Luxembura and Russia's revolution

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TOM Rigby's review of 'The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg' misunderstands Norman Geras's argument on one important point.

Geras points out that Luxemburg's position on the coming Russian Revolution was almost identical to Lenin's, i.e. that it would be a bourgeois revolution led by the working class and peasantry. It is true that Luxemburg approached Trotsky's theory in one respect. In 1905 she wrote:

"Russia is stepping on to the revolutionary world-stage as the politically most backward country... Precisely and only for this reason, contrary to all generally held views, the Russian revolution will have a more pronounced proletarian class-character than any previous revolution"

Yet she still thought "the immediate objectives of the present uprising in Russia do not go beyond the limits of a bourgeois democratic constitution"

So, in a sense, she did come close to stepping out of the straitjacket of the two-stages view of the Russian Revolution. But far from Geras "downplaying the importance, originality and daring of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution" as Tom says, he rushes to defend the originality of that theory.

• • so many people have assimiliated her perspective to Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution. But if she agreed with Trotsky on the question of the motive forces of the Russian Revolution and in that sense described it as proletarian, her own analysis fell short of encourRosa Luxemburg aging the kind of telescoping of bourgeois-democratic and socialist objectives which was central to his perspective." (Italics in original).

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