Hail Communist Leaders Liebknecht and Luxemburg!

(Quote of the Week)

In November 1918, at the end of World War I, the German working masses rose up, overthrew the Kaiser and formed workers and soldiers councils. Revolutionary Marxist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, founders of the German Spartakusbund and belatedly the Communist Party, urged the working class to take power lest it be defeated by the forces of counterrevolution. In January 1919, the Social Democratic government of Ebert and Scheidemann crushed the proletarian upheaval, unleashing the fascistic Freikorps to murder Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Every January the ICL honors the “Three Ls”: Luxemburg, Liebknecht and Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, who died in January 1924.

The quotation below, calling for a soviet government allied to Bolshevik Russia, is taken from a speech by Liebknecht to a mass workers demonstration in Berlin outside the General Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils.

Comrades, fellow soldiers, and friends. Today, when the first Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils assembles, is a historic moment.

The first task facing the congress is to defend the revolution and defeat the counterrevolution by disarming all generals and officers, abolishing the previously existing military authority, forming a Red Guard to complete the social revolution, and rooting out the remaining counterrevolutionaries. And, I might add, even though it will upset some misguided and misled proletarians, that includes the Ebert-Scheidemann government. (Loud shouts of “Down with the Scheidemanns!”)...

What we have right now in Germany is not a socialist republic but a capitalist one. The proletariat must still bring the socialist republic into being through struggle against the present government, which is buttressing capitalism. We demand that the congress assume full political power so that it can institute socialism and that it not turn the power over to a national assembly, which would not be an organ of the revolution. We demand that the congress of workers’ councils extend the hand of friendship to our Russian brothers and invite them to send their representatives. We want world revolution and the unification of workers of all countries under workers’ and soldiers’ councils.

—Karl Liebknecht, “The Congress Must Assume Full Political Power” (December 1918), printed in The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power (Pathfinder Press, 1986)