The Uprising of January 1919

    The Commemorative Demonstration of 2000
    Dramatic Events in Germany

The statement with its historical bearings which is following here was written and issued on Jan., 7/8, on the occasion of the huge Liebknecht-Luxemburg demonstration which is predominantly shaped by the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism), a demonstration with a size of about 100 000 people. It is in fact necessary to debate the politics existing on this demonstration. This was the subject of the following important statement. On the same day of Jan.8, news were been published that this demonstration was thwarted by a provocation which probably is a singular one so far, and for the time being delayed. A subject the political backgrounds of which are unknown, declared that he was preparing to shoot into the demonstration with a machine gun, for some alleged personal revenge against the PDS. This is lacking any coherence anyhow, even more as the people demonstrating on this demonstration are not at all only responsible members of the PDS. This provocation caused an official ban of this demonstration by the police authorities which immediately was accepted by the PDS leadership which sees itself increasingly confronted with criticism from its own ranks and from the forces connected with itself. The police and the PDS leadership in practice immediately had this ban at their hands. On Sunday, the 9th of January, several thousand people demonstrated in spite of the ban at various places in Berlin and made manifestations which were quite rigorously confronted by the police, there were 219 arrestations. Generally the discrepancy is being complained about between the rigor on the one hand against the demonstrators, whereas adequate measures against the assassin are hardly visible.

If, as it is happening here in Germany now, the right to demonstrate is being undermined by basically threadbare methods, this is a matter of general importance. The fact that such a demonstration is threatened in this way is a first rank political issue which is not met by the appropriate notice in the international media. Furthermore we want to recall that since three decades time and again there have been methods, by anarchism, by allegedly anarchistic bombings, to put the left and also the population as a whole under pressure. Gigantic methods of control, the construction of police units, all this was again and again warranted by reference to some anarchists. A danger for the state - which basically did not exist at all - was being constructed which was said to emanate from a bunch of anarchists, the connections of which to the 'Verfassungsschutz' (agency for the protection of the constitution) and other secret service organizations frequently became apparent on a closer look. This issue in no way has a different smell.

All are looking now on this danger and this ban caused by the provocation. But the political questions belonging to this demonstration and the movement remain important. We think that our statement which refers to inner political questions of the demonstration remains of importance in spite of that. In Germany as in other countries the struggle against revisionism which increasingly openly and without inhibition presently is moving towards US-imperialism, toward NATO, is again on the agenda.

In the year after the first NATO war it is time to again think about revisionism and degeneration in the labor movement. The murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht on January 15, 1919, was also the product of a degeneration of the labor movement, of a seizure of power by revisionism under the conditions of the First World War. Already fifty years ago the labor movement had had to keep struggling with the bourgeoisification and even with secret machinations in its own ranks by the ultrareactionaries, as for example the Prussian militarism or attempts at currying favor with the Western "democratic" capitalism. The year 1914, however, brought these struggles to the point and made it unevitable to clearly take sides. Revisionism and opportunism supported the imperialistic war. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were the most important representatives of those who rejected partisanship on the side of capitalism and imperialism and even as a minority decidedly held up the principles of the socialist labor movement. Even if they themselves showed serious mistakes in some questions which for example put them into clear difference to Lenin, or to the necessities to combine the democratic and the socialist revolution, they remain exemplary in their rectitude and in condemning and fighting the imperialistic war, particularly the German imperialistic war.

The ostracizing of Karl Liebknecht started already in the summer of 1914, when he did not declare himself willing to take part in the most patent betrayal of all decisions of the Socialist International. He was put under pressure to bow to the opportunistic trend of the majority of the party leadership. It was him who was willing to put up with this ostracization and even to go to the penitentiary for the principles represented by him, which previously had been also the principles of the Socialist International. The Social Democracy started an ostracization, a defamation and a stirring up of hatred against him in order to cover up its own complete unscrupulousness, its betrayal, its denaturation, headed by such traitors as Bernstein and David as well as Karl Kautsky and company and the black-white-red "socialists" as Ebert, Scheidemann and Noske. When the revolution broke out in 1918, Social Democracy all at once did an about-face and now behaved as if they themselves also represented the revolution. Its decisive representatives engaged the right-wing bands of soldiers and during the January days of 1919 knocked down the workers' uprising in Berlin in the most brutal manner. Still in December 1918 they did everything in order to isolate Liebknecht and Luxemburg. They denied them access to the imperial soviet congress (Reichsrätekongress) of Dec. 16, 1918 in Berlin. They, who had to take responsibility for the imperialistic war for the millionfold slaughtering of the workers against each other, now accused Liebknecht and Luxemburg of being "militarists" because they represented the revolution.

