Communism, Post-Communism, and Democracy

A world is at war.Empires-in Europe, Eurasia, Asia, the Middle East and North Africaare crumbling.Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-German revolutionary Marxist, had anticipated the destruction in her prescient "Junius Pamphlet": "This world war is a regression into barbarism.The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization.At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences.Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degenerationa great cemetery.Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war.This is a dilemma of world history, an either/or; the scales are wavering before the decision of the class-conscious proletariat.The future of civilization and humanity depends on whether or not the proletariat resolves manfully to throw its revolutionary broadsword into the scales.In this war imperialism has won.Its bloody sword of genocide has brutally tilted the scale toward the abyss of misery.The only compensation for all the misery and all the shame would be if we learn from the war how the proletariat can seize mastery of its own destiny and escape the role of the lackey to the ruling classes."Luxemburg wrote these words in 1915, from a German prison cell.Within four years the cataclysm unfolded, though not quite as she imagined, in a dialectical synergy of revolutionary socialism and barbarism; and she lay dead, assassinated by right-wing paramilitary forces, the Freikorps, allied with Friedrich Ebert, the first President of the recently installed Weimar Republic, who was, ironically, a Social Democrat.At the core of this cataclysm was the Russian Revolution of 1917, inaugurated by the overthrow of Czar Nicholas II and the creation of a Provisional Government in February, and capped by the seizure of power in Petrograd by the Bolsheviks, under the leadership of Lenin, in October, leading eventually to the