"The workers have nothing to gain from this war, but they stand to lose everything that is dear to them"
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War is pitched as a national obligation; Zetkin strips that sales job down to its class math. “Nothing to gain” isn’t just moral condemnation, it’s an audit. For workers, the promised dividends of victory - prestige, territory, “security” - don’t cash out in higher wages, safer housing, or political power. The costs do: conscription, hunger, inflation, shattered unions, and the quiet violence of a state that learns how to police its own people under wartime emergency.
Zetkin’s intent is organizing as much as warning. She’s speaking into a moment when European socialists were splintering over World War I, with many parties backing their governments despite years of internationalist rhetoric. Her sentence is engineered to reframe loyalty: not to flag or monarch, but to the material and intimate things “dear to them” - family, bodily survival, community, the fragile gains of labor politics. That phrase broadens “loss” beyond the battlefield. It includes the home front’s attrition: the child underfed, the spouse overworked, the dissenter jailed.
The subtext is an accusation aimed upward. If workers “lose everything,” someone else is positioned to gain: industrialists, arms manufacturers, imperial administrators, politicians who convert crisis into legitimacy. Zetkin refuses the abstraction of “the nation” and forces a concrete question: who pays, who profits, and why are the bill-payers being asked to feel grateful?
Zetkin’s intent is organizing as much as warning. She’s speaking into a moment when European socialists were splintering over World War I, with many parties backing their governments despite years of internationalist rhetoric. Her sentence is engineered to reframe loyalty: not to flag or monarch, but to the material and intimate things “dear to them” - family, bodily survival, community, the fragile gains of labor politics. That phrase broadens “loss” beyond the battlefield. It includes the home front’s attrition: the child underfed, the spouse overworked, the dissenter jailed.
The subtext is an accusation aimed upward. If workers “lose everything,” someone else is positioned to gain: industrialists, arms manufacturers, imperial administrators, politicians who convert crisis into legitimacy. Zetkin refuses the abstraction of “the nation” and forces a concrete question: who pays, who profits, and why are the bill-payers being asked to feel grateful?
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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