War & Peace Quote by Karl Liebknecht

A good slogan doesn’t argue; it indicts. Liebknecht’s line compresses an entire Marxist worldview into a single, chilly equivalence: war and peace aren’t opposites, they’re revenue streams. The sting is in the repetition - “business and nothing but business” - a rhetorical hammer meant to flatten any comforting story about national honor, security, or tragic necessity. If everything is business, then the moral vocabulary surrounding war becomes marketing copy.

The intent is explicitly polemical. Liebknecht, a German socialist who broke with his own party to oppose World War I, is talking to a public being asked to sanctify mass death as patriotism. His target isn’t only generals or monarchs but the respectable bourgeois machinery that profits quietly: arms manufacturers, financiers, industrialists, the press that sells the narrative, the politicians who translate economic interest into national destiny. In this framing, “peace” is not redemption; it’s the consolidation phase. Rebuilding contracts, debt, territorial access, and disciplined labor all have price tags.

Subtextually, he’s warning that capitalism doesn’t need bloodlust to produce war; it only needs incentives. The line works because it refuses the audience a middle ground. Either you accept that the system can monetize anything - including carnage - or you keep believing war is a moral exception to ordinary politics. In 1914-1919, when socialist internationalism collapsed under nationalist pressure, Liebknecht wrote like someone watching ideals get liquidated in real time. His cynicism is not a pose; it’s a diagnosis with urgency.