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Glenn Beck warns the West will go away by 2030 in an interview with Tucker Carlson on Tuesday.GLENN BECK: This is the most important topic of my career, and I think this is the most important topic in the world today.

The Great Reset is not a conspiracy theory, it is something that the Davos people have put together along with the World Economic Forum, and it is running rampant through every Western capital and every Western country. It is, I just read this, tomorrow morning at 9:30 A.M., the Washington state COVID detainment emergency, they are going to have a state board of health discussing from 9:30 to 3:30 tomorrow, 'allowing local health officers to use law enforcement to force an emergency order in involuntarily detaining a person or group of persons, families to be isolated in a quarantine facility following their refusal to comply with request medical examinations, treatment, counseling, and vaccination.'

This is an internment camp. Washington state has done it before, they haven't obviously learned their lesson from World War II. This again is all about total and complete control. I was wrong. For a long time, I thought this was about socialism. It is not. It is a brand of fascism. In socialism and communism, the state and the people own everything, that's not what's coming. If you want to understand why our corporations are saying that they have to have these teach white people how bad they are, why they're condemning the United States, but not China because China is the new global model, and all of it is in here with 50 pages of fine print footnotes.

Do not go online and just search unless it's an original source because there is a lot of bad information out. This must get out to every person I believe in the Western world. This is not an American problem, this is the entire West going away by 2030, and I think the next, they just war-gamed -- the World Economic Forum just war-gamed that next economic collapse. I think that's coming in the next couple of years, I could be wrong, I usually am on timing, but when that happens, it is lights out. It is over. They will control your food, your water, your work, your education, your banking, your money, gasoline. France is just now paying a rate increase for their electricity of 45 percent because of the Great Reset. They are shutting down their nuclear power plants, and it's going to cost 45% increase in energy.

They are going to bankrupt the entire West and only the elites are going to be able to have money, the food they want, the jobs they want, et cetera, et cetera. We will be left in the dust. We must educate ourselves right now.

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Glenn Beck: I Was Wrong That COVID Pandemic Was About Socialism, It Is About Total Control And Fascism - RealClearPolitics

Hong Kong hit the headlines in 2019 when a wave of struggles erupted, trigged by new extradition laws proposed by the Hong Kong government. Lam Chi Leung, a socialist activist based in the region, spoke to International Socialism about the struggle, its roots in earlier social movements and what has happened since.

At the moment, the coverage of Hong Kong in the West emphasises the repression of the democracy movement. It seems as if the movement that erupted in 2019, triggered by attempts by China to impose a new extradition law on Hong Kong, has been contained. How accurate is this perception?

We do have to admit that the anti-extradition movement has been contained. As of October 2021, 10,265 people have been arrested; 2,684 people have been charged with criminal offenses, and 720 of these have been charged with rioting. Nine activists have committed suicide, and some protesters are suspected of having been murdered.

The movement began when small numbers participated in sit-ins and marches in March and April 2019, but it evolved into widespread mass protest on the eve of the attempt by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) government to pass the legislation on 9 June. The wave of protests included two marches of over two million people in June and August, in which one in four Hong Kong residents took part. There was also a successful occupation of the SAR Legislative Council on 1 July and a relatively successful political strike on 5 August. A large number of secondary school students demonstrated in September by forming human chains, and the Polytechnic University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong were occupied by students and protesters.

Violent clashes broke out with police in November, but the movement reached its climax and started to go downhill after this. Planned protests were halted or scaled down when Covid-19 emerged in Hong Kong in late January 2020, and then the Chinese state bypassed the SAR Legislative Council to force through a deeply reactionary Hong Kong National Security Law on 30 June. Although there were still sporadic demonstrations after the passage of this law, such as the spontaneous lighting of candles in various districts across Hong Kong on 4 June, the mass movement had largely ended.

Can you say more about how Covid-19 and other factors changed the pattern of protests? And what kind of situation has resulted since the protests ebbed?

Building on the momentum of the anti-extradition movement, a series of new unions were set up at the end of 2019. These include the Hospital Authority Employees Alliance (HAEA), which was established by frontline public health workers and recruited some 20,000 members. From 3 February 2020, these workers took five days of strike action, calling on the Hong Kong Hospital Authority to provide adequate personal protective gear to doctors, nurses and other staff. As the novel coronavirus spread from Wuhan to the rest of China, the HAEA also demanded the immediate closure of Hong Kongs border with mainland China. So the initial outbreak of Covid-19 in Hong Kong caused the prestige of the SAR to tumble, while simultaneously accelerating the growth of the new trade union movement. People saw that an organised working class was better able to advance the movement than unorganised street actions.

Covid-19 was at its most serious in Hong Kong from February to April 2020; since May 2020 the situation has gradually been improving. However, despite the easing of the pandemic, the Hong Kong government has not lifted its directives restricting public gatherings and has prohibited a workers May Day march. The SAR government uses these directives to stop mass rallies on sensitive dates: commemorations of the Tiananmen Square protests on 4 June, the anniversary of the movement against the extradition bill on 9 June and the anniversary of Hong Kongs return to China on 1 July.

The implementation of the National Security Law in June 2020 will be a strong deterrent to mass resistance, just as it was designed to be. The law is very stringent; its prohibition on the subversion of state power covers a wide range of activities, including openly calling for the independence of Hong Kong. Raising slogans calling for the downfall of the SAR government or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)including displaying banners with these demandsare likely to be illegal.

Collusion between the people of Hong Kong and foreign political forces is also forbidden by the National Security Law, but there is no clear definition of this crime. Moreover, the law provides for the establishment of a special Hong Kong enforcement agency made up of the national security authorities tied to the CCP government. This force can delete online content, enter and search homes, and request any information from an individualthere is no right to remain silent. Its officers can even freeze personal assets without court approval. Essentially, this special agency is unbound by the local laws of Hong Kong and can do whatever it likes.

Secondary schools and libraries have started to remove books that advocate Hong Kongs independence or promote militant resistance by the democratic opposition. The CCP plans to implement a so-called patriotic ideology, leading to attempts at brainwashing in the education system.

