International Socialist Review (1900) Vol 17

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power will not have fallen in vain, because
the brutality of the ruling class will gradu-
awaken the workers. They will see
this series of bloody crimes from Ludlow to
Minnesota and they will note that their leaders
did nothing to prevent or even to protest
seriously. And if the class consciousness
of the workers is not dead, if the workers
are not prepared to be beaten to pieces, one
group after another, they will back up protests
with their masses, if necessary, over
the heads of their leaders.
It is not, in the first place, the difficulty
of understanding what are the real interests
of the workers in the class struggle, it is the
difficulty of how to act, how to break the
old forms of power, including the power
entrusted to leaders, and how to get the
habit of fighting and experience to fight and
to control the fight, both on the political
and economic field. The capitalist class
uses political instruments, militia, judges,
etc., as strong, efficient tools in their class
MANY
CARL WITTMAN 303
struggles; the workers will have to fight
those tools as well as the economic instruments,
but in a manner that suits their purposes
and not according to the methods their
foes invented for them; not in parliamentary
negotiations and hair-splittings, but by
the power of their masses, compelling the
capitalist class to openly oppose or to submit
to their demands.
Fighting, as everything else, has to be
learned in practice, and mass fighting means
that the rank and file has to do some independent
thinking and has to get its own
understanding of important class issues
under imperialism, not resting before there
is organized protest and organized action in
each special case. The form of this mass
action will develop with a growing class
consciousness and a growing international
understanding, and will at the same time
enable the workers to acquire the qualities
necessary to organize a co-operative commonwealth.
The German Minority and tke War
By CARL WITTMAN
comrades left the Socialist
movement because on August 4,
1914, all the 111 Socialist deputies
in the Reichstag failed to do their
duty. Among them are some of the best
members in Germany and also here in
America.
From Comrade Rtihle I received the following
explanation of those critical days at
the beginning of the war: The great majority
of the members of the Socialist group
took unconditionally the ground that the
Fatherland must be defended ; once war has
begun, they said, everyone must fight for his
country. Ten members held that everyone
must fight in case the nation is attacked,
in case it is not waging a war of conquest.
These ten are not fundamentally opposed to
war of defense ; their doubts are of purely
opportunistic character. Only four were
definitely, fundamentally, opposed to all
war, even defensive war. These were Liebknecht,
Riihle, Herzfeld (from Rostock),
and Henke (from Bremen). Their view is
that during this imperialistic era all wars
are carried on for the purpose of conquest
that no land is safe as long as there are
capitalist armies ; that for the proletariat of
any nation the army of that nation is the
greatest source of danger.
The fourteen members of the last two
groups were prepared to vote against the
war appropriation in the Reichstag. In order
to prevent this the majority passed a
resolution providing that every member was
to be present and was to vote for the appropriation.
The fourteen faced the alternative
of voting in accordance with the resolution
or splitting the group and the party. The
voting of the appropriation thus became a
subordinate issue. The division of the party
was the great issue up for discussion. The
fourteen had to decide for or against it on
August 4, 1914. The ten opportunists were
unwilling to see the thing thru, to vote as
they wished to do at the expense of a split
in the party. They pleaded with the other
four and threatened them. As their trump
card they said that a movement begun by
only four members would excite nothing but
ridicule. To divide the tiny minority of
fourteen would be to rob it of all influence
with the majority. In order to prevent this
the four yielded to the fourteen. That Lieb-
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