Page:Rosa Luxemburg - The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy (The "Junius" Pamplhet) - 1918.pdf/89

 Rh constitutional government, has strengthened the reaction of its rulers, the enemies of constitutional government.

By sacrificing the class struggle our party has moreover, once and for all, given up the possibility of making its influence effectively felt in determining the extent of the war and the terms of peace. To its own official declaration, its acts have been a stinging blow. While protesting against all annexations, which are, after all, the logical consequences of an imperialistic war that is successful from the military point of view, it has handed over every weapon that the working class possessed that might have empowered the masses to mobilize public opinion in their own direction, to exert an effective pressure upon the terms of war and of peace. By assuring militarism of peace and quiet at home the Social Democracy has given its military rulers permission to follow their own course without even considering the interests of the masses, has unleashed in the hearts of the ruling classes the most unbridled imperialistic tendencies. In other words, when the Social Democracy adopted its platform of civil peace, and the political disarmament of the working class, it condemned its own demand of no annexations to impotency.

Thus the Social Democracy has added another crime to the heavy burden it already has to bear, namely the lengthening of the war. The commonly accepted dogma that we can oppose the war only so long as it is threatened, has become a dangerous trap. As an inevitable consequence, once the war has come, social democratic political action is at an end. There can be, then, but one question, victory or defeat, i. e., the class struggle must stop for the period of the war. But actually the greatest problem for the political movement of the Social Democracy begins only after the war has broken out. At the international congresses held in Stuttgart in 1907 and in Basel in. 1912, the German party and labor union leaders unanimously voted in favor of a resolution which says: