Rosa Luxemburg insisted in her critique of the Russian Revolution that, “without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of the 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.” Hence, the requirement of “socialist democracy,” she insisted, “begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and the construction of socialism.” The reason for this is not some abstract sense of justice but a law of socialist revolution itself. Such a democracy—no longer formal but filled with economic and social content—constitutes “the very living source from which alone can come the correction of all the innate shortcomings of social institutions…[it thus embodies] the active, untrammeled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people.”5 Socialist democracy is not to be conceived as applying merely to the political sphere, narrowly conceived, but would have to extend to all aspects of public and private life: the factory, the check-out counter, and the office as well, and even the home.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 05:14:34 +0000
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