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The murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht
Workers Power - Monday, June 09, 2014
95 years ago, on the night of January 15 1919, two great socialist revolutionaries died. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were brutally murdered by paramilitaries, acting on the orders of the German Social-Democratic government.
Workers Power commemorates the anniversary of Luxemburg and Liebknechts death by analyzing their contribution to the Marxist tradition.
At the time of their deaths, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were leaders of the Spartacus group, the Left wing of the German workers movement. They had broken from the Social-Democratic Party (SPD) after its betrayal of the 1918 revolution.
In January 1919, the Social-Democratic government of Friedrich Ebert was trying to rebuild a capitalist Germany in tandem with the ruling class. In contrast, Luxembourg and Liebknecht were fighting for a socialist revolution to rid Germany of the corrupt politicians, the warmongering generals, and profiteering capitalists who had led the country into the terrible carnage of the First World War.
Today, Karl and Rosa are remembered as heroes of the Revolution, an inspiration to workers, to youth, to women fighting injustice everywhere. Their writings and their actions are rich in lessons. Their murderers are remembered as those who were prepared to butcher the workers of Berlin to preserve bourgeois rule. Their betrayal of the Revolution led, ultimately, to decades of inequality, terror, and war under the Nazis ...
Much more here: http://www.workerspower.net/the-murder-of-rosa-luxemburg-and-karl-liebknecht
socialist_n_TN
(11,481 posts)nm
yallerdawg
(16,104 posts)What a time, seeing the world go to war as predicted, the mass murder machine created by industry, and then being killed for your ideas, for really trying to show the way out.
Is the system more accommodating today, or are we just being controlled in more effective ways, including the idea of Democratic reform as a peaceful transition away from capitalism?
TBF
(32,092 posts)"Being controlled in more effective ways, including the idea of Democratic reform as a peaceful transition away from capitalism" -
I think your sentence above is how I would characterize the period of 1950's-80s - when the country taxed corporations and high-income individuals. At that time our rivals were recovering from WWII and it seems there wasn't as much pressure to ramp up the war machine so there was more domestic spending (the vaulted "American Dream" . They could pretend we had some sort of democracy and meritocracy that functioned for all. Of course the dream has now reverted back to nightmare status as we return to ramping up the war machine and reach levels of income inequality not seen in the past 100 years. We are back to robber barons (mostly tech billionaires & some of the old oil & gas and similar industries) and the rest of us. The capitalists are very good at pitting citizens against each other so they are focused on gods, guns, abortion etc while the moneyed class robs us blind.
Stargleamer
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