Gilles Dauvé and Denis Authier
The Communist Left in
With texts by:
Laufenberg, Wolffheim, Gorter,
Roland-Holst and Pfempfert
Original Title:
La Gauche Communiste en Allemagne (1918-1921)
(First published in France in 1976)
Translator’s
Note
This revised edition of The Communist Left in
M. DeSocio
Contents
Introduction……………………………………………………………..p.
6
Chapter 1.
Chapter 2.
Origins of the German Workers
Movement……………….p. 25
Chapter 3.
The German Left before
1914……………………………..p.
49
Chapter 4.
War and Radicalization……………………………………p.58
Chapter 5.
The 1918 “November
Revolution”…………………...........p.
70
Chapter 6.
Before the Confrontation: The Relation of Forces……..….p. 75
Chapter 7.
The Confrontation: November 1918 to May 1919……….p. 85
Chapter 8.
The International and Domestic Situations: May 1919 to March
1920…………………………………………………………………p.
96
Chapter 9.
Revolutionary Syndicalism and
Unionism…………………p. 101
Chapter 10.
The KPD: January 1919 to March
1920………………….p. 111
Chapter 11.
Between the First and the Second Congresses of the Communist
International…………………………………………………………p.
118
Chapter 12.
The Kapp Putsch and the
Chapter 13.
The
VKPD……………………….……………………..p.
139
Chapter 14.
The KAPD and the AAUD-E…………………………..p.
144
Chapter 15.
The March Action
(1921)………………………………p.
152
Chapter 16.
The German Left and the Third
International…………p. 161
Chapter 17.
The “International Communist
Left”………………….p. 175
Conclusion………………………..………………………………….p.
203
Appendix I.
The Groupuscular
Phase………………………………p.
207
Appendix II. Bibliography of Topics Addressed
by the German Left during the
1930s…………………………………….……………………..p.
219
Appendix III. Note on “National
Bolshevism”………………………p.223
Texts
Foreword……………………………………………………………….p.
229
The
Factory Organizations or Trade Unions? (Fritz
Wolffheim)……………p.252
The Opportunism of the Communist Party
of the
Resolution of the Conference of the
Abstentionist Communist Fraction of the Italian Socialist Party……………………….……………………p.
286
The Communist Left and the Resolutions
of the Second Congress of the Communist International (Henriette Roland-Holst)………...p. 291
The Lessons of the “March
Action”—Gorter’s Last Letter to Lenin…….p. 295
The KAPD’s Report on the Third Congress of the
Communist
International………………………………………….p.
301
Program of the AAUD (December
1920)………………..…………..p.
313
Extracts from the Guidelines
of the AAUD (December 1920)……….p. 316
Guidelines of the AAU-E (June
1921)………………………..………p.
326
Lenin’s Infantile Disorder… and the Third International (Franz
Pfempfert)………………………………………..…p.
328
Leading Principles of the KAI (Extracts)
(1922)…….………………p. 338
Epilogue
(2004)………………………………………………………..p.
345
Some Websites of
Interest…………..…………………………………p.
354
“It
is not those who fell wrapped in the unfortunate flag of the defeated Revolution
whom we consider to be fraudulent squanderers of the Revolution, but those who
afterwards, from their desks of wisdom or from their podiums as mentors of the
masses, were unable to derive from that sacrifice anything more than a few
phrases of demagogic admiration, accompanied by a defeatist commentary.”
Bordiga:
From the Commune to the IIIrd
International, 1924
The fact that the Russian
Revolution of 1917 was only one aspect and one of the effects of a much broader
movement, whose center was
There is no “particular
situation” with a unique meaning in the history of society. Given the
“period”, or, more precisely, given all the elements which directed
the revolutionary drama, the revolution failed and had to fail. It can be
lamented, and we lament it, but it is of no use to evoke the Bolshevik-style
party or any other deus ex machina
for explaining the development of an unreal past. It would, however, be just as
false, and would also misrepresent the period, to replace the consequences of
the abstract absence of the “party” or any other factor with the
false plenitude of “it could not have been otherwise”; this would
have been tantamount to negating the possibility of revolution. It would be yet
more false, obviously, to present everything as a function of a necessary
failure. We are determinists, of course, but determinism is not a historical
factor which can intervene “a posteriori” in the explanation of
events.
Such a procedure would foist
a meaning upon even the most radical actions which these actions did not in
fact possess, and would interpret the various revolutionary attempts as simple
convulsive motions of capital’s adaptation, as outcomes of economic
crises.
The “lessons” of
the German Revolution? A historical analysis of the revolutionary movement
would be interested in, among other things, discovering the reasons for the
failure of the previous attempts, but not in such a way as to derive from the
latter a guarantee for future victory. We do not consider revolutions as simple
“experiences”. We discover in them, beyond their time, men who live
in community with today’s subversive tendency. And this discovery is
consolidated by discovering that this tendency has always existed and has
always occupied the front ranks of the historical stage on various occasions.
It is not, then, a matter of learning simple “lessons” or of
considering history as a school, but something quite different.
“We know only one
science: history”, means that the other sciences, based upon
“experience”, are not sciences at all. The transformation of
Marxism carried out by its followers, starting at the end of the 19th
century, which made Marxism into a “science”, reduced it to one of
those pseudo-sciences which are not at all subversive of society, in order to
accommodate to the latter and to seek nothing more than the reproduction of
particular “reactions”; it was a question, for the orthodox
Marxists, of socializing capital or, expressed differently, of subjecting it to
real organization and regulation, to prevent some of its annoying effects,
thanks to their Marxist “science” of economic reactions; but they
did not speak of socialist production, or of socialist economics; they
preserved the categories of political economy, such as value and all the rest,
but forgot the only true science: human emancipation. The stance of the proletarian revolutionaries was
identical with the confrontation with real history as it was unfolding. Some,
like Gorter, felt quite profoundly that, with the unleashing of the world war,
the bourgeoisie had dealt an almost irreparable blow to the proletariat; that
the war meant, in the final analysis, the accession of capitalism to world
domination (see Imperialism, the World
War and Social Democracy, 1914); and from that moment (Autumn of 1914) he
foresaw that a revolution, breaking out after the war as a result of misery,
would face nothing but difficulties. Just like Marx who, viewing the general
situation, had “counseled against” the insurrection of the Commune,
saying that it was condemned to failure. Certain individuals in our camp thus
possessed the elements necessary to predict failure. But this did not prevent
Marx, Gorter and Pannekoek (who may very well have shared Gorter’s views)
from participating in the movement from its very first moments; unlike
Luxemburg, they did not apply the brakes (see below, for the increasingly
negative role played by Luxemburg from the beginning of the war); they were
present wherever the human community was being created, contributing their
powers of classification and, while not holding back, not feeling the need to
offer themselves as sacrificial victims to the holocaust, either.
If events are conceived in
the light of their outcomes, all proletarian movements could be interpreted as
phases of the social system’s self-adaptation. From this perspective, the
proletariat has failed up to this point, because capital was not sufficiently
developed and dominated neither the entire world nor life as a whole; today,
however, the total rule exercised by capital will lead to a rebellion which
will be just as total. This vision of a finally pure communist revolution to be
unleashed against a capitalism which is the absolute lord and master of
everything skips over the present and past contradictions of the movement of
capital and the communist movement. Furthermore, in order to provide this total
rebellion of pure negation with a certain coherence, an effort is made to
discover some faraway movements (obviously despised and falsified by the
official “communist” movement which only knew how to speak of the
insufficiency of the productive forces) towards the end of discovering within
them the “ne plus ultra”
of the total revolution, in comparison with which the Commune, the Russian
Revolution, the German Revolution, etc., would be mere child’s play.
Peasant uprisings are sublimated, while the KAPD is reduced to a transitional
step towards the real domination of capital.1 This dual movement,
which on the one hand looks towards the past for truly radical movements,
further back into the night of time, and on the other hand seeks to
“demystify” more recent movements (this second aspect being a
result of the first) only shows that it has “demystified” the most
recent of all revolutionary movements: the future revolution, which is to say
that it has renounced it.
It is not from the
perspective of an unrealized ideal perfection, but, to the contrary, from that
of the contradictions within which the revolutionary movement of 1917-21
developed, that this history is intended to be written. The German Revolution
interests us precisely because it is the disturbance which, due to its extent
and its social-economic background, most closely resembles the situations which
we may be called upon to confront. The problems faced by the German
revolutionaries remain, without having been solved in practice. Capital has
today managed to perfect its new and specific forms of domination, forms which
it had begun to experiment with in the First World War.
II
It is symptomatic that the
“German Revolution” has long remained in oblivion. The
revolutionary movement, both within and outside of
It is quite surprising that Socialisme ou Barbarie, over the course
of its 40 issues (1949-65), did not publish even one study, however brief, on
this theme.2 A whole series of obstacles prevented the comprehension
of the phenomenon of the communist left. It is known how Stalinism (and Stalin
himself) rejected “Luxemburgism” as an infantile disorder, worthy
of sympathy but not very strong compared to its “Bolshevik”
brother. Luxemburg, for her part, became for many people the symbol of the
German Revolution and the best fruit of the movement in the West. The Luxemburg
cult has survived not only because of the social democrats who remember nothing
about her except her democratic side (Spartacus, Masses) but also because of the revolutionaries who were
misinformed concerning the gap which existed between Luxemburg and the
communist left. The use of the term “Spartacist” to designate the
movement’s most radical current was based on the simplified version of
events provided by the bourgeois counterrevolution. The use of this term has
mystified the history of its time, much as the use of the words “Marxist”
and “anarchist”, employed anachronistically, were used to describe
positions which were incompatible with their original meanings. Retrospection
falsifies perspective.3 Finally, the Italian communist left, linked
to Leninism, by interpreting the German Left as a variety of
anarchosyndicalism,4 has sowed much confusion, abetted by the
remnants of the German Left who were no more capable of understanding their own
past.
German historians offer
little information about the revolutionary movement after 1918. The works of
Badia (Histoire de l’Allemagne
contemporaine (Ed. Sociales, Vol. 1, on
These two works are
nonetheless proof of the growing interest in the German events.
Flechtheim’s volume on the German Communist Party7, despite
Weber’s final contribution which comprises a comparative study of the
social bases of the SPD and the KPD, is, rather than a history of a social
movement, the history of an organization. But even this book gives short shrift
to the communist left. Flechtheim falls into one of the two traps which lie in
wait for the academic faced with the temptation to write either a political history or history plain and simple. The former is centered
on the institutional expressions of social movements, and results, in the worst
cases, in considering everything in the light of the evolution of one or
another political group. The latter, with its preoccupation to avoid dogmatism,
accumulates facts without any organizing principle. In the case of the
proletarian workers movements, on the pretext of avoiding a
“totalitarian” conception of history, it privileges a putative
spontaneity (preferably not too violent or else only violent in the past) over
centralized action and organization. The first procedure frequently proclaims
itself to be Marxist and in fact constitutes an institutional theory of class
struggle. The second is careful to take
no position in regard to theoretical communism, it has a pretense to being
independent and joyfully proclaims itself—outrageously enough—to be
in favor of the formula whereby Marx declared that he was not a Marxist. It
ignores the movement’s center of gravity: the passage to communism, which
is, however, essential; the proletariat can only be victorious by making that
passage and organizing itself in accordance with that goal.
The Anglo-Saxon historians,8
who have often written about
Broué’s
monumental work, La révolution en
Allemagne 1917-23 (Minuit, 1972) is an excellent example of a political history. It is true, of
course, that the author, in a recent article10, denied “having
composed a history restricted to the level of the
‘leadership-elite’.” His objective is to study the
“German communists in the light of their form of organization, within the
framework of their party and their International, a framework which they,
within that same movement, tried to construct in order to be
victorious.” Note his
declaration: “their party” is, of course, the KPD; “their
International” is the CI. He has thus written a history of the KPD and
the CI, the latter in the context of its relations with
Studying the revolutionary
events in
Broué’s
Trotskyist inclinations lead him to ignore “leftist” and
“infantile” organizations and to instead treat the diverse
vicissitudes of the social democratic left as a communist movement. For our
part, it is not a matter of opposing our version to a Trotskyist version, or of
correcting one theoretical con game with another. We declare right from the
start that we are studying one aspect—for us, the most important
aspect—of the events in question. The reader will understand on his own
that he has not read merely the chronicle of the “communist left”,
but that of the epoch’s most profound social movement. Broué has
undertaken a partial study with general pretensions: we shall undertake a
partial study of general interest. One will, of course, find an infinite
quantity of useful information in Broué’s book. But its erudition
takes the form of mystification. Fixated on the theoretical expressions and
established organizations but not on the contradictory social agitation and its
more or less articulated manifestations, he devotes himself to the examination
of parties and trade unions (especially the KPD), scorning to bother with a
multitude of significant developments. So, how can it be doubted, after having
perused his impressive bibliography, that he has told the whole truth? The method
chosen, however, comes with a lie, by omission. His work on
From a revolutionary
perspective, the volume of selected texts of Pannekoek, ably presented by S.
Bricianer, has cleared the way and disseminated knowledge of the German Left
beyond a small circle of initiates.13 A serious historical work, it
is nonetheless primarily a biography of Pannekoek presented through his texts,
and devotes few pages to the period 1917-1921, focusing above all on the
lessons derived from those years by Pannekoek, especially in World Revolution and Communist Tactics
(1920). This focus, which is perfectly legitimate in a work of this kind,
ultimately fails to portray the reality of that epoch’s communist
movement in
This persistent focus on form (council, party) facilitates the
current efforts on behalf of capital’s adaptation, which requires both
the authoritarianism and regimentation transmitted by the degraded notion of
the party so dear to the CP and numerous leftists, as well as the
workers’ pseudo-self-management and the illusory freedom which the idea
of the “council” denotes for other leftists. The concept of
self-management is even more dangerous when it is stripped of its workerism:
“if (this conception) is to be true to its postulates, it must assert that with the evolution of
capitalism—which is constantly socializing all human
activities—those organizations which are responsible for realizing the
principle of councilism will have to be located outside of the
factories.”14 The demand for workers’ management refers
to the management of everyday life.15
The real content of the communist
movement lies elsewhere and is replaced by questions of form.
Previously denounced, the
German Left enjoys a relative celebrity today thanks to its most flaccid and
well-known aspects. This was only made possible by disconnecting its texts from
their historical context. As an illustration of this tendency, we can be grateful
for the work of R. Gombin16, who undertakes the task of fusing a
series of different and contradictory
contributions into a whole which is presented as the very trademark of what is
most radical: but this is only possible after having separated these
contributions from their respective sources. The essence of modernism consists
in mixing the most radical aspects of revolutionary thought into an original
synthesis while these aspects are, however, stripped of what makes, or made
them, subversive, and taking delight in mere novelty. His secret lies in having
associated Pannekoek with H. Lefebvre: this monstrous cocktail could only have
been mixed by carefully erasing the roots
of Pannekoek’s ideas. Evoking the mass media in support of this
connection would be superficial. Society has always fed on revolutionary
thought, which, in turn, has also caused the latter to become insipid. It was
not at all strange when the magazine Minuit
published an extract from Pannekoek’s Workers
Councils in its seventh issue, having selected a section from that work
which deals with democracy. But the councilist illusions of certain
revolutionaries also facilitate this absorption, as is demonstrated by the
Preface to Workers Councils written
by former members of the ICO.17 An introduction to the texts of P.
Mattick situates Sorel among the “ultra-left”, alongside the
“socialism of the producers”, “self-management” and
“popular self-government”.18 The German Left defined
itself precisely in contradistinction to syndicalism, including the
“revolutionary” variety and, having suffered the effects of
reactionary violence, did not accept the overabundant and misunderstood myths
of the various experiences with soviets, councils or workers’
pseudo-autonomy. In 1919 and 1920, left communists knew quite well that the
“party-form” had contributed no more than the
“council-form” to the defeat of the revolutionary movement. In any
event, the publication of Workers
Councils signaled the recognition of the German Left, in its councilist form,
by the intellectual world. The “official daily newspaper of the
powerful” even devoted almost an entire page to a good exposition of
Pannekoek’s work.19 Following in the footsteps of Djilas,
Lukàcs and Garaudy, the German Left, in turn, joined the family of
Marxist heretics considered to be worthy of notice. An obsession with
“recuperation” (a superficial myth) would be absurd. The
fashionable interest in the German Left is accompanied by a revolutionary
curiosity and a positive concern with information and clarification. The
phenomenon of vulgarized distortion is inevitable. It is precisely this real
and new interest which obliges us to set the record straight.
The councilists have done
little to shed light on the period of 1917-1921. But the German Left was one of
Bordiga’s obsessions. It is surprising to consider that it was the
journal Invariance, descended from
the Italian Left, which in 1969 first republished a few essential texts, in
particular almost all of Pannekoek’s text, Révolution mondiale et tactique communiste.20 A
subsequent issue of the same journal is almost entirely devoted to the German
Left: it comprises a study, both historical and theoretical, which heralds the
further evolution of the journal, which we shall examine in another work currently
in progress.21 During the same period, a Danish group, also
descended from the Italian Left, wrote an original study with a particular
focus on the unions. A mere fifty pages long, it is one of the richest texts on
this subject.22 Significantly, it is unfortunately little-known. It
has been photocopied and distributed on a small scale, and we have made ample
use of it despite its Leninist vestiges.
A long article in Number 58
of Programme Communiste, organ of the
International Communist Party (the “orthodox” descendant of
Bordigism), published in April 197323, dedicated to reassuring the
faithful who remained in the ICP after the schism brought about by the
sanctions imposed upon the Danes and Invariance,
who had demanded and practiced “free inquiry” (particularly in
regard to its principle opponent, the German Left), highlights the principle
points of the German Left’s defeat. However, whereas the Danes consider
the German Left as a product of the proletariat, the ICP’s article is
primarily a study of the theoretical positions of the various actors, totally
separated from their contexts (which confirms an absolute bad faith when it is
compared to the pains Bordiga took to exculpate-explain, by means of endless
expository forays, the most insignificant—and the
not-so-insignificant—theoretical deviations of Lenin).24
Proletarian action (quite well-perceived elsewhere) is nothing but a backdrop
in this article. The Left is judged on the basis of its
“principles” and its adversaries are preferred for the rigor of
their profession of the Marxist faith.
A collection edited by one of
the authors of the present text, La
Gauche allemande, Textes, reveals a German Left which is much more strict,
dictatorial and “party-centered” than today’s councilists, as
well as the image the latter entertain of their progenitor. This
collection’s postscript focuses on the involution of council communism to councilism.25 We should also
mention a good collection of biographies, recently published in French and
brought together in one volume by the councilists.26 But this list
is already out of date.
