww1_three.htm>.

13. Luxemburg, _The Russian Revolution_ (see n. 9 above), Chapter 6,
    "The Problem of Dictatorship."

14. Ibid., Chapter 4, "The Constituent Assembly."  As noted in this
    translation, Luxemburg is mistaken as to fine points of
    chronology: the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly (6/19
    January 1918) was not literally "Lenin's first step" after the
    October Revolution, since its election (12/25 November 1917) was
    itself an early accomplishment of that revolution. One might
    propose the friendly amendment that its dissolution was "one of
    Lenin's first steps," coming within two months of this election.
    The fact that Bolsheviks would first sponsor the election of a
    democratic parliament, and then dissolve it, adds further irony to
    Luxemburg's language.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid. As the editor of the translation notes, Luxemburg refers to
    Philipp Schneidemann and his likes in German as _Scheidemannchen_
    (with an umlaut on the "a"), a humorous play on his name since
    _mann_ can mean "man, male," and the diminutive _mannchen_ (both
    the singular and plural form) one or more "little men." See
    ibid., Chapter 4, n. 2.

20. Ibid, Chapter 4. Here I have added a "the" in brackets before
    "moment," following some other translations of this passage, and
    for "spokesmen" have substituted "spokespeople."

21. Ibid. Luxemburg states that the English Long Parliament was
    "elected and assembled 1642," when in fact it was in January of
    that year, in the wake of an attempt by King Charles I to arrest
    five of its Members, that this Parliament seized control of
    London, causing the King to leave the capital and leading to the
    Civil Wars of 1642-1648. However, the fact that the Long
    Parliament had actually been elected and convened in late 1640, to
    reach a settlement with the victorious Scottish Presbyterians who
    had formed a Solemn League and Covenant and trounced English
    forces after the King had attempted to introduce the Anglican Book
    of Common Prayer in Scotland (an episode known as the "Bishops'
    Wars"), further strengthens Luxemburg's point. A Parliament
    elected in 1640 continued for eight years to reflect changing
    popular currents and revolutionary realities. Here I take the
    Long Parliament proper as ending in December 1648, when Pride's
    Purge by Colonel Thomas Pride of Cromwell's New Model Army removed
    many Members, radically changing the constituency of the body from
    that elected in 1640.

22. Ibid. The Fourth Duma was indeed elected under a reign of
    repressive counterrevolution that followed the revolutionary
    upheavals in Russia of 1905-1907, and under an electoral law of
    1907 that "enhanced the representation of landowners at the
    expense of peasants, the urban population, and national
    minorities." However, Luxemburg's cited year 1909 was actually
    within the term of the Third Duma, 1907-1912, with the Fourth Duma
    elected in 1912 and serving until 6 October 1917 (shortly before
    the October/November Revolution). Again, correcting these details
    in no way weakens Luxemburg's main point, which could be
    underscored further by noting the willingness of the Fourth Duma
    in 1914, for example, to support the war and agree to its own
    suspension: "representatives of the leading factions called for a
    pause in parliamentary struggles until the national danger
    passed." <http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/duma>.
    On 27 February 1917, the same day that the February Revolution
    achieved victory on the streets of St. Petersburg/Petrograd when
    soldiers refused to fire on demonstrators, Czar Nicholas II
    ordered the Duma prorogued, but it refused to obey; two of its
    members, Alexander Guchkov (President of the Duma) and Vasily
    Shulgin, went to the army headquarters near Pskov to seek the
    Czar's abdication. See Luxemburg, _The Russian Revolution_ (n. 9
    above), Chapter 4, n. 3; and a fuller account available at
    <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Duma_(Russian_Empire)>. 

23. Rosa Luxemburg, _The Russian Revolution_ (see n. 9 above), 
    Chapter 4.

24. Tony Cliff, "Rosa Luxemburg's criticism of the Bolsheviks in
    power" (1959),
    <https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1959/rosalux/7-bolpower.htm>. 

25. Ibid.

26. Stephen Bronner, "Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919)," _Jewish Women's
    Archive_, <https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/luxemburg-rosa>

27. Rosa Luxemburg, "The Elections to the National Assembly" (23
    December 1918), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/23.htm>

28. Spartakus, _German Communists_ (trans. E. Fitzgerald, Foreword by
    Alfred M. Wall), Hutchinson & Co. Ltd., c. 1944, p. 20.
    <https://palmm.digital.flvc.org/islandora/object/fau%3A32393/datastream/OBJ/view/German_communists.pdf>

