6. The War

Despite years of assurances by politicians and diplomats all over Europe that peace was guaranteed, it had been obvious for decades that tensions between the great powers were building up beneath the surface. As capitalism entered into crisis, these tensions mounted further. The war was the military expression of the battle for resources, spheres of interest and colonial possessions, which the powerful states of Europe had been engaged in for a long time. On the one side were the old colonial powers, France and Great Britain, and on the other side there was Germany. Germany had arrived late on the scene of capitalist development, but in a relatively short space of time it had developed a strong industrial base. Now, possessing the military capacity to do so, it sought to seize a position of dominance on the world stage that corresponded to its economic and military might. The First World War was fundamentally a conflict between the great powers of Europe for the distribution and redistribution of markets and colonies.

It became apparent early on to the socialists of the Second International that war was looming. In the years preceding 1914, the question of the growing war threat was discussed many times over in the International. At the world congress in Stuttgart in August 1907, the fundamental position of the International was established – a position that the International would reaffirm on several succeeding occasions.

Rosa Luxemburg participated in the world congress of 1907 as a delegate of the SDKPiL, which gave her freedom from the discipline of the German party. As we have seen on several occasions, the highest wish of the German delegation was to somehow avoid any discussion of the war question and to avoid adopting any resolutions. At the congress, Luxemburg criticised the policy of the German party, and gave a speech which, in particular, included a sharp criticism of Bebel. On the question of imperialism, Luxemburg and Lenin were in agreement, on the basis of which they drafted and moved a joint amendment to the resolution on war. Lenin allowed Luxemburg to write the draft, and he gave her a Russian mandate in the commission.

Lenin, who spent a lot of time with her at Stuttgart, had realised early on that his position was much like hers, and that she could represent it with greater experience and chance of success.^[1]

The resolution began by establishing the fact that war is built into capitalism, and that the struggle against imperialism and war is inseparable from the struggle for socialism:

Wars are therefore inherent in the nature of capitalism; they will only cease when capitalist economy is abolished, or when the magnitude of the sacrifice of human beings and money, necessitated only by the technical development of warfare, and popular disgust with armaments, lead to the abolition of this system.^[2]

The amendment proposed by Luxemburg and Lenin committed the International to action in the case of war, and above all it committed the International to make use of the war to hasten the fall of capitalism. The amendment was inserted as the final two paragraphs of the resolution:

In case of a threat of an outbreak of war, it is the duty of the working classes and their parliamentary representatives in the countries taking part, fortified by the unifying activity of the International Bureau, to do everything to prevent the outbreak of war by whatever means seem to them most effective, which naturally differ with the intensification of the class war and of the general political situation.

Should war break out in spite of all this, it is the duty to intercede for its speedy end, and to strive with all their power to make use of the violent economic and political crisis brought about by the war to rouse the people, and thereby to hasten the abolition of capitalist class rule.^[3]

The resolution and the amendment were adopted by large majorities. In 1914, however, both were simply thrown overboard.

4 August 1914 represents a landmark date in the history of the international workers’ movement. On this date, through their actions, the leaders of the SPD passed a death sentence on the International. Three days earlier, Germany had declared war on Russia. On 4 August, the SPD’s Reichstag fraction unanimously voted in favour of war credits to fund the war. They thus elected to support their own national bourgeoisie and its imperialist ambitions, rather than stand in solidarity with the workers of the world and fight to overthrow capitalism and imperialism. Already on 2 August the German trade union leaders had signed a ‘no strike’ agreement with the employers, banning strikes and lockouts as long as hostilities lasted. The German leaders were certainly not alone in their betrayal. Of the parties of the eight warring nations, only the British Independent Labour Party (ILP), the Serbian Social Democracy, and the Russian Mensheviks and Bolsheviks opposed the war and their own governments.

When the SPD gave its support to the German government’s war credits, shockwaves were sent reverberating across the International. Luxemburg had observed the degeneration of the leadership of the SPD at close range, and yet even she had not anticipated such an immense betrayal. Lenin, who had not observed the degeneration at such close quarters, believed that the edition of Vorwärts outlining the SPD’s support for war credits was a forgery of the German general staff. In a single stroke, the International collapsed. It was now dead as a tool for the world socialist revolution.

National chauvinism was whipped up by the ruling classes everywhere. The social-democratic leaders helped it along. The forces of internationalism were immediately reduced to next to nothing. At the first gathering of internationalist socialists in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, in 1915, Lenin dryly remarked that it would be possible to fit all the internationalists in the world into four stage-coaches. The first years of the war were years of pitch darkness for the revolutionaries.

