THE EMBEZZLED HERITAGE'
By PRICHARDS
On January 15th 1919, in Berlin, Karl Liebknecht question of the leadership of the workers' parties in and Rosa Luxemburg were murdered. In the name of the Russian proletariat and of the Third (Communist) International, founded soon thenafter, Lenin and the representatives of the revolutionary ment of the entire world, assembled in Moscow, took an oath to preserve the heritage of the murdered leaders and to remain true to their spirit. The life and struggle of Karl and Rosa, their part in the German revolution of 1918, and their martyrdom, had made them the symbols of the rising proletarian world revolution.
The Russian proletariat in particular, which was at this period on the point of consolidating its state - power and putting itself at the service of the revolutionary workers' movement of the entire world, was as well acquainted with the history and the ideas of Liebknecht and Luxemburg as with the history and ideas of its own Bolshevik Party, and considered their way the right one. It was determined to remain faithful to them.
This found outward expression in the unheard-of popularity in the Soviet Union of the two murdered fighters. Hundreds of plants, factories, clubs, schools, streets, etc, received the names of Liebknecht and Luxemburg ; their writings and speeches were distributed in enormous editions in all the languages of the Soviet Union ; January 15th became an annual holiday in their honor.
Even stronger must have been the impression produced on anyone who visited the Soviet Union in the early '20s by the deep inner conviction with which the Russian communists, and especially the youth, spoke of Karl and Rosa, and how basically the ideas of both had become the very flesh and blood of some of them. For them, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were an organic part of the world revolutionary movement to which their own Bolshevik Party belonged, and the achievement of Karl's and Rosa's ideals was inseparable from the achievement of their own tasks. Indeed, they could not conceive the latter without "victory on the world scale" (which then concretely meant : especially in Germany).
The workers of other countries were convinced that it was in the hands of the Russian communists that the heritage of Karl and Rosa was safest. When, in the Spring of 1925, I spent rather a long time in Paris with Karl Liebknecht's eldest son (named Wilhelm after his grandfather) and we got talking about the 1 In further commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, also in the Archives of Marxism section, p. 58, "Karl Liebknecht and the War," by Grigori Zinoviev.
various European countries, he remarked:
"It can no longer be a question of forming the leading cadres of communism in a capitalist country. The bourgeoisie, as the case of my father and Rosa demonstrates, will know how simply to liquidate them physically. But in Moscow the general staff of the world revolution, based on the material conquests of the soviet revolution and on the high theoretical level of the Russian communists, and guaranteed against all outrages, can and will develop fruitful activity, such as is not possible elsewhere at the present time.
At that time the Communist International and its most important sections (and in the first rank thereof the Russian Communist Party) stood for the principles of Liebknecht and Luxemburg (whatever differences there might have been on a few tactical questions, talk of which was, furthermore, avoided at the period). They were the same principles which had been for decades the principles of Lenin and his closest companions : consistent proletarian internationalism; firm combative anti-militarism ; the dictatorship of the proletariat, in the sense of a state power set up and administered by the workers themselves, in their own interest and under their constant control.
How much, in those years, Liebknecht and Luxemburg represented one and the same idea as Lenin in the consciousness of the Soviet communists, is visible also in the following detail : in the first years after Lenin's death (on January 2lst 1924), the day of remembrance for him was combined with that for Karl and Rosa and was celebrated as the "Day of the Three Is" (Lenin, Liebknecht, and Luxemburg).
Then came - for the Soviet Union and for world communism — the great retreat. The bureaucratic apparatus, under Stalin's leadership, not only systematically liquidated the best traditions of the Bolshevik Party, but also falsified - down to its very roots — the concept of Leninism. When could then remain of the memory of Karl and Rosa?
It was well-known - and it was just that which Lenin and the Bolshevik old guard esteemed the most in Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg — that for them the spontaneous activity of the working-class masses, their revolutionary élan, their instinct and their inițiative, were the decisive element in social overturn. A small group of functionaries, armed with the means of power, with at their head a "leader" regarded as a godlike personality, could be — according to the conceptions of the Spartakist leaders (which were set in several works by Rosa Luxemburg, among them also her work written while still in prison in 1918, especially devoted to the October Revolution) — only a tool of the reaction. No phrases and soph-
isms could have connected, for them and for the comrades trained in their spirit), the monopoly of such a group with the concept of a revolutionary development.
