The German Revolution: A Balance Sheet

In our account of the critical events and proletarian movements in Germany from 1918 to 1923, our party highlights a series of theoretical and tactical errors that were made by the communist leadership in those momentous years. It must be stated in advance that this should not be interpreted as dishonoring the huge sacrifices made by the revolutionary proletariat; nor is it in any way a dismissal of the legacy of the German working class as a whole, or a matter of assigning “blame” to specific individuals who put themselves at the head of the political and trade union organs of the German proletariat.

Nor are we such poor materialists as to assert that, even if the communist movement in Germany had adopted the perfectly “correct” strategy and tactics, victory would have been assured. It was the objective situation, both in Germany and internationally, that made it at least challenging, and perhaps even impossible, to achieve victory and to produce a party with a firmly established doctrine and well connected to the working-class movement.

Nor should our critique be taken to mean that we reject all of the “positives” of the revolutionary movement in Germany.

However, in every single case, it is vitally important to understand that these positives contained their own contradictions, both in terms of principles and in practice – again, for material reasons that have been clearly identified in our texts.

The most onerous of these objective circumstances was the hold of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) over the working class in general and, in particular, over its most advanced and militant representatives, including the leadership of the young Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

The weight of tradition weighed heavily on the working class, both in the leadership and at the base.

Hardly surprising: the SPD was the world’s largest political party. It had been the party of the German working class since 1875. It had survived Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Laws. It was the bedrock of the Second International. Yet by the outbreak of the First World War, it was a State within a State, inextricably bound to the destiny of German imperialism.

In retrospect, it is easy to see that the degeneration of the SPD must inevitably lead to its abandonment of proletarian internationalism. But at the time, it came as a great shock. When Lenin saw a copy of Vorwärts, the SPD newspaper, which proclaimed the SPD’s active support for the war, he simply refused to believe it; he was convinced that it was a forgery by the German General Staff.

He was not the only one to be deceived. The glaring cognitive dissonance of the socialist left in August 1914 – not just in Germany, but internationally – was embodied in two of Luxemburg’s most significant utterances: “After August 4, 1914, social democracy is nothing but a nauseating corpse,” she correctly stated, and yet, “Better the worst working-class party than none at all”.

But the fact is, the SPD was no longer a party of the working class.

The unwillingness of the opposition faction led by Luxemburg, Liebknecht and Jogiches, the International Socialists, later the Spartacists, to break with the SPD or the left-leaning independent social democratic party (USPD) because “that is where the masses were” was a grave mistake, leaving them badly prepared when the German proletariat finally “awoke from its stupor”, as Luxemburg herself foresaw in her “Junius” pamphlet.

The desire to “go to the masses” was a theoretical and tactical error that would dog the proletarian movement throughout the wartime and post‑war period.

From the first days of the insurrection of 1918‑19, when soldiers and sailors in particular responded to the calls of the Spartacists, when, in the streets of Berlin, it seemed that the fate of the German revolution must be decided, social democracy – whether majoritarian or independent – multiplied its presence to crush the impetus of the masses, putting itself completely at the service of the “Fatherland in danger” by raising fears of a French invasion, presenting the insurgents as “savages”, and mobilizing all forces first to prevent the extension of the movement and then moving on to the massacre of the young Communist Party.

The role of the SPD in this crushing of the revolutionary movement is well known. Less well known is the role of the independents, who always posed as the friend of the revolutionary proletariat, only to leave it in the lurch: “The Devil hath power/To assume a pleasing shape” (Hamlet). At all of the decisive moments, the USPD provided the best weapons for the defense of the bourgeois regime, by disorienting the masses when all the conditions existed for the assault on power; the Scheidemanns and the Noskes were then called upon to complete this treacherous work as the executioner of the working class.

The savage decapitation of the communist movement that followed in the tragic days of mid‑January in Berlin marks an important stage in bringing the proletarian movement to a shuddering halt. But if these were the negative consequences of the defeat, this first baptism of fire of the young communist party in the armed struggle, and the exposure of social-democracy’s role as guard‑dog for the capitalist regime, were the elements that determined the orientation of great swathes of the working class towards communism, towards the Russian revolution. Millions of German proletarians were won over to revolutionary communism.

