Rosa Luxemburg

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Rosa Luxemburg

The Junius Pamphlet

Written April 1915

Originally published in Zurich, Switzerland, February 1916, and illegally distributed in Germany. Translated from Politische Schriften by Dave Hollis and reprinted from the Marxists.org Internet Archive, available online at http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxembur/index.htm.

"One thing is certain. The world war is a turning point. It is foolish and mad to imagine that we need only survive the war, like a rabbit waiting out the storm under a bush, in order to fall happily back into the old routine once it is over. The world war…has changed us."

Rosa Luxemburg

Millions of men and women supported the war and worked diligently for victory, but others vehemently objected to the conflict. Rosa Luxemburg spent her life trying to incite workers to rise up and overthrow their governments. Imprisoned several times for trying to start a revolution, Luxemburg never lost her convictions and was eventually killed for them. Luxemburg's is a dramatic case of what can happen when a person disagrees with the dominant form of government.

In Germany, Luxemburg became one of the most vocal and influential speakers against the war. She is remembered as one of the most eloquent speakers for socialism, a political/economic belief that workers should own property, manage production, and govern themselves collectively. Born Rozalia Luksenburg in Poland in 1870, Luxemburg became active in the socialist movement before graduating from high school at age seventeen. By age nineteen, Luxemburg had become such a strong and active influence in the Polish socialist movement that she had to leave Russian-occupied Poland to avoid arrest. She went into exile in Zurich, Switzerland, where she began studies at the University of Zurich.

In Zurich, Luxemburg began collaborating with Leo Jogiches (1867–1919), a wealthy political activist with whom she would have a longtime political alliance and love affair. In 1892, Luxemburg and Jogiches created the Social Democracy for the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP), a Marxist political party (a party that followed the thinking of Karl Marx [1818–1883] and advocated class struggle and revolution). Luxemburg and Jogiches started rallying supporters with the party's newspaper,Sprawa Robotwicza ("Worker's Cause"). Luxemburg continued to advocate for common workers to take a more active part in government and to be able to own and manage property collectively. Luxemburg embraced Marxism, believing that capitalism would eventually fail when workers rose up to claim their rights. Over the next ten years, Luxemburg devoted herself to the fair treatment of workers and worked tirelessly to promote the SDKP in Poland and Germany. By 1901, Luxemburg had become a leader in the social democratic parties in both of these countries. She was a charismatic speaker and traveled extensively to support her cause. In 1903, Luxemburg represented Poland and Germany at the International Socialist Bureau Congress; she was the only woman present. The essay she presented, "Social Reform or Revolution," established the goals of the congress.

On January 22, 1905, Russian soldiers and cavalrymen massacred Russian workers who had been peacefully striking. In response to this incident, Luxemburg tried to incite a workers' revolution through her speeches and political writings in Russian-occupied Poland. The massacre, called Bloody Sunday, provoked widespread strikes and uprisings throughout Russian territory that lasted until December. For her part in the uprisings, Luxemburg was imprisoned by Russian authorities in Poland, but she continued to conduct her activism from jail by writing letters and pamphlets.

World War I dashed Luxemburg's hopes for a workers' revolution. For years Luxemburg had tried to unite workers against nationalist war efforts. She had thought that Germany's Social Democratic party believed as she did. When the party gave its support to the war in 1914, Luxemburg was infuriated. She was outspoken in her criticism of the German government and the war. As a result, she spent from 1915 to 1918 in jail for public disobedience. From prison, Luxemburg continued her efforts to bring about a workers' revolution: She wrote letters and pamphlets that her supporters smuggled out to the public. In 1915, she wrote one of her most famous pamphlets, The Junius Pamphlet. This piece lays the foundation of the Spartacus League, a group she founded with others to over-throw the German government. In the pamphlet she discusses the impact of World War I on the working class and explains why the working class should embrace socialism.

Things to remember while reading the Junius Pamphlet:

The Junius Pamphlet was originally a document titled "The Crisis of the Social Democracy" signed "Junius."
In the Junius Pamphlet, Luxemburg criticizes the socialist political party, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), for ignoring workers' interests in favor of imperialist ones. The SPD was a huge political force in Germany. The party could reach thousands of its supporters through its 39 daily papers, 28 bi-weeklies, and nine weekly papers.
Even though Luxemburg was angry with the SPD, she did not want Marxists to be divided and worked to keep the differences of opinion from keeping them from uniting for a revolution.
Luxemburg thought war was an obstacle for the revolution, but she thought bloodshed was necessary for the revolution.

