Dana Miles
On Jan. 12,
thousands joined an annual commemorative march in Berlin to honor the memory of
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht — two revolutionaries murdered 106 years ago
on Jan. 15, 1919 by centrist-backed proto-fascists. For decades, the march has
taken place on the second Sunday of January, bringing together activists, trade
unionists, feminists, and others who make up the German radical left. Among the
marchers, those who perhaps best embodied Luxemburg’s spirit of
anti-imperialism were a bloc of pro-Palestinian demonstrators who walked
through the streets chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be
free,” before being attacked by German police officers.
Rosa Luxemburg addressing a crowd during the International Socialist Congress, in Stuttgart, 1907. (Wikimedia Commons)
Germany’s
tradition of cracking down on left-wing activists harks back to Luxemburg’s
time. In 1913, on the eve of World War I, Luxemburg gave a series of famous
speeches across Germany in which she called on soldiers to refuse to serve the
German war machine. She would be put on trial a year later in the Frankfurt
Criminal Court for these speeches and other acts of alleged “incitement,” and
was sentenced to one year in prison, which she served from February 1915 to
February 1916. At the end of that devastating war — with 40 million dead, and
Germany defeated — and following the crushing of the January uprising in
Berlin, she and Leibknecht were assassinated by a gang of right-wing army
officers, with the tacit approval of leaders of the SPD party, in which she had
been active her entire political life before its rightward swing.
Luxemburg left
behind a rich and radical intellectual legacy. In “The Accumulation of
Capital,” published in 1913 and widely considered her most important
contribution to Marxist theory, she drew critical links between capitalism,
imperialism, and militarism. In order to create new markets, Luxemburg argued,
capitalism requires the expansion of the nation state beyond its borders, which
manifests through a process of militaristic imperialism.
Tackling
militarism head-on thus becomes a necessary imperative to bring down this
unholy triad, and a particularly effective way of doing so is through refusing
to be complicit. “We are aware that as long as capitalism exists, we cannot
abolish war,” she declared in the speech that would lead to her imprisonment.
“But we will defeat capitalism if we fight the war with all our might.”
The context at
the time Luxemburg was writing, over a century ago, was starkly different. Yet
Israel’s policies in Gaza over the past 15 months, for which decades of
occupation laid the groundwork, display the same militaristic impulse for
expansionism and power that the revolutionary warned against.
As such, there
is much inspiration we can still take from Luxemburg’s insights into the
symbiotic relationship between capitalism, imperialism, and militarism, and how
this triad can be resisted. Indeed, many around the world — and even a few
inside Israel — have put her teachings into action.
A toolbox of
refusal
Militarism has
long been a pillar of Israeli society, but this has dramatically intensified in
the aftermath of the October 7 attacks — both as an ethos and as fuel for
Israel’s internationally renowned arms industry. Over the course of the war,
Israel’s arms sales have broken new records, reaching $13 billion in 2023, and
the profits of the security industry have also leapt.
The assault on
Gaza, which was framed as “self defense” following Hamas’ October 7 attack,
swiftly morphed into another iteration of imperialism: territorial expansion.
The mass killing, ethnic cleansing, unprecedented wreckage of infrastructure,
starvation, and plans for Jewish settlement in Gaza, along with the expulsion
of dozens of Palestinian communities in the West Bank, are all manifestations
of the attempt to expand Israeli power by military means, further entrenching
Jewish supremacy between the river and the sea.
We can imagine
how Luxemburg might have viewed today’s events by considering a famous letter
she wrote to her friend and fellow socialist Sophie Liebknecht, (who was also
the wife of Karl), from her prison cell in Breslau in 1917. She described a heart-wrenching scene from
the prison yard: buffalos returning from the war’s frontlines, weighted with
the bloody clothes of fallen and wounded soldiers.
