WorkRosa Luxemburg

The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy (The “Junius” Pamphlet)

Smuggled out of a Berlin prison and printed in Zürich under the name Junius: her indictment of her own party for backing the war.

by Rosa Luxemburg249 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Die Krise der Sozialdemokratie
First published: 1916(aged 45)
Original language: German

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Overview

On 4 August 1914 the Social Democratic deputies in the Reichstag voted for the credits that paid for Germany's war. Their party had pledged, at one international congress after another, to oppose exactly such a war. Rosa Luxemburg wrote her reckoning with that vote in April 1915 in the women's prison on Barnimstrasse in Berlin, where she was serving a sentence for an anti-war speech. Mathilde Jacob, her secretary, smuggled the manuscript out, and it was printed in Zürich in 1916 under the name Junius, an echo of the unidentified author of a famous series of letters against the government of George III. The pamphlet takes apart the claim on which the deputies had relied, that Germany was defending itself against tsarist Russia. Luxemburg goes back over twenty years of naval building, colonial rivalry, the Baghdad railway and the crises over Morocco, and argues that every great power had prepared this war. In an age of imperialism, she holds, national defence is the cover under which conquest is carried on, and workers who accept it are fighting each other for their rulers' markets. She states the alternative in a phrase she credits to Friedrich Engels, Marx's collaborator: society must either go forward to socialism or fall back into barbarism. The war, she says, is what falling back looks like. A set of theses printed with the pamphlet called for a new International whose decisions would bind its national parties. Lenin praised the pamphlet in a review in 1916 and objected above all to one point, its claim that national wars were no longer possible. Her group took the name Spartacus the same year, and at the end of 1918 it formed the core of the Communist Party of Germany.

Key concepts

What does Luxemburg mean by imperialism in the Junius Pamphlet?

She means a stage in the worldwide development of capital, and denies that it is the policy of one state or another. In this stage the great powers compete for colonies, concessions and spheres of influence, and their rivalry is one connected whole. Her German example is the Baghdad railway, a concession granted to the Deutsche Bank in 1901 that drew the Reich into Turkey. No state, large or small, can keep out of this system.

What was the civil truce, the Burgfrieden?

The Burgfrieden was the suspension of the class struggle for as long as the war lasted. After the vote of 4 August the trade unions called off all wage disputes and told the employers so, and the party press fell into line. Luxemburg points out that only one side kept this peace. The state of siege and the gagging of the press continued, so that workers gave up their means of defence and received nothing in return.

Why does Luxemburg say wars of national defence are no longer possible?

Because, on her account, no country now fights alone. Each war is a part of the contest between the great powers, whatever the intentions of those who fight it. Switzerland might seem a pure case of defence, but its neutrality lasts only as long as the armed states around it allow, and Belgium showed how quickly such neutrality is trampled. A policy that looks at one country in isolation is, she writes, built on sand.

What duty did the International lay on socialists once war had begun?

The duty was to work for a quick end to the war and to use the crisis it caused to rouse the people and hasten the fall of capitalist rule. This was resolved at the international congress in Stuttgart in 1907 and confirmed at Basel in 1912, with the German delegates voting for it. Luxemburg quotes the text to refute the view that socialist policy has nothing left to do once the guns fire.

What kind of International do the Junius theses call for?

They call for an International that decides and whose decisions bind. Under the theses it settles the tactics of its national sections on militarism, colonial policy and trade in peacetime, and the whole line to be followed in war. Carrying out its decisions comes before every other duty of organisation, and a national party that acts against them places itself outside. The old International had passed resolutions and left each party free to ignore them.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

National defence as the cover for conquest

The Social Democratic deputies said they were defending their country against invasion. Luxemburg asks what a war of defence can still mean when every great power has spent twenty years preparing to attack.