The Junius Pamphlet
Excerpt from Chapter 1

The scene has changed fundamentally [since the war began]. The six weeks' march to Paris has grown into a world drama. Mass slaughter has become the tiresome and monotonous business of the day and the end is no closer….

Gone is the euphoria. Gone the patriotic noise in the streets,…the swaying crowds in the coffee shops with ear-deafening patriotic songs surging ever higher, whole city neighborhoods transformed into mobs ready to denounce, to mistreat women, to shout hurrah and to induce delirium in themselves by means of wild rumors….

The spectacle is over…. The trains full of reservists are no longer accompanied by virgins fainting from pure jubilation. They no longer greet the people from the windows of the train with joyous smiles. Carrying their packs, they quietly trot along the streets where the public goes about its daily business with aggrieved visages.

In the prosaic atmosphere of pale day there sounds a different chorus—the hoarse cries of the vulture and the hyenas of the battlefield. Ten thousand tarpaulins guaranteed up to regulations! A hundred thousand kilos of bacon, cocoa powder, coffee-substitute—c.o.d., immediate delivery! Hand grenades, lathes, cartridge pouches, marriage bureaus for widows of the fallen, leather belts, jobbers for war orders—serious offers only! The cannon fodder loaded onto trains in August and September is moldering in the killing fields of Belgium, the Vosges, and Masurian Lakes….

Business thrives in the ruins. Cities become piles of ruins; villages become cemeteries; countries, deserts; populations are beggared; churches, horse stalls. International law, treaties and alliances, the most sacred words and the highest authority have been torn in shreds. Every sovereign "by the grace of God" is called a rogue and lying scoundrel by his cousin on the other side. Every diplomat is a cunning rascal to his colleagues in the other party. Every government sees every other as dooming its own people and worthy only of universal contempt. There are food riots in Venice, in Lisbon, Moscow, Singapore. There is plague in Russia, and misery and despair everywhere.

Violated, dishonored, wading in blood, dripping filth—there stands bourgeois society. This is it. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretense to culture, philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law—but the ravening beast, the witches' sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity. Thus [bourgeois society] reveals itself in its true, its naked form.

In the midst of this witches' sabbath a catastrophe of world-historical proportions has happened: International Social Democracy has capitulated. To deceive ourselves about it, to cover it up, would be the most foolish, the most fatal thing the proletariat could do….The fall of the socialist proletariat in the present world war is unprecedented. It is a misfortune for humanity. But socialism will be lost only if the international proletariat fails to measure the depth of this fall, if it refuses to learn from it….

[Luxemburg recounts a forty-five-year history of the labor movement and suggests that by joining the war effort workers have given up any gains they made over the past years…]

And what did we in Germany experience when the great historical test came? The most precipitous fall, the most violent collapse. Nowhere has the organization of the proletariat been yoked so completelyto the service of imperialism …. Nowhere is the press so hobbled, public opinion so stifled, the economic and political class struggle of the working class so totally surrendered as in Germany….

One thing is certain. The world war is a turning point. It is foolish and mad to imagine that we need only survive the war, like a rabbit waiting out the storm under a bush, in order to fall happily back into the old routine once it is over. The world war has altered the conditions of our struggle struggle and, most of all, it has changed us. Not that the basic law of capitalist development, the life-and-death war between capital and labor, will experience any amelioration. But now, in the midst of the war, the masks are falling and the old familiar visages smirk at us. The tempo of development has received a mighty jolt from the eruption of the volcano of imperialism. The violence of the conflicts in the bosom of society, the enormousness of the tasks that tower up before the socialist proletariat—these make everything that has transpired in the history of the workers' movement seem a pleasant idyll.

Historically, this war was ordained to thrust forward the cause of the proletariat…. It was ordained to drive the German proletariat to the pinnacle of the nation and thereby begin to organize the international and universal conflict between capital and labor for political power within the state….

The official Handbook for Social-Democratic Voters (1911), for the last Reichstag election, says on p. 42 concerning the expected world war:

Do our rulers and ruling classes expect the peoples to permit this awful thing? Will not a cry of horror, of scorn, of outrage not seize the peoples and cause them to put an end to this murder? Will they not ask: For whom? what's it all for? Are we mentally disturbed to be treated this way, to allow ourselves to be so treated? He who is calmly convinced of the probability of a great European war can come to no other conclusion than the following: The next European war will be such a desperate gamble as the world has never seen. In all probability it will be the last war.

