We cannot underestimate the importance of Liebknecht’s voice after the start of the First World War in providing an internationalists and revolutionary compass point for comrades from around the world to steer. From a speech delivered at Neukölln in January, 1915.

‘Imperialism and War’ (1915) by Karl Liebknecht from Voices of Revolt No. 4. International Publishers, New York. 1927.

AN essential trait of imperialism, whose chief representative on the European continent is Germany, is the tendency to economic and political expansion, which is productive of sharper and sharper political tensions.

Powerful combinations of German heavy industry have for years been casting covetous glances toward the treasures of the soil and the industrial plants of Belgium and French-Lorraine. Already they own valuable establishments in those regions, whose exploits and development would be made immensely easier for them by annexing these countries to Germany, and thus securing them from French boycotts. The same is true of portions of Russian Poland. Furthermore, the annexation of Belgium and of a portion of the northern French coast is being supported as a blow at the heart of the British rule of the Channel. In this demand for a Central European league of states, the lust for European expansion on the part of German imperialists finds untrammeled expression, and aims to encroach even upon neutrals.

Asia Minor and Syria: the foci of international capitalist competition, are among the most important colonial temptations to the impetuously advancing German financial capital. Here lies the center of the imperialist opposition between Germany and Russia, behind which the Anglo-Russian opposition subsides for the present. Here also is the basis of operations for a drive on Egypt (the Suez Canal), the corner-stone of the British world-power.

The Balkans have attained peculiar interest in the eyes of a very influential· section of German capital, as a bridge to fields of exploitation in Asia. Besides, the increasing intimacy between German and Austrian capital, and the military and political aspirations of the Dual Alliance between Germany and Austria, have bestowed considerable importance on the attitude of Austria in the Balkans, for the official German policy.

In this maturing of future conflicts, the munitions capitalists, with their international relations, who had prospered splendidly under the regis of the armed peace, and who might expect a golden harvest in war time, without regard to the outcome, and whose principal German establishments are furthermore much interested in Belgian and French-Lorraine establishments play an important part.

Militarism generates from its own loins additional powerful supporters of war, above all, a clique of military officers, who, particularly in Germany, worked unhindered to produce a military collision, and autocratically established their government within the government.

Internal political conditions, as a consequence of the sharpness of the national oppositions, and particularly of the class oppositions, had assumed a serious aspect for the ruling classes. In Germany the rapid growth of the Social-Democracy, which threatened their political and their economic holdings, caused them to shout for war as long as a decade ago, war being the only means to annihilate the labor movement.

These machinations, which have counter-parts in other nations also, were advanced in Germany by semi-absolutist conditions of government, which deprived the masses of the power to decide questions of war and peace, and rendered possible in the foreign policy a personal influence modified by no control on the part of the people, and therefore, subject the more to the pressure of the ruling classes.

Secret diplomacy, the policy of the secret treaties, has long been a menace to peace.

Though there is no doubt that many circles of the non-proletarian population had a strong and increasing interest in the maintenance of peace, their resistance to this personal dominion was crippled by their hatred and fear of the proletariat. This threw them into the arms of militarism again and again, for they regard militarism as their dependable protector in the class struggle against the rising revolutionary tide.

The Political Effect of the Majority Tactics

It is becoming daily more evident that the majority tactics, far from preventing war in the future, is a direct invitation to war, and its effect on the internal political situation is hardly more pleasing.

Unless all the previous laws of evolution in society are turned topsy-turvy, unless Germany is transformed into a political Utopia, no serious political reformation in the future will be possible–as in the past–except as the result of political and economic struggle. And the prospects of this struggle become the more favorable, the more certain the confidence of the masses in the firmness, in the inflexibility and permanence of the Social-Democracy, and the greater the respect and fear felt by its opponents for its power, its clarity of purpose, its resoluteness. A party whose resistless yielding to mass psychoses, to the national mob of the streets, to ingenious government machinations, to a sheet of paper blackened with printers’ ink and announcing a condition of siege, has been made so clear, a party which deserves to be called subversive only in the sense that it subverts its own principles, and whose steadfastness at a; great moment of history was so slight that a house of cards might be called a fortress wall by comparison, such a party will lack this confidence as well as this respect. This will be the more the case, the greater the number of “Socialistic” larks of springtime that flutter through the inhospitable winter of the imperialistic discontent, and seek to inspire the people with the illusion of the approach of the promised land.

To imagine it is possible to pave the way for the proletariat by the use of such “direct action” of the National Liberal type, is equivalent to a renunciation of the rudiments of dialectic materialism.

The Art of easily vanquishing us has been well learned by the enemies of the proletariat. The Social-Democracy must reconquer its lost self-respect; it must reconquer it in battle!

If it takes up this struggle while the war is still in progress, it may swiftly and thoroughly attain this goal.

If it postpones this struggle until after the war, it will find the task far more difficult, because of its much smaller risk.

But it cannot evade the struggle!

Speeches of Karl Liebknecht. Voices of Revolt No. 4. International Publishers, New York. 1927.

The fourth in the Voices of Revolt series begun by the Communist Party’s International Publishers under the direction of Alexander Trachtenberg in 1927.

PDF of original book: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/parties/cpusa/voices-of-revolt/04-Karl-Liebknecht-VOR-ocr.pdf