Moses through the wilderness. Not only must it conquer a new world, it must go.down to make way for those who will be better able to cope with its problems."
This was written in 1850, at a time when England was the only capitalistically developed nation, when the English proletariat was the best organized and seemed destined through the industrial growth of its nation to take the leadership in the international labor movement. Read Germany instead of England, and the words of Karl Marx become an inspired prohpecy of the present world war. It is ordained to drive the German proletariat "to the leadership of the people, and thus to create the organizatory beginning of the great international conflict between labor and capital for the political supremacy of the world."
Have we ever had a different conception of the role to be played by the working-class in the great world-war? Have we forgotten how we were wont to describe the coming event, only a few short years ago? "Then will come the catastrophe. All Europe will be called to arms, and sixteen to eighteen million men, the flower of the nations, armed with the best instruments of murder will make war upon each other. But I believe that behind this march there looms the final crash. Not we, but they themselves will bring it. They are driving things to the extreme, they are leading us straight into a catastrophe. They will harvest what they have sown. The Goetterdaemmerung of the bourgeois world is at hand. Be sure of that. It is coming." Thus spoke Rebel, the speaker of our group in the Reichstag in the Morocco debate.
An official leaflet published by the Party, "Imperialism and Socialism," that was distributed in hundreds of thousands of copies only a few years ago, closes with the words: "Thus the struggle against militarism daily becomes more and more clearly a decisive struggle between capital and labor. War, high prices and capitalism—peace, happiness for all, Socialism! Yours is the
