Leadership Quote by Karl Liebknecht

“Incendiary capitalism” is Liebknecht’s best kind of insult: not descriptive but prosecutorial. He’s not arguing that capitalism is merely unfair; he’s charging it with arson. The word “incendiary” makes profit-seeking an active accelerant, a force that doesn’t just benefit from crisis but helps manufacture it. That’s the intent: to collapse the polite separation between economics and geopolitics and insist that the marketplace has a foreign policy, whether it admits it or not.

The sentence is built like a warning siren. “More dangerously than ever” tells you this isn’t a timeless Marxist lament; it’s an emergency bulletin. Liebknecht is speaking from a Europe where industrial capital, mass conscription, and imperial rivalry have fused into a modern war machine. His “powder kegs” aren’t abstract nations; they’re militarized states with hair-trigger mobilization plans and leaders eager to translate nationalist fantasies into artillery. Capitalism, in this framing, isn’t one actor among many. It’s the atmosphere that makes ignition likely.

The subtext is strategic: he’s trying to shame and rally the working class against the seduction of patriotic unity. By naming capitalism as the hidden hand behind militarism, he offers an alternative culprit to the usual scapegoats (other peoples, rival monarchs, “ancient hatreds”). It’s also a self-implicating critique aimed at Social Democrats tempted to accommodate rearmament and empire. The line effectively says: if you treat war as inevitable, you’ve already handed the match to the people selling the fuel.