Everything we have said up to
this point sheds light on our method. This work on the German Left is obviously
an intellectual work—and its authors are in this case
intellectuals—but, just like other studies of this subject, even the most
academic, this study is not the fruit of pure intellect, of the closed logic of
“research”; the German Left’s anti-intellectualist critiques
were perfectly justified when they attacked the domination of the
intelligentsia, when they targeted the pretension of a certain kind of
intellectual of being superior to the rest of mortal mankind, and especially
the working class “rank and file”, when such intellectuals fought
for their alleged right to lead the movement. Our work has no pretension to
autonomy27, which for us is not a goal in and of itself; it has no
meaning except as part of a movement which goes far beyond it. The renascent
radical movement must appropriate its own history. Nor do we frame what we see
in the forms in which spoiled intellectuals take pleasure:
“Our purpose is not
literary or aesthetic production. Comrades and readers do not have to waste
their time evaluating a passage, a page or a text which we publish, but they
should always take into account the relation between the different parts of the
labors undertaken by our small movement. . .”
(Bordiga, El Programa Comunista, 1953)
In the following text, the
reader will not read the history of the German Revolution, or even a reference
work on the German Left. Our procedure consists in an attempt to extract the
leading thread and the essential mechanisms from our field of study. We have
not hesitated to go over facts already studied by others, often in detail, or
to rapidly pass over some realities which have since become more accessible in
more recent works. These works are “points of reference” for
following the history of the left. Another kind of approach, which is also
useful, would consist in giving more depth to the immediate reality of these
movements by conducting a study of their everyday activities, based, for
example, on their press and available archival documentation.
It is not enough to
rehabilitate a hidden past. A subversive movement has existed, and still
exists, whose action and expression have been “hidden” by official
“discourse” (state, trade union, bureaucracy, politicians,
academics, judiciary, schools, etc.). But the simple unveiling of its
expression is not in itself revolutionary. Its mere expression, that is, the
only thing that remains of it, is not revolutionary unless it is put to a new
use: not necessarily in the form of “action” in the strict sense of
the word, but simply as a theory which once again embraces events within its
framework. It is of little account that a “liberation” movement
existed long ago: capital placidly accepts the reestablishment of the truth
concerning Luddism or the German Left as long as this changes nothing. The
world begins to tremble when the revolutionary facts of the past resurface in
the practice of a renascent subversive movement. Only the dead bury the dead.
Fashion and pedagogy (often united), on the other hand, take advantage of ideas
when they are dead, or in the form in which they are no longer alive
(councilism, for the German Left). Ideas die, too. A theory is dead when the
movement which gave it life has disappeared, but it can be reborn when a
movement arises which is its authentic continuation; then, however, it appears
in the unpleasant form of a movement of “left fascists”,
“hooligans”, “a society of thieves”, and other
barbarians, like those who were called “Spartacists” in the epoch
which concerns us in this text. Socialism
or Barbarism, ignored when it was subversive, is becoming fashionable, now
that its old theoreticians (Chaulieu, Lefort and Lyotard) have submitted to the
rules of the game of modernism.
Any expression which is not
an action, in the sense that it does not contribute to the clarification of
current revolutionary problems, situates itself within capital. It shows that its author has no real need to change
his situation. The record of the past plays the same ideological role for him,
one of substitution and illusory excess, which politics plays for others. This
past could be a future: one could take pleasure in the description of what is
to come. What contributes to the revolution is neither the evocation of the
past, nor of the world of the future, but the present effort to connect reality
to both. It is not our intention to give lessons to historians. They can only
be what they are. But one can and one must say what they are, and distinguish
between thought which is merely critical and thought which is revolutionary. It
is subversive to show how slavery constituted a form of progress for both the
slaves and for humanity as a whole; it is conservative to restrict oneself to
denouncing it. The same thing is also true within a mode of production,
especially when one takes into account the shrewdness and adaptive capabilities
of capital. Who defends Thiers against the Commune these days? Who reduces the
War of 1914 to the activities of the Pan-Germanists? In relation, however, to
anything that still has a direct role to play in the preservation of the social
order, the issues remain obscure; the war of 1939-45, for example, which proves
that it is the most important and the most anti-revolutionary war, whose
consequences are still with us today and which must by all means be preserved.
This is particularly true of anything which refers to “fascism”,
where clarification is still a threat to the established order, and where
mystification rules.28 There is an abundance of intellectual methods
to avoid such subjects: quantitative
and statistical history fit perfectly with a “liberated” history
operating at the level of everyday life, or with a history of opinions. One
need only consult the catalogue of history journals to see that everything is
studied, but almost never what is essential.
To its own misfortune,
revolutionary theory plays a double role: revolutionary and . . .
non-revolutionary. By seriously presenting the real problems faced by society,
it helps society adapt to these problems. The mass media accumulate information with the intention of incessantly reproducing
capitalist relations. How could one not take a position in relation to all the
critiques, including the most virulent ones, which form part of capitalist society’s auto-critique,
despite the occasional honesty of their authors? Each major capitalist country
has its own way of absorbing revolutionary theory. In
1.
See C.
Juhl’s preface to L’Internationale
Communiste Ouvrière by Gorter, in Invariance, No. 5, New Series.
2. For
a critical study of Socialisme ou
Barbarie, particularly in regard to
3. See
4. Bordiga,
Les fondements du communisme
révolutionaire, Programme Communiste.
5. Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg, Maspero, 1965.
6. Nettl,
Rosa Luxemburg,
7. Flechtheim:
Le PC allemande sous la République
de Weimar, Maspero.
8. See,
for example, the various volumes of Communism
in Europe, edited by W. Griffith, MIT Press; F. Borkenau, World Communism, University of Michigan
Press, Ann Arbor, 1962; B. Lazitch, Lénine
et la IIIe Internationale, La Baconnière,
Neuchâtel, 1951; as well as the journals Problèmes du Communisme, Est et Ouest, and Le Contrat Social edited by B.
Souvarine. The common basis for the thought of all these authors resides in a
cultivated pessimism, which is quite well-expressed by the following formula of
Montesquieu, quoted by Plamenatz in German
Marxism and Russian Communism, Longmans, London, 1945: “One can,
moreover, establish, as a general maxim, that every revolution which was
predicted in advance never arrived.” For another perspective, see D.
Mitchell, 1919: Red Mirage, J. Cape,
9. Stillborn Revolution: The Communist Bid for
Power in
10. Le mouvement social, July-September
1973, pp. 89 and 95. For a critique of Broué’s book, see Cahiers de l’ISEA, December 1972,
pp. 2454-56, and D. Authier, La gauche
allemande (cf. infra No. 23).
11. A.
Kriegel, Aux origenes du communisme français,
Flammarion, 1969, p. 329.
12. Volumes I and II, Albin Michel,
1964.
13. Pannekoek et les conseils ouvriers, EDI,
1969. English translation: Pannekoek and
the Workers’ Councils, Telos Press,
14. Programme Communiste (abridged), No. 56, p. 32.
15. “Pourquoi nous quittons
ICO”, January-February 1973.
16. Les origins du gauchisme, Seuil, 1972.
English translation: The Origins of
Modern Leftism, Penguin Books, Baltimore, 1975.
17. Bélibaste, 1974.
18. R.
París, Introduction to P. Mattick,
Intégration capitaliste et rupture ouvrière, EDI, 1972.
19. Le Monde,
20. Invariance, old series, No. 7, which
also contains: Manifestes des CP et CLP
des EU (1919), La victoire du
marxisme (Gorter, 1920), Pensée
et action communistes dans la IIIe Internationale (S. Pankhurst,
1919) with an editorial note by Il Soviet,
Le mouvement communiste internationale
and La situation en Allemagne et le
mouvement communiste, published in 1920 in Il Soviet, Le KAPD au IIIe
Congrès mondiale and the report of the KAPD’s Central
Committee of July 31, 1921, Le principe
de l’antagonisme entre le gouvernement des Soviets et le proletariat (KAI),
Pour la question du parlementarisme
by Lukàcs (1920), the Thèses
sur le parlementarisme by the Amsterdam Bureau and the Thèses of the Congress of the Belgian communists (May 1920).
21. Ibid., new series, No. 1, “Le KAPD
et le mouvement prolétarian”.
22. Kommunistik
Program, La question syndicale et la
gauche allemande dans la IIIe Internationale, Bagsvaerd, 1972.
See also Note No. 1.
23. Journal
of the International Communist Party (“Bordigist”), No. 58,
“La gauche marxiste d’Italie et le mouvement communiste
internationale”. The same issue also reproduces a series of articles published
in 1920 in Il Soviet concerning
24. Structure économique et sociale de la
Russie d’aujord’hui, L’Oubli, 1975.
25. Invariance, supplement to No. 2 (n.d.),
with a postscript by D. Authier, where one can read: the 1920 Program and the Appeal to the German Proletariat of the
KAPD; the KAPD’s interventions in the 3rd Congress of the CI; the Program
of the AAUD and extracts from its Guidelines;
the AAUD-E’s Guidelines;
Rühle’s The Revolution is Not
a Party Matter; and an extract from the Guidelines
of the KAI. See Part Two of this book, below, for English translations of these
AAUD, AAUD-E and KAI texts. English translations of the interventions of the
KAPD delegation in the 3rd Congress of the CI may be viewed at Wage Slave X’s Revolutionary
Anti-Capitalist Homepage website. An English translation of the Program of
the KAPD is available at the website of the International Communist Current (www.internationalism.org).
Rühle’s famous text has been posted in English translation on
several websites and is readily available.
26. Conseils ouvriers en Allemagne 1917-21,
Vroutsch, Serie La Marge, No. 9-11, 1973, which contains: Le mouvement des conseils en Allemagne, (ICO, No. 101); Anton Pannekoek, by Mattick (Lénine philosophe, Spartacus,
1970); Karl Korsch, by Mattick
(Cahiers de l’ISEA, No. 140); Otto
Rühle, by Mattick (Cahiers du
communisme des conseils, No. 2); as well as Landauer et Mühsam, essais de biographies, Notes sur la
République des conseils de Bavière, Les conseils ouvriers en
Alsace. In English, see: “Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960)”, by Paul
Mattick (in Pannekoek’s Lenin as
Philosopher, Merlin Press,
27. Marx: Oeuvres, Gallimard, Vol. II, 1968, p. 81.
28. For
the period as a whole, we recommend the bibliographies of The German Left… and those of the excellent book by H.
Gruber, International Communism in the
Era of Lenin,
Capitalism and the Proletariat
In 1914,
The ratio of constant to
variable capital was higher in
|
|
|
|
|
|
Year |
% |
% |
% |
|
1910 |
8 |
14 |
6 |
|
1920 |
42 |
43 |
12 |
|
1930 |
24 |
22 |
7 |
Only the survival of these organizations,
which had become autonomous in relation to the proletariat, gave any real force
to the persistence of what has been called the “reformist spirit”
which still held sway over the majority of the German proletariat after 1918.
Between 1871 and 1913, real per capita income doubled in
It was the relatively most
modern characteristics of German capitalism which provided the conditions most
conducive to the success of the proletarian revolution, and which made
Another consequence of
Prior to the war, this mass
of unskilled workers did not form part of the German trade unions, which had
between two and three million members. There were two parallel trade union
organizations. The socialist Zentrale,
by far the larger of the two, brought together various “free trade
unions” in a federation known in 1918-1919 as the ADGB (General
Federation of German Trade Unions). The other federation, the
anarchosyndicalist or revolutionary syndicalist Zentrale, the FVDG (Federation of Free German Trade Unions), became
the FAUD at the end of 1919 with the entry of numerous recently-created factory
organizations (see Chapter 9). Before 1914, the sector which provided the basis
for both Zentrales was composed of
workers in the skilled trades: the FVDG was largely based among the
construction workers.
The OS, on the other hand, together with the “revolutionary shop
stewards” who were still members of the trade unions (see Chapter 4),
created the “factory organizations” during the war, and later
formed the autonomous “left” radical organizations of the
proletariat: the AAUs (General Workers Unions). The trade unions could no
longer ignore this majority of the proletariat, even though only the most
radical minority of the OS joined the
AAU. The skilled workers, previously reticent about admitting unskilled workers
into the trade unions, welcomed them after 1919. The trade unions, which in
fact adopted an organizational structure based on factory and industry, soon
had nine million members. This development was also encouraged by pressure from
capitalists who refused to enter into contracts with workers who were not
members of the trade unions (see the KAPD Program).
The enormous growth of the
trade unions proves that, despite the strength of its radical currents, the
German proletariat was still, taken as a whole, reformist. One cannot speak of
a labor aristocracy except in the case of a few sectors (generally the skilled,
and some others as a result of their particular situations) which defended
certain privileges against the other more numerous sectors (today such a
division exists on an international scale). But even the most privileged
sectors of the proletariat can become seeds of revolution if capital is
compelled to submit their privileges to examination; just as, conversely, the
other non-privileged sectors are not permanently compelled to be revolutionary,
and it cannot be said that when they act in a reformist manner they do so
because they are manipulated by corrupt or bribed elements. One cannot be
manipulated for decades unless one is effectively manipulable. In his pamphlet
on imperialism, Gorter treated all proletarians, without distinction, as
“lackeys”. These sectors benefited from the super-profits obtained
by capital thanks to its favorable or dominant position in the world market.
One cannot speak of a “minority” within the German proletariat
except to designate the minority of revolutionaries
confronting the workers as a whole.
Understood as a minority
which lives at the expense of the workers movement (“bureaucrats”
of the party, the trade unions, the cooperatives, etc.), the labor aristocracy
is a definite sociological reality. But its activities do not explain
everything.8 Although materially favored, certain sectors can behave
in the most radical fashion, since economic determination is not only a
question of wages. During the war, a large number of metal workers were
supporters of peace. One cannot refer to the “economy”, or the
“spirit”, but only to the totality of real relations. As long as
the war seemed inevitable, the mobilized worker supported it and actively
participated in it, since the solidarity of the trenches was the only tangible
reality remaining to him. The worker who was still at his workbench, often due
to his skilled status, and, consequently, because he belonged to a privileged
category, was subjected to more difficult working conditions and rebelled
against the war, which for him was not so much an experienced reality as a
threat: he might be mobilized.
The organization of workers
into unions (unionen, in German; not to be confused with the
“unions” of the English-speaking world, whose counterparts in this
text shall be referred to on all occasions as “trade
unions”—tr. note) or
councils, formed especially during the extensive mass strike movement,
corresponds to the transition from the “tool-machine phase” to the
“specialized machinery phase”9: an epoch during which
the trade unions passed from reformism (although not yet integrated into the
State), to systematic collaboration, and capital passed from surrounding life,
to totally penetrating life. At this juncture the proletariat made the
workplace the site of its attempt to achieve unity because the workplace was
not yet totally conquered by capital.10 Many workers still worked on
tool-machines. They were trained within the old trade union framework, and
demonstrated the results of this training in the factories where they worked,
where they preserved a relative autonomy and carried out many tasks. This stage
of large-scale mechanized industry
progressively yielded—later, with the war and then during the twenties,
at an accelerated pace—to the stage of the OS and of the scientific organization of labor. There is no rupture
between these two mutually interconnected periods; the struggles which
developed immediately after the war, however, comprised the meeting point of
the two phases.11 In the United States and Canada, within a more
modern capitalism, the most intense proletarian movement arose among the OS (who were often recent immigrants)
who tried to unite in the IWW (see Chapter 9). The councils constituted an
attempt on the part of the proletarians to form autonomous groups: they were forced
to do so; there was no other way to carry out any kind of struggle, even a
simple reformist struggle. In their collaboration with the bourgeoisie, the
trade unions went so far as to give their approval to the prohibition of
strikes, and even prohibited them themselves; the councils were therefore above
all compelled to undertake the tasks which the trade unions no longer
fulfilled. Their form (organization by factory, uniting organized and
unorganized workers) was better-adapted for an effective reformist struggle
against modern capitalism. But the control of the entire productive apparatus
by workers councils is in no way revolutionary if the workers limit themselves
to administering what has fallen into their hands in the same way as before, or
even better, with greater efficiency than before. Capitalist society, although
managed by the workers themselves, would still be capitalist.
The
The
The recent character of
The Inconclusive Bourgeois Revolution
The German bourgeoisie had a
seminal weak point whose causes were summarized by Marx.20 The
bourgeoisie received the framework for its later development (the Reich) from
the hands of the Prussian military-bureaucratic apparatus, upon which it was
utterly dependent for its survival. Hence the contradictory coexistence of a
capitalism which was highly-developed for its epoch and a bourgeoisie which was
economically powerful but acted within the confines of a political form
inherited from the end of the Middle Ages: an absolute bureaucratic monarchy,
alongside a powerless parliament.
Similarly, the German
bourgeoisie would receive democracy not from the hands of its own class but
from those of another. It was the proletariat which would carry the democratic
revolution of 1918 to victory. Until June 1920, the first governments of the
new democratic and parliamentary
The struggle for democracy
was one of the principle components of the SPD. The need for a democratic transformation
of the
1. Bry: Wages in
2. Ibid., Chapter 6, pp. 266-322.
3. Ibid., pp. 74-75.
4. Marks:
Journal of Modern History, September
1939, “The Sources of Reformism in the Social-Democratic Party of
5. Reference
is made to Capital, which we cannot
summarize here.
6. Fixed
capital: capital which does not circulate in the sense of the
“circulation” of capital. A fleet is fixed capital. See Vol. II.
7. Marx:
Fondements de la critique de
l’économie politique, Anthropos, 1968, Vol. II, p. 215.
Dauvé: Communisme et
“question russe”, SET-Tête de Feuilles, 1972, pp. 162-71;
and Le mouvement communiste, Champ
Libre, 1972.
8. For
a critique of the thesis of the “labor aristocracy”, see T. Cliff: Les racines économiques du
réformisme, photocopy,
9. Lefranc:
Histoire du travail et des travailleurs,
Flammarion, 1957, pp. 474-76.
10. Invariance, No. 6.
11. Lutte de classes, September-October
1974, “Les rapports sociaux communistes”.
12. In
his Imperialism… Lenin referred
to the considerable number of immigrants employed in all the industrial
countries of the epoch.
13. Engels:
La guerre des paysans; N. Cohn: Les fanatiques de l’apocalypse,
July 1962 (in English: The Pursuit of the
Millenium, revised and expanded edition, Oxford University Press, New York,
1970); see, also, Debord’s critique of the latter in La société du spectacle, Champ Libre, 1971, pp. 93-94
(Thesis 38). In English, The Society of
the Spectacle, Zone Books,
14. For
a critique of Marx’s positions in 1848, see Korsch: Marxisme et contre-révolution, Seuil, 1975.
15. The
Länder are the various states
which comprise
16. R.
Comfort: Revolutionary
17. PC, No. 58, p. 120.
18. Sternberg: Le conflit du siècle, Seuil,
1958, p. 186.
19. Comfort,
Chapter III.
