Reality Rosa ​

"The greatest danger that I see in the present situation is that Germany may throw her lot in with the Bolsheviki..."



-Lloyd George, British Prime Minister, 1918​

"The abolition of the rule of capital, the realization of a socialist social order — this, and nothing less, is the historical theme of the present revolution. It is a formidable undertaking, and one that will not be accomplished in the blink of an eye just by the issuing of a few decrees from above. Only through the conscious action of the working masses in city and country can it be brought to life, only through the people's highest intellectual maturity and inexhaustible idealism can it be brought safely through all storms and find its way to port."



-Rosa Luxemburg, 1918​

Perhaps it was a fortuitous hiccup of the pitiless machinery of History, perhaps the playful caprice of an inscrutable higher being. Or maybe it was just a spate of lucky weather that let Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and the rest of the Spartacist leadership elude the Freikorps assassins in 1919.The result of their survival, however, was to be seen four and a half years later, on October 15th, 1923. After several false starts, the Luxemburgist KPD finally won a working class majority, seized power and held on for dear life. After the blood and iron of the German Civil War, Luxemburg's party went about the work of socialist construction with genuine Teutonic thoroughness. Asof thethroughout the crucial early years of the, Luxemburg ranks alongside Lenin and Trotsky as the foremost leaders of the socialist world revolution.The victory of German Communism shook the capitalist world to its foundations. The first act of thewas to publicly annul the Versailles treaty, that "shameful contract of imperialist slavery". The second act was to nationalize all major banks and cartels under workers' management. Under the banner of the League of Nations, France and Britain tried feverishly to strangle the revolution, bankrolling every anticommunist force from the rightwing Social Democrats to the Nazis and hastily uniting them in the counter-revolutionary "Republican" Armies. It foundered on the rocks of their own workers' resistance. The British unions struck supplies bound for the German White Armies, as the CPGB tripled in size practically overnight. A botched uprising of the French Communists succeded in terminating Poincaré's intervention in the German Civil War, but ushered in the victorious Fascist coup of 1926. The sense that the end of the world - at any rate, the old world - was near, spread into the most conservative milieux of the wealthiest countries. All across the planet, people turned away from liberal democracy in increasing numbers: the poor, to communism; the rich, to fascism. The great world war of the classes appeared inevitable, and the defeat of the bourgeoisie more and more likely, as a mighty Socialist Soviet Federation arose from the ruins of capitalist Central and Eastern Europe.The German October changed every factor in the socialist equation. The numerous, wealthy and literate German workers kept their appointed managers in line, and supplanted them to a large and increasing degree with proletarian self-rule. Cementing forever the Lenin-Trotsky line of international revolution, it consigned Stalin to the background, a self-described Trotskyist to his dying day. German industry absolved the Soviet Federation of having to bootstrap itself economically. Far from devolving into genocidal totalitarianism, under Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg the federation of workers' republics eased into an ever richer and freer socialist democracy. Never strangled by the dead hand of a privileged, despotic bureaucracy, but on the contrary invigorated and corrected at every step by proletarian freedom of speech, organization and criticism - that is, by soviet democracy - the socialist planned economy accumulated success after earth-shaking success.The First Plan of 1925-29 centred around what was known then asor(after the Germanof Planning, Lev "Tyshko" Jogiches) but is now referred to as. It involved the eastward transfer of four and a half million German workers and technicians, together with billions of marks' worth of goods and machinery, industrializing Russia at a pace that completely sidelined Stalin's effort on Homeline, which was, despite everything, one of that history's greatest economic successes. Agriculture was collectivized on a voluntary basis, backed by huge subsidies and grants from the now wealthy state. In accordance with the Marxist program, violence was avoided, and by the end of the decade, more than one third of Soviet farmers worked on the booming collective farms. The economy of Sowjet-Deutschland grew at an admittedly impressive rate of about 10%, but the former territories of Czarism experienced an astonishing average of 70% yearly growth. As Rosa Luxemburg put it in a 1925 speech to the Berlin workers: "We shall sow with knowledge, industry, and culture, those Russian steppes and those Ukrainian fields for which capitalism could find no seeds but bullets and corpses."With the growth of proletarian influence at the expense of Soviet bureaucratism, those