MIA > Archive > Wilhelm Liebknecht > Voices of Revolt
Written: As a speech in German, delivered February 5th, 1872.
Published in English: 1928.
Translated by: Unknown (name not provided).
Source: Voices of Revolt: Speeches of Wilhelm Liebknecht. International Publishers, first edition, 1928, New York, USA. 96 pages.
Transcription and Markup: Bill Wright for marxists.org, November, 2022
(An extract from Liebknecht’s speech, “Knowledge is Power — Power is Knowledge”, delivered before the Dresden Educational Society, February 5, 1872.)
Knowledge is power! This is indeed a true saying; knowledge is power; knowledge gives power, and since knowledge is power, the knowing and the mighty have ever sought to retain knowledge as their monopoly of caste, of station, of class, and to withhold knowledge from those who know not, from the powerless — who always have constituted the great mass of the population. Thus it has ever been; thus it remains to-day.
There never has existed a ruling class, a ruling caste, a ruling station, that has used its knowledge and its power for the enlightenment, the education, the training of those under it, and which has not — on the contrary — systematically cut them off from true education, from the education which makes men free.
A Frenchman[3] once said, concerning the Russians: Grattez le russe et vous trouverez le Tatar! Similarly one might say of our modern civilization: if you scratch our modern civilization, you find the barbarism under it. All civilization and the civilization of a nation represents the sum of culture present in it — is merely a thin veneer, a shining varnish on the outside, under which you will find crudity, superstition, the war of all against all, the war of destruction, in which the strong devours the weak, not literally perhaps, but none the less genuinely.
You will recall the first international industrial exposition, which took place in London in 1851. A calm had followed upon the storms of the “mad years” — 1848 and 1849. The Parisian proletariat was mourning over the tombs of the June heroes. The dreams of liberty of the German people had been ended; the fighters for liberty had been court-martialed, imprisoned, and exiled. The bourgeoisie, rejoicing in the silence of the cemetery, had absorbed miraculous powers from this political decomposition and had blossomed to extraordinary prosperity. In fact, “boundless prosperity” prevailed, and the bourgeoisie of all lands and climes made pilgrimages to London to visit the Crystal Palace, the temple of the new god, who would scatter from his inexhaustible horn of plenty riches and peace over the human race, now intoxicated with joyous prospects. The “murderous swords” had been transformed into “machines of blessing”, the era of war had terminated forever; henceforth the nations would compete only in the arena of industry and of material progress, inspired with noble emulation, to test their powers in peaceful competition.
The entire press of Europe and America gave rich expression in those days to all these illusions. But how soon had the “fair dream vanished”! The enthusiastic shouts had not ceased to echo, with which the bourgeoisie had hailed the presumable inception of the millennial kingdom, when the musket shots of December 2 (1851) were again rattling in Paris, and thousands of unarmed men, women and children were shot down by drunken soldiers like wild beasts at the command of a perjured scoundrel; and this saber-rattling, blood-dripping monster became the “deliverer of society” and had himself crowned “Emperor of the French”[a]. And the civilized world? The princes warmly embraced their “dear brother”. The nobility was jubilant over this new victory over the “canaille”. And the bourgeoisie, which only yesterday had dithyrambically celebrated the final triumph of the “arts of peace”, the elimination of the “swords of murder”, which had been magnified in prose and verse, now prostrated itself in worship before the bloody sword that had accomplished the salvation of society!
Three years later, the Crimean War[b] broke out and hundreds of thousands of men lost their lives in it, without advancing the welfare of humanity by a single inch; eight years later came the Italian War, accompanied by similar slaughter and by the “same outcome” for humanity. And since then, if we consider only Europe and not the other continents, there have been three more wars in a single decade — each one transcending the preceding one in magnitude, in the amount of blood shed and in “glory”, and in all three of these wars it was the “nation of thinkers” that led, that played the first part: the War of Prussia and Austria against Denmark (1864); the war of Prussia against Austria and the rest of Germany (1866); the war of Prussia and Germany against France (1870)! These wars destroyed the lives and the well-being and happiness of millions of men, and their result for mankind, weighed in the balance of reason, is zero!