“The attending
soldier, a brutal character, began to beat away at the animals with the heavy
end of his whip so savagely that the overseer indignantly called him to
account. ‘Don’t you have any pity for the animals?’ ‘No one has any pity for us
people either!’ he answered with an evil laugh.” Staring into the buffalo’s
eyes, Luxemburg sees the essential cruelty of militarism, which seeps into
every corner of the earth and spares no living creature. “We both,” Rosa added,
“stand here so powerless and spiritless and are united only in pain, in
powerlessness, and in longing.”
Even throughout
her years of imprisonment, Luxemburg never wavered or lost her spirit. She
believed she could always fight back — and she saw refusal as a critical tool
of civil disobedience to disrupt militarism, and in turn, capitalism and
imperialism. And at the crux of militarism and capitalism, perhaps the most
powerful manifestation of refusal is the one available to all workers: the
general strike.
Against the
backdrop of the failure of the international community to put an end to the
genocide in Gaza, we’ve seen a wave of civil disobedience and labor actions
seeking to disrupt international arms transfers to Israel. These actions have
used the “block the boat” tactic, drawing from the toolbox that was central to
the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.
In November
2023, shortly after the assault on Gaza began, Belgian port workers refused to
load weapons shipped to Israel. In February, India’s maritime labor force, the
Water Transport Workers Federation, representing 14,000 workers, declared that
it would refuse to handle weapons destined for Israel. At the 2024 May Day
march in London — a key event for the labor movement since Luxemburg’s own days
— protesters blockaded the Department for Business and Trade to oppose arms
sales to Israel. And in October, Greek dockworkers stopped a truck from North
Macedonia carrying ammunition to Israel from entering the port in Piraeus.
There have also
been direct actions at factories exporting arms to Israel and profiting from
the genocide. In November 2023, union demonstrators in Kent blocked a factory
that manufactures and exports arms to Israel. Following the International
Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, activists petitioned the UK Supreme Court to ban British
arms sales to Israel. And in its landmark case against Germany at the
International Court of Justice earlier in 2024, Nicaragua pointed to German
weapons sales to Israel as evidence of its breach of the genocide convention.
The pressure is
starting to yield fruit. In February, a Dutch court ordered a halt to F-35 jet
parts exported to Israel, followed by courts in Belgium, Spain, and Italy. In
September, the UK suspended 30 arms export licenses due to “humanitarian
concerns” — the same day the UN General Assembly approved with a large majority
of 124 countries an arms embargo against Israel.
Unsettling the
war machine
Even inside
Israel, where the discourse of “security” and exhortations to support this
supposedly “just” and “necessary” war suffuse every aspect of our individual
and collective existence, a brave few have resisted. Losing one’s ability to
make ethical judgments is one of the heftiest prices of living in a militarized
state like Israel. But, as Luxemburg reminds us, refusal is the very
precondition for creating an alternative future.
Indeed, since
the beginning of Israel’s assault on Gaza, a small yet significant number of
young people have refused to be drafted into the military. Conscientious
objection is exceptionally rare in Israel, and even more so since the October 7
attacks as Israelis rallied around the military. And although their immediate
impact may be limited, these young objectors have formed a new vanguard for
refusal, opening up a crack in the wall of Israeli militarism.
Reflecting on
Luxemburg’s legacy offers us inspiration to rethink our own modes of
resistance. A variety of actions drawn from the toolbox of civil disobedience,
from tax mutiny to general strikes, aim to unsettle the war machine. Refusal,
which goes to the heart of militarism, is the most subversive of them all.
Over a century
on, as Israel’s leaders threaten to resume the genocide in Gaza after the first
phase of the ceasefire, the words of one of Luxemburg’s 1913 speeches resonate
with a desperate urgency: “Workers! Party comrades! Women of the people! How
long will you watch quietly and undisturbed this specter of hell? How long will
you suffer silently the crimes of butchery, need and hunger? Be aware, as long
as the people do not move to express their will, the genocide will not cease.”
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