Luxemburg writes The Crisis of Social Democracy in prison

The SPD parliamentary group supports funding Germany’s participation in the First World War, breaking with its internationalist commitments. Luxemburg sees the vote as the collapse of international...

Liebknecht becomes the only Reichstag deputy to vote against the additional credits in December. Luxemburg’s political partnership with him helps consolidate a visible revolutionary anti-war current...

Writing under the name Junius, she condemns the war and the nationalist turn of social democracy. Her warning that the choice was between socialism and barbarism made the devastation of imperialist...

Luxemburg joins Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin and Franz Mehring in an organized anti-war current, initially operating within the SPD. Its members distribute illegal material and call for international...

She responds to objections to The Accumulation of Capital and clarifies her argument about capitalism’s relations with non-capitalist settings. The response was written while she was imprisoned and...

The network adopts the Spartacus name and circulates political letters against the war. The group remains a small minority in a society where military command, censorship and nationalist...

The preface explains the purpose of the pamphlet and its criticism of social democracy’s support for the war. It frames the catastrophe as political and international, not simply a military conflict...

Printed in Switzerland as The Crisis of Social Democracy, the work circulates despite wartime censorship. The pseudonym “Junius” protects its author while placing the pamphlet in an international...

Lenin welcomes the pamphlet’s anti-war force but criticizes its analysis of national liberation and some political conclusions. The exchange demonstrates that opposition to imperialist war did not...

She is held in Berlin, later transferred to Wronki and Breslau, remaining imprisoned until the revolution in November 1918. Her imprisonment removes a leading voice from public organizing but...