THE CURSED BOLSHEVIKS

The cursed Bolsheviks
June 12th, 2010

“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.

“A few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless idealism direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an élite 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, however, 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. [. . .] Yes, we could go even further: such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalisation of public life – assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc.”

Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution (1917)

ROSA LUXEMBURG AND BARBARISM

From:

The following was submitted by comrade Hug Yue as a contribution to the discussion on the communist position on Iraq....


...In her Junius Pamphlet, Rosa Luxemburg quoted Fredrich Engels as saying

• “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.”

She goes on to say,

“[T]he triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization. At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences. Today, we face the choice exactly as Fredrich Engels foresaw … either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization …. or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international [working class] against imperialism and its method of war.” Today we are in the period of “unlimited wars” and now stand at that crossroads—the victory of socialism or world-wide death and destruction.