longs. Karl Liebknecht is the best known representative of that tendency and of the new real, proletarian international.
Karl Liebknecht called upon the workingmen and soldiers of Germany to turn their guns upon their own government. Karl Liebknecht did that openly from the tribune of parliament, the Reichstsag. Then he went out on Potsdamer Platz, one of the largest public squares in Berlin, with a batch of unlawfully printed proclamations to head a demonstration that shouted: "Down with the government." He was arrested and sentenced to hard labor. He is now serving his term in a German jail, like hundreds if not thousands of other real Socialists of Germany who have been jailed for waging war against war.
Karl Liebknecht attacked mercilessly in his speeches and his writings not only the Plekhanovs and the Potresofs of Germany (Scheidemann, Legien, David, etc), but also the centrists of Germany, the German Cheidses and Tseretellis, men like Kautsky, Haase, Ledebour and others.
Karl Liebknecht and his friend. Otto Ruhle, alone among 110 Socialist deputies in the Reicfastag, disregarded the party discipline, destroyed the harmonioas union with the centrists and the chauvinists, and fought everybody. Liebknecht alone really represents Socialism, the proletarian cause, the proletarian revolution. The rest of the German Social Democracy, to quote the apt words of Rosa Luxemburg, also a member and leader of the Spartacus Group, is "a stinking carrion.'"[1]
Another group of real internationalists in Germany is gathered around the Bremen paper. The Workers' Politics.
In France those who stand closest to real internationalism are Loriot and his friends (Bourderon and Merrheim have gone over to the social-pacifist group), Henri Guilbeaux, who publishes in Switzerland a paper called Demain. In England, the supporters of the review. The Trade Unionist, and some of the members of the British Socialist Party and of the Independent Labor Party (for instance, William Russell, who has openly separated himself from the leaders who are betraying Socialism), the Scotch teacher and Socialist, MacLean, who has been sentenced to jail by the bourgeois
- ↑ When the "minority" in the German Social Democracy, captained by Kautsky and Haase, broke away and organized the Independent Socialist Party, Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring and others refused to join the new party, considering it moderate and compromising, and organized in a group of their own, a sort of German expression of theoretical Bolshevism.—L. C. F.