Communists who supported increased workers' freedom and welfare gained the upper hand. The resumption of vigorous factionalism in the united CPSF led straight to a radical extension of proletarian democracy in the whole Federation. In 1926, the Soviet Government legalized all political parties that accepted state ownership of the means of production. Dzherzhinsky was not too happy with Lenin's conclusion, first demanded by Luxemburg, that the GPU/SPE should be "dismantled, oiled, cleaned and put securely under lock and key", but reconciled himself to this decision of the overwhelming Party majority that year. Partly voluntarily, but mostly kicking and screaming, the secret police was defanged by degrees, reestablishing freedom of organization and opinion. From 1932, with socialism securely in the saddle, all parties apart from White Guards and fascists were permitted to contest elections. Thanks to their farsighted and genuinely proletarian policies, the Communists still had decisive support among the workers and thus an absolute majority in the Congress of Soviets. The world was presented with the spectacle of Communists contesting and winning Soviet elections against those parties they had only yesterday terrorized and suppressed. On the whole, this softening of the proletarian dictatorship was referred to as the "Great Relaxation".After the German October, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania fell almost automatically, Poland had to be "assisted" by the Joint Red Armies, while Austria became a League-protected White German refuge. But the next great success internationally was the Chinese revolution of 1926. The Communist workers of Shanghai and Canton, backed by the Red Army and the rebellious peasantry, easily routed Chiang Kai-Shek and set about integrating China into the SSF. The French, British and Japanese tried to intervene, but quickly pulled out for fear of provoking the Soviets as well as domestic revolt (Japanese troops came home from China, in one general's expression, "infected with the bacillus of revolution"). This was an event of world historic importance. A colossal nation of 450 million, treated like dogs by Western imperialism for centuries, finally shook off foreign rule, rose to her feet and leapt headfirst into the modern age. China's greatest leader in this period was Communist founder Chen Du Xiu. China was so backward that she didn't even have a standardized language, let alone a tradition of liberal Enlightenment and democracy. Chen played the historical role not only of Lenin, but of Jefferson, Voltaire, and Chaucer besides. The last years of the First Five-Year Plan diverted significant resources to the preparation for China's, and the Second Plan was fully devoted to this enormous task. An endless stream of German, Russian and other barbarians, armed with the very latest in Western science and technique, assaulted the walls of the Middle Kingdom intent on breaking down, not her dignity and independence, but her degrading Asiatic backwardness. Within a decade, simply because it had more people than the rest of the Federation put together, China assumed an economic, political and cultural leading role which she has kept ever since.At this point, despite a number of temporary setbacks, the position of world Communism seemed unassailable. When Lenin finally bit the bullet in '28, the SSF, now headed by the troika of Trotsky, Chen and Luxemburg, was the world's second greatest power: a formidable bloc stretching from the Rhine to the South China Sea, barely hemmed in by increasingly shaky fascist France and Italy, an Imperial Japan staring collapse in the face and seething British India, with America watching in fearful resignation tempered by apocalyptic desperation. The Wall Street Crash of the same year signalled, even to conservative commentators, the final death agony of capitalism.The Bolshevik insurrection had counted on European revolution for its own survival. Indeed, internationalism was the basic principle of the Communist movement. The economic plan which welded together the Central and East European and Asian economies, found its parallel in the intermingling of the Soviet cultures, and the union of the various Communist Parties with a minimum of conflict. National culture was not stuffed into a bureaucratic straitjacket but encouraged to enrich itself and others in free union. The majority opinion, although far from unanimous, was that socialist culture had to be built not from scratch, from a "clean sheet", but on the basis of the massive cultural body developed under capitalism and previous class society, in the same way as socialist technique and thought. This was seen as the stepping stone to a peaceful, progressive federation of the world under a democratic planned economy.The Chinese and Persian revolutions posed with renewed force the questions of an all-Soviet second language and a new, rational-secular system of timekeeping to replace the Christian and Islamic calendars. Fierce debate raged in the Communist International and in Soviet society at large. The two major linguistic contenders were Esperanto and Ido, the latter of which won out after Lenin's promotion of Ido as "Esperanto with the chinks