Since the implementation of the National Security Law, things have been grim in Hong Kong. Around 100 people have been arrested under the law, including 47 opposition figures who participated in the 2020 pro-democracy primaries, which selected a list of candidates for elections to the Legislative Council. Jimmy Lai, the founder of Hong Kongs pro-movement Apple Daily newspaper, and some of his senior staff were also arrested. Some 40 oppositional political and civil society organisations have announced their disbandment. Among them are the Civil Human Rights Front, the Hong Kong Professional Teachers Union, the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China (HKAS), and student unions at institutions such as the Chinese University of Hong Kong. There have been big debates about whether to surrender without a fight like this. Some of those in favour of early dissolution of opposition groups insisted that disbanding would mean leniency from the authorities, which is largely untrue; others contended that if they failed to dissolve early, they might be physically harmed, which is likely true. However, still others argued against dissolution, including Tonyee Chow Hang-tung, vice-chair of HKAS: The bigger the danger we face, the more we need to calmly assess the pros and cons of each choice The regime has unsheathed its sword: cooperating with its operations at this stage will definitely not get us any advantages.

Along with Apple Daily, which was forced to cease publication in June 2021, Hong Kongs alternative media has also come under serious political pressure; the website Stand News, for instance, has deleted all of its old articles. Public broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong, which is editorially independent in principle, has been subject to strict government censorship over the past year. Certain programmes have been suspended, and some hosts have been replaced. Hong Kong citizens have become more cautious when posting online and raising political slogans, fearing they may be detected by, or reported to, national security authorities.

The National Security Law stipulates that not only acts, but even speech considered separatist, subversive or in collusion with foreign forces can be criminally punished. The definitions of these three legal categories are extremely vague. By deliberately refusing to clarify precisely where its political red line lies, the Chinese authorities aim to intimidate Hong Kong citizens in order to extend central government control. Some pro-Beijing figures have already argued that the National Security Law should not just be used to attack open oppositionists, but should also be the catalyst for a political purge lasting at least two years. The aim would be to effect a wholesale transformation of Hong Kongs judicial, social, cultural, ideological, educational and media institutions.

In order to strengthen the control of the Chinese state, the Hong Kong SAR government is now preparing to restart the legislative process related to Article 23 of the Hong Kong Basic Law. This process would mean Hong Kong establishing its own legislation to protect the national security of the Chinese government. The Chinese authorities have wanted to create such laws for a long time; in 2003, a march of 500,000 city residents led to the shelving of similar legislation.

Can you describe the nature and composition of the movement in 2019? What sort of social groups were involved? How did the movement organise? What were the central demands and slogans?

The anti-extradition movement was one of the largest and most violent mass struggles since Hong Kong was returned to China by Britain in 1997. It showed that the people of Hong Kong are deeply dissatisfied with the status quo since the handover of power and are extremely distrustful of the central government in Beijing.

The mass movement mainly involved young and middle aged people, but also older and retired people. Along with university and secondary school students, trade unionists, nurses, social workers, teachers and civil servants, there were even pro-movement rallies organised by the elderly. The marches and blockades were mainly launched through social media, and the strikes were in response to calls from trade unions. Nonetheless, neither the marches nor the blockades nor the strikes were primarily the result of mobilisation by social movement groups and trade union organisations. Instead, they were essentially spontaneous. This is why the movement was described as decentralised and unorganised.

The mass movement spontaneously came up with its own central slogan: Five Demands, Not One Less! These five demands were: full withdrawal of the extradition bill; a commission of inquiry into police brutality; retraction of the classification of protesters as rioters; amnesty for arrested protesters; and dual universal suffrage, meaning elections for both the Legislative Council and Hong Kongs Chief Executive. Other prominent slogans included Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of our Times, Fight for Freedom and Stand with Hong Kong. With increasing state violence, some voices within the movement have even called for the abolition of the police force.

Although none of the five demands had a socio-economic dimension, the breadth of mass participation reflected public dissatisfaction with the serious exploitation and social inequality in Hong Kong. The free market capitalism of Hong Kong has further increased poverty and economic inequality. One in five Hong Kong citizens, some 1.65 million people, live below the poverty line. Its Gini coefficient, which measures wealth inequality, is higher than the United States and Singapore. As the father of Marco Leung Ling-kit, the first young man in the anti-extradition movement to commit suicide, told reporters: The government has tailor-made the extradition bill for the rich, but has no protection for the rest of Hong Kong people. The government is ignorantly pursuing wealth, making young people work for the rich and become slaves, and the lower class and ordinary people have no right to ask questions about the policy.

Who provided the leadership in the movement? And were more mainstream political forces involved?

This can be explained in terms of both organisational and political-ideological leadership. From an organisational point of view, the peaceful marches were mainly initiated by the Civil Human Rights Front, but the storming of government buildings and the occupation of universities were mobilised through social networks. The movement adopted the idea of no big stageneither opposition political parties nor social movement groups took over leadership, not daring to do so. Even the Civil Human Rights Front, which initiated many marches, lacked the authority and ability to lead all aspects of the movement, instead merely providing a platform for public participation.

Ideologically, the movement mainly reflected the ideas of bourgeois democracy. Both pro-US and anti-Chinese far-right forms of Hong Kong localism, which resists integration into China from a right-wing perspective, have attempted to dominate the movement, but without success. Unfortunately, the left was also too weak and fragmented to have any real influence on the movement.

The notion of no big stage is partially a result of disaffection, especially among young activists, with the weaknesses and compromises of the moderate democrats of the Democratic Party. These activists distrust any party that tries to dominate the movement. However, the far-right localists also constantly push the idea, and they even claim to be tearing down the big stage, attempting to seize leadership of the movement by vilifying the progressive social movement. One of the movements slogans, Do Not Split!, ostensibly emphasises peaceful demonstrations and the unity of action without mutual recrimination; however, the objective effect is to allow the far-right localists to organise with impunity.

We on the left do not simply face a choice between two unpalatable optionsbureaucratic, top-down organisation or unorganised forms of protest. There is a third option: the creation of forms of organisation from the bottom up, in which participants are mutually accountable. Once established, this could provide a platform for debate on the direction of the movement and, more importantly, a collective force to counteract the actions of individuals who undermine it. This would be an important step towards mass self-organisation. However, the 2019 movement failed to work towards this goal. This was a major weakness of the movement.

There were a number of large protest movements across the world in 2019. Did people in Hong Kong identify with any of these wider movements?

