Defeat Imperialism Through Socialist Revolution!

(Quote of the Week)

Writing amid the carnage of the first interimperialist world war, Rosa Luxemburg underlined in “The Crisis in the German Social Democracy,” written in April 1915 under the pseudonym Junius while she was in prison for antiwar activity, that there can be no “peaceful” development of capitalism. At the time a leader of the revolutionary wing of the German Social Democracy, whose chauvinist leaders supported German imperialism in the war, Luxemburg along with Karl Liebknecht went on to found the Spartakusbund and, in late 1918, the German Communist Party. They were both murdered in January 1919 by the reactionary Freikorps as part of the Social Democratic government’s suppression of the Spartakist uprising.

The proletarian movement cannot reconquer the place it deserves by means of Utopian advice and projects for weakening, taming or quelling imperialism within capitalism by means of partial reforms. The real problem that the world war has placed before the Socialist parties, upon whose solution the future of the working class movement depends, is the readiness of the proletarian masses to act in the fight against imperialism....

Imperialism, with all its brutal policy of force, with the incessant chain of social catastrophe that it itself provokes, is, to be sure, a historic necessity for the ruling classes of the present world. Yet nothing could be more detrimental than that the proletariat should derive, from the present war, the slightest hope or illusion of the possibility of an idyllic and peaceful development of capitalism....

Historic development moves in contradictions, and for every necessity puts its opposite into the world as well. The capitalist state of society is doubtless a historic necessity, but so also is the revolt of the working class against it. Capital is a historic necessity, but in the same measure is its grave digger, the Socialist proletariat. The world rule of imperialism is a historic necessity, but likewise its overthrow by the proletarian international. Side by side the two historic necessities exist, in constant conflict with each other. And ours is the necessity of Socialism. Our necessity receives its justification with the moment when the capitalist class ceases to be the bearer of historic progress, when it becomes a hindrance, a danger, to the future development of society. That capitalism has reached this stage the present world war has revealed.

—Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis in the German Social Democracy (1916)