"Hatred" between the EU and USA

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"Luxemburg voiced her disapproval at this attack on a budding young democracy with the words "Act! Disarm the counter-revolution, arm the masses, occupy all important positions. Act quickly! The revolution demands it!"

Maybe I'm misunderstanding that, but it says she was against doing that.

Also, the Spartacus Uprising was not an attempt to prey on an budding democracy. It was based on political infighting between the communists and the social democrats in the interim-government. Revolutionary power struggle. Not some opportunistic "lets take over!" need.

edited 9th May '13 12:49:21 PM by 3of4

"You can reply to this Message!"

I'd also point out America dismantles budding democracies all the damned time if we think a despot we put in place will be better for us profitwise.

With Canada and the USA it's more like two siblings who look a bit a like that get irritated when they get called by the wrong name. We hate being mistaken for one another, but that doesn't mean we HATE one another. Then shun being called Americans because they're not Americans. They're Canadian. Just about every country has at least one other country similar but different they resent getting mixed up with.

The best example I can think of is two bothers who really like teasing each other but never really mean it.

And I've never heard anything of Canada making it intentionally harder to travel to Canada from the US (though I have heard examples of the US Fed making the opposite difficult). I've lived on the Canadian-American border. I know several families who cross over on the weekend for the sole sake of shopping. The amount of money that flow from people hopping over for a weekend and returning is huge.

And whatever troubles occur at the northern border are downright insignificant at the southern border. You do know there have been serious attempts to completely fence Mexico off from the United States right? Or that The US wanted to ban Mexican trucks form crossing the border (despite it being against Nafta) because of immigration fears.

As for national mergers. The general opinion of ANY merger in the US is distrust if not outright downright loathing. And even then, you'd still find more resistance to an American-Mexican union than an American-Canadian one.

edited 9th May '13 1:01:04 PM by IConfuseMe

Firstly, that link of yours doesn't support your position.^note Of secondary importance is its very obvious partiality.

Secondly: It was actually Phillip Schiedemann who torpedoed Max von Baden's plans for a constitutional monarchy, by announcing the German Republic, without consulting any of his colleagues, from the Reichstag window. The idea that there was some emerging democracy is farcical - interwar German democracy was doomed from the outset. It was Friedrich Ebert who doomed it by essentially bribing the German Army into suppressing the Spartakists in exchange for upholding German militarism in the Ebert-Groener telephone pact.

Thirdly: You have a very limited understanding of the Spartakist revolt. Firstly, it was not a coordinated uprising, but a spontaneous one by workers, which snowballed. The immediate reaction of the German communists was to call a general strike. Luxemburg supported joining the new government, and she was out-voted. Furthermore, the USPD, another leftist party, had offered to mediate between her and the government. Ebert accepted, and then ordered the Freikorps to massacre them anyway. Like I say, her support was because she did not want to abandon her fellow workers to the tender mercies of Ebert and his Freikorps mercenaries.

edited 9th May '13 1:02:54 PM by Achaemenid

Schild und Schwert der Partei

Yes USA does destroy many budding democracies, and most of them were in South America, the Caribbean or Central America, Guatemala being a repeated victim of it for example.

That does not change the fact that Rosa Luxemburg praised democracy with her lips and then took part in an attempt to destroy one. Okay, maybe I took it out of context but the way I read it she was telling her communist underlings to act, that the revolution was the communist revolution, not the prince's comparatively peaceful parliamentary reorganization. Even if it was "just" against the social democrats the fact the communists were violently against the democrats and that violent dictators came out of their party should be enough evidence.

Does anyone talk about the Filibustering Americans who toppled all those democracies for their own benefit with flowery praise and name foundations after them? To my understand the filibuster became a swear.

edited 9th May '13 1:11:51 PM by Cider

Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack

South American communism is not that much different from European as they got along with Soviet Union pretty well. Fidel and Che Guevara are no saints.

My President is Funny Valentine.

Castros do not rule any part of South American, the murderous Che Guevara I will give you.

Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack

Cuba is part of Latin America culturally.

My President is Funny Valentine.

