Chapter Eighteen ‘English Imperialism’ (4 October 1904) Julian B. Marchlewski (Karski)

Julian Balthasar Marchlewski (1866–1925) was a Pol- ish Social-Democratic and later Communist activ- ist and publicist. He was also known under the aliases Karski and Kujawiak. In 1889, he was one of the co-founders of the Polish Workers’ Union, and four years later, together with Rosa Luxemburg, he founded the Social-Democratic Party of the King- dom of Poland, which was dissolved in 1895 after massive arrests. Marchlewski was arrested himself and served time in prison. After 1900, he became a member of the Social-Democratic Party of the King- dom of Poland and Lithuania and participated in the Russian Revolution of 1905 in the Polish territories. After failure of the Revolution, he migrated to Ger- many, where he joined the anti-revisionist camp and later the left wing against the Kautskyist centre. At the 1907 International Socialist Congress, held at Stuttgart, Marchlewski, then a delegate from the Polish SDKPiL, argued that the socialist colonial pol- icy advocated by the revisionists was a contradiction in terms, since ‘one can speak just as little about a socialist colonial policy as about a socialist state’. He also shared Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis of the Rus- sian Revolution, disputing the commonly held view ‘that every nation must go through capitalism’.1

1. International Socialist Congress (7th) 1907, pp. 32–3. 302 • Julian B. Marchlewski (Karski)

During World War I, Marchlewski was again jailed from 1916–18, this time for participating in the German revolutionary-socialist movement. He belonged to the Berlin Internationale group, together with Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Franz Mehring, and was co-founder of the Spartakus group (Spartacist League). After being exchanged with Russia for a German spy, in 1919 he took part in negotiations with Poland arising from the Polish- Soviet War. During the Red Army’s counterattack in Poland under Mikhail Tukhachevsky, he headed the Polish Provisional Revolutionary Committee in Białystok, which planned in 1920 to declare a Polish Soviet Socialist Repub- lic. After a year in Moscow, he returned illegally to Germany and became a member of the Central Committee of the German Communist Party. From 1922 until his death in 1925 (during a vacation in Italy), he served as President of International Labour Defence, known in Great Britain as the International Class-War Prisoners’ Aid. We have included in this anthology two of Marchlewski’s journalistic articles – ‘English Imperialism’ and ‘A Victory of Imperialism’. We have also included two works that are more theoretical: his review of Hilferding’s Finance Capital and his main work on imperialism in the 1912 brochure Impe- rialism or Socialism?, which we have translated for the first time into English.2 Readers will note that, in the present article, Marchlewski took Rothstein to task for emphasising England’s need to maintain markets for sale of goods and, instead, gave primacy to the need to export capital in response to a fall- ing rate of profit. However, in his later review of Finance Capital, he changed his perspective and criticised Hilferding for dismissing underconsumption as the major cause of crises.3 In this respect, Marchlewski’s later views were closer to those of Rosa Luxemburg in The Accumulation of Capital (1913).

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‘English Imperialism’4

The political season has begun in England, and in coming months the pro- paganda for imperialist ideas will be pursued with redoubled zeal. The

2. Marchlewski 1912, reprinted in Marchlewski 1978, pp. 167–86. See Chapter 35. 3. Marchlewski 1910, reprinted in Marchlewski 1978, pp. 100–10. See Chapter 28. 4. Marchlewski 1904a, reprinted in Marchlewski 1978, pp. 51–6.