Particularly the last of these wars, blasphemously entitled the “Holy War”, is profoundly and painfully interesting to the historian of civilization, to him who loves his fellowman. Two nations, each imagining itself as situated “at the head of civilization”, as a matter of fact the two most distinguished representatives of civilization on the European continent, fly at each other’s throats like wild beasts, rend each other’s flesh, and evince a truly bestial delight in murder, without the slightest reasonable cause, merely at the wish and at the command of a few individuals who take good care of their own skins meanwhile. And this is not true only of those who are directly concerned in the slaughter; no, even those who remain at home, seated comfortably behind their stoves or the tables in the beer-shop, all the representatives of the intelligentsia, the lights of science, the most distinguished “thinkers” of this “nation of thinkers”, journalists, professors and other intellectuals — instead of protesting against the war as an act of high treason against civilization and humanity, instead of admonishing their misguided peoples to return to peace, they poured oil into the fire, they fanned the flames with mad fanaticism, the flames that were consuming the most precious achievements of civilization, and made the timely discovery that the most sublime cultural deed, the noblest activity of human virtue, was war!
A German professor — what baseness is so low that a German professor could not be found so low to descend to it — actually proved this contention “scientifically” in an (of course) very learned dissertation, written for the purpose, which culminated in the statement: “The greater the quantity of labor devoted by a state to its mobilization, the greater the sum of the virtues produced thereby.” All of which is merely a somewhat awkward circumscription of the principle: Mass murder is the pinnacle of virtue. The more massive this mass murder becomes, the greater the virtue; the better the mass murder is prepared, the more virtuous is the state. And I would have you mark this: this statement was not an isolated product of a diseased brain — God forbid — it was only the expression of the generally prevalent mood, only a crass formulation of the bloodthirsty insanity which was preached day by day by our entire press — with a few hardly noticeable exceptions — to the public.
The press, this “focus of the intellectual life of a nation” — this “watch tower of right and truth”, as the saying goes in the mouths of good-natured enthusiasts, had become a torch destined to reduce civilization to ashes and to discredit every man who would offer any opposition to these shameful orgies of nationalistic insanity.
Our civilization is only skin deep: it is merely barbarism whitewashed with a few humanitarian aspirations; war had stripped it of its dazzling cosmetic of civilization; its bestiality now disported itself without a fig-leaf; and no one can be surprised but the one who has been subject to false conceptions of the nature of our present-day civilization.
I have spoken about the bulky military budgets. A not less eloquent language is spoken — on the question of the nature of our civilization — by the meager educational budgets.
The bulky military budgets and the meager educational budgets are unmistakable thermometers for our civilization, and the destructive criticism which they present to its hypocritical face cannot be mitigated by any sophistic attempts to embellish it.
Still drawing their sustenance from legend and tradition, frivolous and unprincipled flatterers of nation and monarchs may trumpet out to all the world: “We are the most cultured nation in the world. We have the best educational system.” Hypocritical fallacies, all of them!
The thing they fail to keep in mind is that the ability to read and write is by no means equivalent to education.
And even the reading and writing taught in German schools are not without their own peculiarities. All that glitters is not gold, and many of the things traditionally supposed to glitter do not even glitter. In the levies of recruits, according to official statistics, there are found a considerable number of young persons born and “bred” in Germany who cannot read or write at all.
“Like school, like state” — this is an ideological proverb, “like state, like school” — this would be the genuine translation and transposition in a realpolitical sense. The school is the mightiest instrument for liberation, and the school is the mightiest instrument for enslavement, depending on the nature and the purpose of the state. In the free state it is a means for liberation; in the unfree state the school is a means for enslavement. “Education makes free” — to expect the unfree state to educate its people would be equivalent to expecting it to commit suicide. The modern class state demands lack of freedom in its very essence. The school as it is bears the same relation to the school as it should be as the state as it is bears to the state as it should be. The state as it is, i.e., the class state, debases the school to be an instrument of class rule.
By the side of the school and the barracks, the press is our third great educational institution. And it is a worthy counterpart to the two I have already mentioned.
Together with school and barracks, the press completes the great holy trinity of popular stupefaction. And this holy alliance against the emancipation of humanity is encouraged by every means which the Church can contribute to its success, as must necessarily be expected by reason of the nature of the Church. While school and Church and barracks are exclusively educational institutions in the hands of the state, the press may be considered as an instrument common to the state and to society.