Solidarity rallies in sympathy with Catalan independence activists were launched during the mass movement in Hong Kong, but this does not equate to the masses identifying with Catalonia or other struggles around the world. Although Hong Kong is known as a cosmopolitan city, the general population is not very internationally minded, and most are still influenced heavily by British and US mainstream media. Nevertheless, the anti-extradition movement was never an isolated phenomenon. In 2019, mass movements erupted in Iran, Iraq, Ecuador and Chile. Some even compared these developments to the Arab Spring in 2011, dubbing them the Spring of the Global South, although there were also serious movements in the Global North, including France and Catalonia. Despite their differing catalysts and methods of struggle, these uprisings were united in their anger against social inequality and political repression.

Even the ruling class in Hong Kong and China understand that the gulf between the rich and poor is driving deep disappointment with the status quo, especially among young people. The inability to see a way out of this situation fuelled the movement for over half a year, and mainstream public opinion continues to support the protesters. The extradition bill was only a spark for the protests; the more deep-seated causes lie in the states neoliberal policies, the exploitative behaviour of financial and real estate capitalists, and the servile relationship of the government towards the rich.

The struggles in Hong Kong and elsewhere since 2019 all exhibit a certain crisis of the notion of leadership, and this has been particularly acute in Hong Kong, where the movement has advocated decentralisation and no leadership. This stands in contrast to the Sudanese Revolutions resistance committees and the assembly of assemblies created by the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) in France.

What were the continuities and changes between the movement that emerged in 2019 and earlier movements such as the 2014 Umbrella Movement?

From 2009 to 2019, Hong Kong witnessed a long wave of rising struggle. This included the fights against the Hong Kong Express Rail Link in 2009 and against the implementation of the National Education curriculum in 2012. Underlying these protests were a radicalisation of ordinary people, particularly the youth, who are dissatisfied with the SAR governments favouritism towards large consortiums in urban planning policies and attempts to introduce ideologically biased content into secondary schools. The so-called Umbrella Movement of 2014 and the 2019 anti-extradition movement are part of this long series of popular struggle. What all of these instances have in common is an impulse towards radical action to secure political democracy, albeit without a thought through plan.

Despite this lineage, the 2019 movement displayed characteristics different from its predecessors. First, unlike the Umbrella Movement, which fought to extend democratic rights to a general election and the election of the Chief Executive of Hong Kong, the anti-extradition movement sought to defend existing personal freedoms and basic human rights from further encroachment. In this sense, it was a defensive rather than offensive struggle.

Second, the Umbrella Movement pursued tactics such as long-term road occupations, stressing the need for a valiant struggle with no retreats. In contrast, the anti-extradition movement adopted more flexible tactics in its early stages. Protesters did not just stubbornly defend their ground in the face of police repression; instead, they advocated a repertoire of protest tactics described as smart struggle.

Third, during the Umbrella Movement, many far-right localists were able to highjack the movement with demagogic slogans, such as Hong Kong First, which often targeted new mainland Chinese immigrants and tourists. The far-right localists influence in the anti-extradition movement was still evident, but also weakened. The majority of participants in 2019 were citizens who were inclined towards peaceful demonstrations and strikes. They criticised the far-right localists for advocating independence for Hong Kong, and they hoped, quite pragmatically, to gain support from mainland Chinese residents. To take one example, a protest took place in Kowloon district on 7 July 2019, where some organisers themselves tended towards xenophobic localism. Despite this, rank and file activists distributed flyers in simplified Chinese to tourists, sung the Internationale and chanted the slogan Democracy is a Good Thingthe title of a well known book by Yu Keping, a CCP official at the University of Beijing. Clearly not all protesters tended towards far-right localist ideas.

To what extent were workers, particularly organised groups of workers, involved in the movements of the past few years?

Since Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, the working-class struggle has made some steps forward. For instance, there was a public sector strike against privatisation in 2000, a construction workers strike in 2007 and a dockworkers strike in 2013. However, generally speaking, the level of activity and class consciousness among workers cannot be described as high.

The 2019 movement, for the first time since the Hong Kong riots of 1967, put the question of the political strike on the agenda. On 5 August 2019, some 350,000 airline and airport staff, social workers, and teachers struck. Perhaps a third of all air traffic control employees took part in the action, and a section of Cathay Pacific and Hong Kong Airlines cabin crew also joined, leading to the cancellation of over 200 flights. Subway lines were also suspended for half a day. Strictly speaking, though, this was not a full-blown strike; in order to avoid retribution from their employers, some workers (including teachers and social workers) used their annual leave entitlements to participate in the action. Some employers simply let their employees take leave for the day. Yet, although it was only a symbolic one-day strike, this was still a breakthrough. During the 2014 mass movement, only dockers participated in the occupation of the central business district, and only 2,000 social workers went on strike in support of the movement. The scale of mobilisation among workers in 2019 was much higher.

Some on the left see the recent movements in Hong Kong as pro-imperialist movements, influenced by the British and US governments, who wish to use them against China. What do you say in response to this?

From the establishment in China and Hong Kong to post-Stalinists internationally, there have been accusations that our popular movements are controlled and backed by Western forces, and that the movement is ultimately in favour of Hong Kong independence. This is false. The movement was initiated by citizens themselves, and its primary driving force has been young protestorsforeign governments have had no power to intervene. Some pro-democracy members of parliament, and prominent activists such as Joshua Wong, have favorable views of the West and a degree of faith in the US government. These people often appeared in the media, but only because they are relatively well known public figures. They also have no power to lead the movement, and they have very clearly disavowed leadership.

Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have said that they oppose the repression in Hong Kong, but there is a long history of exchanges between US law enforcement and Hong Kong police. Weapons and riot control technology used by the Hong Kong police have been supplied by US companies for many years. Many of the same technologies have been used on black protesters and their allies in the US.

Some on the left still hold a campist view, believing that some anti-US regimes still represent a progressive force against Western imperialism. Some even think along the lines of the old, false adage that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Those left wingers who support the Chinese regime as anti-imperialist and refuse to criticise it misunderstand the nature of this state. It is a bureaucratic, capitalist regime directed against the working class.

To what extent is there an organised left in the movement in Hong Kongeither broad formations or narrower revolutionary socialist groups? What kind of politics exist on the left?