The tops of the German SPD had been drifting in a national chauvinist direction for a long time. They had attempted to dodge the question of German imperialist aggression in Morocco, but a number of party leaders had gone further and openly advocated in favour of German colonial policy. Eduard David,^[4] for instance, viewed German colonial politics as an “integral part of the universal cultural aims of the socialist movement.”^[5] When the war broke out, the leadership of the SPD threw their support behind the German government. They argued that it was necessary to defend the fatherland against the encroachment of the barbaric Russian regime. The SPD Reichstag group defended their support for war credits using the following arguments:

We are now facing the irrevocable fact of war. We are threatened by the horrors of invasion. The decision, today, is not for or against war; for us there can be but one question: by what means is this war to be conducted? Much, aye everything, is at stake for our people and its future, if Russian despotism, stained with the blood of its own people, should be the victor. This danger must be averted, the civilisation and the independence of our people must be safeguarded. Therefore we will carry out what we have always promised: in the hour of danger we will not desert our fatherland. In this we feel that we stand in harmony with the International, which has always recognised the right of every people to its national independence, as we stand in agreement with the International in emphatically denouncing every war of conquest. Actuated by these motives, we vote in favour of the war credits demanded by the Government.^[6]

This patriotism seeped like a poison from the top of the party down to the local party leaders and editors. “National unity” became the party’s watchword. Translated into practice, this meant a parliamentary truce and the cessation of all opposition as long as the war lasted. In return for yoking the workers to the war effort, the SPD and trade unions were permitted a continued existence, and the former was embraced into respectable bourgeois society. But the price of such acceptance and legality was the abandonment of everything the SPD had stood for until that point. These ‘leaders’ had sold their claim to defend the interests of the workers, and in exchange they had purchased a seat at the master’s table. As the war developed, the terms of the parliamentary truce were expanded to include agreement on the suppression of the left wing of the SPD, as well as all other expressions among the German workers of a growing mood of discontent with the war.

The so-called ‘centre’ of the party around Karl Kautsky had written off the possibility of an outbreak of war. They had simply swallowed the assurances of the state officials at face value. Kautsky even developed his own theoretical cover for the chauvinism of the SPD leadership: he argued that violence and imperialist aggression were far from an inherent feature of capitalism. Rather, the violent expansionism that the world was witnessing was driven by particular groups of capitalists, such as the bankers, the arms industry etc. The capitalist class as a whole – and particularly heavy industry – he argued, on the contrary had an interest in peaceful capitalist development. This layer of the capitalist class must eventually turn against such violent imperialist politics, and return to the principles of free trade. Kautsky claimed that it was the duty of social democracy to appeal to the progressive section of the bourgeoisie and put the case for capitalism with a human face.

Kautsky deftly conjured away the betrayals of the International’s leaders:

[But] the International is not an effective tool in wartime; in essence it is an instrument of peace. Only in peacetime can it develop its full strength, and insofar as it is able to bring this strength to bear, it always works for peace.^[7]

In other words, when class contradictions sharpened and events reached the point of workers being sent to slaughter other workers in the interest of national capital… according to Kautsky, the International simply ceased to be of any further use.

The Junius Pamphlet

In April 1915, while in prison, Rosa Luxemburg wrote a pamphlet under the title, The Crisis of German Social Democracy, later known more widely as the Junius Pamphlet. Luxemburg was persuaded by her comrades to write under a pseudonym to avoid further imprisonment, and as such she took the pseudonym, Junius, hence the pamphlet’s name.^[8] But upon release from prison, she realised that it actually had not been published owing to difficulties with the censors, and on account of the fact that those who were tasked with publishing it were either themselves in prison, or else had been drafted into the military. For this reason, the pamphlet didn’t actually see the light of day until early April 1916 – over a year after it was written. When the pamphlet was finally published, the movement against the war had already matured. There was a real need for a concrete direction to be given and for the tasks of international social democracy to be spelled out. Luxemburg provided this direction in the form of the so-called ‘Junius Theses’, which were printed along with her longer text.