This kind of revisionism and degeneration which in the German example had deep roots in the labor movement already by Lassalleanism which always kept also open its back door to the Prussian reaction, recurred in later decades in different historical situations. Revisionism in the Soviet Union, for example, which seized other countries, too, equally meant, to an extreme extent, isolation, even terror against all those who at that time also as a minority courageously criticized this revisionism.

Today an astonished left public looks upon the fact that parties which by numbers had been gigantic and had been said to be "monolithic" do not exist any more, have literally dissolved into the air and have proved to possess absolutely no strength in the struggle with capital. Only if the score is settled with these things, it will be settled also with the principles of the murderers of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Only if modern revisionism is clearly being criticized and named as what it is, one can talk of a serious representation of revolutionary principles. Unfortunately, this is not the case with many forces which are marching under the banner and the names say of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht and the revolutionary labor movement. One cries about the loss, one laments it, but one is not willing, beyond the rose thrown upon the grave, to think things over and to draw any consequences. If there is to be a real new beginning with the socialist movement it is indispensable to think about the sources of decay and betrayal. One remarkable sentence could be read the other day, in a commentary by the newspaper "Junge Welt", it read: "The 20th century, characterized by the dialectics of revolution and counterrevolution, ends in regression all along the line."

On the one hand this is not true, as internationally a lot of things are developing which are leading onwards. But referring to our own country: if you look into the program of the Greens whom the various revisionists have liked to court and present as leftists, you need not wonder about regression. This programm, stemming from the deepest bowels of capital itself, quite officially, quite formally means the deepest regression, the falling back into older conditions. It is not by chance that today, directly and indirectly, it has been adopted into the programs of almost all bourgeois parties. The decrying of the present, the industrial society, the hatred against modern industry as it was preached there simply cannot lead to anything else but to a regression and the decomposition of the labor movement. There cannot rightly be a revolutionary labor movement under red banners unless we place ourselves on the positions of those elementary social forces which have revolution as their consequence: the higher socialization, the awakening of the peoples and nations of all countries, their rightful demand for prosperity and further development, and of course also the approval of modern technology, the struggle, for example, against the many decades old machinations by US-imperialism against the civil use of nuclear energy. Whoever represents contrary opinions in these questions automatically places himself on the part of reaction, no matter how he is covering up himself. Never has this been different, and never before has this become so clear as today. Today we have a green party in power - one could almost say: we are grateful for that - and we can see what this party in power (together with the social democrats) is doing. It has accepted the nuclear armament of the US and its claim for absolute, total dominance, it has delegated a foreign minister into the ranks of this policy and it is, contrasting this, of course still against the civil use of nuclear energy. It could happen that a minister who actively is defending the nuclear hegemony of the US, tomorrow lies down in the street and makes a blockade because of alleged dangers of a Castor transport, or sends a deputy for this. These are the peaks of absurdity today, these are the perversities of today, and, if not fought against, these will a l s o lead to intensified suppression of socialists; and it is an offense against Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht to combine with such people, at their grave for example. Whatever mistakes they have made insofar as the democratic revolution, the joining together with broad masses is concerned, they would never have supported an anti-industrial campaign.

It is really important to think about the unity of the socialist movement, also and in particular about the whole development of the split, above all between the CPSU and the CP of China, to critically resume some things, but also to state clearly that the CP of China under Mao Zedong absolutely has held up the revolutionary principles and has undertaken necessary steps to defend them. Reversely, the overthrow in China after 1976 has paved the way for the radical capitalistic development of today. The criticism of Chrushtchow's revisionism of the late fifties and the sixties, which in its essence was carried on until the end of the Soviet Union, remains a minimum point of any new beginning.

Without reappraising these elementary things and debating them in all their aspects there can be no word of a reconstruction of unity. Without a clear condemnation of revisionism and social-democracism there can neither be word of a commemoration for Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, on the contrary one cannot get rid of the feeling that today's followers of those who commissioned the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht are marching along, with the rose in the buttonhole and crocodile tears in the face. This also has to be given attention to, and one must come out of the mere celebrations and commemorations towards practical turning into reality. The widespread sentence that many a participant, together with the rose upon the grave, has also given in his revolutionary vigour, is not without reason. In spite of this, such a big demonstration in which the defence of socialism is demanded, especially today also is of importance. We are for manifestations and demonstrations which clearly take up today's necessities.

Editorial staff of Neue Einheit
Jan. 8, 2000