The left in Hong Kong is small and divided, and encompasses social-democratic and broad left organisations, plus a minority of anarchist-style networks and revolutionary socialists. The socialist left has only a limited influence. Nevertheless, there were some positive developments between 2009 to 2014particularly the formation of Left 21, a board left platform, founded in 2010, that has about 80-100 young members. It played an active role in solidarity with the 2013 dockers strike. Subsequently, however, amid the rise of far-right localist ideology, the broad left fell into political confusion, and some people were even won over to the far right.

Unfortunately, the left was unable to intervene effectively in the 2019 movement. Today, in the new political environment, the socialist left needs to work with the new generation of youth, organising around the issues that most concern the public, and clarifying its ideas at the same time. Only in this way can it gradually strengthen its influence.

In recent years, there have been big workers struggles in China over issues such as wages and factory closures. Yet, these seem very different in character to the movements in Hong Kong, which focused more on political questions rather than economic ones. Is there any prospect of bridging the gap between these two movements?

During the past decade of mass struggles in Hong Kong, the battle for democracy, universal suffrage and political freedoms has been the main theme, but it has also included economic struggles among workers. Conversely, the level of workers struggle in mainland China has been relatively high over this period. This has been complemented by a variety of civic currents, from the feminist movement to residents campaigns against polluting enterprises.

Since the 1990s, Hong Kong activists have consistently supported labour, human rights, gender rights, LGBT+ and environmental activists in China, contributing to the development of Chinese social movements and civil society. The relative civil freedom in Hong Kong enables activists to spread social movement literature into China, promote intellectual exchanges among mainland Chinese and Hong Kong activists, and organise solidarity with resistance in the mainland. Many books that could only be published in Hong Kong have been brought into mainland China, including writings by mainland Chinese authors. However, discussions about social movements have also been increasingly suppressed in Hong Kong. With growing central government control over Hong Kong and the disbanding of numerous labour NGOs, this role has been seriously undermined. It is unlikely to recover in the next few years, and may get even worse.

Nevertheless, there is still some room for activists from both sides to take stock of the experiences of the past decade and to build networks for the exchange of information and analysis. This would ensure that the movement could re-emerge in the future and develop healthily. The socialist left needs to work to facilitate this process.

What should revolutionary socialists be arguing for in Hong Kong?

As a city that is already part of China and highly integrated into the Chinese economy, Hong Kongs future is closely linked to that of China as a whole. The greatest obstacle to democracy in Hong Kong comes from Beijing. Thus, democratic self-governance for Hong Kong can only be achieved if we do our best to work closely with the working people of all China, fighting for full democratic freedoms and working-class power.

This is why revolutionary socialists never saw Hong Kongs independence as an objective. Only by promoting workers struggles and progressive social movements, such as the feminist movement within China, can we transform the bureaucratic capitalist system that dominates mainland China as well as Hong Kong. Realistically, advocating independence will fail to garner the support of the working people in mainland China, instead facilitating groups that seek to divide the residents of Hong Kong from those of China and to distort the democratic demands of Hong Kong residents. Therefore, calling for Hong Kongs independence is an unreasonable and unwise choice.

Revolutionary socialists advocate the general slogan of establishing a Hong Kong residents representative assembly by universal suffrage, but we have no illusions about capitalist democracy. It is only the working masses, not the capitalists, who have the strength and determination to convene such an assembly. When mass struggles arise in the future, working people should set up a representative assembly to implement their own class will and move towards an anti-capitalist transformation of society and the economy.

What are the prospects for the movement in Hong Kong, and in China, in the years ahead?

The defeat of movements always leaves scars. After the failure of the Prague Spring in 1968 and the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in China in 1989, there were many years of downturn. Nevertheless, Hong Kong is different from, say, China back in 1989, because we still retain many freedoms. There is not total censorship of books and the internet, and we can still communicate with one another. National security surveillance is not as severe as it was in mainland Chinaor in Taiwan during the Kuomintangs period of martial law between 1949 and 1987.

Some argue that failed mass movements leave little memory and that future movements will find it difficult to learn from earlier experiences. This is an overly pessimistic assessment. Even in mainland China, it is common for young people to break through the restrictions on the internet and seek valuable information.

When will the current downturn come to an end? Looking at previous historical developments, it is unlikely that it will last long. China has lacked a strong mass movement since 1989, but there was a resurgence of workers and peasants struggles from the mid-90s onwards. After the Prague Spring in 1968 came the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia in 1977.

To a great extent, the future of democracy in Hong Kong depends on whether there is an economic and social crisis in mainland China. If the CCPs bureaucratic rule remains strong, Hong Kong will face a period even more difficult than at present. However, the global capitalism system currently faces deep problems, and Chinas crisis is brewing.

China has become an imperialist state, according to the classical Marxist definition, based on the rule of monopoly capital. The class nature of the Chinese state is not fundamentally different from Western imperialist states. Chinas distinctive feature is its bureaucratic capitalism. This is a model of state capitalism that we could also refer to as party-state capitalism. This state form facilitates corruption and appropriation of state property by the bureaucracy, but it also allows for greater control of the economy than is typical under neoliberalism. Nevertheless, this model only benefits the bureaucrats and capitalists, and it is exploitative and oppressive towards working people. Internationally, China no longer represents anti-imperialism, instead becoming a late-developing but powerful international competitor. China is now turning into a regional hegemon in Asia through its capital exports, its Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure project and its military expansion.

All the horrors of capitalist society are felt particularly acutely in China. Labours share of income in China substantially declined from the mid-1990s to the late 2000s. In 2020, Chinas premier, Li Keqiang, remarked that China has 600 million people with a monthly income of just 1,000 renminbi (US$156). That is more than 40 percent of the Chinese population. Both economic and social crises are accelerating. The appeal for social justice is gathering strength.

With the passage of the National Security Law, Hong Kongs rights and freedoms in relation to mainland China are disappearing. In this sense, the people of Hong Kong and China have become a single community of destiny. The struggle against the authoritarian capitalism in Hong Kong is an integral part of the opposition to Chinese party-state capitalism. Our allies should be the people of every country, especially the people of mainland China.

Lam Chi Leung is a socialist based in Hong Kong and the editor of Selected Writings of Chen Duxiu in his Later Years (Cosmos Books, 2012).

