Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900)

Famous activist and publicist of the German and the international workers’ movement; one of the founders and leaders of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany and the Second International.

Liebknecht was born on March 29, 1826, in the city of Giessen in the central German state of Hesse, into an intellectual’s family. He studied philology, philosophy and theology at the universities of Giessen, Berlin and Marburg, and during his university years, he read Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England and began to come into contact with the theory of scientific socialism. In September 1848, he and Struve led a volunteer army from Switzerland to Baden, Germany, to establish a republic, and after the defeat of the uprising, he went into exile in Switzerland. In May 1850, he left for London, England, where he became a member of the Communist League and established a close fellowship with Marx and Engels. In August 1862, he returned to Germany. In September 1863, he joined the General German Workers’ Association established by Ferdinand Lassalle.

After the founding of First International in 1864, he founded the German section of the First International. In March 1867, he made an organizational split with the Lassalleans and withdrew from the General German Workers’ Association. In August 1869, Liebknecht, together with Bebel and others, founded the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany (the Eisenachers), and served as editor of the Party’s organ, Der Volksstaat (The People’s State) (1869–1876). During the Franco-Prussian War, he stood for proletarian internationalism, opposed Bismarck’s war of aggression from the rostrum of the Reichstag, and resolutely supported the proletarian revolutionary cause of the Paris Commune, for which he was charged of “treason” and “lèse-majesté” and sentenced to imprisonment for two years. In May 1875, Liebknecht participated in the congress held in Gotha for the merger of the Eisenachers and the Lassalleans, which passed a programme replete with Lassalle’s revisionist views and was criticized by Marx and Engels. During his tenure as editor of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany (SAP) organ Vorwärts (Forward) (1876–1878, 1890–1900), he resolutely resisted the Lassalleans. In October 1878, when Bismarck promulgated the Law Against the Public Danger of Social-Democratic Endeavours (Anti-Socialist Laws), he adopted the revolutionary tactics of combining legal and secret struggle and led the whole Party in its struggle against the Anti-Socialist Laws. In 1889, 1891 and 1893, he successively attended the International Socialist Workers’ Congress. In his later years, he resolutely opposed Bernstein’s revisionism and defended Marxism and proletarian internationalism. Liebknecht died in August 1900 in Berlin.

The chief works of Wilhelm Liebknecht in his life are History of French Revolution, No Compromise—No Political Trading, Against Militarism and Against New Taxes, etc. As a famous activist of the international communist movement and a famous leader of the left-wing of the Second International, Wilhelm Liebknecht made indelible contributions in pushing forward the development of the international workers’ movement, criticized militarism and anarchism as well as Bernstein’s revisionism, and he was highly praised by Marx, Engels and Lenin, and was also a friend and comrade-in-arms of Marx and Engels.