the day when peace shall be declared, the social-democracy has declared the class struggle extinct. The first thunder of Krupp cannons in Belgium welded Germany into a wonderland of class solidarity and social harmony.
How is this miracle to be understood? The class struggle is known to be not a social-democratic invention that can be arbitrarily set aside for a period of time whenever it may seem convenient to do so. The proletarian class struggle is older than the social-democracy, is an elementary product of class society. It flamed up all over Europe when capitalism first came into power. The modern proletariat was not led by the social-democracy into the class struggle. On the contrary, the international social-democratic movement was called into being by the class struggle to bring a conscious aim and unity into the various local and scattered fragments of the class struggle. What then changed in this respect when the war broke out? Have private property, capitalist exploitation and class rule ceased to exist? Or, have the propertied classes in a spell of patriotic fervor declared: in view of the needs of the war we hereby turn over the means of production, the earth, the factories and the mills thereon, into the possession of the people? Have they relinquished the right to make profits out of these possessions? Have they set aside all political privileges, will they sacrifice them upon the altar of the fatherland, now that it is in danger? It is, to say the least, a rather naive hypothesis, and sounds almost like a story from a kindergarten primer. And yet the declaration of our official leaders, that the class struggle has been suspended, permits no other interpretation. Of course nothing of the sort has occurred. Property rights, exploitation and class rule, even political oppression in all its Prussian thoroughness have remained intact. The cannon in Belgium and in Eastern Prussia have not had the slightest influence upon the fundamental social and political structure of Germany.