20. Textes 1842-47, Spartacus, 1970.
21. See
Le Roi de Prusse et la réforme
sociale, in Textes 1842-47, and Invariance, No. 10. In English, see
“Critical Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social
Reform. By a Prussian’”, in Karl
Marx: Early Writings, tr. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, Penguin
Books,
Pannekoek was Dutch, and his
native country’s small size helped him to view things from an
international perspective. In Germany, on the other hand, the SPD totally
dominated the entire political horizon of the various tendencies which claimed
to be Marxist, including, among others, the most radical elements around Rosa
Luxemburg.5 Overawed by the power of the “party”, the
left—which represented approximately 15% of the SPD—having
originated in a critique of the reformist practice of the leadership of the party in all fields, and never abandoning the
labor of Sisyphus of trying to unseat that leadership, did not take the
decisive step toward schism. The left in its entirety would wait until it would
be excluded from the party, after 1914, to forge its own organizations. In
addition, there were also, prior to 1914, “revisionist” (Bernstein)
and “orthodox” (Kautsky) tendencies: the latter was apparently the
majority faction. But it soon became clear, after
It is necessary to closely
examine the positions and activities of Rosa Luxemburg during the revolutionary
period as well as the previous years. Because she was heavily criticized by the
Leninists, and because she criticized Lenin and the Bolsheviks both long before
as well as during the 1917 revolution, proletarian revolutionaries often tend
to make her the spokesperson and to consider her as the theoretician (and as a model of practice while she was alive)
of the authentically revolutionary current. This opinion was nourished by the
left factions themselves, which soon overlooked the fact that they had opposed
her at the KPD’s founding congress. The clarification of the history of
the communist left in
Luxemburg’s critique of
Lenin’s organizational fetishism (see Organizational
Questions of Russian Social Democracy) was one aspect of her critique of
workers organizations. The basis of her critique was still more clearly
expounded in The Mass Strike, Party and
Trade Unions: the organizations, and particularly their leaderships,
necessarily followed in the wake of the spontaneous movements of the
proletariat, and usually even tried to restrain these movements. This was in
absolute conformity with what can normally be verified with respect to the
relation between the established organizations of the working class and the
movements of the working class (whether or not they lead to revolutions).
Luxemburg correctly saw this as inevitable, but did not for that reason cease
to view the parties, trade unions, etc., which were formed in the non-revolutionary
period and which embraced large sectors of the proletariat, as organizations
which are perhaps bad, but ultimately are still class organizations, which the
proletariat must rejuvenate during the revolution. This is why she opposed the
Dutch Left, which split from the reformist Dutch party (see Chapter 3), as well
as the German “left radicals”, instead calling upon the masses to
“reconquer” their organization (the SPD). According to her, one
must not separate oneself from the masses even when they follow the
“worst” workers party.
Her position was based on two
theses which had proven to be increasingly false: first, that the
“workers” organizations only possess a relative autonomy in respect
to the workers movement; and second, “the masses” are, at bottom,
revolutionary (or at least never counterrevolutionary).
The German Revolution has
clearly proven what various “lefts” had intuited: the workers
parties had acquired so much autonomy (in respect to the revolutionary
movement, but not to capital) that they were the most skilled architects of the
counterrevolution; in this manner, the revolutionary proletariat was defeated
by the counterrevolutionary proletariat.
Luxemburg wanted to establish
a compromise between these two elements. The Bolsheviks branded her position as
centrist at the Zimmerwald Conference on the war and social democracy (see
Chapter 4); and her position was in fact basically centrist. It corresponded
perfectly with that sector of the workers movement in Germany, organized by the
“shop stewards” during the war, which attempted to achieve positive
results in the reformist struggle, with “real” material benefits
and policies (in opposition to the manifest sabotage of all actions by the
trade unions and the social democrats). They wanted to return to social
democracy’s origins without advancing towards communism. They did not
want revolution.
The Luxemburgian critique of
organizational fetishism was carried out in the name of the fetishism of the
masses; her critique of “isolation” (in the case of the Dutch Left
prior to 1914) was carried out in the name of the fetishism of action. This
explains why she remained, until her death, on the side of the masses in the
insurrection of January 1919, whose failure she had nonetheless predicted. Her
attitude recalls the fetishism of the people among the great bourgeois
revolutionaries, but in the era of the proletariat.
August 1914 was the
consequence of a long evolution. The anarchist movement has never ceased to
refer to it, and has all too hastily viewed it as the failure of
“Marxism”, since there were many “government
anarchists” (following Malatesta’s formulation) who defended the
sacred union on this or that side. We shall cite only the cases of Kropotkin and
J. Guillaume. Anarchism has in particular placed much more emphasis on the
organizational roots of the failure of the Second International than on its
real causes. Contrary to what Marx and Engels said, the revolutionary movement
underwent a “real” split after the Commune.6
“Anarchism” and “Marxism” cannot explain either of the
two, since the Marxist movement preserved and developed certain aspects which
proved useful in 1914 (revolutionary defeatism). This did not prevent both of
them, however, from retaining remnants of the communist perspective, but only
in the form of parts removed from a totality, which they could not grasp
intellectually because the proletariat no longer grasped it practically. The
notion of community had become weakened and the “socialists” began
to place all their hopes in the State: socialization was thus identified with
nationalization or municipal ownership. Certain “anarchists” still
persisted in upholding an old tradition involving the search for community, but
did not clarify the problem of class, oscillating between reformism and savage
revolts. In their activity they, too, made the revolution a question of organization, of the proper formula
which would allow emancipation. Some Marxists also preserved the perspective of
community, although in a contradictory way. In his description of the future
society, Bebel7 heralded the disappearance of value, but not of the
social regulation of the production of goods through necessary labor time, which is the very origin of value.8
Kautsky clearly foresaw the end of the law of value . . . but preserved wages
and prices. The transformation was presented as a series of governmental
measures instituted by the “
It would be useless to
denounce a “collapse”, as Lenin did, who confused the issue with his
talk of “opportunism”. As Engels defined it, the notion of
opportunism (rehabilitated by Lenin) turned reality on its head. Engels equated
opportunism with an emphasis on day-to-day activity and bread-and-butter
issues, and not with the real social fact of social democracy organizing labor
in opposition to and in partnership
with capital. This fits in with his superficial analysis of the workers
movement of his era, which would later be employed by Lenin and the CI in their
analyses of the socialist movement.
In reality, if one wants to
speak of opportunism, one would have to accuse the whole proletariat (and it is
evidently a matter for accusation, since opportunism is a moral notion) of
being opportunist throughout the entire epoch. The workers fought for immediate
advantages because the flourishing condition of capitalism allowed them to do
so. This reformist foundation was transformed, in certain situations, into its
opposite: revolutionary action, whether because the proletariat’s
situation became unendurable, or because society’s rulers themselves
descended into crisis, or, as in the 19th century, due to the
impetus of bourgeois revolutions; there is no hard and fast line between
revolution and reformism; there is an irremediable opposition between the
petrified forms of reformism (which are often even unsuitable for an
“honest reformism”) and revolutionary forms of organization; there
is a bloody struggle between the proletariat which remains reformist and the
proletariat which becomes revolutionary, but to oppose the proletariat (which
“is revolutionary or does not exist”) on one side, to the working
class, “mere variable capital”, on the other, pertains to the realm
of metaphysics.
In their early days, social
democracy and the German trade unions comprised the organization of this
spontaneous reformist struggle of the German proletariat, which demonstrated
its lack of subversive spirit by the very fact of separating its political and
economic struggles in distinct organizations. Soon, however, a line was drawn
between the workers organizations and the workers movement per se: this became clear when the workers movement developed
various forms of action which opposed the traditional organizations during the
wildcat strikes of the first years of the 20th century; this
development would become yet more pronounced with the creation of the
“shop stewards” networks during the war. Henceforth, the
traditional workers organizations, the SPD and the trade unions, had their own
logic and their own function in the existing society: this is what must be
understood (as the Dutch did so well, splitting from the SDAP before 1910); the
grave reproach of “opportunism” is nothing but an empty phrase: its
employment reveals the bad conscience of the organization that feeds on the
energy of the proletariat, which is what social democracy had become.
It is, then, impossible for
revolutionaries to be in workers organizations (like Engels) or to try to deal
with them (like Lenin), so as to guide their transformation (Engels) or to
unmask them (Lenin). These organizations cannot be transformed because they
have their own nature, nor can they be unmasked, because, while they may be
susceptible to the reproach of being somewhat lax in the reformist struggle,
they cannot be held accountable for their lack of revolutionary spirit, since
the workers are reformist anyway. In which case, the only way to conquer what
one may call the workers movement—organizations which have become
autonomous of the workers—is, wherever possible, to decisively attack it,
even if this attack is carried out by a minority.
All talk of
“opportunism” assumed that the social democratic party was really
founded upon principles which it betrayed in its political activities. In
reality, these principles had never been more than a smokescreen. Twenty years
of denunciations of the always-renewed opportunism of a party which was not
actually what it had initially proposed itself to be at its first congresses
and which had revealed a nature which had nothing to do with the organization
of revolutionary proletarians, were of no significance at all. The party had
become an established body within the society which it had theoretically
claimed had to be completely transformed. It preferred the status quo, its
preservation, against the revolution (or even against the simple autonomous
actions of the workers in their attempts to obtain reforms) which could, in
case it failed, threaten the integrity of the organization and the extremely
privileged social situation of its functionaries. It is in relation to this
real function and these real principles behind its activity that the acts of
social democracy must be judged in advance.
Finally, one cannot accuse a
party of being opportunist unless one assumes that it is actually a
revolutionary party which has ceased to be revolutionary as a result of its
resort to certain easy measures to attain its goal, measures which in fact will
by no means allow the goal to be reached. Such a reproach can only be valid for
a short time. The party either rapidly moves towards a form of activity which
is in conformity with its goal and its principles (thus showing that it had
only undergone a momentary and non-essential deviation, connected, for example,
to its temporary domination by leaders who are effectively strangers to the
revolutionary movement)—this case is very rare; it has probably never
happened and only presents the obverse of a false symmetry—or else its
first deviations are confirmed by others, which verifies that the party was in
no way revolutionary, that its nature and its goal are power for itself, for
its leaders, and that in any event, what is most important for it is its own
preservation and consequently that of the existing order. In this case the
reproach of opportunism must be abandoned, since it still implies a certain
community with those against whom it is directed. This is why Gorter’s
resort to this term in applying it to the Dutch Communist Party in 1919 is
fully justified. The party had been undergoing a critical period of development
for several years, and Gorter thought that it still had a healthy nucleus; as
he said: “We hope that these leaders might adopt a better tactic.”
In regard to social democracy this judgment of a politics which was even more
rightist was disseminated for decades. Social democracy had assumed the role of
the long-term defense of the interests of capital. One of the merits of the
German Left would be that of showing that the Second International had
fulfilled its role, that it had not “failed”, and in this respect
the German Left was more advanced than the Italian Left. Without going so far,
numerous Anglo-Saxon historians emphasize the continuity of social democracy,
whereas leftist historians highlight the “rupture” of 1914. In
The Era of 1848
The Brockhaus Encyclopedia of
1846 notes that the term proletariat
“has recently been applied to the lowest social layers with the least
property.”11 Hegel had already used it in 1821 to designate
those who were not capable of supporting themselves and who had fallen into
dependence upon others. The most active categories of the working class during
this period were the master craftsmen, skilled workers and apprentices (who
together comprised 10% of the population), although the decline in craft-based
trades brought with it a reduction in the number of master craftsmen. Skilled
workers still comprised a minority in the factories. The formation of the
working class is a process of social disintegration. Torn from an ancient mode
of existence, the worker clung to that existence and found there part of the
energy needed to rebel against his new conditions.12 The image of
the golden, pre-“bureaucratic” age of the workers movement, where
the worker launched wildcat strikes free from any noxious constraints, is as
unreal as that of a brutalized and inert proletariat. Modern proletarian
movements were born during this transitional period, and modern theoretical
communism is their most inclusive and universal expression. Social democracy,
and particularly the German Social Democracy, would be born of the failure and
demise of this early movement, from which it would derive its theory as an
ideology without making it the theory of its effective practice.13 The proletariat is not and never was pure
negativity. Otherwise, one could never understand how, even in that epoch,
conservative forces could prevent its rebellion and integrate it, nor could one
form a comprehensive vision of the whole era which could explain why there was
no revolution in 1918-1921.
German workers, at that time
a small minority of the population, found it very difficult to link their
actions to those of the agricultural population, who were divided into two
large distinct sectors in the middle of the 19th century: the
farmers of the north and the southwest, where land ownership was relatively
dispersed, and the farm laborers of the east (1.5 million, of whom one-third
were Poles), where serfdom was abolished, but who were still dependents of the
landowners. At the end of the 18th century,
The prohibition of workers
associations between 1731 and 1840 only partially destroyed the old solidarity
of the medieval guilds. For the
workers, German backwardness was not just a negative factor; it also allowed
for the survival of collective forms of action. Mutual aid funds for the
unemployed and invalids among the skilled workers were becoming more tolerated:
among, for example, the printers concentrated in
At the beginning of the 19th
century, a Rhinelander, L. Gall, attributed the source of wealth to labor:
“everything which ennobles and perpetuates life exists as a result of labor, but it is nonetheless precisely
the class of laborers which suffers
from the scarcity of what it has itself created.”16 The
Silesian riots of June 1844, which were discussed by the whole revolutionary
movement of the epoch, occasioned the celebrated debate between A. Ruge and
Marx.17 Silesian industry had benefited from the Continental
blockade, but the weavers were being decimated by the development of
productivity. After the mistreatment of a weaver, some of the houses of the
merchants were destroyed and the riot was brought to an end by means of a
compromise imposed upon the weavers by military intervention, which caused
several fatalities. The region’s workers suffered from a rise in the
price of necessities between 1846 and 1847, which led to the deaths of up to
20% of the population in certain localities. This riot was the
Marx and Engels frequently
insisted on the fact that theory (the “German ideology”, but also
revolutionary theory) had developed so easily in
The liberal bourgeoisie often
supported the workers associations, about which the Jewish typographer S. Born
said: “We want a club so we can be men.” It was not rare for the
municipality to pay the clubs’ lecturers. When these associations too
plainly declared themselves against the established order, the bourgeoisie
withdrew their assistance; sometimes they were prohibited. This development
coincided, around 1844-1845, with growing interest in the “social
question”, as is verified by numerous texts from that time. Engels
recalled that interest in communism was as common among the bourgeoisie as it
was among the proletarians, and related that numerous members of the liberal
professions and even of the bourgeoisie attended lectures on communism.
Understanding that the creation of wealth through labor engendered the creation
of misery among the workers, the bourgeoisie tried to prevent the resolution of
this contradiction from assuming an explosive form, and studied the subversive
movement and its theoretical expressions in order to take action in regard to
social conditions. The Essence of Money
by M. Hess criticized the existence of labor power as a commodity, which had been accepted by Kant and Hegel: “If men
could not be sold, they would not be worth even one penny, since they have no
value unless they sell themselves or put themselves out to hire.”22
The critique of the world of commodities would be pursued by Marx. It is
possible that no more than five or ten thousand people effectively participated
in these “debates” and this “organization”, but their
role would be important in the following years. In 1848-1849, The New Rhineland Gazette had a print
run of 6,000, a considerable number for that era.
However, even though the
barricades of March 1848 forced the Prussian army to evacuate
“This is how the only
occasion offered by the history of the working class of the 19th
century for an action in common between skilled artisans and a much greater
number of more radical and more dispossessed men, with the goal of jointly
confronting the authority of the state, was not taken advantage of.”23
This historian even went so
far as to compare the arrest of Schlöffel (a radical student associated
with unskilled workers) to the assassination of Luxemburg and Liebknecht in
January 1919. Born’s group, representing the “highest layer of the
working class”, was the precursor of the SPD: the defeat of the more
proletarianized elements, in the sense in which Marx employed the term24,
coincided with the beginnings of the organization of the more privileged and
consequently more moderate elements, who appealed especially to the State, thus
presaging Lassalle (see below). It is clear that the journals published later,
in 1849, which were associated with Born, publicized the theme of production
associations supported by public funds.
After the defeat of April
1848, this movement was incapable of promoting the “dual”
revolution (bourgeois and proletarian) advocated by the communists.25
The armed confrontations in which the workers formed a large part of the
democratic camp had little chance of victory after the bourgeoisie of western
In
The effects of this defeat on
the German and European communist movements have been underestimated. The
“lessons” of the counterrevolution were taken into account by the
moderates as well as by the revolutionaries. While the years 1840-1850
coincided with a critique of private property, the defeat of 1848-1849
accentuated the tendency to seek improvements within capitalism. The old
traditions inherited from the guilds had transmitted the experience of
collective struggle to modern proletarians: the succeeding phase would see the
initiation of efforts to achieve a community of wage labor within existing
society with its own defense mechanisms and values recognized by the State.
In 1848-1850, the Brotherhood
(Verbrüderung) led by Born
counted almost 40,000 members and dedicated its efforts to promoting a
collectivist system. As Born stated in a letter to Marx in 1848, it was
necessary to avoid “futile insurrections”; the majority of workers
must be won over and the class must be unified within capital.29 This reformism was obviously condemned
to failure. It was unrealistic to want to organize a reformism parallel to
capitalism in rival units of production (cooperatives). This perspective was
the craftsman’s dream of adapting to technological progress without
destroying capital, thereby preventing artisans from becoming either
proletarians or small capitalist businessmen. The SPD, with the assistance of
the trade unions, would on the other hand construct a modern reformism, consonant with industrial development, not
outside of but within large industry. Lassalle appeared to be the point of
intersection between the two phases, combining labor organization and
cooperation.
In effect, the reaction which
followed 1848-1849 was political: on the economic plane, it could only survive
by adopting the program of its adversary (the bourgeoisie). In order to
consolidate its hegemony, the supposedly feudal
“Marxism” and Lassallism
For anyone who invokes
“Marxism”, especially in
Lassalle made an incomplete
attempt, sealed by an explicit pact (see his letters), to accomplish what
social democracy would later realize by concluding an implicit agreement with
capital. Lassalle was a precursor; for the workers, against the bourgeoisie,
and with the assistance of the State. In this sense, he was also a
prefiguration of 1918-1919 and national socialism. Lassallism could not succeed
because it remained tied to the utopia of the cooperatives which were to have
constituted a counterweight—but always with the help of the
State—to the industrial power of capital, which was impossible. The SPD
would strip Lassallism of these absurdities in order to preserve its essential
nucleus: Lassalle had helped German society to frame the question of what place
the workers should assume within it.
Although it was reformist,
the ADAV, founded in 1863, faced the hostility of the factory owners and the
police in (local) social conflicts, despite the pact sealed by the
Lassalle-Bismarck summit. Since he believed in the possibility of establishing
production cooperatives, Lassalle could all the more easily
“discover” the theory of the iron law of wages, which holds that
wages must always decline to a minimum due to the play of economic mechanisms,
no matter what the organized workers do. This theory allowed him to justify his
indifference, not to say hostility, to the trade unions. That such a doctrine
suited his politics is the least that one could say. His successor as leader of
the ADAV, Schweitzer, followed the same path, but was compelled to recant after
1868 under pressure from ADAV members and the reform movements. He then
organized a conference said to represent 140,000 workers, but this number
rapidly declined and was reduced to 10,000 in 1870.34
Alongside the party linked to
Marx and Engels, the Social Democratic Workers Party (SDAP), which was founded
in 1869, there was the offshoot of an organization created in 1863, the League
of German Workers Clubs (VDA), which from its inception had opposed Lassallism
in regard to the question of German unification.35 The ADAV
supported unification under Prussian leadership, and could be said to have sold
its support to the most powerful German state in exchange for a special law
concerning labor and some advantages within the unified Germany of the future.