ironed out". Taught to Soviet children from preschool on, this fully regular, streamlined, "Spanish-sounding" planned language rapidly became the world's most spoken. This was helped by its being an order of magnitude easier to pick up than, say, English. Today it is spoken by more than 96% of humanity, with 59% listing it as their 'second first language'. It is the language of the Plan, of the Infonet, of the Communist International, not to mention millions of original works of literature. It features next to the local national language on every roadsign and every restaurant menu in the world. There is a growing fear in certain quarters that the youth is actually losing its national heritage thanks to the immense preponderance of Ido - symptoms include the frequent erroneous transfer of Ido grammar and spontaneous direct translation of Ido idioms - but this is a hotly contested issue, being supported by many Communists and other progressive types.The socialist calendar was introduced by referendum in 1933. It tried to kill two birds with one stone by abolishing Sunday and at the same time granting more days off - two in every six instead of every seven (today they discuss whether to extend the weekend from three to four days). It divides the year into twelve months, each with five weeks of six days. The names of the months are childishly simple (unmo, dumo, trimo, quarmo, kinmo, sesmo, sepmo, okmo, nonmo, dekmo, dekunmo and dekdumo) whereas the days of the week descend into true banality (undi, dudi, tridi, quardi, kindi and sesdi). The remaining five or six days constitute, Federation Week, a global year-end festival. Years were intially counted from the 1917 Russian Revolution (), but a later referendum changed it to 1968, the year of the WSSF's founding -, World Federation Era.The German and Chinese revolutions, even moreso than the Russian, roused the hopes of the poor and oppressed of the world, thrown into war, starvation and poverty by aristocrats and capitalists. The international Five-Year Plan showed the superiority of socialism, "not in the language of Capital, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity" (Trotsky). But capitalism wasn't dead yet.As the world's stock markets plunged in history's deepest crash, no doubt intensified by the ripping of China from the fabric of world trade, the Soviet Federation's economic advance proceeded parallel with the political Great Relaxation. Radicalism and Communism grew irresistably among the workers of the world, in spite of the vitriol of the bourgeois press and politicians. So did the violent anticommunist reaction.In America, Socialist Norman Thomas rocketed to the presidency in 1932 atop an elemental wave of strikes and factory occupations. The "sectarian mistakes" of the CPUSA (in Chairman Trotsky's words) in refusing to work with the Socialists and the AFL, limited their influence. Thomas' program was far from Bolshevik, restraining itself to partial nationalization, socialized insurance, increased income tax and Keynesianism. But even this program was extremely unpopular with the business community, and the administration came under attack from the very first day. The corporate press printed spurious allegations of electoral fraud and irregularities, hinting of Bolshevik subvertion of the democratic process.Most of the Establishment felt quite nervous, but still believed they could control the moderate Thomas. A vocal minority, however, was terrified of the movement he represented and furiously demanded decisive action against the 'Reds'. Foremost among this tendency were the army officers, headed by the always rambunctious General MacArthur. MacArthur was already infamous thanks to his bloody crushing of the Pennsylvania miners' strike of 1930. During that historic strike, the masses were radicalized to such an extent that the organizing committees approached the function of labor councils and, despite the wishes of the leaders, the movement took on the character of a mass uprising. In the end, 122 strikers were killed and thousands imprisoned by MacArthur's troops. This was already a portent of things to come. Claiming electoral fraud and Red insurrection, in late 1932 MacArthur launched a nationwide. Not all the nation's millionaires were impressed. "Has he gone mad?" was the watchword in the upper-class salons. But the subsequent course of events was to make them march in lockstep behind the Great General.Marx remarked that the revolution sometimes needs the whip of the counter-revolution. This was indeed the case in 1932. Although the coup failed to take the nation in one fell swoop, MacArthur's men seized control of key areas including much of the South and West, massacring and imprisoning labor organizers. This frontal assault on democracy radicalized broad working masses who had never had anything but contempt for the Reds. The US workers were radicalized more in a few days than in the preceding 20 years. All across the nation, bosses who supported the coup were literally sacked - put in a sack and thrown out on the street - with the workers taking over the factories. The proletarian masses did not demand Communism, only defence of the republic. But the very fact of such a working class