Link:
Interview: after the Hong Kong rebellion International Socialism - International Socialism Journal

The political scientist Samuel Huntingtons famous thesis that the post-Cold War world would be defined by a clash of civilisations turned out to be off the mark. While there certainly is cleavage and conflict, the cause is a clash of cultures within civilisations. It is this clash that fuelled the assault on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

Such intra-civilisational clashes ultimately make civilisation itself impossible or at least dysfunctional, as US politics now very much seems to be. From Covid-19 to geopolitics, every issue is now subject to a culture war. A year ago, the increasingly tattered veil of conflict-mitigating political and behavioural norms was ripped away.

Though debates about cultural values are ubiquitous, everyone assumes that his or her own local or national clash is somehow unique, as if Britain and Frances post-imperial hangovers defy comparison or are all that different from Americas own imperial debacle. Are American debates about the legacy of slavery and racial oppression really idiosyncratic? Is the struggle to overcome or to reassert national identity really an essentially European phenomenon?

If financial panics destroy value, then crises of language destroy values.

In fact, the terms that define these debates are rapidly losing any meaning. In 1907, the American philosopher William James provoked widespread outrage when he suggested that the validity of an idea can be assessed by the concrete difference its being true make[s] in anyones actual life. Referring provocatively to truths cash-value in experiential terms, he argued that ideas have no innate quality; rather, they must show their worth by being broadly accepted through general circulation in a marketplace.

Writing just after the destructive financial crash of 1907, the philosopher John Grier Hibben excoriated Jamess pragmatic argument, warning that its acceptance would certainly precipitate a panic in the world of our thinking as surely as would a similar demand in the world of finance. This century-old argument is just as current today, now that a sense of panic has become the norm.

The financial crisis of 2007-8 was followed by the rise of populism, and then by the devastation of the Covid-19 pandemic. Each development has deepened a broader crisis of language and meaning. If financial panics destroy value, then crises of language destroy values. When people use terms whose meaning they dont understand, they literally dont know what they are talking about. This practice has become all too common.

Many of the words that we use today are the products of previous upheavals. Capitalism and socialism were adopted in the early nineteenth century to come to terms with the Industrial Revolution. Globalism, geopolitics, and multilateralism gained traction in the early twentieth century to account for imperial great-power politics and World War I. Like viruses, these terms have all mutated since their inception.

For example, capitalism and socialism originally described continually evolving ways of understanding how the world was or should be organised. But now they have just become scare words. Ones side in the culture war is determined by whether one is more scared of socialism or capitalism (or iterations such as hyper-capitalism or woke capitalism). Capitalism was recognised very early on as a phenomenon that crossed borders, becoming a global reality. Socialism, too, was international, but its realisation depended on the character of the state system, which in turn embodied a belief that the nation-state was a normal (and some would argue inevitable) political structure. Thus, national politics and the international phenomena of capitalism and socialism lived in constant tension with each other.

Facebook and Google take the place of old socialist state authorities in shaping our behaviour and economic actions.

Capitalism began as the description of a system that not only facilitated exchange but commodified more domains of life, thereby breaking down traditional norms and institutions. As more types of things came to be exchanged, capitalism as an idea became increasingly diffuse, permeating every aspect of individual behaviour. Eventually, market principles were applied to dating, spousal choices, sports management, cultural production, and so on. Everything looked as if it had a financial equivalent.

Adding to its contemporary meaninglessness, capitalism is full of paradoxes. The system relies on decentralised decision-making, but as capital becomes more concentrated, decisions increasingly emanate from just a few central nodes. That opens the way to planning, with Facebook and Google taking the place of old socialist state authorities in shaping our behaviour and economic actions. Neither arrangement is really controlled by individual choices or by representative institutions.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the terms of every political debate were set by 4 binary choices: globalisation versus the nation-state; capitalism versus socialism; technocracy versus populism; and multilateralism versus geopolitics. These debates are now outdated. In each case, there is a glaring need for different options.

Adding the post- prefix helps somewhat. Post-globalisation is more apt than deglobalisation, and post-capitalism may be a good way of framing the solution to overly concentrated capital. Post-socialism may offer a way around the limits of the nation-state, which were inherent in traditional socialism. Post-populism could empower the people without relying on the destructive and surreal notion of the real people as if some people are unreal. In each case, a post- society requires a new set of terms.

Todays uncertainties about meaning have become an obstacle to productive debate, not to mention basic logic. We need an intellectual decluttering. The minimalist lifestyle guru Marie Kondo recommends discarding anything that no longer sparks joy. Her approach has prompted families to sift through and cast away the detritus left by previous generations. That is not a bad idea for improving our intellectual hygiene. In place of an attic cleanup would be a debate to identify defunct concepts. The goal would be to make room for new ideas a reality makeover. Culture wars feed on old, empty nostrums. To stop the useless fighting, we need to discard anything that does not spark creativity.

Project Syndicate

Read the rest here:
The clash of cultures Democracy and society - IPS Journal

What is the Governments plan to tackle the cost of living crisis? It has yet to detail a credible set of policies, including genuine deregulation, pro-growth tax reform and higher quality skills, to boost productivity and wages across the board.

It seems content with the Bank of Englands performance, despite the fact that extreme monetary laxity has helped push up consumer prices and sent asset prices skyrocketing. Its agriculture policy is less about a new Corn Laws abolition moment, and more about remodelling the countryside for environmental reasons. The tax burden is rising disastrously, turning us into a continental-style economy, all to feed the appetite of an unreformed, wasteful state that tries to do too much but is now once again beloved of this Macmillan-style government.

The Governments energy policy is particularly dire: it remains wedded to the imbecilic price cap, it continues to discourage investment in UK gas, there is no hope for shale and nuclear is insufficiently exploited. Cheap renewables are great, and not just in theory, but the wind does not always blow and there needs to be a back-up plan.According to the TaxPayers Alliance, this year the green tax burden is forecast to be the highest on record: 12.5 billion, a rise of 11.6 billion since 2001. Most of the increase 10.3 billion has occurred since the Conservative Party took office in 2010.

Infuriatingly, it now seems that blaming energy companies will be part of the Governments strategy. It is true that smaller companies gambled on offering unrealistically low deals to consumers that, when wholesale costs jumped and prices remained fixed, destroyed their margins. But it is the state that set up this rigged, capped, fake market in a series of reforms over the past 10-15 years that were condemned by all of the free-market economists who had backed our once enviable, competitive marketplace.

That original system now lies destroyed, replaced by an ersatz, ultra-regulated market where prices and sources of energy are dictated centrally and where taxpayer bailouts appear to be the new normal. Market socialism never works.

