Rosa Luxemburg

“ They have fallen on the field of honor, as Marx wrote of the heroes of the Commune, to be enshrined forever in the great heart of the working-class. Now millions of proletarians are falling on the field of dishonor, of fratricide, of self-destruction, the slave-song on their lips. And that, too, has not beep spared us. We are like the Jews whom Moses led through the desert. But we are not lost, and we will be victorious if we have not forgotten how to learn. ”

“ This unsparing self-criticism is not only a fundamental necessity, but the highest duty of the working-class as well. We have on board the highest treasure of humanity, and the proletariat is their ordained protector. While capitalist society, shamed and dishonored, rushes through the bloody orgy to its doom, the international proletariat will gather the golden treasures that were allowed to sink to the bottom in the wild whirlpool of the world-war in the moment of confusion and weakness. ”

“ It is a foolish delusion to believe that we need only live through the war, as a rabbit hides under the bush to await the end of a thunderstorm, to trot merrily off in his old accustomed gait when all is over. The world-war has changed the condition of our struggle, and has changed us most of all. Not that the laws of capitalist development or the life and death conflict between capital and labor have been changed or minimized. ”

“ It is in honor bound to lead the way to the rescue of international Socialism, to proceed with the unsparing criticism of its own shortcomings.
No other party, no other class in capitalist society can dare to expose its own errors, its own weaknesses, before the whole world in the clear mirror of reason, for the mirror would reflect the historical fate that is hidden behind it. The working-class can always look truth in the face even when this means bitterest self-accusation ”

“ The scene has thoroughly changed. The six weeks' march to Paris has become a world drama. Mass murder has become a monotonous task, and yet the final solution is not one step nearer. Capitalist rule is caught in its own trap, and cannot ban the spirit that it has invoked.
Gone is the first mad delirium. Gone are the patriotic street demonstrations, the chase after suspicious looking automobiles, the false telegrams, the cholera-poisoned wells. Gone the mad stories of Russian students who hurl bombs from every bridge of Berlin, or Frenchmen flying over Nuremberg; ”

“ Instead of spontaneous revolution, revolts, and barricades, after each of which the proletariat relapsed once more into its dull passiveness, there came the systematic daily struggle, the utilization of bourgeois parliamentarism, mass organization, the welding of the economic with the political struggle, of socialist ideals with the stubborn defense of most immediate interests. For the first time the cause of the proletariat and its emancipation were led by the guiding star of scientific knowledge. ”

“ And though we can no more skip a period in our historical development than a man can jump over his shadow, it lies within our power to accelerate or to retard it.
Socialism is the first popular movement in the world that has set itself a goal and has established in the social life of man a conscious thought, a definite plan, the free will of mankind. For this reason Friedrich Engels calls the final victory of the socialist proletariat a stride by human kind from the animal kingdom into the kingdom of liberty. ”

“ Socialism will not fall as manna from heaven. It can only be won by a long chain of powerful struggles, in which the proletariat, under the leadership of the Social-Democracy, will learn to take hold of the rudder of society to become, instead of the powerless victim of history, its conscious guide. ”

“ The masses have ceased to be willess, thoughtless herds. That is new in the history of the world. Hitherto the masses have always blindly followed the lead of those who were interested in war, who drove the peoples at each others' throats to mass murder. That will stop. The masses have ceased to be the instruments, the yeomen of war profiteers. ”

“ Just as France was the classic country of the first phase of the proletarian class-struggle, as Paris was the torn and bleeding heart of the European working-class of that time, so the German working-class became the vanguard of the second phase. By innumerable sacrifices in the form of agitational work it has built up the strongest, the model organization of the proletariat, has created the greatest press, has developed the most effective educational and propaganda methods. ”

“ On the 30th of July, 1914, the central organ of the German Social-Democracy cried out:
"The socialist proletariat rejects all responsibility for the events that are being precipitated by a ruling class that is blinded, and on the verge of madness. We know that for us new life will spring from the ruins. ”

