For the Communism of Lenin, Liebknecht and Luxemburg!

Workers Vanguard No. 1015	11 January 2013

TROTSKY

LENIN

For the Communism of Lenin, Liebknecht and Luxemburg!

(Quote of the Week)

Upholding communist tradition, this month we honor Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, who died in January 1924, and Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, founding leaders of the German Communist Party who were assassinated in January 1919. The military reactionaries who murdered Liebknecht and Luxemburg were acting under the auspices of the government led by the Social Democratic Party, which had already definitively betrayed the proletariat by supporting German imperialism in World War I. We publish below excerpts from Luxemburg’s tribute to the Russian Revolution and its Bolshevik leadership.

Only a party which knows how to lead, that is, to advance things, wins support in stormy times. The determination with which, at the decisive moment, Lenin and his comrades offered the only solution which could advance things (“all power in the hands of the proletariat and peasantry”), transformed them almost overnight from a persecuted, slandered, outlawed minority whose leader had to hide like Marat in cellars, into the absolute master of the situation.

Moreover, the Bolsheviks immediately set as the aim of this seizure of power a complete, far-reaching revolutionary program: not the safeguarding of bourgeois democracy, but a dictatorship of the proletariat for the purpose of realizing socialism. Thereby they won for themselves the imperishable historic distinction of having for the first time proclaimed the final aim of socialism as the direct program of practical politics.

Whatever a party could offer of courage, revolutionary far-sightedness and consistency in an historic hour, Lenin, Trotsky and the other comrades have given in good measure. All the revolutionary honor and capacity which western Social-Democracy lacked was represented by the Bolsheviks. Their October uprising was not only the actual salvation of the Russian Revolution; it was also the salvation of the honor of international socialism.

—Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution” (September 1918)