When Karl Liebknecht emerged from prison, from that stone cell, when the raging workers' movement tore him from there, the first movement of his spirit was to recall the working class of the country in which that class raised the banner of the Commune and to which befell the great joy of victory. Liebknecht achieved fame immediately after the war by leading, with Rosa Luxemburg , the Spartacists in the so-called German Revolution against the government of Friedrich Ebert . The half-senseless. Endnotes are Zinoviev's. Captains Hoffmann, Pabst and Petry and Lieutenant Vogel and Jaeger zu Pferd Runge stand at the door. Karl Liebknecht––Comrade Trotsky also spoke to you about this––endured the entire revolution of 1905 together with us. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg always felt the most intimate and fraternal connection to our revolution. “It is probable that Gustav Noske had a hand in the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht,” she told the party faithful in November at an event to discuss the 1919 revolt. in het Duits, 1976. “Liebknecht shot whilst attempting to escape.” They write further, “Rosa Luxemburg lynched by an infuriated crowd.”. John Reed's name has been inextricably linked to the events of the 1917 Great October Socialist Revolution.His book “Ten Days that Shook the World” is a first hand experience of the Revolution that changed the course of human history. [6]  Ebert, Fr[iedrich]––one of the leaders of German Social Democracy, president of the German Republic. Scheidemann and Ebert are now calling their constituent assembly[10]. And they did not deceive the Berlin workers or tell them that if the communards win tomorrow everyone would be well fed. We need to return, comrades, to the atmosphere of sleek and decorous Social Democracy and the Second International of that time, when the demands of Liebknecht seemed to be madness. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were hated by them for bravely, brightly, and ably defending all that was best in the Russian proletariat; they were dedicated to the Russian revolution and wanted to follow in its footsteps. Prior to the war stood on the right wing of the party, during the war an ardent chauvinist, after the war an irreconcilable foe of the communists. Now we see the results of the criminal policies of the gentlemen Scheidemanns. Died during the war. Armed soldiers bunch around him, and he is led deeper into the dark wood. To the bourgeoisie it seems that the proletariat is a corpse over which they will step to get to the constituent assembly. Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive Source: The Communist Review, January 1924, Vol. A Marxist Utopian between East and West: Karl Schmückle A Place for Polemic: Audacity, Implosion, and the Politics of Transition A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Videogame Industry Another larger group – the USPD or independent Socialists – also broke away adopting a halfway position between the revolutionary Spartacists and the ‘moderates’. The coming months may be even more difficult for us. 9. ", She did not betray herself during the war either. Rosa Luzemburg, the Polish Jewess, Rosa Luxemburg, the Spartacist, the agitator, the rebel, Rosa Luxemburg, Red Rosa, bloody Rosa. The murderers arrange a drinking bout at the Eden Hotel. 4, No. We know what an enormous role youth played in our revolution; it played the same in both the German and international [revolutions]. After its first mass demonstration against the First World War in Berlin in 1916, several leaders, including Luxemburg … revolutionary propaganda among the soldiers. (2006). Publisher: Communist Party of Great Britain Ober-Lieutenant Vogel puts his pistol to her head, and blows her brains out with a bullet. Who now, after the death of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, will think of their own personal life? There is a document––and, probably, there are many of them––that bears witness to the love in France for Karl Liebknecht. In the first place, contrary to the opinion of such outstanding political leaders as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the German ‘Lefts’, as we know, considered parliamentarianism ‘politically obsolete’ even in January 1919. And they concentrate their strength, all of their bloodthirstyness, against the people who are broadening the boundaries of the revolution, who are internationalists, who teach the German workers to follow in the footsteps of the Russian communist working class. Karl Liebknecht, (born Aug. 13, 1871, Leipzig—died Jan. 15, 1919, Berlin), German Social Democrat, who, with Rosa Luxemburg and other radicals, founded the Spartakusbund (Spartacus League), a