In her pamphlet, Luxemburg meticulously demonstrated that this was an all-round imperialist war, and that this was true for all the belligerent nations. Even the smaller nations were merely subjugated to one or other of the larger imperialist nations’ interests. The choice she posed before humanity was, “socialism or barbarism”:

This is the dilemma of world history, its inevitable choice, whose scales are trembling in the balance awaiting the decision of the proletariat. Upon it depends the future of culture and humanity. In this war imperialism has been victorious. Its brutal sword of murder has dashed the scales, with overbearing brutality, down into the abyss of shame and misery. If the proletariat learns from this war and in this war exert itself, to cast off its serfdom to the ruling classes, to become the lord of its own destiny, the shame and misery will not have been in vain.^[9]

Bitterly criticising how the social democrats had fully endorsed this war by supporting their own national bourgeoisies, she exposed the hypocrisy of the social-democratic leaders. In particular, she pointed to how the actual result of their policies was diametrically opposed to the claimed ends for which they were pursuing them:

German freedom, that same German freedom for which, according to the declaration of the Reichstag group, Krupp cannons are now fighting, has been endangered by this attitude of the social democracy far beyond the period of the present war. The leaders of the social democracy are convinced that democratic liberties for the working class will come as a reward for its allegiance to the fatherland. But never in the history of the world has an oppressed class received political rights as a reward for service rendered to the ruling classes. History is full of examples of shameful deceit on the part of the ruling classes, even when solemn promises were made before the war broke out. The social democracy has not assured the extension of liberty in Germany. It has sacrificed those liberties that the working class possessed before the war broke out.^[10]

Luxemburg ripped apart each of the social democrats’ arguments one by one. One such argument claimed that support for the war was necessary in order to stop Russian despotism in its tracks. But Luxemburg pointed out that if the leaders of the SPD really believed in the need to combat Russian despotism, they would throw their support behind the revolutionary activity of the Russian proletariat rather than behind the German bourgeoisie.

She also criticised the SPD leaders’ claim that they supported the war as a war of national defence against foreign aggression. She showed, firstly, how history has provided many examples where the bourgeoisie invoked foreign invasion in order to crush revolutionary movements. One such example was the Paris Commune of 1871. She also explained how the best defence against foreign invasion was not at all to put class struggle on hold but, on the contrary:

The centuries have proven that not the state of siege, but relentless class struggle, is the power that awakens the spirit of self-sacrifice, the moral strength of the masses; that the class struggle is the best protection and the best defence against a foreign enemy.^[11]

Luxemburg was not content to simply expose the hypocritical treachery of the SPD. She went on to describe what they ought to have done instead:

Yes, socialists should defend their country in great historical crises, and here lies the great fault of the German social democratic Reichstag group. When it announced on 4 August, “in this hour of danger, we will not desert our fatherland”, it denied its own words in the same breath. For truly it has deserted its fatherland in its hour of greatest danger. The highest duty of the social democracy toward its fatherland demanded that it expose the real background of this imperialist war, that it rend the net of imperialist and diplomatic lies that covers the eyes of the people. It was their duty to speak loudly and clearly, to proclaim to the people of Germany that in this war victory and defeat would be equally fatal, to oppose the gagging of the fatherland by a state of siege, to demand that the people alone decide on war and peace, to demand a permanent session of parliament for the period of the war, to assume a watchful control over the government by parliament, and over parliament by the people, to demand the immediate removal of all political inequalities, since only a free people can adequately govern its country, and finally, to oppose to the imperialist war, based as it was upon the most reactionary forces in Europe, the program of Marx, of Engels, and Lassalle.^[12]

More concretely, she explained:

The most elementary demand of national defence is that the nation takes its defence into its own hands. The first step in this direction is the militia; not only the immediate armament of the entire adult male populace, but above all, popular decision in all questions of peace and war. It must demand, furthermore, the immediate removal of every form of political oppression, since the greatest political freedom is the best basis for national defence. To proclaim these fundamental measures of national defence, to demand their realisation, that was the first duty of the social democracy.^[13]

Luxemburg had defended the idea of the mass strike throughout the preceding decade. She understood, however, that it would be an ultra-left mistake to now denounce the Social Democracy for having failed to simply call a mass strike, or even a revolution, the moment the war broke out. She understood that revolutions and mass strikes cannot be arbitrarily summoned at will. Nevertheless, she criticised the Social Democracy for failing to rally any opposition to the war whatsoever. Quite the contrary, the SPD actively assisted in whipping up the very mood of patriotic fervour that it now used as an excuse for not opposing the war in the first place. Instead, the Social Democracy ought to have exposed the real war aims of the imperialists, and should have advanced timely political slogans in order to foster serious opposition to the war among the masses. She was under no illusion that such a course of action would have immediately paid dividends, or that the Social Democracy could have immediately called upon mass support from its policies. But that was not the point:

