Karl Liebknecht was a leading German revolutionary at the close of the First World War. who with Rosa Luuxemburg, https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2019/01/remembering-rosa-luxemburg-100-years.html founded the Spartakist League and led opposition to WW1 in Germany.
Born on the 12th of August 1871 Liebknecht was the son of Wilhelm Liebknecht a leading German Socialist. During his law and political economy studies at Leipzig and Berlin Liebknecht himself developed Marxist views.
Before starting work as a lawyer Liebknecht served with the Imperial Pioneer Guards from 1893-94. Moving to Berlin in 1898 his political activities increased; he took to defending people charged with political crimes and himself later spent 18 months in prison in 1907-08. He joined the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1900 and married the same year to Julia Paradies. The couple had two sons and a daughter before Julia died in 1911. His father and August Bebel had been the co founders of the SPD, which started as an overtly Marxist party. It was the world's strongest and most influential workers' party until 1914, when it capitulated to nationalism and dispatched German workers to the trenches to kill fellow workers from other European countries.
In 1901 Liebknecht was elected to serve on Berlin's town council, a position he retained until 1913.
In 1912 he married Sophia Ryss, who had graduated from the University of Heidelberg and he was elected to the Reichstag with the SPD. Karl Liebknecht became a leading figure in the anti-militarist section of the SDP. In 1907 he published Militarism and Anti-Militarism. In the book he argued: "Militarism is not specific to capitalism. It is moreover normal and necessary in every class-divided social order, of which the capitalist system is the last. Capitalism, of course, like every other class-divided social order, develops its own special variety of militarism; for militarism is by its very essence a means to an end, or to several ends, which differ according to the kind of social order in question and which can be attained according to this difference in different ways. This comes out not only in military organization, but also in the other features of militarism which manifest themselves when it carries out its tasks. The capitalist stage of development is best met with an army based on universal military service, an army which, though it is based on the people, is not a people’s army but an army hostile to the people, or at least one which is being built up in that direction."
He then went on to argue why the socialist movement should concentrate on persuading young people to adopt the philosophy of anti-militarism:
"Here is a great field full of the best hopes of the working-class, almost incalculable in its potential, whose cultivation must not at any cost wait upon the conversion of the backward sections of the adult proletariat. It is of course easier to influence the children of politically educated parents, but this does not mean that it is not possible, indeed a duty, to set to work also on the more difficult section of the proletarian youth. The need for agitation among young people is therefore beyond doubt. And since this agitation must operate with fundamentally different methods – in accordance with its object, that is, with the different conditions of life, the different level of understanding, the different interests and the different character of young people – it follows that it must be of a special character, that it must take a special place alongside the general work of agitation, and that it would be sensible to put it, at least to a certain degree, in the hands of special organizations."
On 4th August, 1914, he was the only member of the Reichstag who voted against Germany's participation in the First World War. He argued: "This war, which none of the peoples involved desired, was not started for the benefit of the German or of any other people. It is an Imperialist war, a war for capitalist domination of the world markets and for the political domination of the important countries in the interest of industrial and financial capitalism. Arising out of the armament race, it is a preventative war provoked by the German and Austrian war parties in the obscurity of semi-absolutism and of secret diplomacy.
Liebknecht was soon arguing in favour of a revolutionary uprising. The German state could not tolerate such opposition. Liebknecht, although 43 years old, was called up into the army, and was enlisted as an Armierungssoldat, a member of a military unit that provided labour to the fighting divisions and which consisted of men unwilling or not permitted to directly bear arms (for example, because of criminal records or poor health). In this role he experienced life on the Eastern Front and was directly involved in the clearing of the the rotting corpses of the dead, until he suffered physical collapse in October 1915. and he was allowed back to Germany as his health had become so poor.
Together with a small but increasing number of socialist opponents of the Social Democratic Party policy of Burgfrieden, including Luxemburg he founded the Group International which was later named the “Spartacist league.” ,Together he and Luxemburg provided the leadership for illegal opposition to the war. Liebknecht edited the famous “Spartacus Letters,” the “official” organ of the subversive Spartakusbund. which was declared illegal but shared two of Liebknecht’s most important anti-war polemics Klassenkampf gegen den Krieg ("Class War against the War") and Der Hauptfeind steht im eigenen Land ("The Main Enemy is in your own country")
In early 1916 Liebknecht was one of very few German politicians to publicly question the German government’s response to the massacre of Armenians by their Ottoman-Turkish allies. A day after raising this issue in the Reichstag, he was expelled from the parliamentary party (Reichstagsfraktion) of the Social Democratic Party because of his opposition to the war and criticism of the party leadership.
By 1916 opposition to the war among soldiers in the trenches and hungry civilians was growing, and Liebknecht and his comrades in the Spartacus grouping decided to raise the stakes. On 1 May 1916 they called an illegal demonstration in the Potsdam Square in Central Berlin; 10,000 people attended, including many women and young people. As a contemporary report describes, 'They were so numerous that the usual skirmishes with the police began right away. The cops... quickly became very nervous and began to drive the crowd back and forth with blows. Suddenly, at the head of the crowd, right in the middle of the square, the loud sonorous voice of Karl Liebknecht rang out: "Down with the war! Down with the government!"'
Liebknecht was arrested and jailed for four and a half years for sedition. He told the court, 'No general ever wore a uniform with as much honour as I will wear a prison uniform.' Such was the discontent in German society already that his sentencing prompted a strike by 55,000 metalworkers in Berlin. Liebknecht, now became an international symbol. For socialists in Britain and France his courage made it easier to oppose the official demonisation of all Germans as warmongers.
With the collapse of the German government in October 1918 Liebknecht was granted political amnesty by Max Von Baden. However with Rosa Luxemburg and other Spartacists, soon Liebknecht was campaigning again openly for revolution. While Luxemburg and others had formed in early 1916 the loosely organised, and repressed, Spartakus group, it was only as the revolution began to unfold that steps were made to bring together and organise the revolutionary forces into a party. The end of 1918 saw the formation of the Communist Party (KPD) with Liebknecht and Luxemburg being seen as its main public leaders.This new communist organization was quick to exploit the chaos that had swept Germany with defeat on the western front. They escalated demonstrations, with Liebknecht provocatively declaring on January 6th that the SPD government was no longer legitimate, and by January 12th the protests had reached such a size that the government called in the army to quell them and the revolt was soon bloodily suppressed by Friedrich Ebert;s Freikorps a far-right grouping of demobilised German soldiers (.Many future members and leaders of the Nazi party served in the Freikorps) and the revolt was defeated with some ease on Jan. 13, 1919.
Two days later, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were arrested, interrogated and tortured. Liebknecht was put in a car and killed by a shot from behind. Luxemburg was beaten with rifle butts before she was shot. Her corpse was dumped in a Berlin canal.
At a memorial meeting in Petrograd a few days later, Leon Trotsky, one of the central leaders of the October Revolution, drew parallels with 1917 and spoke of how the German "bourgeoisie and military have learnt from our July and October experience" and acted to try to behead the revolution.
Their murders decapitated the leadership of the young German Communist Party which then oscillated between putschism and opportunism for the rest of its existence. The consequences were that the world revolution, which the revolutionaries in Russia had counted on, did not take place.
Both Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were true revolutionary heroes, and their ideas and legacy will be remembered down the ages,against militarism, oppression, exploitation and privilege and .nothing can destroy the heritage of Liebknecht's revolutionary struggle against capitalism and war
"Memorial for Karl Liebknecht" by Käthe Kollwitz, 1921.
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