“Society” finds this joint operation with the “state” extremely profitable to it. The newspaper business is one of the most lucrative sources of profit. The demand for newspapers is increasing from day to day, and, since the owners of privately printed newspapers are often “aided” in such an amiable and generous manner by the state, often receiving money into the bargain — also a kind of “state aid”!— they enjoy a threefold advantage: they are supplied with “good wares”, which contribute to the solidification and “perpetuation” of the class domination; they economize in their operating costs, and thus correspondingly increase their profits; and they assure themselves of the protection of the state.
The fetishism of brute force, the cry of “Crucify him” uttered against every man who tears the mask from this rotten system of society, the distortion of all values, transforming infamy into virtue, gilding the mire, magnifying to the skies the cunning of the horse-dealer and the crudity of the stableman, which are lauded as diplomatic genius — cherishing the national prejudices, inflaming national hatreds — when did the press ever — aside from short intervals of nobler activities — pursue any other mission? A willing servant of the class state and the bourgeois system of society, it has but one lodestar: it glorifies the interests of the class state and of bourgeois society, in short, everything that is favorable to them, that supports them, though it be the basest drivel; everything that contradicts the class state and the bourgeois system of society, it bespews with venom, though it be the most precious treasure of genuine human civilization. Characterlessness is worshiped; character is dragged in the mire; injustice is lauded as a divinely ordained world order; social evils are embellished with beauty patches; in short, vulgarity, dissipation, corruption, corruption in the lowest sense: everything for money; money for everything. No political or industrial swindle is too shameful, too base, too dirty, not to find eager and enthusiastic support in this press — for money. The sucker-baiting activities of the Stock Exchange and promotion swindlers take in their victims on a large scale, with the aid of the press; the promotion swindler sets the traps, lays the net, and the press drives in the victims, not failing to fill its own pockets in the process.
The daily press is the faithful mirror of the state and of society, and the impartial and inexorable historian of the future will find sufficient material in the issues of our newspapers for a single year to enable him to pronounce a final condemnation of our present-day system of state and society.
Workers who think, who feel themselves to be human beings, who have a conception of their rights and duties — for them the present-day employer has no use; they are a “pestilence” in the factory or workshop; they “poison” their surroundings; but the worker must have healthy limbs, strong bones, able “hands”. A vigorous, normal body, if possible without a brain — this would be the genuine model worker of the bourgeois employer. In other words, bodily defects are useful neither to the state nor to the purposes of society; mental defects are not so bad; and when we learn, therefore, that the great majority of the population suffers from some mental defect or other, we are necessarily forced to infer that the mental defectiveness must be even far more general than that of the body.
The science of statistics, which like all the other sciences has been pressed into the service of the state and society, does not like to concern itself with this shady side of our civilization; yet even statistics have been obliged to record the fact that infant mortality in the lower classes is far more extensive, and that the average duration of life in those classes is far lower than in the upper classes. Statistics have, furthermore, been obliged to record the fact that labor, on which the state and society are based, provides those who do not labor, i.e., the upper classes, with wealth and a prolongation of life, while it provides the workers themselves, i.e., the lower classes, with poverty, disease, decrepitude and premature death.
Our hearts recoil involuntarily when we read of the human hecatombs sacrificed by our “civilization” from time to time on the altar of the bloody god of war; and yet — what are these hecatombs of war, compared with the myriads slaughtered, murdered, year in year out, day by day, by our society, on the altar of industrialism, without interruption? Yes — I say murdered; any one who is obliged by his fellow humans, merely because they have the power over him, to engage in a mode of life which must necessarily lead him — according to mathematical certainty, and according to the prediction of any person capable of thought — to a premature death, such a man has been murdered; and if the blame does not rest with a specific individual, it rests at least with the conditions and institutions that have caused this man’s death, and in a certain unmistakable sense, all those individuals are also responsible, as a totality, who in their private and class interests have created these conditions and institutions, and maintained them in force, although their ruinous and murderous effects are perfectly obvious.