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The Government's market socialism is worsening the cost of living crisis - Telegraph.co.uk

Wellred Books is proud to announce the forthcoming release of an important new title by Marie Frederiksen, The Revolutionary Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg.

This great revolutionary martyr has often been misrepresented as an opponent of the October Revolution, and as standing for some sort of softer, anti-authoritarian Marxism as against that of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

But as Fred Weston and Parson Young explain in this article from the latest issue of In Defence of Marxism magazine: these are so many myths about Luxemburg, and it is about time to set the record straight.

This weekend, on Saturday 15 January, the anniversary of the murder of Luxemburg, Wellred Books will host an exclusive online Q&A and book launch of The Revolutionary Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, with the author Marie Frederiksen.

Join this online book launch and Q&A to get a taste of this upcoming work an essential read for every genuine Marxist who wants to learn the real lessons of Luxemburgs life and ideas, which are vital if we are to carry on her struggle and overthrow capitalism.

Register for the book launch here.

And head to Wellred Books to order your copy of The Revolutionary Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg.

Rosa Luxemburg was an outstanding revolutionary Marxist, who played a key role in fighting the opportunist degeneration of German Social Democracy, and in the founding of the German Communist Party.

Unfortunately, however, some of her writings and speeches are often used to create a completely false picture of what she stood for, presenting her as an opponent of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

So-called Luxemburgists present her as a champion of working-class creativity and spontaneity, in opposition to the ultra-centralist Lenin who, supposedly, sought to crush the initiative of the workers and bring them under heel.

By building up this image of Luxemburg, left reformists, anarchists, libertarian communists, and even bourgeois liberals aim to use the authority of this great revolutionary as a battering ram against Leninism.

On this basis, the concept of Luxemburgism has been invented, as if it were a distinct trend within the tradition of Marxism.

This so-called Luxemburgism has an attraction to a layer of honest young communists who seek an alternative version of Marxism to what they regard as Leninism.

The reason they are seeking such an alternative is because the Stalinist, bureaucratic caricature of socialism embodied in the USSR under Stalin, and later replicated in Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam and other regimes has been portrayed as Leninist (or Marxist-Leninist, as Stalinists today like to describe themselves).

It is sufficient to read Lenins Last Testament (Last Testament Letters to the Congress, December 1922 - January 1923), however, to see that he was already becoming concerned at the bureaucratic tendencies that were emerging in the Soviet Union even before he died, and he suggested measures to combat them.

Stalinism, rather than being the natural child of Leninism, is a complete negation of what Lenin stood for. Our latter-day Luxemburgists conveniently ignore this fact.

We have to ask ourselves, therefore, what does this Luxemburgism actually consist of? Is it so different from the revolutionary Marxism of Lenin and the Bolsheviks?

A serious study of Rosa Luxemburgs writings, her whole life and everything she fought for, reveals that the real Rosa was a revolutionary.

At a time when the world workers movement split into revolutionary and reformist camps, Luxemburg was on the same side of the barricades as the Bolsheviks. In the same way that the Bolsheviks fought the opportunist current of Menshevism, Luxemburg waged a battle against the opportunist degeneration of the Social-Democratic leaders in Germany. In spite of this or that criticism that she held at different moments, she fully backed the Russian Revolution led by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Nevertheless, a number of myths persist that attempt to depict Rosa Luxemburg as an opponent of Bolshevism. The first of these is the idea that Luxemburg stood for the spontaneity of the masses as opposed to the Leninist model of the revolutionary party.

We can read a prime example of such distortions in what is written about her by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung a think tank in Germany affiliated with the left-reformist Die Linke party:

Luxemburg criticized Lenin for his conception of a highly centralized party vanguard; according to Luxemburg, it was an attempt to put the working class under tutelage. Her argumentscharacteristic of all her workcomprised factors such as independent initiative, the workers activity, their ability to learn through their own experience and mistakes, and the need for a grassroots democratic organization.

Similarly, Noam Chomsky who claims to be an anarcho-syndicalist and libertarian socialist paints Lenin as a conspiratorial hijacker of the Russian Revolution who destroyed its potential to develop communism. He presents Luxemburg as having warned against this:

Although some of the critics, like Rosa Luxemburg, pointed out that Lenins program, which they regarded as pretty right-wing, and I do too, was, the image was, that there would be a proletarian revolution, the party will take over from the proletariat, the central committee would take over from the party and the maximal leader will take over from the central committee.

This kind of thinking completely ignores the conditions in which the Russian Revolution took place and, most importantly, the consequences of its isolation in a backward country.

Thus, according to these superficial critics, the roots of the monstrous Stalinist regime that arose later are not to be found in the objective conditions, but in the ideas and methods of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Such an analysis simplifies to such a degree that it is impossible to understand the real objective causes of the bureaucratic degeneration i.e. the isolation of the revolution to one very backward country. It relies instead on a subjective explanation of Lenins supposed dictatorial tendencies.

What was Rosa Luxemburgs real view on the question of the spontaneity of the masses? How did she view the relationship of the party to the spontaneous action of the masses? And did her views actually differ fundamentally from those of Lenin?

Her pamphlet, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, is one of her works used by those who claim she was fundamentally opposed to Bolshevism. It is argued that in this pamphlet, which analyses the strength of the spontaneous mass strike movement of the 1905 Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg dismisses the concept of revolutionary leadership. This couldnt be further from the truth, and completely misses the point of why she wrote it and against whom she was polemicising.

The pamphlet was written just as a wave of strikes was sweeping across Germany, inspired by the 1905 revolution, which was very popular amongst the German working class.

Unlike Russia, where trade unions were very weak and the forces of Marxism were small, Germany had mass trade unions and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) was a mass force. The problem was that the leaders of the SPD and the trade unions in Germany exhibited a passive and sometimes even a derisive attitude towards these spontaneous strikes.

Whereas Rosa Luxemburg and the revolutionary wing of the party welcomed the strikes and posed the need for the party to intervene, the right-wing SPD leaders dismissed them as premature and doomed to failure. Many SPD leaders claimed that only struggles that were planned and organised by the party in advance could succeed. Therefore all other manifestations from below were fundamentally meaningless.

This was, in reality, an indication that these leaders were abandoning the idea of a revolutionary struggle against capitalism itself.