@Cider: no, but only because we tend to sweep that under the rug and whistle innocently.

Latin America and South America are not the same thing. Every nation on the South American shield is not "Latin" and it varies on who you ask whether Portuguese nations like Brazil should be considered "Latin" or not. Cuba is part of Latin America, so is The Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico but Samoa, Netherland Antilles, Aruba, Suriname Belize, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, Tobago, Barbuda, St. Lucia, Grenada, St. Vincent, The Grenadines, The Bahamas, Haiti, Martinique or Guadeloupe.

Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack

That's a dubious characterization of the Spartakist revolt as well. Karl Liebknecht was not a particularly intelligent man, but most of the strikers and resisters just wanted a better life, not to rule with an iron fist. An essential plank of Luxemburgism was (is?) a democratic path to social ownership of the means of production and, once that has been achieved, continued democratic participation.

I don't know why you mentioned the USA's own anti-democratic actions - I did look over the thread, but didn't see a mention, though I might have missed it - but I'm not interested in a Europe v. America pissing contest. I only posted because I think Rosa Luxemburg was a pretty cool gal.

The atavistic reaction many Americans have to the word "socialism" comes from years of Cold War-era propaganda that didn't draw a distinction between the various strands of socialist thought. Socialism is no more a unified ideology than conservatism. Americans have never really heard or learned about democratic, guild, or market socialism, despite being allied with many governments that espoused those beliefs against Marxist-Leninism and Maoism (and Juche thought, but that's a sort of ideological orphan). In the same way "conservative" is a label that could be applied to David Cameron, Glenn Beck, Pat Buchanan, and Emperor Showa despite the vast gaps between their respective ideologies, so too can "socialist" be used equally fittingly to describe Rosa Luxemburg, Josef Stalin, Harold Wilson, and Clement Attlee (and me), despite, again, the huge gaps between those figures' belief systems.

edited 9th May '13 1:26:43 PM by Achaemenid

Schild und Schwert der Partei

I am not sure how many people would really accept her definition of democracy though.

To most people a democracy and a dictator would be completely incompatible, a temporary emergency measure in crisis at best. I suppose her dictatorship might be better than Stalin's in that it would be "the work of the class" and not a minority but consider some of her criticism of Lenin. The people who are not cool with the whole Communist thing should not be allowed to leave with the fall of the old government, even though they were conquered populations who may not have wanted to be part of Russia in the first place, which strikes me as undemocratic.

But I think Achaemenid has accurately explained why there are some gaps between American and European stances on the matter. In fact, I think pretty much everything in my initial rant has been settled as far as it relates to the topic at hand...or has it?(edit:For Canadian immigration, that may not be the right word. Basically I heard from Jun Hado(Chinaman working in USA?), Sabu and Jim Cornette that Americans who used to work in Canada that now all the sudden they are being hassled for short trips) I have learned a little either way.

edited 9th May '13 3:27:44 PM by Cider

Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack

Should this thread be renamed something less provocative? "Differences between American and European Politics"? "Europe and Europa"? "European History Thread"? I'm enjoying this discussion.

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Warning, long post discussing Marxist thought.

TL;DR: Rosa Luxemburg is talking about dictatorship of the proletariat. Dictatorship of the proletariat =/= dictatorship as you conceive it.

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When a socialist talks of "dictatorship of the proletariat", it is hard to explain what they mean without an explanation of Marxism and socialism. This is why most modern socialists don't use the term, along with its connotations of Marxism, which is but one strand of socialism.

Rosa Luxemburg was, after a fashion, a communist. Marx and Engels believed that human society would ultimately evolve into "stateless communism" - a theoretical utopia where want was eliminated (what exact form stateless or "pure" communism takes is another topic). "Socialism", the desire for common ownership of the means of production, is a step towards achieving this. This is why the USSR self-identified as "socialist". It was not a communist society, but a socialist society trying to build communism. This is why early socialism and communism had very strong internationalist movements - whilst the reactionary parties of Europe were busy arming up for a continent-wide showdown, the socialists were holding the Second International (the spirit of which is maintained in the modern Socialist International). One step on the road to stateless, global, worldwide communism is dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the "dictatorship" Rosa Luxemburg sought.