Nonetheless, as later events unfolded, every positive development was soon confronted with a countertendency. It was always one step forward, one step back:

– Workers councils were rapidly established and seized power in many German cities and regions; but they ceded power at a national level and lost any political content. For many on the Communist Left, the “workers’ council” became an organizational fetish, while the key questions of political power and arming the broader proletariat were neglected;

– The German Communist Party was (finally) established in January 1919, with a fundamentally clear program; but it was totally unprepared for the onslaught, to the extent that it was unable to protect its most experienced leaders, notably Liebknecht, Luxemburg and Jogiches, who were murdered soon afterwards;

– Millions of young workers, soldiers and sailors flocked to the new party; but frustrated by the hesitations and vacillations of right‑wing and centrist leaders such as Levi, the exclusion of the Communist Left at the rigged Heidelberg Congress of 1919, the merger with the left wing of the USPD, and the embrace of parliamentarism, most militants (especially in the north, including Berlin) left to join the Communist Workers’ Party (KAPD);

– The Kapp putsch of 1920 was brought to a halt by a general strike (perhaps the most effective general strike in history) and spontaneous armed struggle of the proletariat; but the KPD surrendered the initiative to reformists whose objectives were limited to “defense of the Republic”, an early manifestation of proto-antifascism;

– In the Ruhr and parts of Saxony, the working class armed itself and went onto the offensive in response to the Kapp putsch; but the KPD offered no decisive central leadership, and where in coalition (or “loyal opposition”) in regional “workers’ governments”, it actively prevented the workers from seizing more arms;

– There was a rapid growth of militant industrial unionism in the Unionen; but, under the influence of anarcho-syndicalism, these often (though not always) rejected the need for political action (which meant, for example, that the AAUD under Otto Rühle’s direction undermined the insurrection of March 1921);

– The VKPD, to the jubilation of the KAPD, sanctioned the immediate seizure of power in March 1921; but when the revolutionary Red Army acted on this, the leadership hung them out to dry and, after the inevitable defeat, thousands of Red Guardsmen were summarily executed or thrown in jail;

– The Red Armies themselves raised the hopes of the most militant workers; but failed to win the active support of the powerful industrial workers, who, crucially, remained inside the factories;

– The KAPD adopted some positions close to our own; but, lacking firm and experienced leadership, it soon broke into numerous factions embracing non‑Marxist positions (workerist anti-intellectualism, the councilist tendency, the terrorist tendency, national bolshevism…)

– The revolutionary working class made a heroic “last stand” in 1923, mainly in Hamburg; but “the party’s military preparation, began at feverish speed, was divorced from the party’s political activity, which was carried on at previous peacetime tempo. The masses did not understand the party and did not keep step with it” (Trotski). The new leadership hypocritically assigned the blame to Luxemburg’s legacy of “spontaneism”.

There were other factors at work.

History had not yet produced a truly global communist party with consistently solid and common Marxist foundations, well trained in facing the common political enemies in the streets and in the media, and fully rooted in workers’ organizations within which it was held in high esteem for the continuity and effectiveness of its directives.

The Third International, constrained by both the need to promote world revolution and the need to shore up the embryonic socialist State in Russia, inevitably sent mixed signals and contradictory advice, and could provide little assistance. Given the weakness of the German Communist Party, Lenin’s Left‑wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder just disoriented and demoralized German communists and caused further schisms. The defeat of the German proletariat was moreover reflected in the defeat of a series of revolutions started in various other countries.

Following the actions of 1920, 1921 and 1923, literally tens of thousands of the best revolutionary militants were sentenced to long prison sentences. Many of the KPD’s resources were focused on getting them amnestied. This in turn accelerated the process of the integration of the KPD within the framework of the bourgeois Weimar Republic, its courts and its various parliamentary committees, lobbies and pressure groups etc. By the time these militants were released (most of them in 1928) the KPD had been fully Stalinized.

The militants who returned to the KPD were given a choice: accept the new party discipline or take the consequences. Troublemakers such as Max Hölz, leader of the Central German insurrection, were shipped off to Moscow and executed by Stalin in his anti‑German purge of the early thirties.

The legacy

We refer to the events that took place in Germany from 1918 to 1923 as “The German Tragedy”. But this was a tragedy in the Shakespearean sense, in which the leading protagonist, the German proletariat, waged a heroic and admirable struggle, but was brought down by a combination of its own flaws and forces beyond its control.

The physical and intellectual counter-revolution that followed was more intense and devastating in Germany than anywhere else. Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the KPD from 1925, soon perfected the Stalinist art of deploying pseudo-revolutionary language – wrongly characterized by trotskists as “ultra-leftism” – to denounce German communism’s greatest leaders.