The SDAP, however, proclaimed its support for a democratic unification without
Prussian hegemony. The social composition of the ADAV was, at least initially,
more working class than that of the SDAP, which happily directed its message
towards the anti-Prussian democrats as well as militant workers. The
declarations of Bebel and Liebknecht seem to grant a place of honor to the
resistance against Prussian dominance, even more than to the problems of
socialism. It cannot be said that the SDAP represented the class struggle and
Marxism against the class collaboration of the ADAV. The SDAP was quite
ambiguous, so much so that, until about 1880, support for the socialist and
workers movement was provided above all by artisans threatened by
industrialization. The VDA was “a rather weak federation of local
clubs”, while the ADAV was, from its very inception, highly centralized.
Two political organizations were linked to the VDA: the German Party (1865), a
very weak democratic group, and the
Saxon Peoples Party (1866), primarily composed of workers. This dualism would
persist in the SPD. Marx was much more aware of the Lassallian danger than of
the distance separating the SDAP from communism. He was convinced that the SDAP
would evolve in a revolutionary direction; as for the ADAV, its large
membership led him to provisionally take it into consideration before attacking
it in earnest. On
Similarly, when the SDAP
convened its 1869 Congress in Eisenach, claiming to embrace 14,000 workers, its
program, when subjected to careful examination, was by no means
“Marxist”.39 The Lassallian vestiges with which it was
still impregnated (“Free Peoples State”, “the entire product
of labor”, “public credit for production cooperatives”) were
the same ones which Marx would criticize six years later when the Party would
fuse with the Lassallians at Gotha. It is impossible to oppose
“Lassallism” to “Marxism”, even while recognizing that the
latter had provisionally capitulated to the former in 1875. Its alleged
affiliation later betrayed by the SPD never existed. The Eisenach Program is,
furthermore, fully within the democratic tradition: demands for
“political freedom” and a “democratic state”. The
influence of the Peoples Party was such that one of its leaders, Sonnemann, a
left liberal, persuaded Bebel to adopt the name “Socialist Democratic
Party”, thus leaving the word “worker” out of the
party’s title. When Bebel proposed that the word “worker” be
included in the name of the party he was defeated by the former followers of
Lassalle.40 In this sense, the Lassallians were the purest
representatives of a specifically, yet limited (see below) working class
reformism, in contrast to the “Marxists” who obtained all their inspiration
and their power from the democratic movement and from the fear of the liberal
bourgeoisie in the non-Prussian states of being dominated by Prussia. The SPD
would later combine Statism and democracy, but this dualism would again be
manifested in the conflict between an extreme right in favor of State power and
a liberal right (Bernstein).
Parliamentary activity soon
occupied a preponderant place within the new party. Liebknecht, of course,
vehemently declared in 1870: “The Reichstag does not make history and is
content with performing a comedy; its members say and do what the director
tells them. Should we, therefore, make the Reichstag the center of our
activities. . . ? If revolutionaries were not so inept and if the government
did not control the elections, it would be possible.”41 But he
did not reject the principle of parliamentarism and only regretted that it
played its democratic role so poorly.
The SDAP was a section of the
IWA, but, as Engels wrote to Cuno on
On
Bebel and Liebknecht did not
have an international point of view, and in this respect they were like
everyone else. Their attitude, even when it coincided with Marx’s
viewpoint, derived not from international but from national considerations. For
them, it was a matter of making alliances with certain parties and social
groups in
The SPD would speak of a victory
over Lassallism: but which elements of Marxism emerged victorious? Above all,
the idea of the ultimate victory of socialism, and of the need for an
independent political workers organization. But Lassalle was not opposed to
these things. Believing in a final victory is not in itself revolutionary: if
the tasks of the communist revolution are not clarified, the
“transition” to socialism could appear to be a gradual evolution. Lassallism was integrated into the workers
movement. In their pure form, the specific contributions of Bebel, Liebknecht
and Lassalle each represented a stereotyped tendency from the beginnings of the
movement, and fuse when capital distracts the working class. Many signs testify
to the persistence of Lassallism until the beginning of the 20th
century. One can even speak of an official Lassalle cult. Liebknecht, in
publishing an article by Engels in 1868, deleted the passages critical of
Lassalle. In his famous pamphlet Our
Goals (1870), Bebel makes few allusions to the IWA, but often quotes
Lassalle and employs his arguments. Marx often complained that the Lassallians
simultaneously plagiarized and distorted his theories. Marx’s thought was
never understood for what it really was. It was always disseminated through a
filter, that of Lassalle, in an epoch when Marx’s writings were not
widely circulated, and later through the official Social Democratic screen.
Militants’ correspondence testifies, at least until the end of the
century, to a lack of awareness of the Communist
Manifesto. In 1872, the cover of a Party publication reproduced two
photographs, of Marx and Lassalle, flanking that of Liebknecht. The History of Social Democracy, a
semi-official work written by Mehring, a theoretician of the left, is
nonetheless as favorable to Lassalle as to Marx.46 The attack
against Lassalle during the 1870s derived primarily from the (self-avowed)
anti-Marxist Dühring. Lassalle’s real popularity would persist (even
outside the Party) until the War: other idols would then replace him. It is pure
illusion to believe that the polemics of the epoch revolved around Marx and
were settled in his favor. The progressive penetration of theoretical communism
is a legend. Upon Liebknecht’s death (1900), it was Bebel who would lead
the Party until 1913. His polemics were of little importance: above all, he
wanted to preserve the organization, that is, the one which would prepare the
future (ultimately a capitalist future) of Social Democracy.47
Theory became simply an allusive reference, useful or annoying, depending on
the circumstances. The Marx-Engels correspondence, published in 1913, was
carefully abridged by V. Adler, Bernstein and Bebel, with particular attention
to those passages dealing with Lassalle and Liebknecht, whom Marx abused on
several occasions.48 The movement needed heroes. Mehring denounced
this maneuver, and published some of the expurgated passages before the
book’s release, although he claimed in 1915 that the book had presented
the essentials of Marx and Engels’ correspondence. Riazanov would later
guarantee this falsification, but would then regret having done so.
The SDAP combined with the
ADAV in 1875 at the Gotha Congress to form the Socialist Workers Party, making
many concessions to Lassallism, which were severely criticized by Marx. The
legend would have it that this deviation was to be corrected by the creation,
in 1890, of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), whose Marxist Erfurt
Program, written by Kautsky, would be the proof of revolutionary victory. Of
course, Marx expressed vigorous reservations concerning the name itself:
“What a name: Sozialdemokrat.
Why not frankly call it the Proletarian?”,
Engels wrote to Marx on
After
Engels harbored vast
illusions when he wrote to Lafargue on
Engels mistakenly assimilated
universal suffrage with the “index which allows one to measure the
maturity of the working class. It can only be that, and will never be anything
but that in today’s State”.54 The representative system
is much more than that and as capital blocks any other kind of community not
derived from the capital relation it becomes correspondingly more important.
Elections and political life become one of the privileged sites in which one
rediscovers a sense of community. Parliamentarism is not merely a “barometer
of class struggle”: it does not limit itself to measuring, it deforms
what it measures, and itself intervenes with all of its weight in the
“class struggle” in order to bring the latter to an end. It is not
enough to say that parliamentarism was not revolutionary after 191455: one must also see its nefarious role even
before 1914, and admit that Marx, Engels and after them almost the entire left
wing of the Second International did not take this into account.
Engels’ tactic also
rests upon the idea that universal suffrage would not be easily granted in
Reformism and the Radical Response prior to 1914
It would be an excessive
distortion of the facts to consider the SPD’s evolution until the end of
the 19th century from the perspective of the
“revisionist” dispute which began around 1890 involving Bernstein,
the only honest reformist, or Vollmar, the Bavarian socialist. The latter, a
militant in a largely agricultural, only slightly industrialized region,
advocated doctrinal softening and flexibility in electoral tactics in order not
to alienate the peasants and middle classes. This was not the more important
sort of revisionism from the capitalist point of view. In reality, the most
dangerous reformism (for the revolution) came from the workers (trade union)
leaders in the large industrial regions. These leaders applied the second
(reformist) part of the Erfurt Program, abandoning the measures enumerated in
the first part which can be summarized as follows: capitalist socialization of
wealth and production. This Program did not say that the privileged agent of
this evolution would be the State, but neither was anything clearly stated on
this topic, so the road was still open. Lassallian Statism again comes to the
fore, not to develop cooperatives, but to assure society’s
democratization. Since the years when
At first, from about 1869 to
1890, the trade unions were a means of recruitment for the Party, which was
illegal from 1872 to 1890. After 1890, the political and trade union
organizations enjoyed a situation of independent coexistence. In 1906, the
trade unions imposed their right to veto any important decision of the SPD.57
But their mutual evolution did not proceed without problems. Radical elements
often dominated local trade union coordinating bodies and local sections. The
latter, comparable to the departmental unions of the French CGT, frequently
opposed the emergence of a layer of permanent salaried officials, which took
place wherever trade unions existed. The radicals denounced tendencies towards
conciliation, and opposed collective bargaining. In 1896, a local section of
the
The growth of the trade
unions, which combined, in 1892, in the General Trade Union Commission, and
later in the ADGB in 1900, was accompanied by a growing rivalry with the SPD.
Like the Bavarians, the trade unions found the revolutionary ideology of the Party to be an obstacle
to their growth. The Party, on the other hand, needed this ideology to win over
those elements which more or less aspired to social change, as well as to
preserve its left wing. The trade unions supported the
“revisionists” (who loudly proclaimed what the Party was actually
doing), and the “orthodox” leaders forged a revolutionary image at
little expense, appearing to be defenders of the revolutionary tradition. There
was a struggle between these two organizations, whose interests were not
convergent: this disagreement would reappear in the
The bureaucratization of the
Party was also accompanied by a certain amount of resistance and only really
got underway after 1900.60 The most numerous permanent officials
were not in the Party, but in its satellite organizations: in 1914, there were
4,100 permanent officials in the SPD and the ADGB, but in 1912 there were 7,100
in workers cooperatives. The organization had to be organized: to sustain
workers activities, certain commercial enterprises were necessary. Auer had
said, in 1890: “the Party cannot live on dues; we need to make profits
from our Press.”61 A Saxon delegate to the 1894 Congress
denounced the capitalist nature of the Party: “There are enterprises
which employ between 50 and 100 workers. When these workers wanted to take the
First of May off from work, the social democratic management, among whom were
various orators who spoke at the rallies on the First of May, docked their
pay.”62 The Party had to be profitable.
One of the reasons adduced by
the German Left in favor of a purely working class organization was the
enormous weight acquired within the SPD by certain rural groups or small cities
which played a role in the Party which was totally disproportionate to their
real importance.63 The middle classes of medium-sized and even some
small cities were over-represented within the Party’s organizational
apparatus and its leadership. In 1912, at the Party’s Congress in the
State of
“National
Socialism” was progressively confirmed as the dominant characteristic of
the SPD. Concerning
The socialist leaders
severely condemned the anti-militarism of some SPD members, thereby revealing
their patriotism. W. Liebknecht, in a debate with D. Nieuwenhuis in Zurich in
1893 (see Chapter 3), denied that one could “fight against the Moloch of
militarism by convincing isolated individuals, provoking puerile uprisings in
the barracks . . . which is false, but tirelessly advocated. We must establish
our doctrine in the army. When the masses become socialists, then the time of
militarism will have come to an end (prolonged applause)”.66
To the false “anarchist” radicalism then advocated by G.
Hervé, he opposed a gradualism which retained nothing of
“Marxism” but what he found useful, along with, among other things,
a partial critique of anarchism. An in-depth critique would have presupposed
the self-critique of
“Marxism” and the recognition of its crisis. At the 1906 Mannheim Congress, Bebel addressed the issue of
Belgian anti-militarism: “An insignificant country, whose army cannot
compare with Prussian military organization. The same thing is happening in
The socialist youth movement
was one of the focal points of opposition. It was not a creation of the Party.
Groups of young people formed around 1904-1906, sometimes with the assistance
of Party members.
From their inception, it was
perceived that the great mass movements of 1905 in
After the Hamburg Congress
(1908), the Left supported the youth movement and in turn received important
assistance from the youth movement. The position of the youth in the Party
became a touchstone of the conflict between revisionists and radicals. In
almost every place where a youth group existed, the Party section took its side
against the central Party apparatus. As in the question of war, everything
ended in compromise. The authority over the youth groups conceded to the local
sections allowed the youth groups to pursue their radicalism wherever the
sections favored them, even when the Party machine led by Ebert undertook to
control them. After 1911 the movement ebbed due to the actions of the State,
only to be reborn later during the war.
Behind the surface appearance
of adhering to principles, the right—rather than the leadership of the
Party—controlled the Party. The SPD added some pseudo-radical
declarations of principle to the programs of action proposed or imposed by the
trade unions. The “Party” structure was not the sole cause of the
SPD’s degeneration, which was promoted by the trade unions. The center
backed the right and made use of the left for doctrinal support (without any
impact on the policies it pursued), even referring to the left in its
anti-revisionist struggle. The existence of revolutionary tendencies within an
utterly reformist organization is not in itself a positive sign. These
tendencies served to provide the organization with a dynamic and credibility
for radical working class groups and in those situations where revolutionary ideology was necessary. As long as they
did not break with the organization, and as long as they did not understand
that they did not have to conquer or submit to the organization, but to destroy
it, these revolutionary tendencies strengthened the organization. Korsch would
later write that Luxemburg (and, elsewhere in the Second International, Lenin)
only attacked the theory but not the
practice of social democracy, thus strengthening it contrary to her own
intentions.69
In 1908 the Party’s
school, created in 1905 to train functionaries for the SPD and the ADGB, became
the target of revisionist attacks (by Eisner, among others), but continued to
be dominated by the Left (Luxemburg, Mehring). Its function was ambiguous. On
the one hand, it preserved a tradition of revolutionary theory and thus
prepared for the future. On the other hand, it preserved the idea of a party
which was still concerned with revolutionary theory. As for the trade unions,
they settled the matter by sending no more students to the Party’s
school.
In a letter to Kautsky dated
This situation was reversed
by the rise of German capitalism: “the golden chain to which the
capitalist has bound wage labor and which it never ceases to forge, has now
grown long enough to allow for a relaxation of some of its tension.”70
The theme of the integration
of the workers movement into established society was debated for the first time
during this epoch: after 1918, people would speak of
“bourgeoisification” and “ossification”. Max Weber
attributed this trend to “the growing number of people who have an
interest in this kind of social promotion and its material advantages.”
“One could ask who has more to lose by it: bourgeois society or social
democracy? In my opinion, I believe that social democracy has more to lose, and
more particularly those among its adherents who are the bearers of revolutionary
ideology.” He viewed social
democracy as “a State within a State”.71 In 1918, M.
Weber would render homage to the qualities of order and discipline which the
German people, drilled by social democracy, could exhibit, as his own
experience with a local workers and soldiers council demonstrated. R. Michels,
who abandoned social democracy for revolutionary syndicalism, denounced the
SPD’s bureaucratization: 72 for some workers the labor
bureaucracy constituted the social promotion which the church at one time
offered certain peasants. Weber lamented that the bourgeoisie preserved the
revolutionary forces within the workers movement due to its refusal to concede
full freedom of activity (particularly by way of universal suffrage) to social
democracy: one would then see, he said, how it is not social democracy which
will conquer the State, but that it will be the State which will conquer social
democracy.
The bureaucratic
centralization of the SPD gave rise at times to a vigorous reaction, above all
in the urban centers where tendencies developed in opposition to the
leadership. In opposition to reformism it was anti-Statist; in opposition to
the suffocation of internal democracy it wanted a completely democratic party
structure. Kautsky condemned “the rebel’s impatience” which,
according to him, inspired the excessive radicalism of 1907.73 The
left gradually exposed the center, attacking its opportunism, for example, at
the Chemnitz Congress of 1912. But the Party’s evolution was quite
coherent. It was the Left which could be accused of opportunism for struggling
each day against reformism without attacking it in its continuity and its
profound logic. One of the reasons why the Left failed to clarify this point
was an insufficient understanding of the crisis-revolution relation. Convinced
that a war was imminent, it expected the war would bring about a mass uprising.
At the end of the war, the Left would expect, this time as a result of the
political and social crisis engendered by the war, a revolution which it would
still improvidently conceive of as an automatic development. Luxemburg had
often set out her concept of organization as an irresistible flood: in a letter
dated February 17, 1904 to H. Roland-Holst she stated that opportunism thrives
in “stagnant waters” and dies “all by itself” in a
current.74 The idea of the crisis of capitalism facilitated the
avoidance of a serious investigation of questions concerning the critical
situation of the working class in modern capitalism, particularly in relation
to the function of the organized workers movement. Instead of relying on the
shock of a serious disturbance (war, crisis), it was necessary to begin by
breaking with their own organization. Levi was right, in 1930, when he said
that after 1903 there was no radical presence, outside of “a tiny
sect”, which could maintain theoretical coherence and assist in the
reconstruction of a communist organization.75 Judging that the
imperialist phase ruled out the satisfaction of reforms which had previously
been possible, the Left also tended to ignore the considerable role played by
reforms conceded to one part of the working class.
In 1913, a strike of shipyard
workers in
The trade unions occasionally
had to yield in order to maintain their rule over their organizations. This was
an era of trade union splits and a kind of nostalgic longing for the epoch when
the movement had not yet been centralized. In the textile, metal working and
painting trades, local trade unions arose which deliberately emphasized workers
autonomy.77 The
“shop stewards” who made their appearance during the war, were a
new form of this workers autonomy (see Chapter 4). The SPD excluded those of
its members who participated in these trade unions. The “Jungen”, whom the Party had
striven to keep apolitical by means of recreational activities, also clashed
with their Party guardians. A kind of nostalgia was born among the leading
circles of the Party. The Party found itself between two phases, after the
construction and before the management of the State. The Jena Congress (1913)
prefigured the “Community of Labor” created in 1916 by the centrist
opposition in the Party’s leadership (see Chapter 4).
The image of the workers
movement on the eve of the war was a study in contrasts. In
1. Traité de sociologie du travail, Colin, Vol. I, 1961, pp.
220-21.
2. Marx and Engels: Textes sur l’organisation,
Spartacus, 1970, pp. 120 et seq.