29. "Did Rosa Luxemburg Take Back Her Critique of the Russian
    Revolution? - A Debate among Peter Hudis, Jacqueline Rose, Chris
    Cutrone, and Others" (10 September 2011), available at
    <https://www.internationalmarxisthumanism.org/articles/rosa-luxemburg-critique-russian-revolution> 

30. Tony Cliff, see n. 24 above.

31. Sarah Badcock, "The 1917 Peasant Revolutions," available at
    <https;//www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/1917-peasant-revolutions-russia-serfs-bolsheviks>
 
32. Tony Cliff, see n. 24 above.

33. See Jared T. McKeon, "Bolsheviks' `Decree on the Land' Quells
    Peasant Unrest" (5 March 2013), available at
    <http://web.mit.edu/russia1917/papers/1026-BolsheviksDecreeOnLandQuellsPeasants.pdf>;
    and <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Constituent_Assembly>,
    where n. 35 mentions "the violent opposition of Siberian
    landowners to the Constituent Assembly in the wake of this decision."

34. Luxemburg, _The Russian Revolution_ (see n. 9 above), Chapter 5,
    "The Question of Suffrage."

35. John Reed, "Soviets in Action" (October 1918),
    <https://www.marxists.org/archive/reed/1918/soviets.htm> 
    Some pronouns have been modified to gender-inclusive forms,
    especially appropriate in view of the demand for women's suffrage
    at the International Women's Day demonstration on 23 February/
    8 March 1917 that initiated the February/March Revolution, and the
    election of the Constituent Assembly by universal suffrage.

36. Luxemburg, _The Russian Revolution_, Chapter 5.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid.

43. Emma Goldman, _my disillusionment in Russia_ (with Introduction by
    Rebecca West and Biographical Sketch by Frank Harris), Thomas Y. 
    Crowell Co., New York, 1970, p. 33. Interestingly, Goldman had
    heard almost identical words from her host, Sergei Zorin, First
    Secretary of the Communist Party in Petrograd, a position "roughly
    equating to that of mayor," <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Zorin>. 
    "Free speech is a bourgeois superstition," he said; "during a
    revolutionary period there can be no free speech." Goldman,
    ibid. at 14.

44. Rosa Luxemburg, _The Russian Revolution_ (see n. 9 above), Chapter 6,
    "The Problem of Dictatorship."

45. For some variations on this quip, see
    <https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/under_capitalism_man_exploits_man_under_communism_it_is_the_other_way_aroun>

46. Rosa Luxemburg, _The Russian Revolution_ (see n. 9 above), Chapter 6.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid.

54. In her earlier work on _The Mass Strike_ (1906), available at
<https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/mass-strike/>, she
studies how the technique of the strike, used during 1896-1904 by
Russian workers to win economic demands, took many shapes during the
1905 Revolution, touching on political as well as economic concerns.
See especially Chapter III: "Development of the Mass Strike Movement
in Russia."

55. Rosa Luxemburg, _The Russian Revolution_ (see n. 9 above), Chapter 6.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid.

58. On Fanya Kaplan and the attempted assassination of Lenin, see n. 8
    above. While Kaplan was motivated by her politics and the cause of
    the Constituent Assembly, Uritsky's assassin Leonid Kannegisser
    additionally had a more personal motive. A gay poet, he was taking
    revenge for the execution by the Cheka of his lover, an Army
    officer named Viktor Pereltsveig, with the execution order signed
    by Uritsky. See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Kanigisser>,
    and <https://www.thefreelibrary.com/No+Time+for+Poets.-a077712160>. 
    Like Kaplan, he was executed shortly after his arrest.

59. See, e.g., "Red Terror," <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror>, 
    and "The Red Terror" <http://spartacus-educational.com/RUSterror.htm>.

60. "The Red Terror," ibid., Primary Sources, (3).

61. "Red Terror," n. 59 above. Here I have changed the masculine
    pronouns such as "his" in the translation to gender-inclusive
    (e.g. "their") since women were often among the victims of the
    Cheka.

62. R. J. Stove, "The Cheka, G.P.U, and O.G.P.U.: Bolshevism's Early
    Secret Police," _National Observer: Australia and World Affairs_
    No. 49, Winter 2001
    <http://www.nationalobserver.net/2001_winter_106.html>.

63. "Cheka," <https://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Cheka>. The euphemism
    "shooting partridges" recalls a threat to the rebelling Kronstadt
    Commune of early 1921 by the Petrograd Defense Committee on 5
    March 1921, shortly before the Leninist bombardment and assault on
    Kronstadt: "You are surrounded on all sides. A few hours more will
    lapse and then you will be compelled to surrender. Kronstadt has
    neither bread nor fuel. _If you insist, we will shoot you like
    partridges._" Ida Mett, _La Commune de Cronstadt_ (_The Kronstadt
    Commune_), 1938, first published in English by _Solidarity_
    (1967), available at
    <https://marxists.org/archive/mett/1938/kronstadt.htm>, Section 5,
    "Threats, Bribes and Skirmishes."

