Friedrich Engels, Clara Zetkin, and the Capitalist Origins of War

• World War I is understood as a consequence of capitalist contradictions, a catastrophe that socialist leaders of the era predicted and sought to prevent.
• Friedrich Engels warned of a total war that would devastate Europe and destroy ruling regimes, while Clara Zetkin identified militarism as a core instrument of capitalist exploitation.

The Dialectics of War

• Engels utilized his deep knowledge of military strategy to forecast a conflict of unimaginable violence, predicting the collapse of trade, industry, and existing political structures.
• Zetkin argued that war is the most criminal form of mass exploitation, where the working class is pitted against itself to serve the interests of capital expansion, markets, and resource acquisition.

Political Resistance and Internal Division

• The socialist movement faced a sharp divide between those advocating for compromise with bourgeois parties—often trading military support for political concessions—and those demanding absolute opposition to militarism.
• Zetkin, alongside Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, prioritized anti-militarism as the litmus test for the workers' movement, arguing against the "compensatory politics" pushed by party leaders like Wolfgang Heine.
• History shows that while elites feared the revolutionary potential of war-induced suffering, the failure of international socialist solidarity in 1914 paved the way for profound societal collapse and subsequent radical shifts across the globe.