From Abolition Media
Written in 1915, when the Polish-born, Jewish revolutionary was imprisoned for her anti-war agitation, Rosa Luxemburg’s Junius Pamphlet, or The Crisis of Social Democracy, is one of the most powerful indictments of World War I and the bourgeois society that produced it ever published. Over 100 years since her assassination by the German Freikorps in 1919, Luxemburg’s words against war seem eerily appropriate today. She condemns Europe’s socialist parties for betraying the First and Second International’s foundational position against imperialist war by backing the governments of their respective countries in the “Great War.” In the case of her own party, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, Luxemburg rejects its claim that the country is engaged in “a war for Liberty against Russian despotism,” instead showing how it is an imperialist war on the part of Germany, as much as it is on the part of the Allied powers. Among anarchists, a similar split occurred at the time: Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin advocated joining the war on the side of the Allied powers and was (correctly) denounced by most anarchists, including Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman and Errico Malatesta.