Rosa Luxemburg: The Future Everywhere Belongs to Revolution!

Written while Luxemburg was serving a prison term for her opposition to World War I, the essay, �The Russian Revolution,� never published in her lifetime, [1] is her plea for the creation of a �revolutionary democracy after the seizure of power� (The Rosa Luxemburg Reader). It is critical of the Bolshevik leadership for their establishment of a Central Committee resulting in a vanguard of leaders after what she describes as the �mightiest event of the world war,� – the peoples� revolution (�The Russian Revolution�).

Against a Karl Kautsky counter-revolution in the rear of the peoples� struggle in Russia, Luxemburg writes, one that influences the Mensheviks� �utopian and fundamentally reactionary character� and its determination to cling to �a coalition with the bourgeois liberals,� Lenin�s party is the �only one in Russia which grasped the true interest of the revolution in that first period.� His party, she continues, �really carried on a socialist policy� (�The Russian Revolution�).