“Would the masses have supported the social democracy in its attitude against the war?” That is a question that no one can answer. But neither is it an important one. Did our parliamentarians demand an absolute assurance of victory from the generals of the Prussian army before voting in favour of war credits? What is true of military armies is equally true of revolutionary armies. They go into the fight, wherever necessity demands it, without previous assurance of success. At the worst, the party would have been doomed, in the first few months of the war, to political ineffectuality. […]

At first we would perhaps have accomplished nothing but to save the honour of the proletariat, and thousands upon thousands of proletarians who are dying in the trenches in mental darkness would not have died in spiritual confusion, but with the one certainty that that which has been everything in their lives, the international, liberating social democracy is more than the figment of a dream.

The voice of our party would have acted as a wet blanket upon the chauvinistic intoxication of the masses. It would have preserved the intelligent proletariat from delirium, would have made it more difficult for imperialism to poison and to stupefy the minds of the people. The crusade against the social democracy would have awakened the masses in an incredibly short time.

And as the war went on, as the horror of endless massacre and bloodshed in all countries grew and grew, as its imperialistic hoof became more and more evident, as the exploitation by bloodthirsty speculators became more and more shameless, every live, honest, progressive and humane element in the masses would have rallied to the standard of the social democracy. The German social democracy would have stood in the midst of this mad whirlpool of collapse and decay, like a rock in a stormy sea, would have been the lighthouse of the whole International, guiding and leading the labour movements of every country of the earth. The unparalleled moral prestige that lay in the hands of the German socialists would have reacted upon the socialists of all nations in a very short time. Peace sentiments would have spread like wildfire and the popular demand for peace in all countries would have hastened the end of the slaughter, would have decreased the number of its victims.

The German proletariat would have remained the lighthouse keeper of socialism and of human emancipation.^[14]

Luxemburg rejected the SPD leaders’ argument that you had to pick a side in the war. She clearly demonstrated how, no matter which side won, the only true winner would be imperialism:

Imperialism, and its servant militarism, will reappear after every victory and after every defeat in this war. There can be but one exception: if the international proletariat, through its intervention, should overthrow all previous calculations.^[15]

To Luxemburg, the struggle against the war did not mean a struggle for a return to the status quo ante. Such a thing would have been a utopian dream. Besides which, it was precisely the pre-war conditions that led to the war in the first place. No, the proletariat had to take up battle against the source of war – imperialism:

The proletarian movement cannot reconquer the place it deserves by means of utopian advice and projects for weakening, taming or quelling imperialism within capitalism by means of partial reforms.

The real problem that the world war has placed before the socialist parties, upon whose solution the future of the working-class movement depends, is the readiness of the proletarian masses to act in the fight against imperialism. The international proletariat suffers, not from a dearth of postulates, programs, and slogans, but from a lack of deeds, of effective resistance, of the power to attack imperialism at the decisive moment, just in times of war. It has been unable to put its old slogan, war against war, into actual practice. Here is the Gordian knot of the proletarian movement and of its future.^[16]

Lenin enthusiastically welcomed Luxemburg’s pamphlet, although he had no knowledge of the true identity of its author:

At last there has appeared in Germany, illegally, without any adaptation to the despicable Junker censorship, a Social-Democratic pamphlet dealing with questions of the war! […] Written in a very lively style, Junius’ pamphlet has undoubtedly played and will play an important role in the struggle against the ex-Social-Democratic Party of Germany, which has deserted to the side of the bourgeoisie and the Junkers, and we heartily greet the author.^[17]

Nonetheless, Lenin criticised what he believed to be the incompleteness of Junius’ (i.e., Rosa Luxemburg’s) arguments. He also emphasised two points where he believed the author had erred. Despite these criticisms, he emphasised that the errors were made with the best of intentions:

Before proceeding with a criticism of Junius’ faults and errors we must strongly emphasise that we do so for the sake of self-criticism, which is so necessary for Marxists, and of submitting to an all-round test the views which must serve as the ideological basis of the Third International. On the whole, Junius’ pamphlet is a splendid Marxist work, and its defects are, in all probability, to a certain extent accidental.^[18]