rebellion would inevitably split the nation along class lines, pushing the upper and middle class into the camp of reaction. In the words of Henry Ford (one of the Commander's biggest sponsors): "Today, every American must choose: MacArthur... or Bolshevism". The workers had to be punished; the Communists, exterminated. As the workers' fight to defend democracy grew over into a genuine socialist revolution, MacArthur's gang snowballed into a fully-fledged fascist movement. Norman Thomas, the great moderate of yesterday, declared the necessity of using armed force to defeat the rebels. As MacArthur's army threatened Washington, the government had to relocate to Chicago. Overnight, the United States was plunged into civil strife.Civil War Two was to last for three years and claim more than a million lives. On one side stood the Republic headed by Norman Thomas, backed by Communists, Wobblies, anarchists and left Democrats. On the other stood Commander MacArthur's hastily-assembled Patriot Party with its paramilitary Minutemen, absorbing in itself every reactionary current in American politics. There was no middle ground: America was divided down the middle between revolutionary democracy and fascist dictatorship. The conflict was distinguished by extreme brutality on both sides. General Patton, later known as the Butcher of the Bronx, was asked by a New York Times reporter why he was in favor of suspending certain constitutional rights. Patton's reply? "They didn't have Reds back then." Al Capone actually fought and died for the Republican side, having left the life of crime at a young age. "Bugs" Moran, on the other hand, ended his days as a low level fascist bureaucrat. (J. Edgar Hoover didn't have the right attitude to rise above a low rank Minuteman.) In the end, despite Soviet support and heroic resistance, the Republic was crushed, with blacks, Jews and labor organizers cruelly persecuted. Some lucky left-wingers managed to flee to the SSF. Others, such as John Reed and Big Bill Haywood, were to end their lives in hellholes like Oak Ridge Concentration Camp. The totalitarian Iron Heel of fascism was to reign for decades on the bones of American democracy, while millionaires like Henry Ford and Walt Disney profited handsomely from the workers' subjugation.With fascism victorious in the USA, most of Latin America followed suit. As Britain had gone Fascist in 1933, this was the death of the last liberal democracy. By the mid 1930s, the entire world was divided into two great camps: on the one hand, capitalist dictatorship; on the other, socialist democracy. The equilibrium couldn't last. War was inevitable. War... and permanent revolution.According to the Communists, World War One was caused by the productive forces rebelling against the straitjackets of private property and the nation state. The world market wasn't big enough for so many imperialist Great Powers, so they had to fight each other for colonies and strangle each other's industries with tariff walls. This meant that from being progressive, capitalism had become reactionary. It was up to the working class to save civilization from decline, by means of the socialist revolution. Much like the national bourgeoisie had forged nation-states from Middle Ages provincialism, and abolished the archaic feudal quirks and restrictions, thereby making possible the immense progress of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so the international proletariat would unite the squabbling nation-states and socialize the corporations into an international planned economy. This process was necessarily piecemeal, conquering one nation at a time. Once one nation had gone socialist, it was obliged to help out the others, as a "drill ground for the world revolution" (Trotsky).Unlike Stalin's Soviet Union, Trotsky's Soviet Federation was aggressive through and through, fully dedicated to expanding its realm by armed world revolution. At the same time, the Trotskyists tried to restrict Red Army intervention as much as possible in favor of "homegrown" insurrection, believing that the working class had to be convinced by its own revolutionary experience before it could build socialism. In their opinion the Red Army could only assist, not supplant, the proletariat. The exact nature of this "assistance", however, was open to interpretation. For instance, in Karl Liebknecht's sly phrase, the Red Army could assist the proletariat to begin the revolution. This notion was the cornerstone of Soviet military policy from the day it became clear that fascism had stabilized itself in Italy and France.The Red Army preserved and strengthened the egalitarian traditions from its founding. Officers (that is, "commanders") enjoyed no special privileges, eating the same food and sleeping in the same quarters as the soldiers. Ranks and epaulettes, brought back with a vengeance by Homeline Stalinism, remained in the trash-can of history. The Red Army used purely functional titles like komdiv (division commander), kombat (battalion commander) and so on. Commanders could be (and were) court-martialled for having privates polish their boots. Political commissars were abolished in 1931, by which time the commanders were considered sufficiently loyal to