“ Class war in France will revert into a world war. The solution will begin only when the world war has driven the proletariat into the leadership of that nation which controls the world market, to the leadership of England. The revolution that will here find, not its end, but its organizatory beginning, is no short-lived one. The present generation is like the Jews who were led by Moses through the wilderness. Not only must it conquer a new world, it must go.down to make way for those who will be better able to cope with its problems. ”

“ But perhaps these causes may be found in the errors of the leader of the proletariat, the Social-Democracy itself, in the fact that our readiness to fight has flagged, that our courage and our convictions have forsaken us. Scientific Socialism has taught us to recognize the objective laws of historical development. Man does not make history of his own volition, but he makes history nevertheless. The proletariat is dependent in its actions upon the degree of righteousness to which social evolution has advanced. But again, social evolution is not a thing apart from the proletariat ”

“ Again we repeat that we expect, when the ruling classes of the large nations call the sons of the proletariat to arms to satiate the lust for power and the greed of their rulers, in the blood and on the lands of the small peoples, we expect that then the sons of the proletariat, under the powerful influence of their proletarian parents and of the proletarian press, will think thrice before they harm us, their friends, in the service of the enemies of culture. ”

“ Even now, in the midst of the war, the masks are falling, and the old well-known faces grinning at us, But evolution has received a mighty forward impetus through the outbreak of the imperialist volcano. ”

“ The triumph of imperialism leads to the destruction of culture, sporadically during a modern war, and forever, if the period of world-wars that has just begun is allowed to take its damnable course to the last ultimate consequence. ”

“ The German Social-Democracy has been generally acknowledged to be the purest incarnation of Marxian Socialism. It has held and wielded a peculiar prestige as teacher and leader in the second International. Friedrich Engels wrote in his famous foreword to Marx's "Class-Struggle in France": "Whatever may occur in other countries, the German Social-Democracy occupies a particular place and, for the present at least, has therefore a particular duty to perform. ”

“ Then will come the catastrophe. All Europe will be called to arms, and sixteen to eighteen million men, the flower of the nations, armed with the best instruments of murder will make war upon each other. ”

“ We no longer see their laughing faces, smiling cheerily from the train windows upon a war-mad population. Quietly they trot through the streets, with their sacks upon their shoulders. And the public, with a fretful face, goes about its daily task. ”

“ This step, too, is bound by unalterable historical laws to the thousands of rungs of the ladder of the past with its tortuous, sluggish growth, But it will never be accomplished, if the burning spark of the conscious will of the masses does not spring from the material conditions that have been built up by past development. ”

“ Shrapnell, drills, ammunition bags, marriage bureaus for war widows, leather belts, war orders—only serious propositions considered. And the cannon fodder that was loaded upon the trains in August and September is rotting on the battlefields of Belgium and the Vosges, while profits are springing, like weeds, from the fields of the dead.
Business is flourishing upon the ruins. Cities are turned into shambles, whole countries into deserts, villages into cemeteries, whole nations into beggars, churches into stables ”

“ The goal of his journey, his final liberation, depends entirely upon the proletariat, on whether it understands to learn from its own mistakes. Selfcriticism, cruel, unsparing criticim that goes to the very root of the evil is life and breath for the proletarian movement. ”

“ With the strengthened confidence that he must win, he is more than ever certain that he and his party need no new principles, that events and conditions must finally come to meet them." Gigantic as his problems are his mistakes. No firmly fixed plan, no orthodox ritual that holds good for all times, shows him the path that he must travel. ”

“ In place of sects and schools, utopian undertakings and experiments in every country, each altogether and absolutely separate from each other, we found a uniform, international, theoretical basis, that united the nations. ”

“ The German, Spanish, English, Dutch and French delegates of labor organizations hereby declare their readiness to oppose every declaration of war with every means in their power. Every nationality here represented pledges itself, in accordance with the decisions of its national and international congresses to oppose all criminal machinations on the part of the ruling classes. ”

“ Ten thousand tents, guaranteed according to specifications; ”