ROSA LUXEMBURG 418 419 THE CLASS STRUGGLE months later the Junius pamphlet was finished. Rosa Luxemburg did not allow her imprisonment to be a breathing spell for the enemy. They would not let her fight. With stubborn courage she replied to the power attacking her, Very well, now ll fight all the more! Her indomitable will converted the place of severest restraint into a site of spiritual liberty. Writing of a political nature was strictly forbidden her. Secretly, under the greatest difficulties, narrowly watched by spying eyes, outside of the permissible occupation with literary and scientific work, she wrote her grand, penetrating final reckoning with the Social Democracy, using every minute of time, every spark of light for the purpose. Weariness, illness disappeared before the force of the inner voice. That voice helped her to bear the most disconcerting, the most tormenting part of it all that innumerable times she was wrested out of her train of thought, that she was never sure that she might not be caught at her task and prevented from completing it. It was a relief from the most tyrannical spiritual pressure when at last she was able to put the last stroke to her manuscript and, crafty as Odysseus, to send the last pages out of prison walls by the hand of loyal friendship.
Outside the doors of the women prison lay the heavy atmosphere of the World War, reeking with destruction, commingled with the rotten odors of the unbridled passion of profit and usury of the respectable parasites and defenders of the bourgeois order; raged the will to victory, artificially inflamed and fanned to a white heat with all the means of perfidy, violence, despicability; waded the Social Democracy month after month through the fratricidal sea of blood, repeating piously, like an obedient pupil, the sayings of the imperialistic bourgeoisie and its government, with merely a few clumsy variations, breaking every solemn oath of international solidarity, treading upon the ideals of Socialism; outside those prison walls, stood like a gray, oppressive nebular mass, the dullness and stupidity of the workers allowing themselves to be dragged by imperialism into death and ruin instead of resisting it with strength and consciousness of purpose. In the choking atmosphere of those days, the Junius pamphlet came like the fresh, strong wind that hurries on before the purging storm.
And its significance was even greater than that by far. It.
was even a part of that same purging tempest of returning consciousness in which German Social Democrats and German workers began to find the way back to the historical task of the proletariat to overcome imperialism and capitalism through the international class struggle and to realize Socialism. It gave a mighty impetus to the awakening of the proletarians out of the social patriotic war delusion and harmony delusion of civic truce, the process of their rallying to the class struggle and the banner of International Socialism. Clearly, firmly, scientifically, and penetratingly it gave expression and direction to an emotion, a thought, and a will that stirred within the proletarian masses, at first fearfully and scatteringly, then more loudly, more imperatively, uniting ever larger groups.
Karl Kautsky, the official theoretician of the Social Democracy, had changed from a leader into a misleader. In his supply kit of Marxian formulas, he could find not a single one that would justify the miserable treachery of the Party majority. Ad usum Delphini he invented the famous two soul theory for the Socialist International, which was an instrument of peace and not of war, and the principles of which therefore were, all according to the given situation, Proletarians of all lands, unite or on the other hand, Proletarians of all lands, murder one another! Like a beast on the barren heath he wandered vaguely back and forth between gay logical houses of cards and schoolmaster quibbling, in order to place himself with his authority protectingly before the policy of August 4th.
His subsequent opposition was contradictory, uncertain as to principles, weak. Rosa Luxemburg, on the other hand in the Junius pamphlet placed that policy on trial consistently, mercilessly, annihilating it. She proved the bankruptcy of the German Social Democracy, unparalleled in history, and her proofs were not formulas, but hard, stubborn facts. She knocked the bottom out of all the legends and slogans for the justification of Social patriotism by revealing the causes and the impelling forces of the imperialistic war, baring its character and its aims.
The keynote of the Junius pamphlet is contained in the following sentence of the last chapter: The history which gave birth to the present war did not just begin in July, 1914, but dates back decades, where thread was tied to thread with the inevitability of a natural law, until the finely woven net of imperialistic world policy had entangled five continents a tremendous historical complex of phenomena whose roots go deep down into Plutonic depths of economic creation and whose branches point toward the vaguely stirring new world.
Imperialism, born of capitalistic development, confronts us as an international phenomenon in its radiations and influences, accomplishing with its brutal unscrupulousness of conscience,