THE CLASS STRUGGLE OH! HOW GERMAN IS THIS REVOLUTION 386 387 consideration by those who mean to overcome the revolution in Russia and Germany by armies.
When a hundred million peasants in Russia are convinced that the Russian territory belong to them, then no army is strong enough to take this conviction away from them.
When five million workers in Germany are convinced that the factories and all other undertakings belong to them, then the devil himself will not be able to take these things away from them.
The will of the people that is the predominant factor in the present revolutions.
Instead of His Majesty, the Czar, or the Kaiser, we now have His Majesty the People.
Oh! How German is this Revolution!
By Rosa LUXEMBURG (This article which appeared in the Red Flag of Berlin, the organ of the Spartacists of Germany, on the 18th of November, 1918, shows not only the fearless energy, but also the boundless goodness of heart of a great woman.
Its contents may serve, moreover, as a fit weapon against the slanders with which unscrupulous opponents have tried to besmirch the memory of Rosa Luxemburg. For the political victims of the old regime of reaction we ask neither amnesty nor mercy. We demand the right of freedom, fight and revolution for those hundreds of true and faithful men and women who are languishing in jails and prisons because they dared to fight for liberty, for peace and for Socialism under the rule of the sword of the imperialistic criminals whose rule has now come to an end. They are all free, Once more we are standing, shoulder to shoulder, ready to do battle for our cause. But it was not the Scheidemann socialists with their partners of the bourgeoisie and Prince Max at the head, who freed us; the proletarian revolution itself rent asunder the gates of our dungeons.
But another category of unfortunate inmates in those dreary buildings has been completely forgotten. No one thinks of the thousands of pale, emaciated figures languishing in prisons and jails in expiation of common crimes and misdemeanors.
And yet, they too are the unfortunate victims of the infamous state of society against which the revolution was directed. They, too, many of them, are victims of the imperialistic war that intensified want and misery until they became unbearable torture, that awakened, by its brutal bestiality, the evil instincts that slumber in weak and degenerate natures.
Here, too, bourgeois class justice was the net through which rapacious sharks escaped with ease while it caught in its pitiless meshes every small, helpless minnow that ventured beyond the pale of capitalist law. Millionaire war profiteers escaped, or were condemned to pay ridiculously inadequate fines. The small thieves were punished with draconian sentences.
On starvation rations, shivering with cold in cells that are practically unheated, in a state of hopeless mental depression from the horrors of four years of war, these stepchildren of society are waiting for mercy, for relief.
They wait in vain. As a good father to his country the last of the Hohenzollern forgot these unfortunates over the cares of mass slaughter and the division of the spoils of war. During the past four years, since the fall Louvaine, there has been no amnesty worthy of mention, not even on that highest holiday of German slaves, the Emperor Birthday.
It remains, therefore, for the proletarian revolution to lighten the dreary existence of life behind prison walls with a small ray of mercy, to shorten the severity of the imposed sentences, to uproot and discard the barbarian disciplinary system that still obtains the system of corporal punishment, the system of the ball and chain, to improve, to the best of its ability, the treatment, the medical supervision, the food and the conditions of labor that prevail. It is a debt of honor! The existing penal system, breathing the spirit of brutal classspirit and capitalist barbarism must be torn up by the roots. fundamental system of prison reform must be inaugurated immediately. To be sure, a truly free method of criminal treatment, one that is in every respect in harmony with the aims and the spirit of a socialist state of society can be erected only upon the foundations of a new industrial and social order. For, in the last analysis, crimes as well as their punishment are but the outgrowth of the prevailing social conditions. But one decisive measure can be carried out immediately; capital punishment, that greatest blot upon the reactionary penal code of imperialistic Germany must disappear. Why do they hesitate in the Workmen and Soldiers government? Ledebour, Daeumig, Barth, did the noble Baccaria who, more than two hundred