The first point that Lenin criticised was an argument which Luxemburg made in both the pamphlet and the ‘Junius Theses’: namely, that in the present imperialist epoch, national (i.e., non-imperialist wars) are impossible. According to Lenin, this is incorrect. He cited revolutionary wars or colonial wars for national liberation as possible examples. But Lenin believed such a mistake was understandable in the given context:

It may be that this negation of national wars generally is either an oversight, or an accidental overstatement in emphasising the perfectly correct idea that the present war is an imperialist war, not a national war.^[19]

Nonetheless, from this small mistake, incorrect conclusions could be drawn, and therefore Lenin felt it necessary to deal with the question. Whilst Junius was absolutely correct to argue that this was true of the First World War, Lenin argued that one could not rule out such national wars occurring in the future – for example, as a result of an uprising of the oppressed peoples in the colonies. It is unlikely that Rosa Luxemburg would have disagreed with this point. Lenin laid out his critique not simply for the sake of theoretical clarity, but also because of the potentially damaging consequences this argument could lead to in practice. It was correct, in Lenin’s view, to refuse to support any of the belligerents in the First World War as all of the belligerents were imperialists or the proxies of imperialist powers. But ought we conclude from this that one must never support any side in any war? Or that one had to be against war as a matter of principle? Lenin answered:

But the mistake is very harmful also from the standpoint of practical politics, for it gives rise to the absurd propaganda of ‘disarmament’, since it is alleged that there can be no wars except reactionary wars. It also gives rise to the even more ludicrous and downright reactionary attitude of indifference towards national movements. And such an attitude becomes chauvinism when members of the ‘great’ European nations, that is, the nations which oppress the mass of small and colonial peoples, declare with a pseudo-scientific air: “national wars are no longer possible!” National wars against the imperialist powers are not only possible and probable; they are inevitable, progressive and revolutionary, though of course, to be successful, they require either the concerted effort of huge numbers of people in the oppressed countries (hundreds of millions in our example of India and China), or a particularly favourable conjuncture of international conditions (e.g., the fact that the imperialist powers cannot interfere, being paralysed by exhaustion, by war, by their antagonisms, etc.), or the simultaneous uprising of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie in one of the big powers (this latter eventuality holds first place as the most desirable and favourable for the victory of the proletariat).^[20]

Although it is probable that this point of difference partially reflects the differing views of Luxemburg and Lenin with regard to the right of nations to self-determination, Lenin said it would be “unfair to accuse Junius of being indifferent to national movements”. In practice, Luxemburg had openly and actively opposed the colonial aspirations of the ‘great German nation’ in Morocco and elsewhere.

The other point on which Lenin believed that Luxemburg was wrong, was on the question of the defence of the fatherland. Luxemburg dealt in the pamphlet with the SPD’s argument that it was necessary to defend the fatherland. She criticised their actions, however, from the premise that their policy was actually ineffectual in achieving its aim. Lenin, however, believed that it was the very idea that the Social Democracy should be concerned about defending the capitalist fatherland that ought to be attacked. Lenin compared Luxemburg’s arguments with the Menshevik theory of stages – i.e., that we must first raise the ‘acceptable’ demands, and only at a later, second stage can we raise socialism:

In saying that class struggle is the best means of defence against invasion, Junius applies Marxist dialectics only halfway, taking one step on the right road and immediately deviating from it. Marxist dialectics call for a concrete analysis of each specific historical situation. It is true that class struggle is the best means of defence against invasion both when the bourgeoisie is overthrowing feudalism, and when the proletariat is overthrowing the bourgeoisie. Precisely because it is true with regard to every form of class oppression, it is too general, and therefore, inadequate in the present specific case. Civil war against the bourgeoisie is also a form of class struggle, and only this form of class struggle would have saved Europe (the whole of Europe, not only one country) from the peril of invasion. The ‘Great German Republic’ had it existed in 1914-16, would also have waged an imperialist war.

Junius came very close to the correct solution of the problem and to the correct slogan: civil war against the bourgeoisie for socialism; but, as if afraid to speak the whole truth, he turned back to the fantasy of a ‘national war’ in 1914, 1915 and 1916.^[21]

Lenin criticised Luxemburg for looking backwards rather than forwards when she posed a national programme against the imperialist war. By doing so she left the door ajar to those, such as the Mensheviks, who might wish to misuse her arguments to legitimise their own politics. While Lenin believed that her critique of the war was absolutely correct, he criticised her for stopping half way. Her slogan, “war against the war”, pointed in the right direction, in Lenin’s opinion. However, she failed to fully take the next step. Only the socialist revolution could offer a way forward. And the only way to secure that was by turning the imperialist war into a civil war of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.

