6. The War¶
Core Argument¶
The First World War represented the military expression of capitalist great powers competing for markets, colonies and spheres of influence, particularly between the established colonial powers France and Britain and a late-developing but industrially formidable Germany seeking dominance. At the 1907 Stuttgart congress of the Second International, Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin jointly drafted an amendment establishing that war is inherent in capitalism and committing the International to use any war to hasten capitalism's overthrow. On 4 August 1914, the SPD Reichstag fraction unanimously voted for war credits, betraying this commitment in what Lenin identified as a betrayal rooted in the long history of opportunism.
Luxemburg's Junius Pamphlet (1915–16), written secretly in prison following her arrest in February 1915, demonstrated that the war was imperialist for all belligerents, posing the stark choice of socialism or barbarism. She exposed SPD leaders' hypocrisy: their claimed defence of German freedom actually sacrificed working-class liberties, and their anti-Russian-despotism argument should have led them to support the Russian proletariat rather than the German bourgeoisie. She argued the SPD should have exposed the war's real aims and fostered opposition, even without guarantee of immediate mass support, to preserve proletarian honour.
Lenin welcomed the pamphlet as a splendid Marxist work but criticised two errors. First, her claim that national wars were impossible in the imperialist epoch; Lenin countered that revolutionary wars and colonial liberation struggles remained possible and progressive. Second, while Luxemburg criticised the SPD's defence of the fatherland as ineffectual, Lenin insisted the very idea of defending the capitalist fatherland must be attacked, arguing she applied Marxist dialectics only halfway, stopping short of the correct slogan: civil war against the bourgeoisie for socialism. His central criticism was that Luxemburg had not broken with the SPD or with Kautskyism, remaining silent on opportunism and failing to link the betrayal of 4 August 1914 to opportunism's long history.
The Spartacist group around Luxemburg expanded through illegal literature and underground organisation, launching the newspaper Spartacus in March 1916. Luxemburg opposed splitting from the SPD, arguing it would break with the masses and reduce revolutionaries to a sect. When the opposition formed the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) at Easter 1917, the Spartacists joined, fearing isolation. When revolution broke out in November 1918, German revolutionaries lacked an organisation capable of leading the masses.