War is used to combat the "enemy within" and as well as the enemy without. Did not Marx observe that wars, Luxemburg writes, are conducted for the "mutual butchery of the proletariat'"?
In capitalist history, invasion and class struggle are not opposites, as the official legend would have us believe, but one is the means and the expression of the other. Just as invasion is the true and tried weapon in the hands of capital against the class struggle, so on the other hand the fearless pursuit of the class struggle has always proven the most effective prevention of foreign invasions.
It is not an accident nor an accident that pogroms such as COINTELPRO, the War on Drugs, Secure Communities, and drug disparity laws have targeted Black, Brown, and Red communities just as it is not an accident that U.S. wars of aggression target people of color and non-Christians. It is not an accident that capitalistic imperialism amasses militarized-assault campaigns against the poor and the working class here and abroad.
But no one state creates imperialism, as Luxemburg writes. Imperialism, she explains, "is a product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognizable only in all its relations, and form which no nation can hold aloof at will. From this point of view only is it possible to understand correctly the question of "national defense' in the present war."
Luxemburg continues:
Today the nation is but a cloak that covers imperialistic desires, a battle cry for imperialistic rivalries, the last ideological measure with which the masses can be persuaded to play the role of cannon fodder in imperialistic wars.
Critical of the German Left's interpretation of socialism, Luxemburg insists that their understanding of the workings of imperialism and their subsequent betrayal of the working classes' struggle was in fact a betrayal of socialism. The Left did not put forth a "wrong" policy--it simply had "no policy whatsoever," Luxemburg argues. Convictions were thrown to the wind in exchange for the acquisition of power.
But the working class will have the last word. Successful popular movements, Luxemburg writes, depends "on the very time and circumstances of their inception." and is decided "by a number of economic, political and psychological factors."
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