[Luxemburg quotes several more socialist leaders who implore workers to resist war.]

Even a week before the outbreak of war, on July 26, 1914, German socialist party newspapers wrote:

We are not marionettes. We combat with all our energy a system that makes men into will-less tools of blind circumstance, this capitalism that seeks to transform a Europe thirsting for peace into a steaming slaughterhouse. If destruction has its way, if the united will to peace of the German, the international proletariat, which will make itself known in powerful demonstrations in the coming days, if the world war cannot be fended off, then at least this should be the last war, it should become the Goetterdaemmerung of capitalism. (Frankfurter Volksstimme)

Then on July 30, 1914, the central organ of German Social Democracy stated:

The socialist proletariat rejects any responsibility for the events being brought about by a blinded, a maddened ruling class. Let it be known that a new life shall bloom from the ruins. All responsibility falls to the wielders of power today! It is "to be or not to be!" "World-history is the world-court!"

And then came the unheard of, the unprecedented, the 4th of August 1914.

Did it have to come? An event of this scope is certainly no game of chance. It must have deep and wide-reaching objective causes….

Friedrich Engels once said: "Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism." What does "regression into barbarism" mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization. At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences. Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration—a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war…. The future of civilization and humanity dependson whether or not the proletariat resolves manfully to throw its revolutionary broadsword into the scales In this war imperialism has won. Its bloody sword of genocide has brutally tilted the scale toward the abyss of misery. The only compensation for all the misery and all the shame would be if we learn from the war how the proletariat can seize mastery of its own destiny and escape the role of the lackey to the ruling classes….

Now, millions of proletarians of all tongues fall upon the field of dishonor…. This, too, we are not spared. We are like the Jews that Moses led through the desert. But we are not lost, and we will be victorious if we have not unlearned how to learn. And if the present leaders of the proletariat, the Social Democrats, do not understand how to learn, then they will go under "to make room for people capable of dealing with a new world."

The Junius Pamphlet
Excerpt from Chapter 8

The war means ruin for all the belligerents, although more so for the defeated. On the day after the concluding of peace, preparations for a new world war will be begun under the leadership of England in order to throw off the yoke of Prusso-German militarism burdening Europe and the Near East. A German victory would be only a prelude to a soon-to-follow second world war; and this would be the signal for a new, feverish arms race as well as the unleashing of the blackest reaction in all countries, but first and foremost in Germany itself.

On the other hand, an Anglo-French victory would most probably lead to the loss of at least some German colonies, as well as Alsace-Lorraine. Quite certain would be the bankruptcy of German imperialism on the world stage. But that also means the partition of Austria-Hungary and the total liquidation of Turkey. The fall of such arch-reactionary creatures as these two states is wholly in keeping with the demands of progressive development. [But] the fall of the Habsburg monarchy as well as Turkey, in the concrete situation of world politics, can have no other effect than to put their peoples in pawn to Russia, England, France, and Italy. Add to this grandiose redrawing of the world map power shifts in the Balkans and the Mediterranean and a further one in Asia. The liquidation of Persia and a new dismemberment of China will inevitably follow.

In the wake [of these changes] the English-Russian, as well as the English-Japanese, conflict will move into the foreground of world politics. And directly upon the liquidation of this world war, these [conflicts] may lead to a new world war, perhaps over Constantinople, and would certainly make it likely. Thus, from this side, too, [an Anglo-French] victory would lead to a new feverish armaments race among all the states—with defeated Germany obviously in the forefront. An era of unalloyed militarism and reaction would dominate all Europe with a new world war as its ultimate goal.

Thus proletarian policy is locked in a dilemma when trying to decide on which side it ought to intervene, which side represents progress and democracy in this war. In these circumstances, and from the perspective of international politics as a whole, victory or defeat, in political as well as economic terms, comes down to a hopeless choice between two kinds of beatings for the European working classes. Therefore, it is nothing but fatal madness when the French socialists imagine that the military defeat of Germany will strike a blow at the head of militarism and imperialism and thereby pave the way for peaceful democracy in the world. Imperialism and its servant, militarism, will calculate their profits from every victory and every defeat in this war—except in one case: if the international proletariat intervenes in a revolutionary way and puts an end to such calculations.

