Luxemburg's Quote

"One thing is certain. The world war is a turning point. It is foolish and mad to imagine that we need only survive the war, like a rabbit waiting out the storm under a bush, in order to fall happily back into the old routine once it is over. The world war has altered the conditions of our struggle and, most of all, it has changed us. Not that the basic law of capitalist development, the life-and-death war between capital and labor, will experience any amelioration. But now, in the midst of the war, the masks are falling and the old familiar visages smirk at us. The tempo of development has received a mighty jolt from the eruption of the volcano of imperialism. The violence of the conflicts in the bosom of society, the enormousness of the tasks that tower up before the socialist proletariat – these make everything that has transpired in the history of the workers’ movement seem a pleasant idyll." 

     In this passage Rosa Luxemburg is telling people that people that WWI was not going to change their fate by itself.  The party had to be proactive in changing their fate for the better or else they would just fade away after the war. This is a very nihilistic theme in the way that Luxemburg is telling the people that they need break away from what they were doing before the war.  Her criticism with capitalism is that if you do not change your way of life, you are left out to dry and it turns people into "working masses of all zones into wage slaves."  Changing to capitalism does not only effect Germany but also the entire world as she wrote: "In Africa and Asia, from the northernmost shores to the tip of South America and the South Seas, the remnant of ancient primitive communist associations, feudal systems of domination, patriarchal peasant economies, traditional forms of craftsmanship are annihilated, crushed by capital; whole peoples are destroyed and ancient cultures flattened."