3. See
the famous (and much misunderstood: see below) Critique du programme de Gotha by Marx, as well as the other
documents collected in the Ed. Sociales edition of 1971. In English, see
“Critique of the Gotha Program”, in Karl Marx: The First International and After. Political Writings:
Volume 3, ed. David Fernbach, Penguin Books,
4. Théorie marxiste et tactique
révolutionnaire (1913), quoted in Pannekoek et les conseils ouvriers, as well as his 1915 text,
summarized in Chapter 4 below. For an English translation of the entire text of
Pannekoek’s Marxist Theory and
Revolutionary Tactics, see Pannekoek
and Gorter’s Marxism, ed. D.A. Smart, Pluto Press,
5. Luxemburg,
Mehring, Vandervelde: Grèves
sauvages et spontanéité des masses, Spartacus, 1970, with an
introduction by P. Guillaume.
6. Les
prétendues scissons dans l’Internationale, in Textes sur l’organisation. In
English, see “The Alleged Splits in the International”, in Karl Marx: The First International and
After. Political Writings: Volume 3, ed. David Fernbach, Penguin Books,
7. Woman under Socialism: this text
inspired some passages in Bordiga’s works of the 1950s (see Construction et révolution).
English translation: Woman Under
Socialism, tr. Daniel De
8. P.
Louis: 150 ans de pensée
socialiste, new series, Rivière, 1953, p. 72.
9. La révolution sociale,
Rivière, 1912, pp. 157 and 160. In English: The Social Revolution, tr. A.M. and May Wood Simons, Charles H.
Kerr &
10. Pannekoek et les conseils ouvriers, p.
77. In English: Pannekoek and the Workers
Councils, Telos Press,
11. R.
Reichard: Crippled from Birth: German
Social Democracy 1844-70,
12. Thompson:
The Formation of the English Working
Class.
13. Korsch:
La crise du marxisme (1931), in Anti-Kautsky, Champ Libre, 1973. In
English, see: Karl Korsch: Revolutionary
Theory, ed. Douglas Kellner,
14. Engels:
La question paysanne en
15. Reichard,
pp. 220-221.
16. Ibid., p. 22.
17. Grandjonc:
Marx et les communistes allemands
à
18. La Ligue des Communistes, Aubier, 1972.
19. Marx:
Herr Vogt, Costes, Vol. I, 1927, pp.
103 et seq.
20. Le militantisme, stade suprême de
l’aliénation, OJTR,
21. Cf.
the Correspondence de Marx et Engels,
(Ed. Sociales), and their biographies written by A. Cornu (PUF, 4 Vols.); and Oeuvres, II, pp. 98-99.
22. Quoted
by E. de Fontenay: Les figures juives de
Marx, Galilée, 1973.
23. Reichard:
p. 65.
24. Cf.
Blanqui’s response to his judges in 1832, in which he claims the name of
“proletarian” (Bruhat, Histoire
du movement ouvrier français, Ed. Sociales, Vol. I, 1952, p. 240).
25. For
the lack of another term we use this formulation, but without granting it all
the implications which it possesses in Bordiga (Cf., for example, Les révolutions multiples).
26. Reichard:
p. 94.
27. Ibid., pp. 95-97.
28. Ibid., p. 98.
29. Ibid., p. 100.
30. Ibid., pp. 171-172.
31. Ibid., p. 143.
32. Hunt:
German Social Democracy 1918-33,
33. For
the SPD as a “counter-society”, cf. Hunt, p. 53, and Reichard, p. 285,
note 7 of Chapter II. See also:
34. Reichard,
pp. 218-19.
35. R.
Morgan: The German Social Democrats and
the First International 1864-72,
36. Ibid., p. 49.
37. Ibid., p. 103.
38. Ibid., p. 132-33.
39. Ibid., pp. 172-173.
40. Ibid., p. 173.
41. A.
Berlau: The German Social Democratic
Party 1914-21,
42. Cahiers de l’ISEA, Vol. III, No.
7, July 1969.
43. Morgan:
p. 208.
44. Ibid., p. 211.
45. Ibid., p. 216.
46. Ibid., pp. 234, et seq.
47. Cole:
The Second International 1889-1914,
Vol. I, MacMillan,
48. Especially
the portions concerning Hegel: E. Weil, Hegel
et l’Etat, Vrin, 1950. The Costes edition of the Marx-Engels
correspondence is based on the German edition.
49. Correspondance Marx-Engels, Costes, Vol.
VIII, 1934, pp. 106 and 107-108.
50. Engels:
Progès de la réforme
sociale sur le continent (1843), in Écrits
militaires, l’Herne, 1970.
51. Correspondance Engels-P. et L. Lafargue,
Ed. Sociales, Vol. II (1887-1890), 1957. On this issue, cf. the collection of
texts of Marx and Engels, UGE (10/18).
52. Correspondance Engels-Marx et divers,
edited by Sorge, Costes, Vol. II, 1950, pp. 210-211.
53. Ibid., p. 260.
54. L’origine de la famille…,
Ed. Sociales, 1954, pp. 158-59. In English: The
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Foreign Languages Press,
55. As
the Italian Left does, for example, in its 1945
Theses, published in Invariance,
No. 9.
56. Écrits militaires, p. 483.
57. Hunt:
p. 150.
58. Comfort:
Chapter V.
59. Hunt:
pp. 187-190.
60. Marks.
61. Ibid., p. 349.
62. Ibid., pp. 351-352.
63. C.
Schorske: German Social Democracy,
1905-17,
64. Schorske:
p. 144.
65. Dauvé:
Pour une critique de l’ideologie
anti-militariste, Ed. de l’Oubli,
66. W.
Walling: The Socialists and the War,
67. Ibid., p. 76.
68. Ibid., p. 77.
69. International Council Correspondence, in
La contre-révolution
bureaucratique, UGE, 1973, pp. 243-45.
70. Marx:
Oeuvres, Gallimard, Vol. I, 1963, pp.
127-128.
71. E.
Waldmann: The Spartacist Uprising of 1919,
Marquette University Press, 1958, p. 108, note no. 81.
72. In
his book, Political Parties. See his
earlier article quoted by Schorske, Chapter V.
73. Schorske:
p. 185.
74. Ibid., pp. 32-33.
75. Quoted
in the R. Luxemburg issue of Partisans,
December-January 1968-1969, p. 8.
76. Schorske:
pp. 260-261.
77. Ibid., p. 261.
78. Comfort:
Chapter V.
79. Angress:
pp. 105, et seq.
The Dutch Left
Not surprisingly, the
theoretical (and, to some degree, the organizational) sources of the German
Left originated not outside of the classical workers movement, or in its
heartland, but in its periphery. They are of German-Dutch origin.
In the
Their organ was the journal De Nieuwe Tijd, to which De Tribune was added later (see below). This
current attempted to go beyond traditional debates. In relation to the colonial
question, for example, it did not restrict itself to endorsing the contemporary
theory which held that capitalism was an “inevitable stage for the
colonies in their march towards socialism . . . if socialism were to triumph in
the old world, it would be possible to avoid the miseries of capitalism on the
other continents by sharing capitalism’s technological advantages with
them. Gorter and Pijnappel agreed with Mendels, and said that his analysis
agreed with Marx’s writings.”2 Their analysis, in
effect, returned to the view entertained by Marx, especially in regard to
Russia.3 Gorter broached the theme of the proletariat’s
isolation, which he would again address in his Open Letter to Comrade Lenin: “Attacking the Party’s
illusions concerning the petite bourgeoisie and the peasants, Gorter stated in
passing that a large part of this petite bourgeoisie had an interest in the
products of the colonies . . . annually making hundreds of millions from the
Indies . . . .” The International’s Stuttgart Congress (1907),
interpreted by Lenin as a healthy reaction against the Right, “opened the
eyes of the Dutch Left.”4 This development was not uniform,
however: Roland-Holst, despite understanding the connection between German
imperialism and the positions supported by the German socialists, concluded
that the Congress had ended to the revolutionaries’ advantage.
In its essentials, the
German-Dutch Left (including Radek) held a position close to that of its Polish
and Russian adversaries on the question of the right of nations or of
“peoples” to self-determination. For Wiedijk: “the colonial
question is essentially situated, not in the colonies themselves, but in the colonizing
countries, where the most important interests are at stake. . . . Colonial
reform cannot come before class struggle.”5 Lenin was quite
isolated on this issue. The other Bolsheviks did not accept the defense of the
absolute right to self-determination before the revolution. Always on the
lookout for anything which could undermine the power of the leading capitalist
countries and lend support to the proletarian struggle, Lenin tried to find
substitutes for proletarian action. He saw the centrifugal role which nationalist
forces could play to weaken the
“The Marxist solution
to the democracy question consists in the utilization,
on the part of the proletariat conducting its class struggle, of all democratic
institutions and aspirations against
the bourgeoisie. . . . As for the Marxists, they know that democracy does not
eliminate class oppression, but only makes the class struggle clearer, more
extensive, more open; it is what we need. . . . The more democratic the regime,
the more obvious, for the workers, is the origin of the evil which is
capitalism. . . .”6
The creation of a democratic
national state thus constitutes progress, since such a state would then become
a framework within which the proletariat could organize and educate itself. The
proletariat needs democratic States
because it needs democracy. For Pannekoek, however, the national solution is
utopian under the regime of capital, because every nation is at war with the
others and oppresses its own minorities. In 1912, his critique of the projects
for cultural autonomy in the Austro-Hungarian Empire was also an indirect
critique of Lenin: “It is not our
advocacy of national autonomy, whose realization does not depend on us, but
only the strengthening of class consciousness which will really smash the
terrible power of nationalism to pieces. It would be false to want to
concentrate all our efforts on a ‘positive national policy’ and to
stake everything on . . . the realization of our program for national
self-determination as a precondition for class struggle.”7
In the same year J. Strasser,
an Austrian left-socialist,8 published a similar text, in which he
simultaneously attacked the federalism of Austrian social democracy (which
sought the means to preserve the unity of the empire in concessions to the
other nationalities), the nationalism of Czech social democracy and the
supporters of pan-German unification. The socialist party, Strasser wrote, must
be centralized, and all national solutions are illusory: “it is not true
that nations can in any circumstance live side by side without becoming rivals.
In bourgeois society, each nation accuses the others of expansionist
tendencies, and even aggression, whenever they get in each others’ way.
Every national struggle makes a mockery of revisionist internationalism. What,
then, will the proletariat do when the struggle between nationalities breaks out?”9
During the war, Pannekoek did
not participate in the debate on the national question. Lenin stated with
satisfaction that while Gorter was against the principle of self-determination,
he nonetheless allowed for it in the case of colonialism; for the Dutch East
Indies, for example.10 Like the German Left he was not directly
confronted by the reality of the national question, unlike the Russians, the
Poles and the Austrians, nor was it a crucial theme in his experience or
activity. Each time he systematically investigated the question, however, he
did so in the sense of this observation of Bukharin’s: if the
“right of nations” is not an empty, meaningless term, it must
include the compulsory defense of the national State, and end in the demand for
patriotism or, which is the same thing, in the absurd position of the
revolutionaries’ denial of internationalism.11 The only
meaning which the slogan of self-determination can have is opposed to the
revolution. Bukharin was more aware than Lenin of the integral connection which
existed between organized capitalism and any
State, large or small.12
Within the SDAP, the
conflicts between the left and the center became increasingly acute. In 1901
they revolved around the agrarian question: the left refused to oppose the expropriation
of small farmers for the purpose of the development of modern capitalist
agriculture. It was not the Party’s job to incite the small-scale
peasants to unite in defense of the small family farm, but to fight for
socialism. This debate would be taken up again in the Open Letter to Comrade Lenin. On the education question (1902), the
Left rejected any concessions to religious schools, which were desired by the
Party’s leadership for reasons having to do with electoral deals. In 1903
the Left turned against the trade unions which sabotaged a railroad strike.
Finally, in 1905, in the debate over the parliamentary question, it violently
denounced the alliance with the radical bourgeois parties in the run-off
elections, which granted a majority to the radicals against the Right. As these
trade union and parliamentary trends were to continue to unfold (the same kind
of alliance was made in the German elections of 1912), the Left would become
abstentionist and critical of the trade unions.
In 1907 the Left established
its own newspaper: De Tribune (whence
the name “Tribunists”), which was particularly vehement in its
attacks on the Party’s leadership. An extraordinary Congress of the Party
in 1909 demanded that it cease publication. With the exception of a small
circle around Roland-Holst, which would not join the others until some time
later, the whole left wing left the Party and founded the Social Democratic
Party (SDP). It was a “groupuscule”: it had no more than 700
members in contrast to the 25,000 members of the SDAP in 1913. It was not
accepted as a member by the International, despite the support of the
Bolsheviks, another schismatic party. Its application having been presented to
the Bureau of the Socialist International in 1909, the latter was confronted by
two motions. The motion of the SDP and the German SPD, which was supported by
Lenin, was in favor of the new party’s petition for affiliation: but the
opposition motion, presented by the Austrian V. Adler, obtained a majority.
Luxemburg condemned the split in the name of Party unity.13 The SDP
did, however, engage in parliamentary activity. In 1918 it would become the
Communist Party of the Netherlands (KPN), with two seats in Parliament. In 1919
Gorter denounced the opportunism of the Dutch
communist party. His attack included, among other themes, the notion of a
“pure” and “clear” “nucleus” which would be
further developed in 1920-1921.
For her part, Roland-Holst
occupied an intermediate position, somewhat like that of Trotsky in
The significance of the Dutch
Left is above all theoretical and international. The Dutch would provide a
meeting place for the socialist opposition during the war; the
There are now some important
historical works dealing with Pannekoek: we shall only focus on what
distinguished him, even before the war, from the Luxemburgist Left. Almost from
the start of his political activity, in 1904, he worked for the most part in
Pannekoek and Radek attacked
Kautsky in the Bremer Bürger-Zeitung,
particularly in regard to international issues and imperialism, and posed the
problem of the possible relation between war and revolution: “The
struggle against imperialism does not have the purpose of hindering its
development, but of mobilizing the masses against it. . . .”15
This position, expressed by Pannekoek in 1910, would be taken up by Lenin in
1914. Of Polish origin, Radek was excluded from Polish Social Democracy in 1912
for embezzlement. He had previously been a supporter of the Warsaw Group which
was at that time close to the Bolsheviks and opposed to the (Luxemburgist)
Party leadership. He was excluded from the Party the following year, despite
Pannekoek’s protests. A Russo-Polish court of honor ruled in his favor in
1915.16 He went to
In 1912, Pannekoek was among the
first to connect the class struggle in Europe to the independence movement in
the colonies: only by joining with the proletariat in the highly-developed
countries could the struggles in the backward countries acquire a socialist
character.18 This position was quite unlike both Lenin’s view
as well as that of the other members of the Dutch left wing, which is outlined
below, and which could at times border on indifference
concerning underdeveloped regions.
The left-wing current which
would coalesce in the KPD was born long before 1918-19, and by virtue of its
actions had already demarcated itself from the first (Luxemburgist) leadership
of the Party.19 The communist left which appeared after 1917 was
not, therefore, without roots in the previous epoch. What is called the
“communist left” became the communist left prior to 1914 through
contact with other left currents (particularly those of Lenin and Luxemburg),
and these currents mutually influenced one another. The revolutionary currents
which would confront one another after 1917 had to a great extent already known
and opposed one another before 1917, in relation to the national question,
among other issues. Pannekoek made extensive contributions to the polemics on
this question. By criticizing “infantile leftism”, Lenin was
continuing a debate which started a dozen years earlier.
Pannekoek distinguished
himself from the Luxemburgist Left on two important points. He thought that
radical elements should abandon social democracy and regroup outside it. Luxemburg,
however, condemned the SDP’s schism: one must persevere wherever the
masses are found: “one cannot remain outside the organization, one must
not lose contact with the masses. . . . The worst workers party is better than
no party at all.”20 This presaged the rupture between the
Spartacus League and the ISD, and later that between the KPD and the KAPD.
An important polemic also set
Pannekoek against Luxemburg, concerning the theory of the “final
crisis” of capital, as expounded in The
Accumulation of Capital.21 Pannekoek criticized it on two
levels. On the “mathematical” level, Luxemburg took as her starting
point one of Marx’s “errors” in his accumulation schemas in
Sections 2 and 3 of Volume II of Capital.
Defending Marx, Pannekoek showed that it was impossible to prove that
capital’s movement must of necessity come to a halt should it be deprived
of possibilities for expansion outside of the “capitalist zone”.
Without, however, making the proletarian movement the motive force of history,
he criticized the idea that one could speak of the crisis of capital in purely
economic terms, as well as the content which Luxemburg conferred upon
necessity. According to Luxemburg, the necessity which drives capitalism
towards collapse is mechanistic: the proletariat is not included as one of its
factors. Her catastrophic vision overlooks this factor although it is an
element even at the “purely economic” level. Pannekoek would return
to this theme much later, explaining this concept of mechanistic necessity as a
resurgence, on the theoretical plane, of a typically social democratic trait
which Luxemburg criticized on the political plane: Kautskyist fatalism, the
negation of the revolutionary character of the proletariat.22
Nonetheless, after the war, and unlike the case of the first divergence
summarized above, the German Left (although opposed to Luxemburg’s
tactics), would again take up the Luxemburgist thesis, simplifying it instead
of developing it, under the rubric of the “death crisis” of capitalism.23
Paradoxically, a historian
(Schurer) has viewed Pannekoek as one of the precursors and founders of
“Leninism”.24 Bricianer was right to reject this hasty
assimilation, but did not go far enough in his examination of the genesis of
the Left prior to 1914.25 Schurer relies upon real analogies, which
do not, however, justify his comparison of Lenin and Pannekoek, even before
1914. It is true that each was opposed to the Luxemburgist theory of
imperialism; and that Pannekoek was undoubtedly the first to grant importance
to the notion of a “labor aristocracy”, and in particular was the
first as well to once again resuscitate Marx’s thesis on the need to
destroy the State. But he approached these questions in a way dissimilar to
that of Lenin.
Tactical Differences in the Workers Movement (1909) effectively examined the root of the reformist
tendency, which Pannekoek attributed to the weight of the middle classes, and
of the employees and officials of the workers movement; on the other side, the
workers in large industry constituted the revolutionary nucleus. Lenin,
however, in Marxism and Revisionism
(1908), insisted upon the role of the petite bourgeoisie. Even more than
“small-scale production”, which Lenin would never cease to discuss
(even in Infantile Disorder), Pannekoek
showed that it is the very mode of existence of the workers in a
non-revolutionary period which defines the nature of the “labor
aristocracy”. Merely by virtue of their numbers, the workers must join
together into a bloc (in fact, into numerous rival blocs) which requires representatives to deal with
capitalists and the State, from whom concessions must be wrested. The workers
bureaucracy was more than a kind of activity or a leader-masses relationship;
it was above all sociologically a relation in which a privileged, entrenched
minority was formed. In the higher ranks, the leaders even hoped to enter the
bourgeoisie, even if this hope was based on nothing but the inevitable
financial and commercial activities of the workers movement, through the funds
which it absorbed: social welfare, sick benefits, cultural centers, publishing,
etc. In the lower ranks, the cadres possessed socio-cultural means for the
advancement of their offspring. It is in this sense that one can speak of a
social layer which reproduces itself as privileged, and not simply of
categories which enjoy more advantages than others.
