Page:Rosa Luxemburg - The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy (The "Junius" Pamplhet) - 1918.pdf/12

 10 the German Social-Democracy. The war of 1870 and the downfall of the Paris Commune had shifted the centre of gravity of the European labor movement to Germany. Just as France was the classic country of the first phase of the proletarian class-struggle, as Paris was the torn and bleeding heart of the European working-class of that time, so the German working-class became the vanguard of the second phase. By innumerable sacrifices in the form of agitational work it has built up the strongest, the model organization of the proletariat, has created the greatest press, has developed the most effective educational and propaganda methods. It has collected under its banners the most gigantic labor masses, and has elected the largest representative groups to its national parliament.

The German Social-Democracy has been generally acknowledged to be the purest incarnation of Marxian Socialism. It has held and wielded a peculiar prestige as teacher and leader in the second International. Friedrich Engels wrote in his famous foreword to Marx's "Class-Struggle in France": "Whatever may occur in other countries, the German Social-Democracy occupies a particular place and, for the present at least, has therefore a particular duty to perform. The two million voters that it sends to the ballot boxes, and the young girls and women who stand behind them as non-voters, are numerically the greatest, the most compact mass, the most decisive force of the proletarian international army." The German Social-Democracy was, as the "Wiener Arbeiter-Zeitung" wrote on August 5th, 1914, the jewel of the organization of the classconscious proletariat. In its footsteps the French, the Italian and the Belgian Social Democracies, the labor movements of Holland, Scandinavia, Switzerland and United States followed more or less eagerly. The Slav nations, the Russians and the Social-Democrats of the Balkan looked up to the German movement in boundless, almost unquestioning admiration, In the second International the German Social-Democracy was the determining factor. In every congress, in the