Just as little could the "Communist Soviet policy" cracked up by Stalin as proletarian internationalism have found agreement with Karl or Rosa. Just as group or clique dictatorship and the power of the proletariat were for Rosa Luxemburg contradictory and mutually exclusive conceptions, just so she (together with Liebknecht) had also a very clear idea of what national-chauvinism is. The revival of GreatRussian power chauvinism that developed under Stalin's auspices and that was pushed so far in the '30s that both the interests of the significant proletarian groups in Europe (Germany, France), and the interests of the whole world proletariat were sacrificed offhand - all that, naturally, was never to be brought into harmony with the memory of Karl and Rosa.
Still less can it be imagined that Karl Liebknecht would, directly or indirectly, have given his agreement to the petty cult of the Czarist Marshals Suvorov and Kutusov, to whom, on Stalin's instruction, homage had to be paid, not only by the peoples of the Soviet Union, but also by the Communist Parties of the entire world. The Red Army, which immediately after the Revolution and in the Civil War had passed into history as a model of a truly revolutionary army and vanguard of the world revolution, whose creation had also been hailed by Karl and Rosa, was suffused with a militaristic and Imperial-Russian spirit, and many of the rousing anti-militarist speeches of Karl Liebknecht could now be applied also to Stalin's militarism.
For decades, during the reactionary dictatorial period of Stalin, his propaganda apparatus was busied in a gross deformation of the works of Rosa Luxem-
The "genial leader" himself gave the signal therefor when, in his well-known 1930 letter to the editors of the historical periodical Proletarskaya Revolutsia, he insulted the great revolutionary and forged the concept of "Luxemburgism," which was described as a deviation from the Leninist line, as a "semiTrotskyist" ideology, and as a collection of errors.
The campaign thus opened against "Luxemburgism" grew like an avalanche, and in the '30s went so far that it was prosecuted by administrative measures as a crime and a counter-revolution similar to Trotskyism. In the many prosecutions against Polish and German communism in these years, the "tendency to the ideology of Luxemburgism" with which the defendants were charged was a particularly crushing accusation. The German reaction had murdered Liebknecht, Luxemburg, : and many heroic Spartakists ;
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL the Stalinist reaction completed its work on Soviet territory by the particularly cruel murder of Polish and German proletarians branded as "Luxemburgists."
Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg had dreamed of great international solidarity, of the fraternization of Russian and German workers. At the time of Hitler's 1941 attack on the Soviet Union, the natural revolutionary way out of the war, in the sense of Liebknecht's slogan, would have been the fraternization of the German and Russian toilers, setting itself as a goal the construction of a powerful German workers' state allied on a basis of equality with the Soviet Union. But even the idea of such a fraternization became, in the Soviet Union, treason punishable by death. (The recounting of fraternization scenes from the First World War was considered "anti-Soviet agitation!") And, after the victory over Hitler, instead of seeking to draw close to the masses, millions strong, of the German industrial proletariat, Stalin preferred to create a buffer-state on German territory, which under the administration of the stooge Ulbricht, "faithful to the line," would ensure the carrying out of all the directives of Stalin and his clique. How Karl and Rosa - with all the fiery ardor of their temperaments - would have stormed against this lamentable caricature of a "people's" state.
Today, 40 years after the assassination of Karl and the problem of the German proletarian revolution has again become especially timely. Everything is done to deepen and render permanent the split in the German proletariat, a split which bears in itself the germ not only of an intra-German civil war, but of a terrible atomic clash bringing the entire world to catastrophe. The German workers, when they are set against each other in the interest of the world reaction and a new world war, can learn much about the way they must take to save themselves and the world, if they will consult the works of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg (and, naturally, not limiting themselves to a few phrases torn out of context, that are set before them by the propagandists of the Ulbricht-Grotewohl clique, which is trying to exploit the names of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, although they will not hear of their spirit and their true teachings).
By comparing the words of the murdered proletarian heroes with the course of history in the last 40 years, every worker will come to the conclusion that here was a great and priceless heritage that was embezzled and dissipated. And the international workers' movement must take to itself the heritage of Karl and Rosa just as it does that of the other outstanding leaders of the post-war period.