This was precisely what Luxemburgs Mass Strike pamphlet was arguing against. She was not arguing against the Bolsheviks, but rather against the opportunist leaders of the SPD. Her goal was not to dismiss the need for leadership, but rather to push the SPD leaders into actively intervening in these spontaneous struggles precisely because they needed political leadership. As Rosa wrote:

To fix beforehand the cause and the moment from and in which the mass strikes in Germany will break out is not in the power of social democracy, because it is not in its power to bring about historical situations by resolutions at party congresses. But what it can and must do is to make clear the political tendencies, when they once appear, and to formulate them as resolute and consistent tactics. Man cannot keep historical events in check while making recipes for them, but he can see in advance their apparent calculable consequences and arrange his mode of action accordingly.

Any serious analysis will show that both Luxemburg and Lenin agreed that the revolutionary partys task was not to impose a pre-existing schema upon the masses and dictate a schedule for revolution according to its own whim. They both understood that the masses move at their own pace, and when events erupt the task of revolutionaries is to understand them and intervene in them to provide leadership.

Take, for example, the workers councils (soviets) that emerged during the Russian Revolution of 1905. These new organs of workers power were a creation of the Russian workers, an expression of the spontaneity and creativity of the working class.

The ranks of the Bolsheviks inside Russia did not recognise their significance, and even tried to impose an ultimatum on the soviets that they submit to the partys control. But Lenin clearly disagreed. In Our Tasks and the Soviet of Workers Deputies (November, 1905), he wrote:

I think that it is wrong to put the question in this way and that the decision must certainly be: both the Soviet of Workers Deputies and the Party. The only questionand a highly important oneis how to divide, and how to combine, the tasks of the Soviet and those of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. I think it would be inadvisable for the Soviet to adhere wholly to any one party.

Lenin recognised that revolutionaries should join the soviets in order to win over the working-class masses that had created them as organs of workers power. This was the very same strategy that Lenin maintained until the success of the October Revolution in 1917.

In his April Theses published in April 1917, Lenin summed up the task of the Bolsheviks in relation to the masses:

The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government, and that therefore our task is, as long as this government yields to the influence of the bourgeoisie, to present a patient, systematic, and persistent explanation of the errors of their tactics, an explanation especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses.

Here we can find no fundamental difference between Lenin and Luxemburg in their understanding of the necessarily spontaneous nature of the outbreak of struggles, but also of the need for revolutionaries to politically intervene.

Were there any differences between Lenin and Luxemburg? Of course there were, but as Marie Frederiksen shows in her soon-to-be-published work, these were not about whether a revolution needed organisation and leadership or not:

A disagreement was expressed on the Russian Social Democratic Labour Partys congress of 1907 in which Luxemburg criticised the Bolsheviks for putting too much emphasis on the technical side of the uprising in the 1905 Revolution, while believing that they ought instead to have focused on giving the movement political leadership.

In this sense, Luxemburgs approach to the revolution was abstract: the masses will move, and when they do it is up to the party to provide the correct political programme. From her experience in the SPD, focus on the practical side of organising was the hallmark of a conservative leadership that held back the movement of the masses.

Instead of rejecting the bureaucratic character of the SPD, she rejected the technical, practical side of organising altogether as an evil in and of itself. Luxemburg seemed to believe that the movement of the masses itself would solve the problem of organisation and leadership.

It is abundantly clear that, even when Rosa Luxemburg was making criticisms of the Bolsheviks, she did not reject the need for a political leadership in general, just as Lenin did not reject the spontaneity of mass struggles.

What the two differed on was the degree of emphasis revolutionaries should place on the practical tasks of intervening in the mass struggles.

On this question, however, Luxemburg was proven to be wrong in her earlier writing, as the act of intervening in and winning over the masses involves highly practical tasks in order to be successful.

The experience of the October Revolution would prove that it was precisely the existence of the Bolshevik Party, a highly disciplined and educated organisation with cadres in key workplaces and neighbourhoods, that allowed the Russian workers to take power.

Furthermore, towards the end of her life, Luxemburg worked towards building a party along similar lines in Germany.

The inescapable conclusion from what we have been highlighting is that the supposed gulf between these two outstanding Marxists on this question is highly exaggerated. The aim of this exaggeration is to distort the truth in order to ward workers and youth away from a genuine revolutionary outlook, and in particular from the need to build a mass revolutionary party as an essential prerequisite for a victorious socialist revolution.

Whenever currents on the left have begun diverging from a revolutionary standpoint, they have never openly admitted that what they are doing is betraying the basic interests of the working class. Instead, they will often seek this or that authoritative figure of the movement whose words they can distort and exaggerate in order to justify their own bankruptcy.

Unfortunately, Rosa Luxemburg has been the victim of such methods time and time again. She is quoted out of context, or criticisms that she later abandoned are dishonestly used to present her as being fundamentally opposed to Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

In particular, the myth has been woven that Luxemburg stood for genuine workers democracy in opposition to the dictatorial methods of Leninism.

This myth draws from her writings in a 1904 pamphlet called Organisational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy, where she denounced Lenin and the Bolsheviks for their ultra-centralism and even Blanquism that is, the idea of organising a socialist revolution totally controlled by a small conspiratorial group of revolutionary leaders.

In reality, Luxemburg did not understand what Lenin was striving for at that moment in time.

Those who use this to try to separate Rosa Luxemburg from Lenin ignore the real development of her later thinking. Only a few years later, Luxemburg abandoned these views.

Later on, she would set herself the aim, along with Karl Liebknecht, of transforming the Spartacus League into the German Communist Party a section of the Communist International led, at that time, by Lenin and Trotsky.

To attempt, on this basis, to paint Luxemburg as diametrically opposed to Leninism, is sheer dishonesty.

These same currents falsify what Lenin and the Bolsheviks really stood for in order to facilitate this myth-building. The Bolshevik Party is presented as having a monolithic, highly-centralised regime under Lenin, where no debate was possible and where there was no internal democracy.

The truth is that the history of the Bolshevik Party reveals that there was the fullest freedom of internal debate, with different opinions being freely discussed.

What the reformist critics of the Bolshevik Party really object to is the fact that the party was not a debating club, but a fighting, revolutionary organisation of the advanced layers of the working class. Its task was to clarify questions of programme, methods and tactics and to build a disciplined party whose aim was the overthrow of the capitalist system.

