this goes to you Leninists too
Rosa did not feel Germany was ready for a revolution, blame Liebknecht’s camp for the brevity of the Spartacist uprising (not the Bavarian revolution at all).
Lenin is cool, but you’re giving a really weird list of “successes.” Your version of being an ML may think Kim Il-Sung and Stalin are cool, but I know plenty of MLs who wouldn’t classify them as Leninists at all (and I agree–Lenin would find Stalin’s USSR unrecognizable and repulsive). Mao and Ho Chi Minh’s “successes” morphed into capitalist regimes. Che and Sankara got owned pretty young, just like Rosa.
I respect Sankara and the Cubans the most on your list, but bottom line: there has not been a success yet. We see glimpses of what success might look like in Paris, Petrograd, Barcelona, Santiago, and sundry radical union halls, but it’s the height of presumption to ask all of us to toe your party line because of how successful (?) North Korea is.
Edit: Beaten to the punch by comrade Virgil!
Rosa did not feel Germany was ready for a revolution
Okay. That does not change the fact that Germany did not provide us a revolution to study. Rosa did not provide us insight on the defeat of imperialism in a country, and the construction of socialism.
Marx and Engels didn’t provide us a revolution to study either. Rosa wrote like two pages about the German revolution before she was executed–most of her work was about the conduct of communists in the context of European social democracy, the economics of imperialism, and commentaries on the Russian revolution.
If I was trying to transition a semi-feudal peasant autocracy into a more humane state-capitalist system that would be better able to stand up to imperialism, I could see how reading Lenin, Mao and Ho Chi Minh would help. But I’m trying to make socialism happen in a bourgeois democracy in the developed imperial core, and Rosa’s work is a lot more relevant to that struggle than the people you’re suggesting.
Marx and Engels didn’t provide us a revolution to study either.
Correct. They provided us the method of dialectical materialism, and the only dialectical materialist analysis of the first workers’ revolution, the Paris Commune. They provided us an understanding of Marxism before the age of imperialism
But I’m trying to make socialism happen in the developed imperial core
If you are American, you should be looking at the works of American revolutionaries for our context. Particularly, Harry Haywood’s work on the National Question in the US & Huey Newton’s work on organizing the lumpenproletariat. But again, these revolutionaries build off the work of Lenin in a way that it is impossible to build off Rosa’s work, just given the nature of historical development.
Neither 1917 Russia nor 1918 Germany provide a useful analogy to the specific conditions of the imperial core today. But Lenin’s work still provides us a blueprint for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat & challenging capitalism in the age of imperialism.
defeats are arguably more instructive than victories. many factors can lead to either but defeats are final and in the ultimate accounting, we have no true victories yet, only situations that have yet to yield defeat. after all, communism exists no where and fascists victories in the coming decades threaten even what socialism does exist. our first question must be what yields defeat, not what we hope might lead to victory. we only have the data to answer that first question, and even that far from conclusively.