Admirers of the present-day system speak of the “battlefields of industry on which there are no corpses”. What a delusion, or rather, what a fraud! No corpses! If we should gather, for the period of but a single year, and lay out in a row one next to the other, the corpses of the workers, of their wives, their children, in short, of all persons who have inhaled death in venomous workshops and factory rooms by reason of excessive work, long before the time allotted to them by nature, even before half this time has elapsed — and if we place in another row the corpses of all the soldiers who have died in all the “holy” and unholy wars of the last twenty years, Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, Danes, Englishmen, Americans — now all fraternally united in death — the former row, that of the workers who died in bed, died a “natural death”, according to the doctor’s certificate, will extend far further than the bloody row of the tattered and torn corpses, defaced by gaping wounds, that once were soldiers. And the terrible thing is that with very few exceptions these battle victims of industry can be proved to have been slain by a vicious, conscienceless operation of business, indifferent to the life and health of the worker, in other words homicide, even according to the legal definition of the word; yet it is a sanctified, practically unpunished homicide; for State, the vulture, will take every precaution not to pluck out the eyes of Society, the vulture.
So much for the “Kultur” of our present-day society!
Thanks to the division of labor and to the work of machines, labor is being deprived more and more of the element of soul.
Far be it from me to fulminate against the division of labor. The division of labor increases the productivity of labor, and is therefore an essential element in human progress. Yet our present-day society practices a division of labor at the expense of the laboring individual, and the enhanced productivity of labor redounds to the advantage not of the generality, least of all of the workers, but of the minority which exploits labor.
I wish not to be misunderstood; I am not an opponent of the machine. The machine-breakers,[c] who were so active among the workers of England sat the outset of large-scale industry in that country, were entirely reactionary, and were acting in accordance with a false view of things, with failure as a result — to the great good of mankind, but not of the individual working man. It is precisely the curse of our present-day civilization, that every general progress is useful only to a privileged minority, and even lowers, on the other hand, both relatively and absolutely, the position of the disinherited masses, that every “blessing” of civilization results in the decline, the extermination of entire communities of workers; as an example, I shall merely mention the extermination of the hand weavers in the Erzgebirge, which is now going on; a heart-moving social tragedy that arouses no one’s tears, at least no one’s that could or should remedy it.
To eliminate this curse, to make the general will synonymous with the will of each individual, this is our goal. The machine will cease to oppress the working individual, will cease to debase him to the level of a purely mechanical performance — we can hardly call it an activity — as soon as it ceases to be the property of an individual, of a single class. From the moment in which the machine enters into the service of the generality, the master of the worker becomes his servant, it will free him instead of enslaving him; it will enrich him instead of impoverishing him. The Socialist Party, therefore, rightly demands the expropriation of machines, as well as of all instruments of labor — and rightly, not only from the point of view of humanity, but also — I might also say — for legal reasons, in so far as machines and instruments of labor are the product of the collective intelligence as a whole, and therefore should not be claimed by any individual as an absolute isolated property.
To be sure, we are told by the spokesmen of the golden calf:[d] “If you eliminate the prospect of gain, you will destroy inventive talent, you will destroy initiative, you will destroy progress.” Nothing could be farther from the fact. Even now, it is not the prospect of gain that spurs men on. The performances of those who are egged on by the desire for gain are of very subordinate nature when compared with the achievements of science to which we owe our progress; and it will at all periods be a very simple matter to find suitable talents for such subordinate tasks. The worshipers of the golden calf are turning the truth upside down. For every single person who is inspired by the prevailing conditions of production and by his prospect of gain, to make a useful invention, in fact, to perform any useful mental work, there are thousands who might under reasonable social conditions have performed useful things, things valuable to human progress, and who have been prevented from doing so and destroyed mentally by the prevailing social conditions. And the one individual who now has a useful function would have performed not just as much but far more under a sensible, i.e., a just organization of society, encouraging all human capacities and satisfying all human demands. Our present-day society not only does not encourage the development of talents, but suppresses or cripples talents outright.
Present-day society, therefore, has no right to term itself a civilizing force and to call us a subversive force. This society is hostile to civilization, for it prevents its blossoming, and we, the champions of the new socialist society, are the defenders of civilization against the uncivilizing old society, which keeps knowledge from the people, which oppresses the people in the body and in the spirit, which sacrifices the common weal to anti-social class interests, which makes property the monopoly of an exploiting minority, degrades the worker into a thing, the family to a pious wish, as far as the proletariat is concerned, morality to hypocrisy, and education to a lie.
