Politics & Power Quote by Karl Liebknecht

Freedom, in Liebknecht's hands, becomes a trapdoor word: he pulls it open and forces you to look at what props it up. The line is engineered to short-circuit the cozy, self-congratulatory nationalism of imperial Europe by redefining "nation" not as a flag or a parliament but as a moral relationship. If your prosperity and prestige require someone else's coercion, then your "national existence" is structurally compromised. You're not sovereign; you're dependent on domination.

The intent is political, not merely philosophical. Liebknecht was a socialist agitator in a Germany swelling with imperial ambition and, soon, war fever. By insisting that "colonial peoples, too, are peoples", he drags those kept off the political map back onto it. The repetition is deliberate, almost prosecutorial: it indicts the common imperial alibi that colonies are property, wards, or raw material rather than political communities.

The subtext targets social democracy's temptation to compartmentalize: be progressive at home, predatory abroad. Liebknecht refuses that split. He also smuggles in a radical claim about the state itself: the "national state" is not a closed container of citizens but a system whose boundaries and benefits are drawn through empire. If colonial subjects are "parts" of the state in the sense that their labor and subjugation sustain it, then democracy confined to the metropole is a partial democracy built on a hidden constituency.

It's a moral argument with tactical bite: anti-colonial solidarity isn't charity; it's the prerequisite for any nation daring to call itself free.