Berlin underground group that became the Communist Party of Germany, dedicated to a socialist revolution. Luxemburg and Liebnecht were idolized as communist martyrs by the East German communist regime and are still idolized by the East German communist party's successor party The Left. The goal of the union was to fight against official Social Democracy, which had betrayed the cause of the proletariat and supported the military policies of the German [bourgeoisie]. German Politician. Zinoviev saved particular scorn for the German Social Democrats as traitors to the working classes and socialism and as puppets of the German bourgeoisie. Look how the international proletariat views our policies. At a moment when things are particularly difficult, when our Red Army soldiers, somewhere around Archangelsk or in some other distant front in the cold, poorly dressed and shoed, have to lie side-by-side and return fire from imperialist bands; or when our women workers have to return to hungry children with an eighth of a pound of bread or have to overcome these or other new adversities––at that difficult moment we will remember Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. ", And thus say workers of the entire world now. Liebknecht sent us a letter at the Zimmerwald conference which ended with famous words in response to the slogan that Schiedemann and his fraternity had issued at the start of the war: "Civil peace, reconciliation between classes, between wolves and sheep, between the bourgeoisie and the working class, between the butcher-monarchs and the soldiers and peasants." The murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht and the suppression of the Spartacist uprising cast a pall on those hopes. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg always felt the most intimate and fraternal connection to our revolution. Not a month passed before the German proletariat declared, "Only over our dead bodies will you come to a constituent assembly." The murderers are at work, Their enemies are in their power. Karl Liebknecht enjoyed the same trust and popularity in recent years in France. Their killings came after the crushing of the January Uprising in Berlin, and enjoyed the tacit approval of leading members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which had taken power only […] Today marks the passing of 100 years since the murders of Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) and Karl Liebknecht (1871-1919). Rosa Luxemburg is in their power. Following one frightfully unsuccessful exchange of fire for the French in 1915, the French frontline soldiers gathered in a circle, started a fire, and the survivors––among whom were many French intellectual workers––began to discuss their fate and think about what awaited them further. man is told that the motor has broken down, and is asked if he can walk. And right at that moment one thoughtful shout from a soldier resounded: "Are there not, after all, people who are fighting against this hell, even individuals who come out on their own in the course of world history and proclaim "down with the war"[?] When Karl Liebknecht emerged from prison, from that stone cell, when the raging workers' movement tore him from there, the first movement of his spirit was to recall the working class of the country in which that class raised the banner of the Commune and to which befell the great joy of victory. In 1871 elected to the National Assembly as a socialist, was a member of the Commune; fled, sentenced to death, in 1881 amnestied, in 1884 a member of the Parisian municipality, from 1893 a deputy. He devoted his whole existence to his work as a socialist, and his followers idolised him.\" He had inherited money from his grandfather and was willing to use this for the good of the soci… You remember the recent dialogue between French and German generals. What will be the tasks of worker-revolutionaries when the criminal hand of the bourgeoisie leads Europe to that imperialist war? [8]  The Spartacists, i.e. All is well for murderers. [2]  Born in 1870, killed 15 January, 1919. The French general rebuked the German general for the help that German soldiers supposedly gave to us, the Bolsheviks, in occupied places around Riga. Then he is struck down, a shot and somewhere in the night the wood groans. 