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Chapter Thirty-Six German Imperialism and the Working Class (March 1912) Karl Radek

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Chapter Thirty-Six German Imperialism and the Working Class (March 1912) Karl Radek Chapter Thirty-Six German Imperialism and the Working Class (March 1912) Karl Radek Karl Bernardovich Radek (1885–1939) was born Karl Sobelsohn in Lvov (then in the Polish part of Austria-Hungary) to a Jewish family. He was active in socialist circles from the age of sixteen, joining the Social-Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. In 1904, he moved to Switzerland, but, the following year, he returned to Poland to partici- pate in revolutionary activity in Warsaw. After a brief prison-term, Radek spent the next decade working as a Social-Democratic publicist in both Poland and Ger- many. Together with Anton Pannekoek, he became one of the two main spokesmen of the Bremen left wing grouped around the Bremer Bürger- Zeitung. His criticisms so irritated leading socialists that he was successively expelled from the Polish and the German Social-Democratic Parties. During the First World War, Radek returned to Switzerland, where he became Lenin’s main ally in the Zimmerwald Left. After the overthrow of the Tsar in February 1917, Radek accompanied Lenin in the ‘sealed train’ across Germany, but was not allowed to enter Russia. He then spent several months in Stockholm organising Bolshevik support among European socialists, and, after the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917, he moved to Moscow. There, he became responsible 524 • Karl Radek for foreign-language propaganda, accompanying Leon Trotsky to Brest- Litovsk although he opposed the treaty and supported the Left-Communist opposition. At the end of 1918, after the collapse of the imperial régime in Germany, Radek returned to Berlin in order to help organise the German Communist Party. Though he counselled against a putsch, the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 led to his incarceration for almost a year. After returning to Moscow, he was assigned major roles in the Communist International and also became head of the Central-European Section of the Soviet Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. He helped to organise the founding congress of the German Communist Party in December 1918, and, the fol- lowing year, he was elected to the Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee and became the Comintern secretary. However, Grigorii Zinoviev used the col- lapse of the German Revolution of 1923 to exclude Radek from the Comintern and high party posts. Radek’s support for Trotsky’s left opposition to Stalin’s régime led to his expulsion from the Bolshevik Party in 1927 and subsequent exile to Siberia. After recanting in 1929, he became a fervent Stalinist and a foreign-affairs commentator for Izvestiya (1931–6). In 1936, Radek was one of the co-authors of the new Soviet constitution. However, later that year, he was arrested for treason, and, in the so-called Trial of the Seventeen, in Janu- ary 1937, he was convicted of being a Trotskyist agent and sentenced to ten years of imprisonment. Radek died in a prison-camp sometime in 1939.1 Radek’s brochure on German imperialism, written in the aftermath of the Second Moroccan Crisis, was 82 pages in length and divided into eight chap- ters, of which the first two are translated here. The other six dealt with the history of German colonial policy; the transition from a continental to a world foreign policy and the corresponding growth of the German navy; the trans- formation in world politics brought about by the growing Anglo-German antagonism (which would later lead to the outbreak of the First World War); German interventions in China, Turkey and Morocco; German imperialism and the situation of the working class (especially the influence of imperialism on social reform and democracy); and the relationship between the struggle against the arms-race and the struggle for socialism. In Chapter Five (‘Ten Years of German Imperialist Policy’), Radek offered the following definition of imperialism: ‘Modern imperialism is not a chase after phantoms, after a purely 1. The standard biography in English is Lerner 1970. .
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