What happened next…

From jail in 1916, Luxemburg and others founded the Spartacus League, a group dedicated to starting a socialist revolution. Through her writings in the group's newspaper, The Red Flag, Luxemburg tried to inspire the starving masses to rebel. Though the Spartacus League never started a revolution, Luxemburg continued her efforts after her release from jail in 1918. With Karl Liebknecht (1871–1919) and others from the Spartacus League, Luxemburg helped to form the German Communist Party. After the German defeat in World War I, the German Communist Party criticized the new German government and called for a complete stoppage of work, hoping that this would incite a revolution of the people and bring about the establishment of a humane government. The German Communist Party failed in its attempt to seize power in 1919, and the German government ordered Luxemburg and Liebknecht to be arrested. The two were arrested on January 15 and were also badly beaten. Luxemburg was then shot and her body dumped in Berlin's Landwehr canal. Liebknecht was also killed, and a few weeks later so was Luxemburg's lover, Leo Jogiches.

Did you know…

Although Rosa Luxemburg was Jewish, she rejected her Jewish culture and assimilated (blended) into Christian society. She developed a strong anti-Semitism (hostility toward Jews) in her later years.
Luxemburg thought that revolution should be a creation of popular will, not of violence, as was the case in Russia in 1917.
Although Luxemburg failed to start the revolution she had envisioned, her work is well remembered and praised by modern-day socialists.
The German government in 1919 was called the Weimar Republic. Led by Friedrich Ebert, it viewed Luxemburg's ideas as dangerously radical.

For More Information

Books

Abraham, Richard. Rosa Luxemburg: A Life for the International. Oxford: Berg, 1989.

Ettinger, Elbieta. Rosa Luxemburg: A Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.

Heyman, Neil M. World War I. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997.

Sommerville, Donald. World War I: History of Warfare. Austin, TX: Raintree Steck-Vaughn, 1999.

Winter, Jay, and Blaine Baggett. The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century. New York: Penguin Studio, 1996.

Web sites

"The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century." [Online] http://www.pbs.org/greatwar (accessed February 2001).

Luxemburg, Rosa. The Junius Pamphlet. Translated by Dave Hollis. [Online] http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxembur/works/1915/04.htm (accessed April 2001).

The Rosa Luxemburg Internet Archive. [Online] http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxembur/index.htm (accessed May 2001).

Imperialist: A government's efforts to increase power by capturing new territories or nations.

Six weeks' march to Paris: Refers to the Schlieffen plan, the Germans' strategy to win the war on the Western Front in six weeks' time.

Reservists: Enlisted soldiers.

Aggrieved visages: Distressed faces.

Prosaic: Dull.

Tarpaulins: Waterproofed canvas coverings.

c.o.d.: Cash on delivery.

Jobbers: A person who buys merchandise from manufacturers to sell to another firm-in this case to the government.

Cannon fodder: Soldiers that are expected to be killed in battle.

Moldering: Decaying.

Beggared: Made poor.

Sovereign: Ruler.

Bourgeois society: Business owners; the class that Luxemburg thought the workers must fight in a revolution.

Ravening: Greedily waiting impatiently to eat.

Witches' sabbath: A meeting of witches.

Capitulated: Surrendered; given in.

Proletariat: Workers.

We: Proletariat workers; the working class.

The great historical test: The beginning of World War I.

Yoked: Laboring under conditions that allow no worker control.

Imperialism: A nation's quest to dominate other nations.

Our struggle: The socialist cause.

Basic law of capitalist

development: Socialists believed that the capitalist economic system (that of privately owned means of production and distribution) would ultimately fail when workers revolted against the owners of the means of production and distribution.

Amelioration: Improvement.

Idyll: An easy experience.

Ordained: Destined.

Goetterdaemmerung: Literally, this means the "twilight of the gods," but here it meant "the undoing of capitalism."

Organ: Group that is part of a larger organization.

4th of August 1914: The date the war began.

Friedrich Engels: (1820-1895) A famous German socialist.

Throw its revolutionary broadsword into the scales: Begin a revolution.

Genocide: Deliberate killing of a group of people.

Lackey: Servant, follower.

Tongues: Nationalities.

Belligerents: All countries engaged in the war.