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	Workers Vanguard No. 972	21 January 2011

TROTSKY

LENIN

Honor Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht

(From the Archives of Marxism)

In the tradition of the early Communist International, each January we commemorate the “Three Ls”: Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, who died on 21 January 1924, and revolutionary Marxists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who were assassinated in Berlin on 15 January 1919 by the reactionary Freikorps as part of the German Social Democratic government’s suppression of the Spartakist uprising.

Although not well known today, Karl Liebknecht’s name is synonymous with intransigent opposition to one’s “own” bourgeoisie in the crucible of imperialist war. Despite his individual opposition to German imperialism from the outset of World War I, on 4 August 1914 Liebknecht submitted to the discipline of the Social Democratic Party and voted for war credits along with the rest of the party fraction in the Reichstag (parliament). But Liebknecht became increasingly vocal in his opposition to the party’s betrayal of the proletariat. When the party fraction resolved to support a new vote for the Kaiser’s military budget at the Reichstag session of 2 December 1914, Liebknecht broke ranks and cast the sole vote opposing war credits.

Liebknecht was prohibited from delivering a statement motivating his vote on the floor of the Reichstag or having it printed in the body’s official record. Barred from the German press, the statement was published in a Dutch socialist newspaper and translated into English in the Socialist New York Call. Below we reprint the statement as it appeared in the February 1915 issue of the U.S. leftist journal The Masses. Liebknecht’s stand inspired proletarian militants in Germany and internationally, not least in Russia, where the working class under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party would seize power in the October Revolution of 1917.

In a May 1915 leaflet, Liebknecht declared, “The main enemy is at home,” which for generations afterward became the watchword for revolutionaries at a time of war between imperialist powers. As he denounced the slaughter of World War I at a May Day rally in 1916, Liebknecht was dragged from the platform and thrown into prison on charges of treason. Released in October 1918, Liebknecht along with Luxemburg founded the German Communist Party at the end of the year. They were assassinated two weeks later.

In honoring the Three Ls, we fight to carry on their revolutionary tradition. As Liebknecht declared the day before his murder: “Whether or not we are alive when it arrives, our program will live, and it will reign in a world of redeemed humanity. Despite everything!”

* * *

My vote against the war credit is based upon the following considerations:

This war, which none of the peoples engaged therein has wished, is not caused in the interest of the prosperity of the German or any other nation. This is an imperialistic war, a war for the domination of the world market, for the political domination over important fields of operation for industrial and bank capital. On the part of the competition in armaments this is a war mutually fostered by German and Austrian war parties in the darkness of half absolutism and secret diplomacy in order to steal a march on the adversary.

At the same time this war is a Bonapartistic effort to blot out the growing labor movement. This has been demonstrated with ever-increasing plainness in the past few months, in spite of a deliberate purpose to confuse the heads.

The German motto, “Against Czarism,” as well as the present English and French cries, “Against Militarism,” have the deliberate purpose of bringing into play in behalf of race hatred the noblest inclinations and the revolutionary feelings and ideals of the people. To Germany, the accomplice of Czarism, an example of political backwardness down to the present day, does not belong the calling of the liberator of nations. The liberation of the Russian as well as the German people should be their own task.

This war is not a German defense war. Its historical character and its development thus far make it impossible to trust the assertion of a capitalistic government that the purpose for which credits are asked is the defense of the fatherland.

The credits for succor have my approval, with the understanding that the asked amount seems far from being sufficient. Not less eagerly do I vote for everything that will alleviate the hard lot of our brothers in the field, as well as that of the wounded and the sick, for whom I have the deepest sympathy. But I do vote against the demanded war credits, under protest against the war and against those who are responsible for it and have caused it, against the capitalistic purposes for which it is being used, against the annexation plans, against the violation of the Belgian and Luxemburg neutrality, against the unlimited authority of rulers of war and against the neglect of the social and political duties of which the government and the ruling classes stand convicted.