Portal:Communism/Selected quote/39

“ The name of Karl Liebknecht, as it has gone into world history, is inseparably connected with the war. The greatness of Karl Liebknecht consists in the fact that he succeeded better than anyone except Lenin in expressing with unusual forcefulness the turn in the proletarian revolution that took place in the working class of Germany and the other warring countries in connection with the first imperialist world war.

It is not especially necessary to recall that the working class of Europe which emerged from the first imperialist world war was not at all the same that it had been at its beginning. Every month of the imperialist world war was an enormous lesson for the international proletariat. Every salvo on the imperialist battlefields hit also the reformist pacifist illusions in those layers of the European working class which had entered the First World War with the feelings generated in them by the 25-year-long peaceful development of the Second International.

Blood poured out in floods. Every week tens and hundreds of thousands of men lost their lives. With every day, poverty, sufferings, and hunger grew. Already in the first months of the war, hesitations and doubts began to seize the patriotically disposed workers who were under the influence of the Social-Democracy. Soon the hesitations and doubts gave way to an ever greater hatred of the war, which the Social-Democratic leaders were calling the “great” and “liberating” war. It fell to Karl Liebknecht, we repeat, to express in the broadest and deepest way precisely this swing taking place in the mass millions of the working class ; together with these masses, to drive through to revolutionary decisions ; and, together with them, and in their name, to protest against the war with the whole might of his ardent heart. He succeeded better than anyone else in expressing the anger and pain, the sufferings and protest, and, developing therefrom, the ripening revolutionary determination of the best part of the European working class that the criminal hands of the bourgeoisie and their Social-Democracy had sent on to the imperialist battlefield.

” — Gregory Zinoviev (1883-1936)
Karl Liebknecht and the War , 1920