64. Thus see Benedict Carey, "In the Execution Chamber, the Moral
    Compass Wavers," _New York Times_ (7 February 2006, p. F6),
    <http://query,nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9906E0DA173EF934E35751C0A9609C8B63&pagewanted=all>.
    For a classic study, see Michael J. Osofsky, Albert Bandura, and
    Phillip G. Zimbardo, "The Role of Moral Disengagement in the
    Execution Process," _Law and Human Behavior, Vol. 29, No. 4,
    August 2005, 371-393, available at
    <http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.536.559&rep=rep1&type=pdf>

65. Jacqueline Rose, _Women in Dark Times_ (Bloomsbury Publishing,
    2014), ISBN 1408845407.

66. _The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg_, Georg Adler, Peter Hudis, and
    Annelies Laschitza, eds., George Shriver, tr., Verso Books, 2011,
    ISBN 978 1 84467 453 4. This volume is part of a series, _The
    Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg_.

67. Jacqueline Rose, "What more could we want of ourselves!"
    ("Jacqueline Rose reviews `The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg' edited
    by Georg Adler, Peter Hudis and Annelies Laschitza"), excerpted
    from the _London Review of Books_, Vol. 33, No. 12, 16 June 2011,
    <https://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n12/jacqueline-rose/what-more-could-we-want-of-ourselves>.
    For a slightly different translation of the passage in question,
    see Rosa Luxemburg, _The Russian Revolution_, n. 9 above, Chapter 8,
    "Democracy and Dictatorship."

68. Jacqueline Rose, ibid. For the quote from Luxemburg's discussion
    of the Constituent Assembly, see Section 2.1 and n. 23 above.

69. Rosa Luxemburg, _The Russian Revolution_, n. 9 above, Chapter 8,
    "Democracy and Dictatorship."

70. The term "participatory democracy" occurs in both the original
    draft and final version of the Port Huron Statement (1962), a
    germinal document of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
    and the New Left movement. For the original draft, see
    <http://www.sds-1960s.org/PortHuronStatement-draft.htm>; final
    version at <https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/111huron.html>.
    See also <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Huron_Statement>.

71. Aileen O'Carroll, "Rosa Luxemburg on socialism and objective
    conditions - an anarchist analysis," (talk given to Dublin WSM
    branch, September 1994) <http://struggle.ws/wsm/talks/luxemburg.html>.

72. This article is available in two translations at marxists.org.
    The first, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/11/18c.htm>,
    appears to be a closer translation by W. D. Graf; while the
    alternative version, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/11/18c-alt.htm>,
    "Against Capital Punishment" by William L. McPherson, uses a freer
    idiom. I have here followed the first version, but both are worth
    carefully reading and comparing. The Graf translation, which
    follows the English style of spelling standard in Ireland and the
    Commonwealth of Nations, should be entitled "The Duty of Honour,"
    but the marxists.org site has the title in an American English
    style, "The Duty of Honor."

73. Ibid.

74. Ibid. The freer translation compares the war profiteers to
    "sharks" and the petty thieves to "sardines."

75. Luxemburg shows her antimonarchical convictions in noting the lack
    during the war of "an amnesty worthy of the name, not even on that
    official holiday of the German slaves, the `Kaiser's Birthday.'"

76. See Section 3.3 above and n. 49 above.

77. Luxemburg, "A Duty of Hono[u]r," n. 72 above. In view of the
    epidemic of mass incarceration still prevalent in the USA, with
    its elements of classism and racism as well as the massive
    imprisonment of women who have known poverty and violent abuse
    (including sexual abuse), Luxemburg's words are as timely now as
    ever.

78. Ibid.

79. Ibid. While Luxemburg often extols debate, dissent, and the
    democratic process, here her point is that abolishing judicial
    homicide should be a point on which all progressive people can
    reach a swift and happy consensus.

80. Ibid.

81. Ibid.

82. Ibid.

83. Ibid.

84. Emma Goldman, _my disillusionment in Russia_, n. 43 above,
    "Preface to First Volume of the American Edition" at xlix (1922).

85. Barbara Deming, _Revolution and Equilibrium_, Grossman (1971),
    ISBN 0670596515.  For the title essay in this book, "On Revolution
    and Equilibrium," see
    <https://canvas.santarosa.edu/courses/20768/files/639885/download?verifier=E6oQoPvoqTxigxhI0Pi5lZgaC8z0eqViMaLULOmR&wrap=1>.