Property, family, morality, education! It is really an unparalleled piece of impudence for our bourgeoisie to take such words into its mouth at all. They are in favor of property — they mean the property they have robbed from the workers. They are in favor of the family — but they have destroyed the family of the worker. They are in favor of morality — but the morality they preach in theory is trodden under foot by them in practice, like all their fair theories. They even preach liberty, and cast the worker back into slavery; they preach civic virtues, and grovel in the dust before the victorious saber; they preach peace, and revel in the atrocities of war; they preach the “harmony of interests” and incite social warfare.
Never was this hypocrisy, this contradiction between theory and practice more crassly manifested than during the Commune at Paris last year. The program of the Paris Commune was local self-administration, the abolition of militarism, the separation of Church and School, free public instruction, the separation of Church and State, the abolition of the death penalty, all of them demands that the bourgeoisie had also espoused in theory. But no sooner did the bourgeoisie find that here an effort was really being made to put through its own theoretical demands in earnest, than they pounced upon the Commune movement in mad fury and hailed the victory of the Versailles[e] hangmen with fanatical jubilation. There can be no amnesty for this shameful denial of their own creed, for this act of high treason against conscience and humanity.
And as for education — the bourgeoisie actually dares to speak of education, the bourgeoisie, which does not even content itself with sucking the marrow from the bones of the worker, its wage slave, but even robs him of his spirit, his soul, affords him and his children not even the necessary time for continuing their education, prevents him and his children from securing any kind of culture, degrades him beneath the beast, condemns him to an existence which it would consider unworthy of its horses and its dogs!
So much for the bourgeois lie of education.
Bourgeois morality and bourgeois practice are not more crassly divergent than are the education actually handed out by the bourgeoisie and the education which its fine phrases publish as its ideal.
Another point. Let no one talk to us about science and art in present-day society. “Art must seek its bread”, and instead of being the molder of the people it is the concubine of the great and the wealthy. Woe to the artist of to-day who, insisting on his higher calling, would dare try to be independent, would dare refrain from intriguing for the dishonoring protection of distinguished patrons, by vile flattery, parasitism and even worse, who would not pay any money for the laudations of the press — a thousand to one he will die of hunger or of a broken heart, killed by silence or killed by the written criticisms of the kept press, which brands as a rebellious criminal who must be inexorably hounded to death any artist who will not pay the tribute that is its due. And science! What has the people to do with science? What has science to do with the people? Science is not for the people. It is to be used against the people. Science the Queen, the liberator of the world, has become the petty prostitute of the ruling classes. “Professors and whores can always be had for money!” was the cynical remark once made, in a moment of frankness, by the late King of Hanover.[f]
So long as the present-day state and the present-day society continue, there will be no civilization, no education, no mental development of the people.
[3.] Count Joseph de Maistre (1754-1821): “If you scratch the Russian, you will find a Tatar!”
[a.] Louis Napoleon (1808-1873): Nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte; President of the Second French Republic, later Emperor of France (until 1871). See Karl Marx: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1926 [1852].
[b.] Crimean War (1852-1854): A war, of which the Crimea was the principal theater, between Turkey, England, France and Sardinia, on the one hand, and Russia on the other; terminated by the Treaty of Paris.
[c.] Liebknecht is referring to the Luddite movement, a popular uprising in England active from 1811-1816. The Luddites, named for their fictional mascot, “Captain Ludd,” were an underground movement of unemployed workers and artisans who organized mass sabotage of the factories that forced them out of the market. While popular memory has termed “Luddite” as synonymous with a reactionary distrust of technological progress, and they were criticized as such by Marx, recent histories have shown that this conception has been greatly exagerrated. Many Luddites, after all, were skilled machine operators themselves; they destroyed machinery not out of a yearning for a pretechnological way of life, but as a sabotage tactic in the class struggle. —New note by Bill Wright, transcriber.
[d.] Golden Calf: A false idol of worship from the Christian Bible, which Liebknecht uses as a metaphor (despite his atheism) for the worship of capital. Biblical metaphors of capital as a false god were common in socialist agitation during this era; besides the Golden Calf, Mammon or Moloch were often used. —New note by Bill Wright, transcriber.
[e.] Versailles: The center of counter-revolution in France; in 1871, the Commune at Paris was put down by troops recruited at Versailles.
[f.] George V (1819-1878), King of Hanover (1851-1866): indolent and dissolute monarch dethroned by Prussia (1866).
Last updated on 08 July 2023