The notion of a “labor
aristocracy” was frequently employed in England during the 1880s to
designate a quite numerous minority of “artisans (skilled workers and
craftsmen) and above all those who were members of the trade unions and other
labor organizations”.26 The privileged social layer(s) varied
from country to country depending on the background of the working class and
its organizations, and in 1890 Engels invoked the “aristocratic
minority” of unionized workers.27 In the United States, this
issue was inseparable from that of racial and ethnic minorities: in England
Marx also emphasized the antagonism between the English and the Irish.28
What was new about Engels’ 1892 Preface to The Condition of the Working Class in England was his connecting
this phenomenon to British industrial monopoly: a thesis appropriated by Lenin.
In that same year, Wilhelm Liebknecht declared at the Socialist Congress:
“The majority of you are certainly, for the most part, aristocrats of
labor, insofar as income is concerned.”29 The German Left went
beyond a sociological view in understanding that a certain kind of workers
struggle, in a calm period, gives rise to structures which immediately turn
against the revolution. Lenin, on the other hand, saw in this phenomenon
nothing but the corruption of one part of the workers who held the leadership
of the movement: he might have asked himself how this minority could have led
the movement against the wishes of the majority. In regard to which Lenin
logically deduced that one must re-conquer these organizations, while the Left
perceived them as the products of a non-revolutionary phase and, consequently,
as structures which must be destroyed. Luxemburg, although she emphasized the
trade unions’ regressive role, did not address this problem (see Reform and Revolution). But her
opposition to the trade unions had its origin in her distrust of purely
economic action, since she saw this as jeopardizing socialist education. The respect (in her case one
cannot speak of fetishism30) which Luxemburg had for the existing
workers organizations, and which was well-evidenced by her refusal to create
new schismatic organizations, was an aspect of her fetishism of education which
she shared with the immense majority of the revolutionaries of her time.
Between 1910 and 1912,
Pannekoek made a theoretical “breakthrough” by evoking the
proletariat’s need to create new organs of power, which meant that the proletariat
could not use parliament as a political form. Pannekoek defined the
proletariat’s need to exercise Machtmittel,
instruments of force or of power, which Bricianer translated as “elements
of force”.31 Such an idea illustrates the complexity of Pannekoek’s
thought and the twists and turns of subversive theory. Much later, Bordiga
would define the communist movement as a question of “force” rather
than one of “form”.32 Lenin rendered homage to Pannekoek
in 1917, in State and Revolution, but
also accused him of not having drawn all the conclusions which follow from this
idea. The critique was probably justified, but Lenin continued to nourish
illusions about the pre-1914 socialist movement. Pannekoek, furthermore,
implicitly criticized Kautsky’s (and also Lenin’s) view of class
consciousness. His great merit was having discerned communism in the nature of
the class, and not just as a program.
But rather than in its deepest being he discerned it in its organization. His
preoccupation with “spontaneity” was not focused on the
self-destruction of the proletariat as such: that is, as commodified human
activity reappropriating the means of life and with these its humanity. He
discerned the rise of the proletariat in its forms rather than its content,
because its content was hardly discernable in that era.
In September, 1918, Radek
recognized Pannekoek’s contribution, saying that the existing political
forms, even the most democratic, must not be used, although he did not say what
new institutions would replace them. But these two questions—the State
and the labor aristocracy—highlighted the differences between Lenin and
Pannekoek. Lenin was animated by the will to seize power, which involved
advocating the destruction of the old State (and not its conquest as he had
long thought, thus imitating almost all the world’s social democrats).
But he did not understand the “how”, he did not see what was
potentially contradictory in the proletariat’s being which would rise to
the fore in a revolutionary period: this explains his exaggeration of the
“Party”.33 Quite unlike his usual views on the matter,
the short shrift given to the idea of the Party in State and Revolution is neither a trick to flatter the workers nor
something positive about which one should be pleased. State and Revolution simply testifies to one facet of Lenin’s
contradiction, sometimes inclining towards an exaggeration of the role of the
Party (What is to be Done?), and at
other times allowing for democratic self-management (State and Revolution, which does not prevent this book from being
an excellent revolutionary text). The way he dealt with the example of the
Commune is significant; he once again took up Marx’s position, which is,
however, susceptible to criticism, in The
Civil War in France.34 Pannekoek, however, did not explicitly
refer to 1871, concerning which he had a more lucid and quite well-justified
judgment.35 It is also true that his ideas about the labor
aristocracy had influenced Lenin and Zinoviev, 36 but Pannekoek
viewed the issue from a different angle. Later experience would show that Lenin
and Pannekoek would deduce the opposite conclusions from their analyses of the
labor aristocracy. What is essential is not denouncing a privileged minority,
but understanding the (inevitable) expansion of reformist activity among all
the workers organized in trade unions, parties, etc., and seeing that the
revolution must be made outside of these institutions. Between 1910 and 1912,
Pannekoek began to be aware of this, denying that the trade unions and parties
could be used as structures of proletarian power: the proletariat must
therefore create new organs for this purpose. He would later understand that
the revolution must be made not outside
of the classical organizations, but against
them. Lenin, on the other hand, fought and would continue to fight for the
impossible conquest of these organizations, upon certain class bases, and
through the creation of “new” trade-union-type organizations, which
involved the same kind of activity conducted by the old reformist trade unions,
which is to say reformist activity.
Lenin did not understand the
proletarian experience of his time in its most profound aspects. He was only
able to theorize a few of its most essential orientations: his best efforts
(his defeatist position in 1914) were negative.
From the moment that the proletariat of the advanced capitalist countries
engaged in revolutionary action, Lenin was superseded. Then, at that precise
moment, although he was not situated at the most advanced stage attained by the
movement, he imposed his will. Lenin’s success at the head of the Russian
Party and the CI is the theoretical and organizational expression of the
historical compromise: the proletariat attacked
society without destroying it. This
is why Lenin became the highest expression of a combative but not a communist
movement. The experiences acquired during this assault would survive, but they
would be deformed and truncated by capital: this is Leninism, a tendency which
was nonetheless revolutionary in its origins, despite its weak points. The
communist left, however, the expression of the most radical but also one of the
least popular aspects of the movement, would be crushed.
1. Le socialisme en danger, published by
Payot in 1975, with an introduction and notes by J. Y. Bériou.
2. La IIe Internationale et
l’Orient, a collection edited by G. Haupt and M.
Rébérioux, Cujas, 1967, p. 236.
3. Invariance, No. 4.
4. La IIe Internationale et
l’Orient, p. 239.
5. A
summary of his position by F. Tichelman, Ibid.,
pp. 243-46.
6. Oeuvres, Vol. 23, Ed. Sociales, 1959,
pages 20, 23, 24, 57, 67-68, and 79-80.
7. Lutte de classes et nation, reproduced
in the collection Les marxistes et la
question nationale (1848-1914), Maspero, 1974, p. 305.
8. Cf.
his biography in the Dictionnaire
biographique du mouvement ouvrier international. L’Autriche, Ed.
Ouvrières, 1971, pp. 301-302. Strasser was a member of the Austrian CP
and adopted an “anti-putschist” position close to that of Levi; he
would later be excluded for “Trotskyism”.
9. Les marxistes et la question nationale,
p.288.
10. Oeuvres, Vol. 22, Ed. Sociales, 1960,
pages 164, 181 and 375.
11. Ibid., p. 261.
12. L’économie mondiale et
l’impérialisme, Anthropos, 1967, Chapter XIII.
13. Pannekoek and the Workers Councils.
14. He
was the author of Révolution
mondiale (1918), L’organisation
de la lutte de classe du prolétariat (1921), La nécessité de la réunification du KAPD
(1923), a large number of articles in the KAPD and AAUD press, as well as
pamphlets from which we provide some extracts below. See Herman Gorter, The Organisation of the Proletariat’s
Class Struggle, in Pannekoek and
Gorter’s Marxism, ed. D.A. Smart, Pluto Press,
15. Pannekoek and the Workers Councils.
16. Concerning
the relations between German and Polish socialists, see, as well as the work of
Nettl, H. Schurer: “Radek and German Revolution”, Survey, October 1964; and especially the
upcoming book by C. Weil, to be published by Champ Libre.
17. On
18. Cf.
his article “Révolution mondiale” in Le Socialiste of
19. Pannekoek and the Workers Councils.
20. Cf.
his letter to Roland-Holst, dated August 1908, quoted by Nettl (English
edition, Vol. II, p. 657).
21. An
essay on this theme can be found in L. Laurat: L’accumulation du capital, Rivière, 1930, and in
various articles in Révolution
Internationale (1968-1972). For a critical judgment, cf. Lutte de classes, February 1975,
“Profit et marché”; and Mattick: Marx et Keynes, Gallimard, 1972 (in English, Marx and Keynes: The Limits of the Mixed Economy, Porter Sargent
Publisher,
22. In
this context we can only provide a basic outline of the positions taken in relation to this problem: for more extensive elaborations which treat the issue in
depth, cf. Pannekoek’s essay “The Theory of the Collapse of
Capitalism”, translated by Adam Buick, published in Capital and Class, Spring 1977, and currently available online at
the marxists.org website.
23. On
the problem of a mechanistic interpretation of the crisis, cf. C. Brendel, Pannekoek, Theoretikus van het Socialisme,
Nimegen, 1970, Chapter XII.
24. “A.
Pannekoek and the Origins of Leninism”, The Slavonic and East European Review, June, 1963.
25. Pannekoek and the Workers Councils.
26. E.
Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries. Contemporary
Essays, Weidenfeld-Nicolson, 1973, p. 121.
27. Marx
and Engels: Le Syndicalisme, Maspero,
Vol. I, 1972, p. 195.
28. Cf.
the texts collected in J.-P. Carasso: La
rumeur irlandaise, Champ Libre, 1969.
29. Marks:
p. 354.
30. Cf.
Questions d’organisation de la
sociale-démocratie russe, Spartacus, 1946. English translation:
“Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy”, in Selected Political Writings of Rosa
Luxemburg, ed. Dick Howard, Monthly Review Press,
31. Pannekoek and the Workers Councils.
32. Eléments d’orientation
(1946), reproduced in Invariance, No.
7 and as a pamphlet, Ed. Programme Communiste, 1972.
33. Authier:
Les débuts du mouvement ouvrier
russe, in Trotsky: Rapport de la
délégation sibérienne, Spartacus, 1970, and the
postscripts by P. Guillaume and G. Dauvé in Kautsky’s Les trois sources du marxisme,
Spartacus, 1969.
34. It
is true that this view can be contrasted with other texts of a private and
confidential character: cf. La Commune de
1871, UGE, 1971. In 1905, Lenin warned against imitating the Commune:
“it was a movement which our movement must not copy” (quoted by
Haupt in Le mouvement social,
April-June 1972, p. 213).
35. Pannekoek and the Workers Councils.
36. Zinoviev:
The War and the Crisis of Socialism,
written in 1915-16, published in 1917 (influenced by Michels).
1914 and Democracy
On
The 1907 Stuttgart Congress
of the Socialist International had ended in a compromise which raised the hopes
of the Left. The Lenin-Martov-Luxemburg amendment, which proclaimed that, in
case of war, the “economic and political crisis created by the war should
be used . . . to precipitate the destruction of capitalist rule,” had no
practical force since the International was quite careful not to authorize the
means to implement such a policy.1 It was a respectable institution,
recognized by the international bourgeoisie, which even as late as 1913 had
expectations of being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize: had the war not taken
place, it would quite likely have been awarded the prize in 1914.
Some groups and individuals
then proclaimed the “collapse” of the Second International: the
Bolsheviks, Bordiga and the left wing of the Italian Socialist Party, Pannekoek
and Gorter, the Serbian Socialist Party, etc. The French, German and English
parties accepted the war. The other two important parties (their importance was
not merely numerical), the Russian and the Italian parties, had quite distinct
positions. The two factions of the Russian Party, which in reality constituted
two distinct parties, did not abandon the struggle against their own
government. Italy did not enter the war at first: while an important minority
took a revolutionary position on the war which was similar to that of the
Zimmerwald Left, the majority of the PSI adopted a completely pacifist
position, and was quite content not to have to take up a position between the
two lines of fire. When
The different positions
adopted by the Socialist Parties cannot be understood if one inters oneself in
the logic of the parties themselves. The parties represented the general
tendency of the proletariat in each country: almost total support on the part
of the French and English proletariat for the war, a more subdued adherence on
the part of the German proletariat, which would be transformed into rebellion
against the war, and Russian proletarian defeatism.
In
The positions of the various
proletariats and workers parties revolved around the defense or conquest of
democracy. On a world scale there was just one proletariat. Generally, it
sought improvements within the framework of the existing mode of production.
The reformism of the West and the democratic revolutionism of the East were two
aspects of the same reality. One could say that the proletariat participated in
these two aspects. Even in
Developments within the SPD
As of
On August 4, the left wing of
the SPD parliamentary delegation, K. Liebknecht and Otto Rühle, yielded to
Party discipline (Luxemburg was not a deputy). Taken as a whole, however, the
social democratic edifice, including the trade unions, was already beginning to
crumble. The rate and methods by which the various tendencies would regroup in
different organizations can be examined on three levels: parliament, party and
the workers movement, with each influencing the others, especially from the
bottom up, as the development of the workers movement was the foundation of the
development of the left radical and centrist groups.
It was on the parliamentary
level that the splits appeared and crystallized most quickly. The parliamentary
apparatus, and, consequently, the reactionary tendency, possessed a monopoly of
information due to the very nature of such an organization. Liebknecht had to
go to
The tide of events would push
Rühle, and then some twenty other deputies, towards the opposition. In
February of 1915, Luxemburg was imprisoned for the first time during the war,
and would not be released until February 1916. While in prison she wrote The Crisis of Social Democracy, also
known as the Junius Pamphlet after
her pseudonym (see below). An international women’s peace conference
convened in
In early 1916, all these
oppositionists were excluded from the parliamentary delegation. The centrists
formed the social democratic Community of Labor (Arbeitsgemeinschaft), the nucleus of the future USPD. It was
opposed to the SPD leadership’s war policy but refused to break with the
Party until it was excluded in early 1917.
After the February Revolution
in
The de-aggregation of the
Party’s left was paralleled by a reaction on the part of the leadership.
For the first time, the old radical current of social democracy was dispersed
into numerous groups (prior to 1914, Luxemburg and Kautsky were both known as
“radicals”). Later, a process of regroupment culminated in the
founding of the USPD, the Spartacus League and the ISD.
The first opposition groups
formed primarily in Hamburg, around Wolffheim and Laufenberg, and in Bremen,
where the group included the majority of the socialist organization and could
express its views in the Bremer
Bürger-Zeitung, which from the very start of the war took a firm
stand: “everything which we have said until now would amount to nothing
but empty words unless we uphold our positions during and after the
war.”3 Groups also formed in
The loyal branches of the
Party diminished in number: after
The leadership’s policy
was to fire the editors of its papers who did not support its directives, and
to replace them with more docile editorial teams. In
The ISD
The ISD was formed in
September 1915. It was the smallest of the radical currents, but it was the
precursor of the postwar German Left. Its theoretical spokesperson before the
war was Pannekoek. After
Upon definitively breaking
with the SPD, these groups explained the supposed betrayal of 1914 as being due
to the social democratic form of organization itself. They wanted a new form of
organization in which complete democracy would prevail: the delegates must be
revocable at any moment, under the constant vigilance of the rank and file,
etc. In this manner the formation of a layer of bureaucrats living on the
members’ dues, the “bonzes” who become conservatives (in
politics as well) in order to preserve their positions, would be prevented. One
of the principle refrains of the German Revolution began to be heard:
denunciation of the leaders, praise for the masses.
Lichstrahlen
was founded in 1913 by Julian Borchardt. The very title of the magazine clearly
indicated its enlightenment goal: to clarify the consciousness of the masses so
they could take measures to free themselves from the influence of leaders.4
(Knowledge of the currents involved in the origins of the German Left is
important in order to form an accurate idea of the latter.) Pannekoek, who was
in close contact with the
Besides the fact that it did
not join the ISD, the
In September of 1915, various
groups and individuals (among others, the Russian Bolsheviks and Mensheviks)
held a conference in Zimmerwald attended by all the currents of international
social democracy which were opposed to the Second International’s policy
since the onset of the war, in order to build a new worldwide revolutionary
organization. The internationalists, few in number, could be counted on the
fingers of two hands.
From Germany, the following
were represented at Zimmerwald: the International
group (the future Spartacus League: see below); the Bremen and Brunswick groups
(represented by Radek); the Berlin group (Borchardt); as well as the centrists
Ledebour and Hoffmann who took as their basis the proclamation of Kautsky,
Haase and Bernstein demanding a peace treaty, without attacking the leadership
of the SPD.
On the fundamental question
of what attitude to adopt concerning social democracy, a split developed
between the left and the center. The Mensheviks (Martov) and the future
Spartacists joined the centrists. They rejected an immediate split and spoke of
re-conquering social democracy. The left (the Bolsheviks, Roland-Holst8
representing the Dutch SDP Left, and the delegates from
“Social-patriotism and
social-imperialism, defended in Germany by both the majority—which is
openly patriotic—of the old social democrats, as well as by the so-called
centrists grouped around Kautsky . . . is an even more dangerous enemy of the
proletariat than the bourgeois advocacy of imperialism, because
social-imperialism, outrageously claiming to be the standard-bearer of
socialism, can lead unenlightened workers into error” (un-aufgeklärte, always Aufklärung, the clarification of
consciousness).
The resolution saw only a
spiritual problem of consciousness where it was above all a matter of the
relation of forces. But even at the level of the relation of forces its
analyses seemed to be correct because, after the war, social democracy was the
only effective counterrevolutionary force. Gorter’s Imperialism, the World War and Social Democracy (1915) developed
the major theses of the Zimmerwald Left: transforming the war into a civil war
and creating a new international. It also contains an implicit critique of the
thesis concerning the labor bureaucracy: it was the whole proletariat (and not
just its highest layers) which had been “corrupted”, that is, it
had seen its material situation improve through its struggles, thanks to the
rise in the rate of profit in the preceding period.
Gorter and Pannekoek, who
could not attend the Zimmerwald Conference, supported the left. Pannekoek and
Roland-Holst sent money (the SDP did not want to become involved in this kind
of activity). They were entrusted with editing and publishing a German-language
international organ, Vorbote (the
Precursor), whose other collaborators were Lenin, Radek, Zinoviev and Gorter.
Only two issues appeared as a result of disputes within the small group, due in
part to the Bolsheviks’ sensitivities. One such dispute, for example,
involved Roland-Holst and Trotsky.10
This collaboration within the
framework of the Zimmerwald Left is one of the elements which help to explain
the German Left’s misunderstandings concerning the Bolshevik seizure of
power and the Third International at the time of its founding. When Lenin and
the leadership of the Third International began to attack the
“leftists”, the latter would long believe that this was a result of
a lack of information.
