Translated "Avante!"article by Albano Nunes, Member of the International Department

The centenary celebration on Rosa Luxembourg’s and Karl Liebknetch’s assassination takes place in January 15th next. It regards a tragic event that ought not to be forgotten. By the just tribute to the memory of the workers and communist international movement of two heroic leaders and what it represented in the path to impose on workers the most great capital terrorist dictatorship – fascism.

The crime circumstances are those of a very sharp class struggle round the destinies of the revolution within Germany, a revolution considered of major importance in order to stop the country’s enclosure from the soviets and for the process of building socialism in Russia. After all, one lived the dramatic imperialist 1914-18 War consequences. The German workers’ movement was very strong and the October Revolution influence great. The possibility of a socialist revolution was in the horizon. Before the opportunist positions of the Germany Social-Democrat Party (SPD) leaders, it was the time to create a revolutionary force in order to lead the workers class unto victory. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg engaged themselves in that purpose, by organizing the Spartacus League amid the SPD and founding the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) during the revolutionary process itself, at the end of 1918. Within the framework of a sharp political and ideological combat, social-democrat Friederich Ebert’s government arrests the two communist leaders and carries out the hideous crime.

This tragic episode is particularly significant of the then struggle among the Bernstein revisionists’ heralds and the defenders of the Lenine’s creatively developed Marxism; among the social-democrat parties, whose MPs voted the war credits ( regarding Germany, Liebknecht was an exception) and the Bolshevik party, whose Duma’s members, by voting against, were banished unto Siberia; among the October Revolution opponents and supporters. The rupture with the II International opportunist leaders became inevitable. The III International, the Communist International, was founded in Moscow, in March 1919.

The KPD founders’ assassination is inserted amid the shameful social-democracy decline trajectory. Along with rare and honorable exceptions, generally during popular influx moments, ideology and class collaboration policy, and its visceral anti-communism transformed social-democracy in an imperialism pillar. Currently, an institution that holds Rosa Luxembourg’s and Karl Liebknecht executioner name, the “ Friedrich Ebert Foundation”, carries on to be active regarding the promotion of the workers movement corruption, trade-union divisionism, anti-communism, German imperialism interests, European monopolies ‘interests. The “hold out our hand” to all those who fear the right-wing advances, the necessary wide unity in order to build a solid barrier against fascism, to be authentic, cannot hinder this reality.