  Luxemburg was one of the first to draw attention to the risks of progressive isolation from the wider movement that this conception of partisanship entailed. Although she applauded the October Revolution of 1917 for showing that the idea of a working class state was no hopeless utopia, she insisted that without connection to and guidance from the masses, the party would soon reach a state of bureaucratic stalemate, separate from the concerns of the rest of society which would endanger the very freedoms that socialists promised to realise. As she memorably put it: “Freedom for supporters of the government only, for members of one part only – no matter how numerous they might be is no freedom at all. Freedom is always freedom for those who think differently” (Luxemburg 1922 [RLR: 305]). This freedom to think differently, she believed could only flourish if it remained connected to democracy understood as rule by the oppressed people, maturing the skills, epistemic insight and views necessary to guide them in circumstances of revolutionary transitions. She believed that political education of the mass of the oppressed, and the ability to develop their views through practice was essential to working class rule. While a liberal democratic order could maintain its stability thanks to the cooperation of an already educated elite, the challenge for a movement of the oppressed was to develop the knowledge necessary to develop a new political order in the course of transforming the old one. This is why, democratic practice and the idea of historical experimentation as a learning process was crucial. Not, as Luxemburg put it, because of any fanaticism about the “concept of ‘justice’ but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic”, and “freedom” effectively loses its meaning once it becomes a privilege (Luxemburg 1922 [RLR: 305]). Active participation in public life required guaranteeing general elections, freedom of the press and assembly, and an uncensored exchange of opinions without which public life “gradually falls asleep” and only buraucracy is kept alive.