Main NI Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. 5 No. 3, 18 January 1941, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Twenty-two years ago this January 15, the two outstanding revolutionary leaders of the German working class, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, were arrested and murdered by the German Junker officers whom the Social Democratic government had called upon to aid it in crushing the socialist revolution. That horrible deed, connived at by the pro-war “socialists,” beheaded the revolution and led to the victory of Nazism.
Liebknecht’s life is an inspiration to the German proletariat which will rise in the course of this war and avenge him.
At the time of his birth, in August 1871, his father, founder of the German socialist movement, was in prison for “high treason.” Karl became a lawyer – but one whose first case was the defense of a young socialist, and so it was always.
His immortal fame rests, above all, on his leadership of the struggle against bourgeois militarism. In 1906 he was on trial; the “crime” was a series of lectures on militarism, delivered to the annual conference of the Socialist Youth organizations. When he published the lectures, the book was confiscated, he was arrested and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment.
He was not a pacifist. On the contrary, as a member of the international bureau of the Socialist Youth he attacked those who proposed refusal to register for military services. In opposition to these pacifists, he called for the struggle against bourgeois militarism within the bourgeois army itself.
When the war broke out, he was a member of the Reichstag. The Social Democratic party’s Reichstag group was dominated, as was the party, by trade union bureaucrats; they carried their peacetime opportunism to its logical conclusion, and supported the war. Liebknecht refused to go along, although at the first vote in the Reichstag he abided by party discipline; at the December 2, 1914 session, however, he broke discipline and voted against war credits.
With Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, and Franz Mehring, he founded Die Internationale, the first illegal organ of the German revolutionists. But they did not build a party.
Liebknecht organized the magnificent May Day demonstration of 1916 in Berlin. There he denounced the imperialists and called upon the German proletariat to fight against its main enemy at home. Arrested for this heroic protest, he was tried behind closed doors – the German “democracy” feared an open trial – and sentenced to four and a half years’ imprisonment.
Set free when the Kaiser was overthrown, Liebknecht and Luxemburg agonizedly realized that the revolutionary wave had no leadership; they tried, working against time, to build the necessary revolutionary party. The Spartacusbund which they formed suffered all the ills of an inexperienced and ultra-left group, and it was not permitted time to learn. At the invitation of Noske, the Social Democratic Minister of War, Junker troops invaded Wilmersdorf where Liebknecht and Luxemburg were in hiding, and, assassinated them. The assassins were known; but their trial was a mere farce.
Shortly before Comrade Trotsky’s death, he predicted, and events bear it out, that the Prussian drill-sergeant would become the ideal of capitalist America. Liebknecht’s Militarism – his 1906 lectures – deserves to be read by all workers today, for it is an analysis of bourgeois militarism, as expressed by its Prussian exponents and now imitated everywhere.
Militarism, Liebknecht points out in his book, assumes under capitalism special forms, suited to the uses to which capitalism puts it. Best adapted to capitalist needs is universal military training; Liebknecht predicted its establishment. in the United States.
The army of capitalism serves as a “national institution destined for attack”; but it is at the same time also a weapon in the struggle of the bosses against the workers. Not only against the workers at home, but also against the masses abroad. For the wars of capitalism in this epoch, Liebknecht already saw clearly in 1906, originate not in Europe but in the political and commercial expansion of the “civilized nations,” whose colonial politics produces two new forms of militarism: “navalism” (militarism on sea) and colonial militarism. The last is becoming increasingly important for the capitalists, Liebknecht proved; it is used to enslave the natives of the “backward” continents.
The most significant contradiction within capitalist militarism, Liebknecht showed, is that in the struggles of the big capitalist countries against each other, they are compelled to arm the whole people. Liebknecht foresaw that the Czar would be one of the first to be destroyed by this contradiction.
“In the bourgeois capitalist state,” he wrote, “the conscript army, in its function as a weapon against the proletariat, is a crude and terrible contradiction in itself; under the Czar’s despotic regime the conscript army is a weapon which must turn itself more and more with crushing power against the despotism of czarism itself.”
Another contradiction in capitalist militarism is that, as modern weapons and strategy become more and more complex, they require highly intelligent soldiers. It was an open secret that the German officers, though they found the East-Elbian peasants the most easily commanded soldiers, complained that they could be used only within certain limits because of their low intelligence. These monarchist officers had to confess that the class-conscious Socialist workers made the best soldiers. At the same time, of course, these Socialists were dedicated to destroying the Junker officer class. This contradiction is even more pronounced today than it was in Liebknecht’s time; precisely the most intelligent trade-unionists and revolutionists make the best tankdrivers, machine-gunners, aviation mechanics, etc. The Czar will have plenty of company!
The power of life and death which capitalist army officers have over their men tends to be extended to private industry and it is first challenged there by the workers. Industrialists holding army contracts attempt to impose barracks discipline on their workers. That Liebknecht was right in generalizing that this would be done elsewhere besides Prussia is proved to the hilt by the present attempt to outlaw strikes in war-production plants in the United States.
The maltreatment of soldiers, Liebknecht insists, is an integral part of bourgeois militarism. It flows from the need of the capitalists to discipline in their army the working class whose interests are opposed to those of the capitalist class. The power of life and death possessed by the officers further aggravates this situation; the officers tend to use maltreatment instead of persuasion in whipping the men into shape.
This exposition of Liebknecht’s views indicates how he proposed to put an end to bourgeois militarism. Pacifism, disarmament, etc., he viewed as so much nonsense. The fundamental contradiction between the capitalist officers and the armed worker-soldiers would inevitably lead to an explosion from within. It was the task of the revolutionary party to fight for the interests of the worker-soldiers and to organize them to secure redress of their grievances. Out of this struggle – as much part of the class struggle as is the fight in the factories for workers’ rights, and in the epoch of militarism even more important – would come, Liebknecht was sure, the socialist society of the future.
Liebknecht and Luxemburg made the mistake, I have, said, of not beginning to build the revolutionary party in time to lead the revolutionary wave. Two generations have paid dearly for that mistake. But our generation will learn, has already profited, from both their mistakes and their great contributions.
Main Militant Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 16 November 2020