Rosa Luxemburg - Revolutionary Marxist Leader
1871-1919
“In Germany, the only truly democratic
institution – universal suffrage – is not
a conquest won by bourgeois liberalism.
Universal suffrage in Germany was an
instrument for the fusion of the small
States. It is only in this sense that it has
any importance for the development
of the German bourgeoisie, which is
otherwise quite satisfied with semifeudal
constitutional monarchy. In Russia,
capitalism prospered for a long time
under the regime of oriental absolutism,
without having the bourgeoisie manifest
the least desire in the world to introduce
democracy. In Austria, universal suffrage
was above all a safety line thrown to a
foundering and decomposing monarchy.
In Belgium, the conquest of universal
suffrage by the labour movement was
undoubtedly due to the weakness of the
local militarism, and consequently to the
special geographic and political situation
of the country. But we have here a “bit of
democracy” that has been won not by the
bourgeoisie but against it.
The uninterrupted victory of democracy,
which to our revisionism as well as to
bourgeois liberalism, appears as a great
fundamental law of human history and,
especially, modern history is shown upon
closer examination to be a phantom.
No absolute and general relation can
be constructed between capitalist
development and democracy. The political
form of a given country is always the result
of the composite of all the existing political
factors, domestic as well as foreign. It
admits within its limits all variations of
the scale from absolute monarchy to the
democratic republic.
We must abandon, therefore, all hope of
establishing democracy as a general law
of historical development even within the
framework of modern society."
