56 THE CLASS STRUGGLE KARL LIEBKNECHT AND ROSA LUXEMBURG 57 to take the offensive, that the masses may follow us with full confidence in our powers.
In this connection, and because both Rosa Luxemburg and Liebknecht, and in fact all supporters of a more general adoption of mass action in Germany, and other countries, have been accused of anarchistic and syndicalistic ideas and aspirations, it is of interest to know that both at all times fought against anarchistic and syndicalistic tactics. They consistently opposed the anarchic syndicalist movement in Germany that was organized in the so called Lokale Gewerkschaften.
In 1910, at Magdeburg, Comrade Luxemburg expressed this in a speech on the same subject. political mass strike can only arise out of historic conditions, out of the ripeness of the political and industrial situation. If anything could prove that one may talk indefinitely of mass strikes without the slightest practical result, so long as the initial conditions for its outbreak are not given, it is the history of the idea of the mass strike itself. You know that anarchists, of the type of Nieuwenhuis, propagated the idea of the mass strike for decades, as a panacea against all evils in society and against war as a means of bringing about the social revolution within 24 hours.
And today, who talks more of the general strike than the French Syndicalists of the anarchistic school. And yet the country where the general strike has been least put into practice is France, where the Syndicalists are forever mouthing its phrases.
During the War The position taken by Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg from the beginning of the outbreak of the war, their struggle not only against the power of a war mad government, but, what was far harder to bear, against a deluded people, need not be repeated here. Only those who understand what party discipline means in Germany, only those who know what the Social Democratic Party as the expression of the political and social aspirations of the working class meant to Karl Liebknecht can appreciate the inner struggle that he and his comrades that later formed the Independent Social Democratic Party had to undergo before they took the step that separated them irrevocably from the movement that had been the end and aim of their very existence. In the caucus that preceded the vote in the Reichstag on the first war loan, Liebknecht, Haase, Ruehle and a few others stood alone against an overwhelming opposition. And so strong was the hold of the party upon them that not even Liebknecht voted against the first loan in the Reichstag, that Hugo Haase, the chairman of the Socialist Reichstag group, delivered the declaration explaining the action of the majority, although every word he uttered seared his very soul.
When the second war loan vote was taken, Liebknecht alone voted against it, and was condemned by the Executive Committee of the party, by a vote of 65 to 26.
On Christmas, 1914, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg sent letters of greeting to their comrades in England. Confusion reigns in the ranks of the Socialist movement, writes Liebknecht. Many Socialists make our principles responsible for our present failure. The failure is due, not to our principles, but to the representatives of our principles. All such phrases as national defence and freedom of the people, with which imperialism decorates its instruments of murder, are lying pretense. The emancipation of each nation must be the result of its own efforts. Only blindness can demand the continuation of murder until its opponents are crushed. The welfare of all nations are inseparably interwoven.
The world war that destroyed the International will surely teach the world a mighty lesson. It will bring a new International, an International with a power greater and more unshaking than that which fell last August before the blows of the capitalist powers. In the cooperation of the working classes of all nations alone in war and in peace, lies the salvation of mankind.
The greeting sent by Rosa Luxemburg breathes this same confidence in the victory of the Socialist ideal, in spite of the downfall of the Socialist movement. It is necessary that we express the bitter truth, not to encourage futile despair and resignation, but, on the contrary, to learn from the mistakes we have committed in the past and the facts of the existing situation, valuable lessons for the future.