Notice that I have skipped Chapter 5 which dealt with universal suffrage. Instead, the Bolshevik leaders instead emphasized (or at least initially) the soviets (councils of workers and soldiers). In this chapter I found her arguments to be overly condensed--especially the first several paragraphs. But then, who knows what primitive conditions she experienced while writing this in prison. In this chapter she criticizes the Bolshevik leaders, especially Trotsky, for expecting too much of the proletariat.
“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.”
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| Russian Empire 1914 |
In defense of the Bolshevik leaders, she may not have been aware of the extreme difficulties they experienced after they took power. (By the way, I erred in the belief that the Bolsheviks took power around Nov. 1, they actually took power on November 7, 1917.) They were confronted by all kinds of problems in addition to organizing new governing institutions: food shortages, typhus and other epidemics, the counter-revolution organized by the White generals, the independence movements in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland; the invasion of other capitalist countries to crush the revolution: principally Britain, USA, France, and Japan; etc. It's quite a miracle that the revolution succeeded at all.
Still Luxemburg emphasized the importance of educated and experienced people to safeguard the revolution, to create a new kind of society, and to participate actively in making policy decisions. I remember reading elsewhere that the Bolsheviks had to rely on many members of the Czarist bureaucracy to enable their new government to work.