The Bolsheviks, and the
German, Dutch, Bulgarian and Italian Lefts, were unique in their espousal
during the war of the revolutionary position against social democracy and their
advocacy of the realistic and revolutionary watchword: no to peace, transform
the war between nations into a civil war to seize power.
It was upon this set of
positions that the
The two touchstones of the
left at the founding Congress of the German CP would, in effect, be electoral
abstentionism and sabotage of the trade unions. These two positions were
arrived at by the ISD in the course of its theoretical development, greatly
influenced by the workers movement during the war. It was in Arbeiterpolitik that, for the first
time, the watchword of the German Revolution appeared: Heraus den Gewerkschaften! (Out of the Trade Unions!), at first to
be subjected to criticism, and later to be adopted. Much the same thing took
place regarding the concept of the unitary
organization which was expressed for the first time in 1917 in the same
journal. This idea would be re-appropriated and further elaborated by Wolffheim
and Laufenberg, providing the first theoretical foundations of the AAU. But the
German Left went beyond the IWW: instead of basing itself on economic
organizations which rejected politics, it wanted to positively overcome the
rupture between political and economic organizations. Finally, the critique of
social democracy and its methods led the ISD to the rejection of
parliamentarism as a tactic which fatally led to the domination of the
parliamentary delegation over the rest of the Party which would thus become the
instrument for purely electoral ends. The later theoretical elaborations of
this current are clearly of great interest today: World Revolution and Communist Tactics, by Pannekoek, as well as
three texts by Rühle: The Revolution
is Not a Party Matter!, Fundamental
Questions of Organization, and From
the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution.
The USPD
As the Left maintained, the
USPD was a “party of leaders”, created by “leaders” to
lead the “masses”. At the beginning of 1917, after a national
conference of oppositionists, which was attended by the social democratic
Community of Labor, the Spartacus League and Lichstrahlen (these groups contributing 111, 34 and 7 delegates,
respectively) and which voted to remain in the SPD, the Community of Labor and
the Spartacists were excluded from the SPD. In April, the centrists created the
USPD, the Independent Social Democratic Party, which the Spartacus League
joined as an autonomous group. It was an important party which would receive
2.5 million votes in the 1919 elections. Drawn from the SPD Left, which
comprised many of its sections, it had its own trade union organization in the
“revolutionary shop stewards” (see below), an oppositionist trade
union organization born during the war.
The Independents denounced
the existing German State as “the State of the Middle Classes” and
wanted a State of the working class.12 This position differs from
both Bernstein’s stance at the turn of the century which was in favor of
an SPD-Liberal alliance, as well as from that of the defenders of imperialism,
who were supporters of a working class-big capital alliance against the liberal
bourgeoisie and the middle classes, a program which would be more or less
realized by the Nazis. The USPD extended traditional liberalism by mixing it
with a laborism of workers ideology. The numerous workers who supported it were
against the revolution as well as the authoritarianism and bureaucratism of the
SPD and the ADGB. Historically, this Party expressed the ambiguous character of
a (numerous) fraction of workers whose confusion would be augmented by defeat.
In conformity with its
dualism, it was the Party where all compromises found a place. Whenever its
left wing launched or reactivated an action, it began negotiating from the very
moment that the action appeared to become dangerous to the established order.
It had a left wing which took to the streets (the Spartacists, at the
beginning, and leaders like Ledebour who had connections with the shop
stewards), and a right wing which undertook parliamentary maneuvers. After the
sailors had established contact with the USPD during the summer of 1917 (see
the next Chapter), it abandoned them the moment they were repressed and denied
any responsibility for their actions. A leader of the USPD declared: “We
have tried to channel the justified indignation of the masses into legal
political action.”13 These “pure” social democrats
wanted social democracy without its natural consequence: social
democracy’s counterrevolutionary future. Their critique, like
Luxemburg’s, was directed at the “official authorities”, the
“current leaders” of the SPD, but never at the SPD as such.
The USPD was the German
expression of the international phenomenon Lenin designated as
“centrism”: the center of the Italian SP under Serrati, the
Independent Labour Party in
The Spartacist League
The Spartacist League
included both the future rightist leaders of the KPD (Luxemburg, Leo Jogisches,
Levi, Pieck--the future president of the GDR--Zetkin), as well as future
KAPists (Rühle, Bergmann, Meyer). Others, like Liebknecht, occupied an
intermediate position in the revolution.
The Spartacist League
suffered from a problem which would be reproduced on a larger scale during the
KPD’s first few months: a left majority and a right-wing leadership, with
the left not daring to make a clean break to join the ISD. In 1915, the
Spartacist League was known as the International group, which was the name of
the single issue of a journal which it published. In 1916 it became the
Spartacist Group or League: starting in January 1916, Luxemburg published a
series of political letters under the signature of “Spartacus”, and
the “Spartacus” journal appeared in September. Its two
theoreticians were Liebknecht and Luxemburg. For his valiant and spectacular
opposition to the war, Liebknecht was the most popular of the “social
democratic leaders” in
If Luxemburg was the author
of the formula, “After
“However laudable and
understandable the impatience and bitterness which today lead the best elements
to leave the Party (we should recall that 4/5 of the Party has thus abandoned
it), flight is still flight. For us, this means a betrayal of the masses who are
struggling and suffocating, caught in the snares of the Scheidemanns and the
Legiens (socialist leader and the leader of the ADGB, respectively), who enjoy
the favor of the bourgeoisie. One can ‘leave’ small sects and
little cults when they no longer please, in order to found new sects and new
cults. To attempt, by means of a simple “departure”, to free the
proletarian masses from the horribly heavy and disastrous yoke of the
bourgeoisie and to thus set a good example for them, is purely imaginary. To
entertain the illusion of freeing the masses by tearing up the militants’
membership cards is nothing but the inverted expression of the fetishism of the
Party membership card as an illusory power. Both these attitudes are merely
different poles of institutional cretinism, an illness inherent to the old
social democracy.”14
The Spartacus Letter of March 30, 1916, concerning the founding of the
Community of Labor, concluded in this fashion: “The watchword is neither
schism, nor unity, nor new party, nor old party, but the re-conquest of the Party from the bottom up by means of the
rebellion of the masses who must take their organizations and instruments into
their own hands, not with a rebellion of words, but of deeds.”
This tactic was similar to
the centrist position of the Spartacists at Zimmerwald: refusing to publicly
denounce the Kautskyist center and to accept Lenin’s and Gorter’s, et al., slogans against the war,
Luxemburg and Liebknecht underwent the following evolution. At first, they
propagandized in favor of a “just” peace without annexations,
defined as a “socialist peace”. At the meeting of the SPD shop
stewards held in Charlottenburg on December 30, 1914, Liebknecht proposed a
vote on a “Resolution on the nature of the war and the tasks of the
working class” in which he said: “The goal of the socialists is to
obtain through struggle a peace without annexations, without humiliating any
country, and to do everything possible to reinforce the movement for such a
socialist peace in all countries concerned.” Later, the conclusion of the
Junius Pamphlet (“Theses on the
Tasks of International Social Democracy”) launched the slogan “War
against War”, which was susceptible of many different interpretations.
Luxemburg would long remain bound to the socialist conception of the war.
Jaurés’s phrase is well-known: “Capitalism brings war the
way clouds bring a storm.” The Zimmerwald Left went so far as to add a
third term: war leads to revolution. The slogan, “War against War”
remains in the social democratic camp.
Liebknecht developed an
original position on organization. He had seen that, except for those made by
Pannekoek, the “leftist” critiques of the social democratic form of
organization were quite superficial and effectively revealed a degree of
organizational fetishism. He attempted to oppose to an organizational form
which favored the leaders and the counterrevolution, another form which would
favor the “self-activity of the masses”. This leftist point of view
was expounded by Liebknecht in his prison writings and was shared by the
majority of the Spartacist League:
“To eliminate the paid
bureaucracy, or to exclude it from all decision-making processes; to limit it
to technical labor; to prohibit the re-election of all officials, after a
maximum time served . . . , to reduce the power of high-level positions; decentralization; vote by the rank and
file on all important questions (veto power). . . . To teach the masses and
individuals intellectual and moral independence, to question authority, to take
the initiative and personal responsibility, so that each person would be
prepared for and capable of free action: all these things comprise the only
sure foundation for the development of a workers movement which would be equal
to its historic tasks, in general, and this is also the precondition and
essential basis for the extirpation of the bureaucratic danger.”15
Luxemburg did not want to
become involved in this kind of critique. She broke with social democracy, but
only reluctantly, and helped retard the construction of a new, entirely
autonomous radical organization. Her 1904 polemic with Lenin, however, showed
that she was by no means a devotee of organizational fetishism.16 It
is impossible to agree with Laufenberg when, in 1920, he wrote in Communism versus Spartacism:
“Luxemburg never freed herself from the social democratic form of organization.” Laufenberg’s
critique issued from the mystified point of view expressed by Liebknecht above.
All the debates within the German Left are generally very confused.
There was, then, an important
Left, which was even in the majority within the Spartacist League; but it did
not distinguish itself in relation to its centrist leadership, represented by
Luxemburg. The Spartacist League itself remained an autonomous group within the
USPD, which, for its part, never lost hope of reunification with the SPD.
Labor Agitation and the “Shop Stewards”
All strikes were prohibited
by the trade unions as a “betrayal of our brothers at the front”.
As a result, everything was very clear from the beginning on the labor front,
as far as organizations were concerned: in every strike, a new organization was
born in each factory, led by the “revolutionary shop stewards”.
These men were generally regularly-elected trade union delegates who did not
follow the official line of the ADGB’s Central Committee. The new
structures were based on the factory,
and these factory organizations (BO,
Betriebsorganisation) were organized by industrial
regions (for example, the workers council of Greater Berlin), in accordance
with the technical structure of capital during that era. This form of
organization would be adopted and theorized by the German Left (KAPD, AAU), and
was also the embryo of the future workers councils. The shop stewards held
effective leadership over all strikes, and called them off without any
negotiations when they felt that the strike movement was in no position to make
the State back down. Starting and stopping strikes almost at will, the shop
stewards were the most authentic expression of the labor rank and file at that
time: they comprised its executive organ. Constantly spreading, the strikes
were supposed to have terminated in the insurrectionary general strike. The
shop stewards would elaborate a plan for November 1918 along such lines which,
as it turned out, could not be executed: once again, it became obvious that the
revolution would begin spontaneously before the D-Day foreseen by all the
leaders. Later, when this revolution directly posed problems at the level of
the State, once the struggle became directly political, the shop stewards in
fact proved incapable of leading it: they generally rallied to the USPD as
their political party. Incapable of transcending the limitations of the
factory, they left it only in order to fall prey to the limitations of
political democracy. Opposed to mass action, which they considered to be
“revolutionary gymnastics”, the Revolutionäre
Obleute (RO) proved that the mere
fact of their working class and factory background did not confer upon them any
more immunity against opportunism and immediatism than was the case with social
groups “outside” the factories. The most radical sectors of the
proletariat (the “left”) would not clearly emerge until the
revolution.
The first disturbances were
hunger riots accompanied by looting of stores, in October 1915 in
The movements in the
provinces were followed by a large strike in
The strikes of January 1918 were
an extension of the strikes in
The strike spread in
1. Haupt: Le congrès manqué,
Maspero, 1965, pp. 25-27.
2. Badia: Histoire de l’Allemagne comtemporaine,
Ed. Sociales, Vol. I, p. 62.
3. Walling,
p. 268. Cf. Humbert Droz, L’origine
de la IC, La Baconnière, 1968; and Gankin and Fisher, The Bolscheviks and the World War,
Stanford University Press and Oxford University Press, 1940.
4. H.
M. Bock: Syndikalismus und
Linkskommunismus, Marburger Abhandlungen für Politischen Wissenschaft,
Vol. 13, 1969, p. 72.
5. “L’imperialisme
et les tâches du proletariat”, Vorbote,
No. 1, 1916.
6. Guerin:
Le mouvement ouvrier aux
7. Bock:
p. 79.
8. Roland-Holst:
she left the small “Internationalist Group” to join the SDP in
1916.
9. Bock:
p. 69.
10. F.
Kool: Die Linke gegen die
Parteiherrschaft, Walter-Verlag, Olten et
11. According
to Waldman, most members of the Lichstrahlen
would later join the Linksradikalen
of northern
12. L.
O’Boyle: American Historical Review,
July, 1951, “The German Independent Socialists during the
13. Badia:
p. 81.
14. Quoted
by Bock, p. 69.
15. Ibid., p. 65.
16. “Organizational
Questions of Russian Social Democracy”, op. cit.
17. Badia:
pp. 87-88.
Prior to November 9
The revolution began among
the sailors of the German fleet at
Their attitude and program
were quite pacifist: peace, democracy and recognition of the workers. This was
the program of all the councils which were born in that first phase. They took
the form of the Russian workers and soldiers soviets. They were based on
cities, neighborhoods or the various military units. Their form was unlike that
of the enterprise or factory councils.
The
This tactic of the SPD proved
to be more suitable under the circumstances than the one advocated by the
government minister from the Catholic Zentrum
Party, Erzberger, who proposed that
The revolution rapidly spread
throughout the whole country, taking
Unlike the precedence of
Approximately 10,000 councils
were established, electing leaders who were in their great majority members of
the SPD. Both the leaders of the SPD as well as the Army encouraged this
process and helped to form councils: “All power to the Councils”.
The council was the form chosen to liquidate the subversive movement, from the
very moment of its appearance. The “council-form” is no less a
failure than the “party-form”. Yet, even today, in imitation of the
Leninists, councilists speak of the council as if it must always be a revolutionary
council, while the latter constituted an exception within the German
Revolution. The Leninists speak the same way about the “revolutionary
party”, as if it were a magical talisman, despite the fact that it has
never existed. These disputes concerning party or council are of no account
because they have always lacked and will continue to lack any real historical
substance.
The November Revolution took
place in a totally unexpected manner for all the parties and groups which
attempted to assume its leadership, including, among others, those who were
closest to the rank and file, the RO,
whose plan for an insurrection was rendered superfluous by the wave which
spread from
The strategies and functions of the
various organizations
As far as the bourgeoisie was
concerned, the State was momentarily neutralized. Nowhere did the bureaucracy
offer any resistance to the formation of councils which, although concentrating
all power in their hands wherever they were established, left the old State
intact, and demanded that the latter “recognize” them. The Army
dissolved, although its officers managed its return to
The SPD which had taken power
had undergone a large reduction in its membership, which was in its eyes a sign
of proletarian radicalization, although the masses allowed it to remain in
power. Once it occupied the highest offices of the State, its membership as
well as its audience rapidly expanded: it obtained 35% of the vote in the
January 1919 elections. It was the “backbone of the new bourgeois
State” (Wolffheim).
Although it had been formed
by those who had been excluded from the SPD, the USPD never lost the hope of
reunification. Since its leaders were primarily concerned with the exercise of
power, they did not consider the possibility of assembling a council as the
Spartacist left had desired. Having taken account of the obvious current of
radicalization, Spartacus had to show that it had at least become a significant
minority within the USPD. We must point out that “public opinion”,
the press, etc., had at that time seized upon the term “Spartacist”
as being more suitable than “left radicals”, “international
socialists”, etc., for causing a sensation, and that the term was applied
to the whole revolutionary movement, within which Spartacus was just one group
among others, and which would constitute neither the majority nor the most
radical current within the KPD. The term “left radical” was also
used in an imprecise manner, designating not only the USPD left (without
distinction) but also everything to the left of the USPD.7
On
Freed by the government at
the end of October, Liebknecht met with the
Like Spartacus, the ISD also
grew and multiplied the number of its publications: some of them would become
the organs of the left wing which would be excluded from the KPD. On November
23, meeting in
On a national scale, the
revolutionary shop stewards seemed to constitute the trade union left. As such,
they corresponded exactly to the USPD (following the old economic-political
dichotomy which the revolution would try to overcome). The RO was ultimately the trade union organization of the USPD. It
fully confirmed this tendency by providing itself with a trade unionist leadership:
Ledebour, Däumig (both from the USPD) and Müller (of the
On
Meanwhile, the
anarchosyndicalists, although outlawed and reduced to inactivity during the
war, had preserved their cadres. The Free Federation of German Trade Unions
(FVDG) rapidly rebuilt its organization. During December 26-27 it held a
conference and, most importantly, decided to invite its members to collaborate
with the communist organizations (IKD) and the Spartacists, in support of the
councils and the dictatorship of the proletariat.9
The “November
Revolution” was not even a bourgeois revolution: ultimately, it was the
political conclusion, carried out by the proletariat, of a bourgeois revolution
which started in the 19th century. This “revolution” was
not a revolution: it did not fight the essence of the State, which was only
modified in a secondary manner. Eichhorn, a USPD member, who was appointed
“chief of police” of
1. Comfort: Chapter
III.
2. See The Revolution in
3. Summarized by
Waldman: p. 107, note 78.
4. Compare
with the Italian bourgeoisie of the same era: R. Paris, Histoire du fascisme, Maspero, Vol. I, 1962; and Communisme et fascisme, Ed. Programme
Communiste.
5. Quoted
in A. Grosser, Hitler, la presse et la
naissance d’une dictature, Colin, 1972, p. 19.
6. Reichenbach:
“Zur Geschichte der KAPD”, Archiv
für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, 1928,
Vol. XIII.
7. Comfort,
p. 43.
8. On
the relations between the RO and the
Spartacus League, cf. Prudhommeaux.
9. Bock:
p. 105, and Document III.
The Bourgeoisie and the “Workers
Party”
The economic crisis at the
end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919 was primarily due to economic
disorganization caused by the war and the need for peacetime reconversion: at
this level alone, it was not a crisis
in the sense of a cyclical crisis. Its features (a considerable decrease in
production, a large trade deficit, a million unemployed at the beginning of
1919—with 250,000 unemployed in Berlin alone—a 2/3 decline in the
exchange value of the mark) were conjunctural effects of the war and
reconversion.
The way capitalism managed to
survive and to crush subversion was basically new. All the institutions which one
would have thought would have served the counterrevolution had collapsed. First
of all, the State and the Army; the bourgeoisie remained in the background, its
parties having relinquished political power (see the previous Chapter). The
bourgeoisie yielded to the socialists, whose leader, Ebert, reassured them:
“We are the only ones who can maintain order.” Among the
pre-revolutionary hierarchies, the SPD and the ADGB were the only institutions
which were still effective on a national scale in
Nowhere did the proletariat
undertake decisive measures of the kind advocated by Lenin in his Message to the Soviet Republic of Bavaria
of
In Bavaria, the
transformations in the army were purely formal: certain rights were conceded to
the soldiers in exchange for their general obedience to their officers.4
Even worse, the only effect of this reform was to exacerbate the
officers’ hatred for all social change, without having granted, in
exchange, the means for the soldiers to organize themselves against the officer
corps. J. Knief considered “the practice of many of the soldiers councils
to be counterrevolutionary”.5 It was within the proletariat
itself that the issue would be decided. The majority of the workers, organized in
trade unions and led by the SPD, would be the agent for capital’s
survival. Capital only exists because the
proletariat creates it, and the proletariat reproduces capital until the
general breakdown of the relations integral to capital, together with the
experience of numerous failed revolutions, compels the proletariat to struggle
and gives it the ability to fight for its survival by rejecting its own
condition as proletariat, rather than in order to survive, by way of political
reforms and activities, as workers who sell their labor power.
