The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era by Ishay Micheline

Author:Ishay, Micheline [Неизвестный]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2008-06-01T21:00:00+00:00

The revolution will not come as quickly as expected. History has proved this, and we must be able to take this as a fact, reckon with the fact that the world socialist revolution cannot begin so easily in the advanced countries as the revolution began in Russia. . . . But to start a revolution in a country in which capitalism is developed, in which it has produced a democratic culture and organization, provided it to everybody—to do so without preparation would be wrong, absurd. We are only just approaching the painful period of the beginning of socialist revolution.66

For Luxemburg, along with Liebknecht, the treaty was a big blow to hopes for an international proletarian uprising against imperialism and capitalist greed. It was not a real peace, they argued, but a Bolshevik capitulation to German militarism; it represented nothing more than Lenin’s disillusionment with revolutionary opportunities in Germany and would result in nothing less than the economic strangulation and isolation of the Bolshevik revolution from all sides. Any socialist party, Luxemburg continued, would fail in its task and perish, by carrying out “the dictatorship of the proletariat and the socialist revolution in a single country surrounded by reactionary imperialist rule and in the fury of the bloodiest world war in human history.”67 Stalin’s proclamation of “Socialism in one country” and his merciless purge of his fellow Bolsheviks following Lenin’s death (1924) would later confirm her darkest fears.

The 1919 socialist conference held in Bern at the end of the war proved an ephemeral effort to resurrect the idea of a Second International. The conference had been called principally to influence the discussions held at the Paris Conference that was convened by the victors of the war. Drawing on the spirit of the International Socialist Organization and the reports by British Fabian Leonard Woolf (1880–1969) on international governance, detailing as early as 1915 a peace program orchestrated by a supranational organization, socialist delegates in Bern called for the establishment of a league of people rather than a league of representative governments.68 In time of conflict, they argued, member states of the League needed to surrender their sovereign powers to a supranational entity, which should be able to back its decisions by exercising economic pressure.69

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