16, Osnovopolozhniki i vozhdi kommunizma; biograficheskie ocherki, Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1924, 198–212). Matthias John: Höhere Bildung in Leipzig. Januar 2009 — Wehler: „Mord an Liebknecht und Luxemburg hätte gerichtliches Nachspiel haben müssen“. Would the Holocaust be avoided? Would Hitler still find a way to come to power? She said, "Look what is happening in Riga and in the occupied places. Transcription/Markup: Brian Reid In 1916, after the split of the "independent SDs" from the official party, "Spartacus" joined the "independents," preserving, however, its internal autonomy. When the working class sacrifices its blood so selflessly, gives up the best that it has without hesitating for a second, will rank-and-file participants really waver? Such was the official slogan of German Social Democracy. That is, until their leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the latter a Jew, were murdered by opposite forces. Do you want to know why exactly Rosa Luxemburg was killed? Founded in 1997 it asserts that, not withstanding the variety of its practical and theoretical articulations, Marxism constitutes the most fertile conceptual framework for analysing social phenomena, with an eye to their overhaul. Jaeger Runge hits Liebknecht, who sits in the automobile, twice on the head from behind with a rifle butt. They feared that Social Democracy would lose its legal standing that way, that the bourgeoisie would be offended, that the bourgeoisie and the rulling classes would decide that German Social Democracy had ceased to side with the state! They knew this perfectly well. After all, the same government that calls itself the government of a socialist republic is in power. Bernstein and the revisionists, as they were called then, insisted that, in essence, the working class should not reject the so-called colonial policy or imperialism (as we would put it now) but carry it out, as they said, in cultural forms and for the benefit of culture. He, Liebknecht, is in their power. Zinoviev's tribute was published in Volume 16 of his collected works (Sochineniia, vol. These gentlemen quickly dressed themselves up as proponents of Soviet power, seized the driving reins, and to get to power German workers will have to step over the corpse of so-called Social Democracy. You see, in conversation with each other these people do not hide what matters. They rub their hands. Januar 1919 in Berlin Freikorpssoldaten der Garde-Kavallerie-Schützen-Division die untergetauchten Führer des Spartakusbunds , Rosa Luxemburg und Karl Liebknecht . Berlin workers do not lag behind Petrograd or Moscow workers, and now they are the focus of the proletarian struggle for the entire universe. They did not want to listen to Rosa Luxemburg, but she was able to make them listen to her; she accepted the fight, raised the gauntlet thrown by Bebel, the best representative of the Second International, she made that congress, half of which consisted then of hucksters and traitors of socialism, pronounce the word "International.". Dozens of articles about this were printed in the most widely distributed bourgeois newspapers, and entire brochures were published to the effect that K. Marx was himself always a pan-Germanist, a proponent of the "great" bourgeois Germany. The automobile drives away into the night with Liebknecht, but not in the direction of Moabit, but into the Tiergarten (a large well-wooded park in the centre of Berlin). The Burgergerwehr (Civil Guard) of Wilmersdrof, a suburb of Berlin, raided the illegal dwelling of Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and arrested and took them both to the Eden Hotel in Berlin, the Staff Headquarters of the Gardeschuetzen (Horse Guards) Division. This week marks the anniversary of the Jan. 15, 1919, murders of German communists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. These peasants, these workers and soldiers will honor forever the names of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The official declaration of "red terror" in September, 1918, contributed to the tensions. work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. This party was led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, a Russian educated, Jewish woman, who came to Germany via Ukraine. Liebknecht, the Jew, Liebknecht, the Spartacist, Liebknecht, the agitator and rebel, the man without a country, the man who wants to level everything, the man who wants to nationalise women, the man who wants to abolish money. