We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, November 2, 2017

The Russian Revolution: Chapter 2: The Bolshevik Land Policy

Click here to access article by Rosa Luxemburg from her book The Russian Revolution that was written by her in prison in 1918. (Note: I will be running the important chapters in this book over the next days.)

In this chapter she cites the socialist problems related to delivering the Bolshevik promises of land to the peasants.
The seizure of the landed estates by the peasants according to the short and precise slogan of Lenin and his friends – “Go and take the land for yourselves” – simply led to the sudden, chaotic conversion of large landownership into peasant landownership. What was created is not social property but a new form of private property, namely, the breaking up of large estates into medium and small estates, or relatively advanced large units of production into primitive small units which operate with technical means from the time of the Pharaohs.

Nor is that all!
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