the new regime.After Soviet Germany's consolidation came the fusion of the Red Armies of Liebknecht and Trotsky. At this point Mussolini and Léon Daudet could not hope to make a dent in the SSF by military means, and the arming of 30 million Chinamen (making the Soviet wartime strength larger than the entire population of France) further underlined their hopelessness. All they could do was dig in as deep as possible, close their eyes, blame the Jews (in the case of France), wait for the Bolsheviks to come, and pray. The first Five-Year Plan was openly regarded as economic preparation for a new world war. During this time Lenin and Luxemburg tried to play on the divisions in the bourgeois camp, but found that with each new revolution, the world bourgeoisie was welded closer together. The League of Nations more and more assumed the shape of the League of Defense against Bolshevism. War planning had to account for the eventuality of having to take on every imperialism in the world at once.Even this was not a cause for despair, considering the state in which capitalism found itself. Each new month meant huge economic and thus military advance in the socialist camp, while capitalism stagnated and declined. The showdown had to come at some point, that was clear, but it was decided to take advantage of the capitalist crisis to develop the economy in the meantime. Finally, in 1935, after intense anti-fascist agitation, Trotsky declared war upon France and Italy. Britain and Japan declared war upon the SSF, and thus began, the World Revolutionary War.Armed with the world's best weapons, tactics and officers, Tukhachevsky's and Guderian'smade short work of the demoralized fascist armies. A big part was played by the Soviets' extremely effective class-war propaganda, cutting across nationalism and calling upon the French and Italian workers and farmers in uniform to shoot the generals on their own side. (Stalin's racist WWII propaganda was one reason why the Nazi soldiers fought so fiercely.) Faced with this onslaught, many of the fascist armies simply disintegrated. As if on cue, the insurgent proletariat fell upon the enemy's rear.was greeted with red flags by the workers of Milan, Paris and Barcelona, and within eight months, the Soviet Federation had spread to all of continental Europe. Scandinavia followed in the footsteps of Finland which had already gone red in 1931.In the East, Korea was seized in the very first weeks. The British and Japanese blockade had little effect. On the contrary the Soviets launched a colossal new offensive to secure insurgent India and the Middle East, while expanding the Red Navy. Soon the red flag swayed over all of Asia. In the year 1938, a nuclear device was detonated over Scapa Flow, made possible by Einstein and other 'fellow-travellers', among them many Jews who had fled fascist persecution to the Yiddish-speaking Jewish Soviet Republic in the Ukraine. American scientists exploded their own a few months later, blocking Trotsky's already-unpopular invasion plans. The Second World War ended with a stalemate between the Eurasian-North African SSF and the capitalist bloc of the Americas, South Africa, Japan and Oceania. Thus began Rosa's Cold War, the so-called 'long breathing-space'.Under the crossed atomic spears, Comintern agents for decades infiltrated the totalitarian countries, evading the secret police to call the workers to revolution. The tension of spy dramas more than once brought the world to the brink of mutual destruction. Capitalism held out longer than anyone could have hoped, based on the inertia of the working class. Finally, in 1966, the system started to unravel. Revolutions spread like wildfire across Latin America and the USA was powerless to stop them. Upon MacArthur's death, US capitalism fell to the broadest popular uprising so far. Three decades of fascist repression had completely exhausted the moral reserves of capitalism. The very word 'patriot' had become synonymous with fascist. There was no Civil War Three. The proletarian dictatorship in America limited itself to the execution of a few thousand leading fascists. Socialism secured for itself the heritage of progressive capitalism which the bourgeoisie had thrown overboard in its Nietzschean frenzy. The Labor Government expropriated Jefferson and Lincoln in the same go as Ford and Rockefeller.America was followed immediately by Africa, Japan and Australia. In the fiftieth year of the Russian Revolution, the Socialist Soviet Federation added a "World" to its name, drafting a new constitution. All humanity stood united under the red banner. Well, almost. New Zealand's somewhat bizarre dictator, Michael Lee Young, resisted for another few months. He had American-made SRBMs that could reach Sydney, so the World Congress of Soviets decided to humor him for a while. Soon enough he too fell. Borders were finally abolished, and thus so was war. The government started to dismantle the nuclear arsenal and gradually disband the Red Army. All across the SSF, millions of workers erupted into the streets in wild cheering - it was like the revolution's first days all over again. The Brotherhood of Man was at hand. At last, the work of socialist construction could begin in earnest.