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-320-01050-6. Karl Radek; Rosa Luxemburg; Karl Liebknecht; Leo Jogiches; Autorenseite << zurück weiter >> Rosa Luxemburg. The murderers make their report. If they were victorious tomorrow––it would not mean that the workers of Berlin would receive two pounds of bread apiece and that there would be foodstuffs in Berlin and that rivers of milk with banks of jelly would flow there. State–Labour Relations and Spaces of Dissent: Whither Labour Activism? They have followed our path, they have fallen by the thousands, and tomorrow thousands more will fall in the name of achieving what already exists in Petrograd and Moscow and in Soviet Russia. Runge hits a second time, and leaves her for dead. [10]  The speech was given on 18 January 1919, and 19 January of the same year elections for the National Assembly were to be held. Liebknecht was alone in voting against war credits in the German Reichstag, and his voice resounded across the entire world. Rosa Luxemburg is in their power. Such was the official slogan of German Social Democracy. „Die großen Revolutionäre wurden zu Lebzeiten von den unterdrückenden Klassen ständig verfolgt, die ihrer Lehre mit wildestem Ingrimm und wütendstem Hass begegneten, mit zügellosen Lügen und Verleumdungen gegen sie zu Felde zogen. November 2008 ↑ Rosa Luxemburg: Fragment über Krieg, nationale Frage und Revolution, GW 4, S. 366 ↑ Die russische Revolution. Karl Liebknecht en Rosa Luxemburg over misdaad en straf, Amsterdam, Bos (1922) Literatuur [ bewerken | brontekst bewerken ] Hetmann, Frederik: "Rosa Luxemburg", oorspr. Karl Liebknecht enjoyed the same trust and popularity in recent years in France. Universitätsverlag, Leipzig 1998, ISBN 3-933240-20-4. Did Marx Ever Meet Walras (on a Lake in Switzerland)? members of the "Spartacus" union (Spartacus was the name of the leader of a well-known uprising of Roman slaves), formed at the beginning of the war by K. Liebknecht, R. Luxemberg, L. Jogiches (Tyszka), and others. The elections did, in fact, take place, and the resulting National Assembly, in which bourgeois parties dominated, drafted and promulgated the current bourgeois-republican constitution of Germany. Having led the wartime Council of People's Deputies throughout the entire revolution, she assumed the position as Chairperson of the People's Council after the first elections in 1921 . There is a document––and, probably, there are many of them––that bears witness to the love in France for Karl Liebknecht. In our selection of material we do not favour any one tendency, tradition or variant. What do you mean, go to the soldiers to preach socialism! Bebel himself, knowing Liebknecht since childhood and loving him as a son, attacked him harshly for such, in his view, an "adventurist" proposal. He’ll not reach Moabit (the prison) alive.” “Nor Rosa.”. “Swine! At the beginning of the war, in 1915, everything German was cursed in France. I remember perfectly well the Jena congress of German Social Democrats that took place in 1911; Rosa Luxemburg crossed swords with August Bebel, who at that time leaned to the right, to the side of the old party, having declared war against Rosa Luxemburg for denouncing Social Democracy and for pointing out elements of chauvinism in the policies of the party's C[entral] C[ommittee]. He is best known for his opposition to the war in the Reichstag and his role in the Spartacist uprising of January 1919. Precisely for that they were especially hated by the Berlin social democrats. And only a small group of Marxists, at the head of which stood Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, said in 1907, eleven years ago: imperialist war is approaching, the bourgeoisie of all countries is leading all of humanity toward this unavoidable catastrophe. The German general answered, "your excellency, why do you not understand that your accusation is without foundation? She said, "We stand at the outset of a new struggle. Jahrhundert! In 1920, during the attempted revolutionary coup in Germany carried out by Kapp, offered his final services. He did not personally participate in the Zimmerwald conference because he had been conscripted; he was sent to the front in the calculation that a stray bullet would remove that dangerous enemy of the bourgeoisie. Her brilliant books and articles on the mass strike, her speeches in Jena[3] at the German Social-Democratic congress, taking place at the moment of our revolution, her identification of the role that awaited the Soviets of Workers' Deputies to play––all of these points, made over a decade ago, were of colossal historical significance. Espionage and Intrigue in Babylon Berlin: The General’s Daughter, Live Free and Die: Notes On American Exterminism, Lockdown Politics: A Response to Panagiotis Sotiris, Lucien Sève: death of a major Marxist philosopher[1], Marx on British politics … and cab drivers[1], On Production and Reproduction (and Back Again): Nancy Fraser’s Socialism and its Problems, Revisiting the 'Mode of Production': Enduring Controversies over Labour, Exploitation and Historiographies of Capitalism, Rigorous Suppression of Intellectual Creativity: Responding Again to Alf Hornborg, Rossana Rossanda and the unfinished project of a critical communism, The Development of British Capitalist Society: