Under the Banner of the “Three L’s”

(Quote of the Week)

This month, we continue the communist tradition of honoring the “Three L’s”: V.I. Lenin, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. On 15 January 1919, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, founders of the German Spartakusbund and Communist Party, were murdered by counterrevolutionary troops unleashed by the Social Democratic Party-led capitalist government as it crushed a workers uprising. Five years later, on January 21, Lenin, head of the Bolshevik Party and Soviet workers state, died after suffering a series of strokes following an assassination attempt. Liebknecht and Luxemburg’s assassination exemplified “democratic” bourgeois rule, as Lenin noted in a resolution presented to the First Congress of the Communist International.

In Germany, the most developed capitalist country of continental Europe, the very first months of full republican freedom, established as a result of imperialist Germany’s defeat [in World War I], have shown the German workers and the whole world the true class substance of the bourgeois-democratic republic. The murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg is an event of epoch-making significance not only because of the tragic death of these finest people and leaders of the truly proletarian, Communist International, but also because the class nature of an advanced European state—it can be said without exaggeration, of an advanced state on a world-wide scale—has been conclusively exposed. If those arrested, i.e., those placed under state protection, could be assassinated by officers and capitalists with impunity, and this under a government headed by social-patriots, then the democratic republic where such a thing was possible is a bourgeois dictatorship. Those who voice their indignation at the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg but fail to understand this fact are only demonstrating their stupidity, or hypocrisy. “Freedom” in the German republic, one of the freest and advanced republics of the world, is freedom to murder arrested leaders of the proletariat with impunity. Nor can it be otherwise as long as capitalism remains, for the development of democracy sharpens rather than dampens the class struggle which, by virtue of all the results and influences of the war and of its consequences, has been brought to boiling point....

In these circumstances, proletarian dictatorship is not only an absolutely legitimate means of overthrowing the exploiters and suppressing their resistance, but also absolutely necessary to the entire mass of working people, being their only defence against the bourgeois dictatorship which led to the war and is preparing new wars.

—V.I. Lenin, “Theses and Report on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (4 March 1919)