"Dictatorship of the proletariat" is not dictatorship in the traditional sense of a single autocratic ruler or ruling elite. Dictatorship of the proletariat means nothing more or less than the economic control of the means of production by the working class. The current state of society is, to the Marxist mind, "dictatorship of the bourgeosie". Workers work for the bosses and the middle classes who own and exploit the fruits of the workers' labour. In a "dictatorship of the proletariat", this situation is remedied. Eventually, so the theory goes, large-scale capitalism is phased out, and as there are no more capitalist owners being born, there are no more classes, and so pure communism is reached.

It refers to the control of political power by the masses. That is the dictatorship Rosa Luxemburg mentioned. To give an idea of what Marx and Luxemburg envisaged by this, Karl Marx described, in his eyes, the Paris Commune as the ideal dictatorship - or rather, his somewhat idealistic view of the Paris Commune:

When Marx's partner and co-author of The Communist Manifesto, Friedrich Engels, was asked what he meant, he replied: "Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat":

This is more like modern direct democracy than modern dictatorship. It is certainly very far from Gadaffi, Pinochet, Stalin, or Mao. Rosa Luxemburg wanted dictatorship of the proletariat, not dictatorship.

The reason for the confusion is that, despite Marx's predictions, no Communist revolution has ever (with the possible exception of the Paris Commune) actually emerged via Marx's vision of democratic organization of the working class. The Russian Revolution began as a genuinely popular uprising, but it was hijacked by Lenin's Bolsheviks, a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party, themselves only a part of the seething popular discontent. Following Communist "revolutions" were established along the Soviet lines of bureacratic dictatorship. This was essentially no better than bourgeoise capitalism, as the problems that the early revolutionaries identified - of wealth and power becoming concentrated in the hands of an elite - were just as evident in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (and still are in China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba).

As for her support of Lenin - I can only say that she was naive, and she lived in a different time. Rosa died less than two years after Lenin took power, and with the Russian Civil War raging on (where White Russians committed just as many atrocities as the Reds), with Czarist tyranny fresh in everyone's minds, and Europe staggering to its feet after the upheaval and carnage of WWI, she can, at least in my book, be forgiven for a certain amount of ignorance of Leninism. I think it is still true to note, and very important to note, that she accurately predicted Stalinism, and that her model of socialism has not been tried and found wanting, but found difficult and left untried. I don't personally think it would work, but I think it was devised with the best of intentions and the values of the Enlightenment in mind.

EDIT: Have a nice song

OTHER EDIT: I am not a Marxist, so there's no need to point out the flaws in Marx's theoretical model of societal progress. I tried to, but it would have taken a whole other post in itself, and this one was already too long.

edited 9th May '13 4:27:37 PM by Achaemenid

Schild und Schwert der Partei

As a side-note, Róża Luksemburg was a controversial person here even during her life for other reasons: she left mainstream Polish socialist movement over disagreement whether gaining independence from Austria, Germany and Russia is more important or building socialism.

My President is Funny Valentine.

The Free Territory and Anarchist Catalonia don't count?

Laws are made to be broken. You're next, thermodynamics.

I admit I overlooked them, but they were not really Communists in the strictest sense. The Makhovists were anarcho-communists, and Catalonia was run by the unions in conjunction with anarchists.

Did they not still need some form of force to create them though? And were the Makhovists and Anarchist a genuine popular majority? Marx envisaged a popular uprising of all workers, and I'm fairly sure neither the Makhovists or Anarchist Spaniards were fully supported by the totality of the proletariat.

edited 12th May '13 4:36:39 PM by Achaemenid

Schild und Schwert der Partei

Makhno was mostly military advisor who protected the area. Keeping armed forces was more than reasonable due to presence of nearby Polish, other Ukrainian, White and Red Russian forces who weren't sympathetically inclined to their ideals.

My President is Funny Valentine.

I'm aware of that. My question was whether or not the Free Territory was a genuine popular project or something essentially imposed.

Schild und Schwert der Partei