Turkey is now bombing and shelling Kurds in Iraq once again under the excuse of trying to destroy the PKK. This is a continuation of the horrible oppression and repression faced by Kurds that I wrote about in:

Kurdish Culture, Repression, Women’s Rights, and Resistance
people.tribe.net/steveargu...23f092e9dc

One of the criticisms I faced from those backing the repression against the Kurds was the fact that the PKK is a revolutionary socialist organization. An attempt was made to equate the leadership of the PKK with Stalin.

Yet, here is part of what the PKK says about the Soviet Union and socialism in their program:

"The Soviet Union has disappeared, the Soviet Bloc has dissolved itself, and there have been major developments in the socialist movement. The phase of Soviet-dominated socialism is finished. That was a phase of primitive and brutal socialism. Now, a new phase of socialism has begun, namely its rich phase. Our party is the embodiment of one of the most significant socialist movements during this new phase, and we plan to live up to our duties in our revolutionary work."

I have not seen a detailed analysis by the PKK of the Soviet model, but I see their rejection of that model as encouraging. The PKK are a popular group among Turkish Kurds that have gained that support through their struggle for socialism against the horrible oppression and repression faced by both Kurds and women in inside of Turkey. No matter what the position of the PKK on the Soviet Union or anything else, I support the Kurdish right, as an oppressed people, to self-determination.

The Bolsheviks, under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, were swept to power in a popular revolution that called for an end to the war with Germany, land reform, and socialism. Besides the betterment this revolution meant for the workers and peasants in general, including access to healthcare and education, giant strides forward were made for oppressed nationalities, Jews, women's rights, and gay rights. Before the revolution, under Czarist rule, Jews were routinely slaughtered in the thousands in government-sponsored pogroms. Peasants were the property of feudal landlords, and huge numbers of drafted young peasants were dying in the inter-imperialist war with Germany. This all ended with the Russian Revolution. In addition, gay rights and the right to abortion were legalized for the first time in any country with the birth of the Soviet Union and backward anti-woman practices such as bride-price and forced marriage were made illegal. Priorities were made of literacy and meeting the basic needs of the people. These were huge advances made by a revolution that had inherited a poor economically backward nation, soon to be further devastated by civil war and the invasion of many imperialist armies.

Yet, Rosa Luxemburg, a key leader of the German and international communist movement, while praising the advances made by the Russian Revolution, did not excuse the lack of democracy in the Soviet Union. She saw the Marxist concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in a completely different way than Lenin and Trotsky. She saw this simply as the toiling majority becoming the dictators over the capitalist minority that once held power. For that majority to actually be in charge, however, they would need democratic organs, universal suffrage, and democratic rights. For Lenin and Trotsky, the concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" fit more into bourgeois models of individual dictatorship by those in power. As Rosa Luxemburg states in her 1918 work, the “Russian Revolution”:

Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only a bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders with inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule [...] a dictatorship, to be sure, but not dictatorship of the proletariat [...].

A different position by Lenin and Trotsky more in league with that of Rosa Luxemburg would have produced a much better and more open society that would have made Stalin's type of rise to power through skullduggery, corruption, and terror within the ranks of the party much more difficult.

Rosa Luxemburg did not see the question as being counterpoised between bourgeois democracy (democracy for the rich as we have in the United States) on the one hand (defended by "socialists" who had betrayed socialism and become administrators of capitalist exploitation and war), and dictatorial communism on the other. Instead, she rejected both and fought for a socialist society with nationalized industries where the working class has democratic control.

It is this essential banner of democratic revolutionary socialism that is being revived in the struggle for human rights against brutal U.S. backed capitalist dictatorships and other capitalist governments in the struggle for human rights such as language rights, women's rights, medicine, food, clean drinking water, for environmental survival, an end to U.S. imposed wars, and an end to capitalist and imperialist exploitation. Forward in the struggle for democratic revolutionary socialism!

Liberation News
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