The Russian Revolution: The Problem of Dictatorship

The Problem of Dictatorship
Rosa Luxemburg

Lenin says the bourgeois state is an instrument of oppression of the working class; the socialist state, of
the bourgeoisie. To a certain extent, he says, it is only the capitalist state stood on its head. This simplified
view misses the most essential thing: bourgeois class rule has no need of the political training and
education of the entire mass of the people, at least not beyond certain narrow limits. But for the
proletarian dictatorship that is the life element, the very air without which it is not able to exist.

"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."

Here Trotsky refutes himself and his own friends. Just because this is so, they have blocked up the
fountain of political experience and the source of this rising development by their suppression of public
life! Or else we would have to assume that experience and development were necessary up to the seizure
of power by the Bolsheviks, and then, having reached their highest peak, become superfluous thereafter.
(Lenin’s speech: Russia is won for socialism!!!)

In reality, the opposite is true! It is the very giant tasks which the Bolsheviks have undertaken with
courage and determination that demand the most intensive political training of the masses and the
accumulation of experience.

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.

The Bolsheviks themselves will not want, with hand on heart, to deny that, step by step, they have to feel
out the ground, try out, experiment, test now one way now another, and that a good many of their
measures do not represent priceless pearls of wisdom. Thus it must and will be with all of us when we get
to the same point–even if the same difficult circumstances may not prevail everywhere.

The tacit assumption underlying the Lenin­Trotsky theory of dictatorship is this: that the socialist
transformation is something for which a ready­made formula lies completed in the pocket of the
revolutionary party, which needs only to be carried out energetically in practice. This is, unfortunately ­­
or perhaps fortunately ­­ not the case. Far from being a sum of ready­made prescriptions which have only
to be applied, the practical realization of socialism as an economic, social and juridical system is
something which lies completely hidden in the mists of the future. What we possess in our program is
nothing but a few main signposts which indicate the general direction in which to look for the necessary
measures, and the indications are mainly negative in character at that. Thus we know more or less what
we must eliminate at the outset in order to free the road for a socialist economy. But when it comes to the
nature of the thousand concrete, practical measures, large and small, necessary to introduce socialist
principles into economy, law and all social relationships, there is no key in any socialist party program or
textbook. That is not a shortcoming but rather the very thing that makes scientific socialism superior to
the utopian varieties.

The socialist system of society should only be, and can only be, an historical product, born out of the
school of its own experiences, born in the course of its realization, as a result of the developments of
living history, which ­­ just like organic nature of which, in the last analysis, it forms a part ­­ has the fine
habit of always producing along with any real social need the means to its satisfaction, along with the task
simultaneously the solution. However, if such is the case, then it is clear that socialism by its very nature
cannot be decreed or introduced by ukase. It has as its prerequisite a number of measures of force ­­
against property, etc. The negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the building up, the positive,
cannot. New Territory. A thousand problems. Only experience is capable of correcting and opening new
ways. Only unobstructed, effervescing life falls into a thousand new forms and improvisations, brings to
light creative new force, itself corrects all mistaken attempts. The public life of countries with limited
freedom isso poverty­stricken, so miserable, so rigid, so unfruitful, precisely because, through the
exclusion of democracy, it cuts off the living sources of all spiritual riches and progress. (Proof: the year
1905 and the months from February to October 1917.) There it was political in character; the same thing
applies to economic and social life also. The whole mass of the people must take part in it. Otherwise,
socialism will be decreed from behind a few official desks by a dozen intellectuals.

Public control is indispensably necessary. Otherwise the exchange of experiences remains only with the
closed circle of the officials of the new regime. Corruption becomes inevitable. (Lenin’s words, Bulletin
No. 29) Socialism in life demands a complete spiritual transformation in the masses degraded by
centuries of bourgeois rule. Social instincts in place of egotistical ones, mass initiative in place of inertia,
idealism which conquers all suffering, etc., etc. No one knows this better, describes it more penetratingly;
repeats it more stubbornly than Lenin. But he is completely mistaken in the means he employs. Decree,
dictatorial force of the factory overseer, draconian penalties, rule by terror ­­ all these things are but
palliatives. The only way to a rebirth is the school of public life itself, the most unlimited, the broadest
democracy and public opinion. It is rule by terror which demoralizes.

When all this is eliminated, what really remains? In place of the representative bodies created by general,
popular elections, Lenin and Trotsky have laid down the soviets as the only true representation of political
life in the land as a whole, life in the soviets must also become more and more crippled. Without general
elections, without unrestricted freedom of 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. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy
and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the
leading and an elite 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 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 (the postponement of the Soviet Congress from three­month periods to six­month periods!) Yes,
we can go even further: such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted
assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc. (Lenin’s speech on discipline and corruption.)

Source: Rosa Luxemburg, "The Problem of Dictatorship," The Russian Revolution, 1918,
http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/index.htm (accessed October 1, 2007)

Rosa Luxemburg, "The Problem of Dictatorship," The Russian Revolution, 1918, marxists.org, Rosa Luxemburg Internet Archive, (accessed October 1, 2007).