Its internal life was governed by the principles of democratic centralism: once an internal debate had taken place on any question, a vote would be held and the majority view would become the policy of the party. On that basis, the whole membership would then be required to take the democratically-agreed positions into the wider labour movement.

This has nothing to do with the caricature of Bolshevism drawn by the reformists. Their lie about Bolshevism as nothing but a conspiracy and a dictatorship in party form is complemented by the lie about Luxemburg as someone who stood up against Lenin in the name of democracy.

In doing so, they conveniently ignore what she wrote a mere two years later in 1906 in Blanquism and Social Democracy, in which she defended Lenin against the charges of Blanquism and attacked the Mensheviks for their opportunism:

If today the Bolshevik comrades speak of the dictatorship of the proletariat, they have never given it the old Blanquist meaning; neither have they ever made the mistake of Narodnaya Volya, which dreamt of taking power for itself (zachvat vlasti). On the contrary, they have affirmed that the present revolution will succeed when the proletariat all the revolutionary class takes possession of the state machine.

It is high time to finish with such scholasticism and all this hullabaloo to identify who is a Blanquist and who is an orthodox Marxist. Rather we need to know if the tactic recommended by comrade Plekhanov and his Menshevik comrades, which aims to work through the duma as far as possible, is correct now; or, on the contrary, if the tactic we are applying, just like the Bolshevik comrades, is correct the tactic based on the principle that the centre of gravity is situated outside the duma, in the active appearance of the popular revolutionary masses.

And a year later, in a speech she gave in 1907 at the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party where both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were present in one reunified party she again defended the Bolsheviks from charges of rigidity and narrowness in terms of organisation:

It is possible that Polish comrades, who are accustomed to thinking more or less in ways adopted by the West-European movement, find this particular steadfastness [of the Bolsheviks] even more startling than you do. But do you know, comrades, where all these disagreeable features come from?

These features are very familiar to someone acquainted with internal party relations in other countries: they represent the typical spiritual character of that trend within socialism that has to defend the very principle of the proletariats independent class policy against an opposing trend that is also very strong. (Applause.)

Rigidity is the form taken by Social-Democratic tactics on the one side, when the other side represents the formlessness of jelly that creeps in every direction under the pressure of events. (Applause from the Bolsheviks and parts of the Centre.)

The conclusion here is clear. What Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and the Bolsheviks all stood for, more than anything else, was precisely the proletariats independent class policy.

In the struggle between Bolshevism and Menshevism, between revolutionary Marxism and reformism, Luxemburg stood firmly on the side of Lenin and the Bolsheviks against reformism, which is precisely the policy that the so-called Luxemburgists today try to attribute to her.

As Lenin later commented: In 1907 she participated as a delegate of the SD of Poland and Lithuania in the London congress of the RSDLP, supporting the Bolshevik faction on all basic questions of the Russian revolution.

Another text of Rosa Luxemburg that is used to pit her against the Bolsheviks is one she wrote privately, but which she never decided to publish in her lifetime, entitled The Russian Revolution (1918).

In this article she makes several criticisms of the actions of the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. However, what the Luxemburgists conveniently ignore is that Luxemburg was in prison when she wrote this article. She had been in prison since 1916 and was still incarcerated when the Russian Revolution took place. She could only get very partial information about the October Revolution and she wrote down her observations privately.

After she was released from prison in 1918, aware of the fact that her analysis written in confinement would inevitably be imperfect, she refused to publish anything she had written on the Russian Revolution while in prison. This was because she knew full well that it would be distorted by the enemies of the revolution.

Clara Zetkin, who had a close relationship with Rosa Luxemburg, later testified that after she was released from prison in November 1918, she stated that her views had been wrong and were based on insufficient information.

Rosa Luxemburg was capable of recognising when she had made a mistake, and there can be no confusion here about where Rosa Luxemburg stood in relation to the October Revolution: she fully backed it and the party that led it.

In fact, the 1918 text was only published later, in 1922 by Paul Levi, three years after Rosas death. He published it after his expulsion from the German Communist Party and the Third International for severely violating party discipline. He had never been given Rosas permission to publish the text a very important detail that one has to bear in mind.

However, even in this text, one still finds that she was fully supportive of the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks from start to finish. Hers was a comradely criticism rather than a denunciation of October.

If she had genuinely believed that Lenin was setting up a monstrous dictatorial regime, it is hard to imagine why she took the time to offer critical suggestions. Rather, she would have called on the Russian workers to oppose the Bolsheviks. This was clearly not the case.

The article opens with the words, The Russian Revolution is the mightiest event of the World War. And this is how she ends the first section of the article:

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 all the other comrades have given in good measure. All the revolutionary honour 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 honour of international socialism.

And she concluded her article thus:

What is in order is to distinguish the essential from the non-essential, the kernel from the accidental excrescences in the politics of the Bolsheviks. In the present period, when we face decisive final struggles in all the world, the most important problem of socialism was and is the burning question of our time. It is not a matter of this or that secondary question of tactics, but of the capacity for action of the proletariat, the strength to act, the will to power of socialism as such.

In this, Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the first, those who went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world; they are still the only ones up to now who can cry with Hutten: I have dared!

This is the essential and enduring in Bolshevik policy. In this sense theirs is the immortal historical service of having marched at the head of the international proletariat with the conquest of political power and the practical placing of the problem of the realisation of socialism, and of having advanced mightily the settlement of the score between capital and labour in the entire world. In Russia, the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to Bolshevism.

Luxemburg, however, did not limit herself to supporting the Russian Revolution. She was also aware of the fact that the flaws in the Soviet regime were not the product of the intentions or ideas of Lenin and Trotsky, but of the isolation of the Russian Revolution and the backward conditions in the country.

The solution was to break the isolation of the revolution by carrying out the German Revolution:

Everything that happens in Russia is comprehensible and represents an inevitable chain of causes and effects, the starting point and end term of which are: the failure of the German proletariat and the occupation of Russia by German imperialism.

It would be demanding something superhuman from Lenin and his comrades if we should expect of them that under such circumstances they should conjure forth the finest democracy, the most exemplary dictatorship of the proletariat and a flourishing socialist economy.

By their determined revolutionary stand, their exemplary strength in action, and their unbreakable loyalty to international socialism, they have contributed whatever could possibly be contributed under such devilishly hard conditions.

Continued here:
Rosa Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks: Dispelling the myths - Socialist Appeal