Rosa Luxemburg
“If indeed the socialist commonwealth were an impossibility, then mankind would be cut off from all further economic development. In that event modern society would decay, as did the Roman empire nearly two thousand years ago, and finally relapse into barbarism.
“As things stand today capitalist civilization cannot continue; we must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism.”:rosa:
Born in southeastern Poland on 5 March 1871, Rosa Luxemburg was a towering figure of the classical socialist movement— a brilliant thinker, sharp-tongued rhetorician, and trailblazing leader of the proletarian cause. The famed socialist historian and journalist Franz Mehring once called her the “best brain after Marx”. Her comrade and dear friend Clara Zetkin described her as the “sharp sword, the living flame of revolution”. Even Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, with whom she often clashed, was compelled to acknowledge her status as an “eagle” of the Communist movement, at least in retrospect.
“Democracy is indispensable to the working class, because only through the exercise of its democratic rights, in the struggle for democracy, can the proletariat become aware of its class interests and its historic task.”:rosa:
She was, by all accounts, a truly unique figure. A Jew, a Polish woman, physically disabled and politically an irreconcilable Marxist—the obstacles to her pursuing her aims in life were legion, yet she rose to become one of the paramount leaders of the largest and strongest socialist movement in the Western world, German Social Democracy. In her short but brilliant career, she locked horns with the Prussian military elite several times and spoke as equals with Karl Kautsky, August Bebel, Victor Adler, and many other leading lights of socialism. As a political agitator she rallied masses of workers against capitalism and imperialist warfare, while also challenging Marxist orthodoxy as both a theorist and instructor at the Social Democratic party school in Berlin.
Yet since being cut down by proto-fascist thugs in January 1919, Luxemburg has been memorialized as a martyr for the revolution and a symbol of the tragic highs and lows of Germany’s twentieth century more than anything else. While her name and image remains iconic, her prodigious intellectual output and many contributions to socialist theory, have often been reduced to footnotes.
“Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party – though they are quite numerous – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of justice, but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a special privilege.”
Karl Liebknecht
Karl Paul August Friedrich Liebknecht, born on this day in 1871, was a German socialist politician and theorist. Originally associated with the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), Liebknecht later became a co-founder with Rosa Luxemburg of both the Spartacus League and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Liebknecht is also known for his outspoken opposition to World War I.
The main enemy of the German people is in Germany: German imperialism, the German war party, German secret diplomacy. This enemy at home must be fought by the German people in a political struggle, cooperating with the proletariat of other countries whose struggle is against their own imperialists.
The son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the founders of the SPD, Karl Liebknecht trained to be a lawyer and defended many Social Democrats in political trials. He was also a leading figure in the socialist youth movement and thus became a leading figure in the struggle against militarism.
As a deputy in the Reichstag he was one of the first SPD representatives to break party discipline and vote against war credits in December 1914. He became a figurehead for the struggle against the war. His opposition was so successful that his parliamentary immunity was removed and he was improsoned.
Freed by the November revolution he immediately threw himself into the struggle and became with Rosa Luxemburg one of the founders of the new Communist Party (KPD)
The defeated of today, they will have learned. They will be cured of the delusion of being able to find their salvation in the help of masses of confused soldiers; cured of the delusion of being able to trust in leaders who prove themselves to be feeble and impotent; cured of the belief in independent social democracy, which disdainfully abandoned them. Left only to their own devices, they will fight their coming battles, gain their coming victories. And the watchword, that the liberation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself, will have gained for them a new, deeper meaning.
In January 1919, the Spartacus League played a leading role in the Spartacist Uprising, a general strike and armed rebellion in Berlin. The uprising was crushed by the SPD government and the Freikorps (paramilitary units composed of World War I veterans). For their role in the uprising, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were both kidnapped, tortured, and murdered on January 15th, 1919.
Their contributions to European socialism are commemorated annually in Germany during the second weekend of January, an event known as the Liebknecht-Luxemburg Demonstration, or "LL-Demo" for short.
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Did you all know that the Minecraft Create mod got an update last year that added a logistics system that can help you automatically move items around where they're needed using packages? The system integrates nicely with trains^[Nicely but not perfectly, there are issues when you have, for example, a situation where a train that doesn't visit Station X picks up a package addressed to that station. This situation can be avoided with some clever tricks like holding off packages until a specific train arrives at the station, or a more dedicated system where trains are only allowed to pick up packages from a station if they'll also visit all the stations it could have packages for. If you're willing to make your trains go around in a circle visiting all stations that also solves the problem, but it means you won't have much reason to make interesting rail infrastructure when you really just benefit from making a big old loop.] which is a huge relief.
Before this update, using Create for a rail network was a huge headache if you wanted to do anything more complicated than bring in resources to a central location because you had to deal with trains' finite storage space to send and receive an arbitrarily large number of types of things; if you filled up your train with wood, you wouldn't have space for the iron, redstone, and cobble for your piston factory. That's why it was only really useful before if you were using it with some farms that would bring stuff in to a big factory, you'd fill up trains with the resources from the farm and empty them into the factory; if the train fills up it's not a problem because you don't need it to carry anything else.
The new system actually lets you coordinate crafting logistics precisely with no overflow, you just have to make sure packages always reach their destination. I'm really excited about this and it makes Applied Energistics and Refined Storage completely optional unless you really need to handle fluids, Mekanism chemicals, Ars Nouveau Source, and whatever else has integrations for those mods. And there's nothing stopping you from using the new Create system to automate processes that use those kinds of resources, it just doesn't automate the request and delivery for you so you have to supply them in some other way.
I've been interested in Create for a while, is it worth doing a world with that as the main mod?
Yeah but I would recommend still playing with a modpack that has a fair number of mods. I played Create: Astral for a while and it did a good job of motivating progression through different Create assembly lines. I don't know if that pack has updated to the latest version of Create, though.
Edit: I checked and they have not.
are you on a specific mod pack?
I'm on Stoneblock 4 but Create is in almost every modpack nowadays.
Interesting... I've been looking for a mod pack that includes mod progression quests... not a fan of the Stone world, though.
Also about that caveat, I haven't tested that it works that way, it could actually be smart enough that trains will check their own schedule before picking up a package in case it's addressed somewhere the train will never visit (which might itself be another double edged sword because you might want to pick up a package that's addressed for X, drop it off at Y, then have it be picked up by another train that visits X, like some sort of situation where Y is a hub, but I digress) because I'm playing Stoneblock 4 and it doesn't make sense to use trains in this pack. Once I play a pack where using trains makes sense again I'll be all over this stuff.