After taking power, the SPD
declared the revolution was over, at least in its phase of violence and mass
action. The party of the working class being in power, and the working class
thus having taken political power in its hands, the revolutionary
transformation of social relations (what was called socialization) was only a
question of time: it was a matter of a progressive and peaceful process. The
development of capital still had to continue, since only a capital which had
arrived at the ultimate stage of its development could be
“socialized”. For this reason, order must reign, and the
“Spartacists” must be crushed, “Spartacists” being
another way of saying “reactionary lumpenproletariat”.
The workers movement came to
consider the revolutionary proletarians as marginal in respect to the
“working class”. This was also the source of the rise of racism:
anti-Semitism wreaked havoc in the workers movement, 6 especially
the variety directed against the eastern Jews who had come from
“The Jews of the east
are, for the most part, a proletarian group mired in filth, poverty, and the
lowest moral level of commerce. Unable to adapt to industry, their physical
constitution, furthermore, generally renders them ill-suited for industrial or
agricultural labor.”
Considering fact that these
lines were extracted from the SPD’s leading journal, Neue Zeit, one can imagine what forms anti-Semitism assumed in
everyday agitation and propaganda. Becker, an SPD deputy in the national
assembly, declared in that forum, in 1919: “The Warschovskys, the
Auerbachs and the Sickmanns of Lodz, the Stachovskys and the Alexandrovitchs of
Warsaw are doing business everywhere in
Having a better appreciation
than anyone else for the revolutionary potential of the radical sector, the
driving force of the movement which had just been unleashed, the SPD took
measures to confront it, while it diverted the “masses” with grand
speeches about the advent of socialization. One can see the ideology of
socialization in P. Lensch, who moved from the left to the socialist right wing
and who announced on the eve of the peace that capital would emerge from the
conflict as “a captive of socialism”.7 Economic
socialization was inevitable: “capitalism must be organized”.
Prefiguring the Nazis, which is to say the language of National Socialism so dear to the SPD, he presented the alternative
between “social” organization” and “plutocratic”
organization. The State “has undergone a process of socialization”
and social democracy has experienced a process of
“nationalization”: “For the first time in history, we are
establishing harmony between the State and the people.” Nazism would
receive its “totalitarian language” from social democracy.
In an article on Socialization, 8 Pannekoek
criticized the term itself, which alone designates nothing but organized
capitalism or “State socialism”. But he did not discuss the notion
of a community without exchange. Nor would Gorter: 9
“The proletariat must
take State and legislative power into its hands. It must guarantee a minimum of
the means of subsistence to all the workers and to all those who must become
workers. It must take over the management of all production, of trade and
transportation, and of the distribution of production. It must decree
compulsory labor for all. It must repudiate the State’s debts; confiscate
war profits; it must only tax capital and income and thereby arrive at a
confiscation of capital. It must expropriate the Banks and large industry. It
must socialize the land.”
The SPD also availed itself
of violent measures. After November 10, Ebert was in contact with the
Army’s leaders and assured them of his assistance: the distrust, and even
more than distrust, on the part of the General Staff with respect to social
democracy was a habit which would not disappear simply because the latter held
government power. It was at this moment that Ebert uttered his famous phrase:
“we are the only party which can maintain order.”10 On
the 11th, Ebert’s government made haste to sign the armistice
so as to be able to dedicate itself to a more essential war. Since the Army had
to be dismantled according to the terms of the armistice, its leaders undertook
the construction of Freikorps: even
so, the military means at the disposal of the counterrevolution were still
scarce, which was a powerful reason for choosing which tactic to follow. The
SPD faced a unique situation, unlike, for example, that faced by its Austrian
counterparts.11 Founded in 1889 by an accord between radical and
moderate socialists, Austrian social democracy did not have to vote for war
credits, since the government had suspended parliament in March of 1914. It
did, however, support the State (above all K. Renner and V. Adler, against the
opposition of F. Adler). Austrian social democracy did not have as much blood
on its hands as its German neighbor, and preserved, for the most part, a leftist
ideology and semblance. “Socialization” and democracy had
relatively greater importance in
The Function of Democracy
Democracy served all
purposes. Trade union leaders and employers, who had long served on the same
commissions, quickly signed the accord known under the name of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft: literally, the
“community of labor”. The businessman, who was aware that the
period rendered a great number of measures impractical, surrendered
“everything” to preserve what was essential.
For the trade unions and the
SPD this reaction was excellent propaganda for guaranteeing a good beginning
for socialization and for preventing strikes. Significant reforms, for that era,
were adopted, such as the principle
of the eight hour day. In particular, the trade unions were recognized as valid
interlocutors and components within the enterprise. Joint committees were made
obligatory, composed of trade union and employer representatives in enterprises
with more than 20 employees: this measure would be implemented in January 1920
under the rubric of the “law on enterprise councils”. Instead of
going on strike and conducting propaganda campaigns, it was better to discuss
matters with the joint committee: this is what the anti-trade union left would
call “economic democracy”.
Council democracy revived
parliamentary democracy, the trade unions being unable to overcome the
simulacrum of parliamentary democracy within their own ranks. In December, the
elections for the provincial assemblies were organized: the SPD won a majority,
except in
In order to prevent the
revolutionary wave from sweeping everything away, the counterrevolution
consolidated the only really existing means to stop it: the reformist majority
of the working class, which in addition had its own concrete
goals--negotiations with the employers, councils, elections. Everything was
connected together by democratic ideology, and defended by the Freikorps. It was on this last level
that the shoe pinched: the military apparatus of the counterrevolution was
short on soldiers, while the workers were armed. The first direct attack on the
radicals (the Volksmarinedivision)
would fail (see the next Chapter). This would give way to the tactic of
progressively crushing the partial uprisings in the various regions of
This tactic could not have
succeeded unless the revolution, despite its scale, was unable to act
simultaneously and with one will. Each council power had specific problems of
all kinds which it hoped to solve locally. There is no example of a movement
which was victorious in one State and devoted itself to agitation in a
neighboring State. Among the leftists, it seems that Wolffheim and Laufenberg
were the only ones to concern themselves with establishing communication
between the rebellious zones in northern and central
Once it had consolidated the
counterweight to halt the revolution, social democracy had to take immediate
action in order to prevent the constitution of the proletarians into a class, a
process begun at the end of the war, whose first confused manifestation was the
generalization of councils-soviets, but which would acquire an increasingly
more precise expression in the factory councils and the increasing strength of
the Spartacists and the IKD, particularly with the fusion of these two groups
into the KPD.
To speak of
“strategy”, of “tactics”, of “provocation”,
etc., by no means implies that the motive force of this whole revolutionary
movement was established by “consciousness”. Under the pressure of
the social and political crisis which followed the war, social and political
groups were obliged to take action in order to survive; the survival of one
could only be achieved to the detriment of the other, and each group adopted,
more or less consciously, the tactic which the pre-existing conditions imposed.
The SPD was forced to take action against the Volksmarinedivision, and after its defeat it was compelled to
sacrifice a pawn against the revolution (the expulsion of Eichhorn). In both
cases, these moves provoked a reaction in the reactionary camp for whom it
became obvious that the proletarians, having reached the limit of their
potential, could not bring about the fall of the social democratic State. The
reaction could then make its move without fearing any response.13
Except for the
The Founding of the KPD
The prelude to the founding
of the KPD was the national conference of the IKD held on December 24 in
After having desired to
remain in the USPD, the Spartacus League placed itself “outside the
organization” by taking the initiative to hold a national conference in
October (see the preceding Chapter). Excluded de facto, it accepted the IKD’s position and left the USPD. A
small minority (Luxemburg, Levi, and L. Jogisches) was very hesitant, since it
judged that the situation was not “mature” enough for the creation
of the revolutionary party. But they followed the majority. The Congress set
the date when Spartacus would convoke its second national conference: December
30.
Except for certain
specialized histories, 16 whenever the matter of the radical
movement of 1918-19 is discussed, it is the Spartacists who get the most
attention. The left groups of
At the founding Congress of
the KPD it became evident that the overwhelming majority of the delegates,
although not all of them members of the IKD, adhered to the theses of the IKD.
The party would have 90,000 members in March 1919. According to F. Kool, it was
formed of mostly young workers “without political experience”.
According to Bock, the sociological profile of its recruits was much more
varied and included workers from all layers of the proletariat. Subsequently, a
consensus concerning the “lack of maturity” of the delegates to the
founding Congress would become established.17 Historians and
political organizations cannot admit that proletarians could
“spontaneously” adopt such radical positions.
After having unanimously
adopted the program which had been written by Luxemburg and had already been
published on December 14 as the “Program of the Spartacus League”
under the title of What Does Spartacus
Want?, along with the slogans of the “Communist Party of Germany
(Spartacus League)” or KPD(S), the leftist tendency crystallized around
two questions, that of participation in the elections (for the constituent
assembly) and that of working in the trade unions.
The Congress held a debate on
the question of organization, but for the most part opposed centralism. Workers
autonomy, if not workerism, occupied a preferential place in the Congress.
Eberlein declared: 18 “The organizations of the old SPD,
except for periodic elections, were inert and empty. . . . We must construct
our organization on totally different foundations. We demand that the workers
and soldiers councils exercise all political power. The factory councils are
the basis of power. Our organization must be adapted to this situation. It
would then be best, probably, to create communist groups in the factories. It
cannot be tolerated that orders should be imposed from above. The industrial
organizations must enjoy complete autonomy. The task of the central organ is
above all that of synthesizing the movements which develop outside of it and
assuring political and ideological leadership.” Each organization must
have full autonomy of action; the central office has a minimal political role:
information clearing house, preparation of congresses and managing day-to-day
business. Above all it was not to be a revolutionary general staff for all of
Participation in the
elections was rejected by 62 votes against 23; among the latter, Liebknecht
declared that he had only reluctantly voted “in favor”.20
Knief, on the other hand, of the Bremen IKD, was a supporter of revolutionary
parliamentarism. The 62 votes represented the IKD and the party’s
“rank and file”.
Luxemburg reproached the
abstentionists for “transforming radicalism (which in German is
synonymous with ‘leftism’) into something quite comfortable”.
A more “useful” tactic was needed, Levi explained in his report, which
would consist in participating in the elections in order to destroy
parliamentarism. Rühle presented the opposition’s report. The
majority of those “lacking in political experience” did not want to
hear any nonsense about classical politics, and their hostile shouts often
interrupted the speeches of Luxemburg and Levi.
It was crucial for its
current and future activities that the KPD Congress should affirm that the
party should work for the destruction of the trade unions and call upon all of
its members to leave them: such was the opinion of the abstentionist majority.
On behalf of the left, Frölich (
The radicalism displayed by
the Congress was one reason why the RO
refused to join the KPD. Under Däumig’s leadership, they formed a “Community
of Labor” and in 1922 returned to the rump USPD (that is, what was left
of it after the departure, in 1920, of its left wing for the KPD; cf. Chapter
13), which soon rejoined the SPD. A minority chose to remain outside of the SPD
and the KPD and preserved the name USPD, which later split in its turn into two
groups in 1923, which would join the SAP (another centrist party) in 1931. The
ex-USPD members who returned to the SPD in 1922 preserved certain
characteristically “leftist” positions: hostile to national
coalitions of the socialist party with the bourgeois parties, in 1923 they
initiated the abortive experience of the “workers government” in
Saxony.22
Luxemburg’s maneuver
regarding the trade union question and the fact that the party minority was
elected to the party’s leadership positions demonstrated a certain
inexperience or incompetence in political affairs on the part of the KPD
majority: this would be further confirmed when, in October 1919, the minority
managed to exclude the majority. The German Left would be constituted and would
distinguish itself in opposition to Spartacism, in the course of which it would
experience more difficulties than in other aspects of its break with its social
democratic past.23 But if there is a clear difference between
“Spartacism” and the “German Left”, neither the one nor
the other had become petrified in 1919. Had proletarian action followed an
ascending course, which did not happen, profound analyses would have been
possible. It is just as impossible to draw a hard and fast line between the two
currents, as the golden legend of Spartacism is false. The KPD Congress was
divided over “the question of the ‘unitary’ organization
defended by ISD elements . . . and the ‘leader-masses’ problem,
which in addition to garnering the support of the above mentioned
‘radicals’ also had sympathizers among the Spartacists, who had
defended these positions—although in a somewhat vague manner—when
they had constituted the ‘International’ fraction of the
USPD”.24 It would be the left, however, which would be
consolidated during the course of the struggles of 1919, and its divergences
with the KPD’s right wing would become so profound that they would lead
to a split.
The Spartacist leaders proved
to be incapable of breaking with social democracy and its methods. One of the
errors of the left was that of not criticizing the party program itself.
According to What Does Spartacus Want?,
a revolution had taken place: its first phase (up to December 24) had been
“exclusively political”; from that point forward, it had to be
oriented towards what was essential: towards the field of the economy.25
“The conquest of power
cannot be accomplished at one blow, but must be incremental: we shall introduce
ourselves into the bourgeois State until we occupy all of its posts and defend
them against all external attacks. . . .
It is a step-by-step, hand-to-hand struggle, in each State, in each
city, in each village, in order to put all the instruments of power into the
hands of the workers and soldiers councils, instruments which must slowly be
torn from the grasp of the bourgeoisie. While achieving this goal we must,
first of all, educate our comrades. . . .”
It serves no purpose to
insist on those aspects which separate Marx (concerning which Pannekoek and,
later, Lenin, would write at length) from this “incremental”
conquest of the capitalist State by a proletariat which “introduces
itself” into that State. It is the same kind of absence of a rupture as
is found in the Kautskyism of The Road to
Power. Luxemburg’s contradiction, like that of so many others, was
that of effectively being a revolutionary, and not only in words, but without
acquiring the means to really be a revolutionary. Her originality resides in
the method chosen for her purpose: it is always a question of teaching and
educating, but by means of action and not classical pedagogy. The fear of a
failed putsch caused Luxemburg to renounce proposing a centralized struggle:
“It is among the rank and file, where each factory owner confronts his
wage slaves, where we must uproot the instruments of power, little by little,
from the rulers.”
Luxemburg did not understand
that even though the class struggle is especially fluid and mobile, it also
crystallizes into organizations, both revolutionary and reactionary.26
Hence her refusal to create an independent organization. Her reasoning in
relation to the State born in November 1918 was like her reasoning concerning
the SPD and the USPD. Conceiving of social life primarily as movement, she
neglected the moments of rupture. She rejected a frontal assault on the
1. La question syndicale et la gauche allemande…., p. 6.
2. Conseils ouvriers en Allemagne 1917-21, pp. 158-166.
3. Comfort,
Chapter III; cf. also P. von Oertzen, Die
Betriebsräte in der November Revolution, Düsseldorf, 1963.
4. A.
Mitchell: Revolution in
5. La question syndicale…., p. 58,
note no. 6.
6. Berlau:
pp. 345-346.
7. Three Years of World Revolution,
Constable,
8. Le Phare, March 1920.
9. Bulletin communiste, June 3 1920,
“La révolution universelle”, cf. also Rühle, From the Bourgeois to the Communist
Revolution, Socialist Reproduction, London, 1974, with a good introduction;
and L. Valiani, Histoire du socialisme au
XXe siècle, Nagel, 1948, pp. 115-116.
10. Statement
attributed to Scheidemann, quoted in Badia.
11. K.
Shell: The Transformation of Austrian
Socialism,
12. PC, No. 61, p. 37 et seq., and No. 64, p. 77 et
seq.
13. Concerning
“historical coercion”—which is not synonymous with
automatism—cf. La Sainte Famille,
Ed. Sociales, 1969, pp.47-48. In English, The
Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism, Progress Publishers,
14. Waldman:
p. 150, No. 92.
15. R.
Lowenthal, The Bolshevisation of the
Spartakus League, in St.
Anthony’s Papers, No. 9, Chatto-Windus, London, 1960, p. 26.
16. Bock
and Kool, in particular.
17. Among
others, Badia, in Le spartakisme,
conclusion; Waldman, p. 152, note no. 96; and Lowenthal, p. 27.
18. Waldman:
pp. 155-156.
19. Cf.
La gauche allemande. Textes.
20. Bock:
p. 95.
21. Cf.
Lange’s report: Waldman, pp. 153-154.
22. Hunt:
pp. 206-207 and 210, et seq.
23. PC, No. 58, pp. 91-115, concerning
Spartacism and pp. 100-101 for the IKD.
24. La question syndicale…., p. 5.
25. Luxemburg:
Oeuvres, Maspero, Vol. II, 1969, pp.
126-128.
26. R.
Paris: Introduction to La
révolution russe, Maspero, 1964.
The Councils Commit Suicide
On November 10, the delegates
of the councils in the Berlin region met and proclaimed the “Socialist
Republic”, and elected a provisional executive committee (Vollzugsrat), composed of six SPD
members, six USPD members, and twelve soldiers, all of the latter being SPD
supporters. Although it considered itself to be the repository of all power, it
delegated all of its power to the council of peoples’ commissars, in whom
it declared that it placed all its confidence. This explains why, on the 13th,
it opposed the creation of a proletarian red guard.
In some regions the councils
would go further. In
It is clear that, throughout
this entire period, the example of the soviet-Russian revolution led to a
fetishism of the soviet form. For the German movement, not having reached the
point of its most extreme radicalization, “making” soviets became a
substitute for revolutionary action. During the Congress, the Spartacists, who
had been excluded from its deliberations, led a demonstration calling for
another round of elections for the councils.
The Conflict in
With this SPD victory and the
SPD’s success in the local elections for the Brunswick assembly, Ebert
thought that the moment had arrived to make his first move by attacking the Volksmarinedivision which, composed of
3,000 sailors from Kiel, had installed itself in Berlin “to defend the
conquests of the revolution” against the attacks of the reaction. For the
government, it was the principle military manifestation of the revolution: it
was best neutralized as soon as possible.
Immediately after the Council
Congress, an attempt was made to provoke the sailors by withholding their pay.
On December 24, the sailors responded by occupying the Chancellery. Ebert, who
could not yet act openly, contacted General Lequis, who assembled the security
forces and surrounded the sailors. The latter took refuge in the royal palace,
which they used as a base camp. The battle began with a volley of artillery
fire, killing and wounding 60 sailors, who resisted until the moment when a
radical demonstration began. Lequis’ troops, having themselves been
surrounded, were forced to withdraw: their officers only escaped being lynched
thanks to a speech by Ebert. At that time, demonstrators also occupied the Vorwärts offices for the first
time: the