27th September 1914, Berlin.
The socialist agitator Rosa Luxembourg was meeting with a group of her closest allies to discuss the war its progress and how best to respond. She was nominally a member of the Social Democratic Party but with the official party supporting the war she was moving away from it. She and her nearest comrades had denounced the Kaiser’s war, they had called it a capitalist sham to enrich the blood suckers of international finance, while the poor bleed. The recent disasters suffered by the army in both Russia and on the Franco-Belgian front had swept the capital.
The Army officers in their glittering braid who had so often lorded it over the ordinary German subjects now looked downcast, their morale impacted by the stunning series of defeats. The bourgeoisie plump in their exploitation of the workers likewise were beginning to suffer, their marks drawn from the toil of honest workers availed them less. The Royal Navies blockade was already biting hard on imports, no shipping was making it past the minefields and the roving patrols of British destroyers. Some goods were being imported via Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands but only a little and what little was making it to Germany was prohibitively expensive. Oranges and Bananas had disappeared from the shops and even Danish bacon was becoming harder to access.
Whilst she was adamantly opposed to the capitalist system, Rosa Luxembourg had spent some considerable time studying its workings. She was fascinated in many ways by its flexibility and its ability to enable trade between disparate peoples who would never meet but linked by a chain of middlemen. The desire for a cup of coffee in Berlin would be met by a farm in Tanginika, heedless of course to the cost for the workers and peasants exploited by those same middlemen along the way. She understood the impact that the blockade, the defeats and the consequential plunge in the value of the German Mark would cause financial chaos in Germany and Austro-Hungary.
The Socialists would be tarred with the support for the war, her groups refusal to support it was a point in their favour. As the war which was already touching families across Germany worsened, how to take advantage of the wars hard hand was therefore subject of much of her thinking and planning. From all she could see the suffering would only increase, especially as winter came. The economic logic of the war would require the total subordination of the German State to the war, that subordination would entail much misery and as the people suffered, they could be brought to think of a new way to order society. One in which they were not mere serfs to be exploited, sent out to die in battle, labour endlessly in the fields for the enrichment of another, or starve in a tenement to let others gorge themselves on the fruit of their labour.
She would continue to advocate patience to her comrades, as the war went on the inherent corruption in the German state would be revealed, ripening with every dead soldier and starving civilian. The ties of loyalty to Kaiser and Empire would be weakened by defeat and demoralisation, when those ties finally snapped then her people would be positioned to act. The other advantage of not being overly active yet, was it reduced the risk of the secret police infiltrating her group and disrupting their plans.