A Marxist Debate, The Siren Call of Posthumanism: A Rejoinder to Cox, The Workers’ Opposition in Ukraine, 1920s–1930s, The struggle for land and capitalist exploitation, A Democracy of Forms: Levine, Latour and the New Formalism, A Marxist Utopian between East and West: Karl Schmückle, A Place for Polemic: Audacity, Implosion, and the Politics of Transition, A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Videogame Industry, A Religion for the Unbelieving: Review of Mikhail Lifshitz, The Crisis of Ugliness, Commodities, Price Formation and the Technologies of Power behind Markets, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, Crossing a twister: On Malm’s The Progress of this Storm (2018), Globalizing the History of Capital: Ways Forward, Half-Buried Books: The Forgotten Anti-Imperialism of Popular-Front Modernism, Hegemony, People, Multitude: Contemporary Movements and Radical Theory, Lifeblood, Climate Change, and Confronting Fossil Capital’s ‘Other Moments’, Modernity and Capitalism: India and Europe Compared, Nietzsche in His Time: The Struggle Against Socratism and Socialism, Questions without Answers: The Dutch and German Communist Left, Resuscitating the Dialectic: Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital in the Supposed ‘Age of Man’, Socialism in One Genre: On Cai Xiang’s Revolution and Its Narratives (Geming/Xushu), Soviet Archaeology in Theory and Practice, State and Capital in the Era of Primitive Accumulation. Do you want to know why exactly Rosa Luxemburg was killed? Confronted with the violence and disruption of their lives, the German people squarely aliened behind the government, and the revolution was crushed. In 1917–1918 enjoyed immense popularity not only in liberal bourgeois circles but also among American and West European workers. Rosa Luxemburg began her work as a young girl in Poland and then continued it in Germany; she worked also in Russia. To Rosa Luxemburg belongs the immense credit, which she shares with our comrade and teacher, Lenin, for formulating in 1907 at the international socialist congress in Stuttgart the basic idea for which Liebknecht and Luxemburg perished and for which everything that is honest and heroic in the international working class is now fighting. In note 8 I have replaced "proletariat" with "bourgeoisie," as it seems obvious that this was intended. ", She hurled that right in their faces! With that there should be no doubt that the blood of Liebknecht and Luxemburg will quicken the ripening of world socialist revolution! . In Riga, thanks to Scheidemann's odiousness and the work of the German leader of trade unions, August Winnig,[9] German proletarians together with Allied forces and the Baltic barons are coming out against Russian Bolshevik forces. Anti-Anti-Zionism and Bad Faith Critique: Refuting a Misrepresentation of Enzo Traverso, Capital Comes to America: Charles H. Kerr & Company and the Cross-Atlantic Journey of Marx’s Master Work, Debating The Other Adam Smith: A Response to Christian Thorne’s Review, Dialectical Confusion: On Jason Moore’s Posthumanist Marxism. Zinoviev's tribute was published in Volume 16 of his collected works, (Sochineniia, vol. We need to return, comrades, to the atmosphere of sleek and decorous Social Democracy and the Second International of that time, when the demands of Liebknecht seemed to be madness. Rosa Luxemburg especially emphasized this. On January 15, 1919, the revolutionary leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered in cold blood by a gang of right-wing army officers. Sided with the revisionist wing of the party. On January 15, 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and her co-leader Karl Liebknecht are killed in Berlin by soldiers who were suppressing the uprising, and their bodies were thrown into a canal. The Bolsheviks pinned their hopes on German radicals to spread the revolution into Europe and, once victorious, extend a fraternal hand to the struggling Soviet state. You remember the recent dialogue between French and German generals. He was a founder of the union of international youth, which has a great future. Here is what happened: German Social Democracy, having for many years played a reactionary role in history, was able to seize the soviets through its apparatus of bureaucratic officials, usurp their rights, impose its own policies, and gather everything in its own paws. When the "independents," together with the official SDs, joined the "Council of People's Plenipotentiaries" (a provisional revolutionary government) in November 1918, the Spartacists broke with them and, in December 1918, formed the German Communist party. The answer was Rosa Luxemburg, but she wasn’t given a chance to do so.