[dankolog]

Dear Comrade,thank you so much for your detailed and stimulating reply. I am really happy that somebody, with more experience than I, is helping me to understand the deep differences between Austro-Marxism and “Impossibilism”. This is a very important issue for me, because I have been raised and educated in a family politically very close to the far-left wing of the Italian Socialist Party (well before the final and shameful collapse in the Craxi’s age in the '80-'90). In this political environment, where the leading characters were Lelio Basso, Vittorio Foa and Riccardo Lombardi, there was a sort of "veneration" for Rosa Luxemburg's ideas, but also for "Austro-Marxism". It  was even taught that the latter was, in some sense, a continuation of the former…. but now I can see that, probably, it was not true. I have got somehow the impression that they were trying to construct a sort of “icon”, a bit like Lenin for the pro-Russia communists, in order to give a “revolutionary flavour" to their intrinsically reformist practice. I do not know if there has been a similar phenomenon in the UK with the left wing of the Labour party, say Tony Benn or even the Militant Tendency in Liverpool, but surely you understand what I mean. The other point I still need to clarify is the question of the Russian revolution and the Leninist strategy. I have been taught since my young age that Rosa Luxemburg had deeply criticized the Blanquist attitude of the Bolshevik party in Russia in 1917, and even the fact that Lenin got quickly rid of the Constituent Assembly in 1918, saying that socialism is a open process implying the development of forms, more and more advanced, of democracy. And that this critique was very similar to those by Otto Bauer, Karl Kautsky and Julius Martov, who saw in the undemocratic and authoritarian character of Bolshevism the unavoidable product of the backward conditions of Russia made worse by the horrors and the slaughters of five years of First World War. Do you think it is correct to merge Luxemburg’s ideas with those of the left-wing of the post-war Social-democracy (i.e. the so called “2-and-half International”), at least as far as the critique of Lenin and Bolshevism is concerned?   Yours in socialism Dan Kolog  

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