Thälmann called for the “sharpest fight against the remnants of Luxemburgism” and described it as a “theoretical platform of counter-revolutionary directions”. In the divided Germany that followed 1945, Rosa Luxemburg’s legacy was further mutilated on both sides of the Berlin Wall. Walter Ulbricht, Chairman of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) called Luxemburgism a “mutation of social democracy”. Her Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organization, criticized by Lenin in What Is to Be Done? for what he regarded as its tactical errors, was taken out of the context of the struggle against revisionism and dismissed in a way Lenin never intended.

Luxemburg always believed in the need for a political party, and in 1918 she and Liebknecht established the first Communist Party outside Russia.

Later, as the DDR needed its own home-grown icons, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were idolized as martyrs, as they still are by the German Left Party (Die Linke), whose main political research organization, which pumps out wretched papers calling for a more caring, “green” capitalism, is named the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Even more nauseatingly, Luxemburg has been embraced by various liberals, “democratic socialists”, libertarians and new‑age thinkers. The bourgeoisie loves dead revolutionaries.

This latter trend was initiated by Paul Levi. Levi left the KPD after aligning with the Serrati faction at the Livorno Congress in 1921, joined the USPD, and then the SPD in 1922. In that year he planned to republish precisely those writings of Rosa Luxemburg where she had differed with Lenin. Lenin commented that Paul Levi’s intention was to get into the good graces of the bourgeoisie and his new (i.e., old!) party. Lenin famously wrote:

“We shall reply to this by quoting two lines from a Russian fable, ‘Eagles may at times fly lower than hens, but hens can never rise to the height of eagles’ […] But in spite of her mistakes she was and remains for us an eagle. And not only will Communists all over the world cherish her memory, but her biography and her complete works will serve as useful manuals for training many generations of communists all over the world” [our emphasis].

The other left current that might have emerged with some credit was within the KAPD. From the start, the Italian left criticized the KAPD’s “libertarian and syndicalist tendencies” (as discussed in the third section of this report) but the critique did not prevent Il Soviet from recognizing the combativity that the KAPD exhibited during the Kapp putsch and contrasted it with the passivity of the KPD:

“The new organization is to a large extent more combative and revolutionary and has developed a broader activity amongst the masses; its partisans are the workers who tolerate neither the lack of intransigence which the old party has sometimes shown, nor its conversion to parliamentarism, which took it close to the Independents, who are taking advantage of its tactics to gain credence in front of the proletariat and the International” (“The situation in Germany and the communist movement”, Il Soviet no. 18, 11 July 1920).

Our current initially hoped to see the KAPD reintegrated into the KPD and regarded the greater danger (as in Italy with Serrati) as coming from the opportunism of the left USPD. But in Germany as well as Italy (and elsewhere) the Communist International pushed for the integration of communists with left social democrats to create a mass party – in Germany, the United Communist Party (UKPD). This proved disastrous. Left Communists never judge the strength of a party by the number of membership cards it issues, but the instruction from the Comintern was to “go to where the masses are”.

The fundamental problem with the KAPD, however, and the cause of its disintegration into factionalism, lay precisely in its origins: it brought together various currents that were only united by their common disgust at the centrism and opportunism of the KPD. It attracted the best militants, but its programs were inevitably a mish‑mash and, once the revolutionary tide had turned, all of its “tendencies” ran aground, one by one. Once the KAPD cut its ties to the Third International, debate between the Italian Left and the Communist Left not only in Germany, but also in England, the Low Countries and Bulgaria, became impossible and they grew further and further apart.

“I was, I am, I will be”

Germany offers the one and only attempt so far at communist revolution by the proletariat of a modern country, that is to say, a country that was highly industrialized and had a constitutional-democratic political system.

Despite the many mistakes, the “German Tragedy” provides a powerful inspiration for the working-class militants of today and tomorrow. The German and international proletariat must rescue its history, and the experiences of the revolutionary workers who took part in its struggles, from the official commentariat and hagiographers of the bourgeoisie.

This will provide an essential weapon in the intellectual arsenal of the German working class when it once again rises from its slumber, as one day it must. The lessons drawn from the events in Germany from 1918 to 1923 have played no small part in the formulation of the program of the International Communist Party, echoing Rosa Luxemburg’s words: “I was, I am, I will be”.

Commentators from across the bourgeois political spectrum have done their best to suffocate this cry. We reclaim it. Only in this way should the German revolutionaries be remembered. Only in this way will the dead of yesterday rise again to inspire the revolutionaries of tomorrow.

“We may die, but our program will live!”.