Luxemburg sets the deputies' declaration against the record: the naval programme, the Baghdad railway concession, the crises over Morocco. Imperial policy, she argues, is the work of no single state. It is a stage in the world development of capital that no state can stand outside, so that a small country fighting for its existence, as Serbia was, becomes a piece in the larger game. For German workers victory and defeat would be equally ruinous. What the party owed them was the truth about the war's origins and a set of demands: arms for the people, the people's decision over war and peace, an end to the state of siege.

national defense
nationalism
war
imperialism
war propaganda
propaganda
foreign policy
geopolitics
diplomacy
alliances
colonialism
militarism
international relations

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Socialism or barbarism, and a party's failure

What does it mean that the strongest workers' party in the world gave way in a single day? Luxemburg treats the collapse as a lesson to be learned in public, and sets it inside a choice that concerns everyone.

Bourgeois society stands, in the pamphlet's opening pages, wading in blood and dripping with filth, while army contractors advertise and dividends rise. Luxemburg takes from Engels the alternative of socialism or a relapse into barbarism, and says the war is the relapse. Her own party made it possible by suspending the class struggle for the duration, the so-called civil truce. She answers with self-criticism, which she calls the air and light of the workers' movement: socialism is lost only if workers refuse to measure how far they fell. The appended theses draw the conclusion, an International whose decisions bind its national parties in war as in peace.

social democracy
political responsibility
internationalism
proletariat
class struggle
revolution
socialism
historical memory
capitalism
political repression

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Within this work

passages held: 249
distinct concepts: 232
by passages held, corpus-wide: #302

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “imperialism” and “war”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 75 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
imperialism	war	44
nationalism	war	29
imperialism	militarism	23
capitalism	imperialism	21
imperialism	nationalism	18
social democracy	war	18
capitalism	war	16
class struggle	war	13
class struggle	social democracy	12
militarism	war	12
internationalism	war	11
class struggle	imperialism	9
internationalism	nationalism	9
capitalism	militarism	6
class struggle	internationalism	6
class struggle	nationalism	6
militarism	social democracy	6
nationalism	social democracy	6
capitalism	class struggle	5
imperialism	internationalism	5
imperialism	social democracy	5
internationalism	social democracy	5
capitalism	nationalism	4
capitalism	internationalism	3
capitalism	social democracy	3
class struggle	militarism	2
internationalism	militarism	2
militarism	nationalism	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1899 Reform or Revolution (Sozialreform oder Revolution?)
Within a year of her arrival in Berlin she had written the newspaper articles gathered here. Their case about where reform stops is the ground she argues from in everything later.
DE
1904 Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy (Organisationsfragen der russischen Sozialdemokratie)
Written against Lenin's plan for a party, this is her sustained piece on how one should be organised. The prison manuscript on the Russian Revolution took the argument up again fourteen years later.
DE
1905 Socialism and the Churches (Kościół a socjalizm)
The Polish side of her work: a pamphlet for the party she helped to lead in Russian Poland, written in the revolutionary year that she analysed afterwards in The Mass Strike.
DE
1906 The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (Massenstreik, Partei und Gewerkschaften)
The fullest statement of her view that mass action cannot be scheduled by leaders. The dispute it opened with the trade unions came back in 1910 as her break with Karl Kautsky, the party's leading theorist.
DE
1913 The Accumulation of Capital (Die Akkumulation des Kapitals)
Among pamphlets and articles, this is the one full-length treatise she finished. It supplies the economic basis for the account of war she gave three years later in the Junius Pamphlet.
DE
1916 The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy (The “Junius” Pamphlet) (Die Krise der Sozialdemokratie) you are here DE
1919 Aufsätze und Artikel
Newspaper and journal pieces from 1893 to 1919, the running record beside the books. They include the 1910 polemics against Karl Kautsky and her last articles for Die Rote Fahne.
DE
1919 Reden
What she said aloud, on the questions her articles and pamphlets argue in print, from her first months in Germany in 1898 to the last weeks of her life.
DE
1922 The Russian Revolution (Die russische Revolution)
She left it unfinished in Breslau prison in 1918, and Paul Levi printed it four years later. It returns to the objection she had made to Lenin in 1904, now that his party held a state.
DE
1925 Introduction to Political Economy (Einführung in die Nationalökonomie)
Her economics as she taught it: plainer than The Accumulation of Capital, which grew out of it, and the place where her reading on communal societies before capitalism is set out.
DE

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