CONTRIBUTI / 6 / Michele Fiorillo /
The search for a form of ‘true democracy’ – where the governors can potentially coincide with the governed – seems to be the central point of the political research and struggle of Rosa Luxemburg, as it was for Antonio Gramsci. Both of them co-founders of communist parties, in Germany and Italy respectively, they exercised their own strong critical view, in different moments, on the degeneration of the Soviet experience. Both practiced and theorized a ‘counciliar’ model of democracy, imagining it as a finally full participation of the people to the government of the ‘common’. Luxemburg criticized particularly the idea of Lenin and Bolsheviks about the supremacy of a strongly centralized revolutionary party, claiming at the contrary for a well understood ‘dictatorship of proletariat’ conceived as a self-government of the working masses. Moreover, in the controversial manuscript on The Russian Revolution she was opposed to the dissolution of the Constituent assembly and to the limitation of civil rights perpetrated by the Bolsheviks. Conversely, in Luxemburg’s opinion complete freedom was essential for a full emancipation and for the flourishing of people’s power.
