 further lines of its development. We have to judge the political situation according to the outlook I have just tried to characterize from the standpoint of the realization of socialism as the immediate task which guides every measure and every position that we take.
Comrades! Our Party Congress, the Congress of what I may proudly call the only revolutionary socialist party of the German proletariat, happens to coincide with a turning point in the development of the German revolution. “Happens to coincide,” I say; but in truth the coincidence is not an accident. We may assert that after the events of the last few days, the curtain has gone down upon the first act of the German revolution. We are now in the opening of the second act, a further stage in the development, and it is our common duty to submit to self-criticism. We shall be guided more wisely in the future, and we shall gain additional impetus for further advance, if we examine critically all that we have done and created, and all that we have left undone. Let us, then, carefully examine the events of the now-ended first act in the revolution.
The movement began on November 9. The Revolution of November 9 was characterized by inadequacy and weakness. This is not surprising. The revolution followed four years of war, four years during which, schooled by Social Democracy and the trade unions, the German proletariat had behaved with intolerable ignominy and had repudiated its socialist obligations to an extent unparalleled in any other land. We Marxists and socialists, whose guiding principle is a recognition of historical development, conscious aim. What we experienced on November 9 was more the collapse of the existent imperialism than the victory of a new principle. [Hear! Hear!]?” [Applause]., between November 9 and the present, has been filled with illusions on all sides. The first illusion of the workers and soldiers who made the revolution was: the illusion of unity under the banner of so-called socialism. What could be more characteristic of the internal weakness of the Revolution of November 9 than the fact that at the head of the movement appeared persons who a few hours before the revolution broke out had regarded it as their chief duty to agitate against it, follows what we have to do to insure the presuppositions of the success of the revolution. I would summarize our next tasks as follows: First and foremost, we have to extend in all directions the system of workers’ and soldiers’ councils, especially those of the workers.. Thus, the conquest of power will not be effected with one blow. It will be a progression; we shall progressively occupy all the positions of the capitalist state and defend them tooth and nail. In my view and in that of my most intimate associates in the Party, the economic struggle, likewise, will be carried on by the workers’ councils. The direction of the economic struggle and the continued expansion of the area of this struggle must be in the hands of the workers’ councils. The councils must have all power in the state.
We must direct our activities in the immediate future to these ends, and it is obvious that, if we pursue this line and pursue these tasks, there cannot fail to be an enormous intensification of the struggle in the near future. It is a question of fighting step by step, hand-to-hand, in every province, in every city, in every village, in every municipality in order to take and transfer all the powers of the state bit by bit from the bourgeoisie to the workers and soldiers councils. But before these steps can be taken, the members of our own Party and the proletarians in general must he educated. Even where workers’ and soldiers’ councils already exist, there is still a lack of consciousness of the purposes for which they exist. [Right!] We must make the masses understand that the workers’ and soldiers council is in all senses the lever of the machinery of state, that it must take over all power and must unify the power in one stream – the socialist revolution. The masses of workers who are already organized in workers’ and soldiers’ councils are still miles away from having adopted such an outlook, and only isolated proletarian minorities are clearly conscious of their tasks.!]
Our motto is: In the beginning was the act. And the act must be that the workers’ and soldiers’ councils realize their mission and learn to become the sole public power of the whole nation. Only in this way can we mine the ground so that it will be ready for the revolution which will crown our work. This, comrades, is the reason, this is the clear calculation and clear consciousness which led some of us, and me in particular, to say yesterday, “Don’t think that the struggle will continue to be so easy.” Some comrades have interpreted me as saying that they wanted to boycott the National Assembly and simply to fold their arms. It is impossible in the time that remains, to discuss this matter fully, but let me say that I never dreamed of anything of the kind. My meaning was that history is not going to make our revolution an easy matter like the bourgeois revolutions in which it sufficed to overthrow that official power at the center and to replace a dozen or so persons in authority. We have to work from beneath, and this corresponds to the mass character of our revolution which aims at the foundation and base of the social constitution; it corresponds to the character of the present proletarian revolution that the conquest of political power must come not from above but from below. The 9th of November was an attempt, a weak, half-hearted, half-conscious, and chaotic attempt to overthrow the existing public power and to put an end to class rule. What now must be done is that with full consciousness all the forces of the proletariat should be concentrated in an attack on the very foundations of capitalist society. There, at the base, where the individual employer confronts his wage slaves; at the base, where all the executive organs of political class rule confront the object of this rule, the masses; there, step by step, we must seize the means of power from the rulers and take them into our own hands.ze]
[1] This same point is made above in Social Reform or Revolution against Bernstein’s use of Engels’ Preface to justify his revisionist theory. Rosa Luxemburg did not, however, know the full details of the falsification of Engels’ work. It was not Engels who wrote the seemingly revisionist views cited here. The Party leaders, arguing that because the Reichstag was considering passage of a new anti-socialist law it would be dangerous to give them grounds to attack Social Democracy, eliminated all the passages in the Preface which seemed too radical. Engels protested, but died before any changes could be made. The original version of the manuscript, with the editorial changes of the Party leaders, was discovered after the war by D. Ryazanov, editor of Marx’s and Engels’ works. Thus, to give only one example here, after Engels had discussed the strategic reasons which made barricade struggles seem antiquated (new weapons, the construction of wide streets in the new workers’ quarters, etc.), the following passages were omitted:
“Does this mean that in the future street fighting will no longer play a role? Definitely not. It means only that since 1848 conditions have become less advantageous for the civilian fighters, more advantageous for the military. A future street fight can thus only be won when this unfavorable situation is counterbalanced by other moments. Thus, street fighting will occur less in the beginning of a great revolution than in the further development of such a revolution, and will have to be undertaken with greater forces. These forces, however, will then, as in the whole French Revolution, on September 1 and October 31 in Paris, prefer open attack to the passive barricade tactics.”
[2] In the discussion following this speech, it was agreed that the section of the speech concerning Winnig and the German anti-Bolshevik activity be distributed as a leaflet.
Rosa Luxemburg’s resolution was not printed as part of this speech, and has only recently been rediscovered. It reads:
“The national conference indignantly takes note of the actions in the East of the German government. The unification of German troops with those of the Baltic barons and English imperialists signifies not only the vile betrayal of the Russian proletariat; it also signifies the confirmation of the world league of the capitalists of all lands against the fighting proletariat of the whole world. In reference to these monstrosities, the Party Congress again declares: The Ebert-Scheidemann government is the deadly enemy of the German proletariat. Down with the Ebert-Scheidemann government!”
Last updated on: 13 February 2012Anthony Watts has just posted an article (archived here) with the headline:
New record low set in the coldest city in the continental USA – much of the country headed for a deep freeze
Oh boy! We're heading for an ice age.
Thing is, his NEW RECORD LOW is for International Falls, Minnesota, USA. Guess how long they've been keeping records - a whole forty years. Yes, that's right. According to this weather website:
This report describes the typical weather at the International Fa (International Falls, Minnesota, United States) weather station over the course of an average year. It is based on the historical records from 1974 to 2012. Earlier records are either unavailable or unreliable.
Over the course of a year, the temperature typically varies from -21°C to 25°C and is rarely below -33°C or above 30°C.
So what was the "record low" that was recorded? It was cold. Very cold. It was -42ºF, breaking the previous cold record of -37ºF.