The Dialectical Core in Rosa Luxemburg’s Vision of Democracy

Abstract

As Norman Geras has stressed is his essay Bourgeois Power and Socialist Democracy: On the Relation of Ends and Means (in The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, New Left Books), Rosa Luxemburg’s concept of socialist democracy neither corresponds to the theory of bourgeois parliamentarism nor does it subscribe to the anarchist-libertarian worldview. Inextricably linked to the praxis of class struggle and accomplishment of the socialist revolution, her vision of democracy from the beginning to the end is steered by the principle of dialectics which incorporates criticism as well as the corrective impact of the actual revolutionary experience. This exciting journey, by reconciling contradictions, aspires for a sociopolitical order where the individual and the collective are bound by the practice of free and fruitful human endeavour. This paper explores Rosa’s dialectical understanding of the theory and practice of socialist democracy, which is but another name for the realm of freedom, as envisaged by Marx in his Paris Manuscripts.