Lenin developed on what the tasks of Marxists were moving forward. First among those was the task of building a new International. Luxemburg also wrote about the need for a new International, but Lenin’s central criticism was that she had not yet completely freed herself from the German Social-Democratic milieu. He was not speaking only or even particularly about the right wing of the party. He emphasised that it was most important of all to break completely from the so-called ‘centre’ of the party, focused around Kautsky. Using radical language but siding with the right wing in practice, this was all the more dangerous precisely because it sowed doubt in the minds of the workers and gave the right a left-wing cover. Kautsky’s name only appeared twice in Luxemburg’s entire pamphlet. Indeed, where she did mention him it was not to subject him to merciless criticism, but rather to hold up and contrast the current position of the SPD against something correct he had written about the struggle against imperialism back in 1907. According to Lenin, the magazine Internationale, which Luxemburg often wrote for, had a much clearer line on this question:

The chief defect in Junius’ pamphlet, and what marks a definite step backward compared with the legal (although immediately suppressed) magazine, Internationale, is its silence regarding the connection between social-chauvinism (the author uses neither this nor the less precise term social-patriotism) and opportunism. The author rightly speaks of the “capitulation” and collapse of the German Social Democratic Party and of the “treachery” of its “official leaders”, but he goes no further. The Internationale, however, did criticise the “Centre”, i.e., Kautskyism, and quite properly poured ridicule on it for its spinelessness, its prostitution of Marxism and its servility to the opportunists. This same magazine began to expose the role the opportunists by revealing, for example, the very important fact that on 4 August 1914, the opportunists came out with an ultimatum, a ready-made decision to vote for war credits in any case. Neither the Junius pamphlet nor the theses say anything about opportunism or about Kautskyism! This is wrong from the standpoint of theory, for it is impossible to account for the “betrayal” without linking it up with opportunism as a trend with a long history behind it, the history of the whole Second International. It is a mistake from the practical political standpoint, for it is impossible either to understand the “crisis of Social-Democracy”, or overcome it, without clarifying the meaning and the role of two trends – the openly opportunist trend (Legien, David, etc.) and the tacitly opportunist trend (Kautsky and Co.).^[22]

Despite the betrayal on 4 August, it was clear that Rosa Luxemburg still regarded herself as part of the SPD. Although she famously declared the party a “stinking corpse” following its great betrayal, throughout her pamphlet she nevertheless speaks on the party’s crisis in the manner of a participant in an internal discussion, rather than as someone who has broken with the party, as Lenin noted. She compared the party’s practice on the outbreak of the war and contrasted it with its earlier statements and practices. As part of the Social Democracy, she argued for the reform of the party and for a change in its policy, rather than of the necessity of a clean break with opportunism in the party in all its forms:

But the German social democracy was not only the strongest body, it was the thinking brain of the International as well. Therefore the process of self-analysis and appraisement must begin in its own movement, with its own case. It is in honour bound to lead the way to the rescue of international Socialism, to proceed with the unsparing criticism of its own shortcomings.^[23]

Lenin, on the contrary, argued that it was high time the revolutionary left wing in Germany drew the necessary conclusions and broke with the SPD. It was necessary to begin building an illegal organisation that openly proclaimed its revolutionary program:

[…] Junius quite rightly says that a revolution cannot be “made.” Revolution was on the order of the day in 1914-16, it was hidden in the depths of the war, was emerging out of the war. This should have been “proclaimed” in the name of the revolutionary class, and its programme should have been fearlessly and fully announced: socialism is impossible in time of war without civil war against the arch-reactionary, criminal bourgeoisie, which condemned the people to untold disaster. Systematic, consistent, practical measures should have been planned, which could be carried out no matter what pace the revolutionary crisis develops, and which would be in line with the maturing revolution. These measures are indicated in our Party resolution: 1) voting against war credits; 2) violation of “class truce”; 3) creation of an illegal organisation; 4) fraternisation among the soldiers; 5) support for all the revolutionary actions of the masses. The success of all these steps inevitably leads to civil war.^[24]

This was the main difference between Lenin and Luxemburg. The collapse of the International had taken Lenin by surprise. However, he immediately understood the extent of its degeneration, and concluded that a radical break was necessary, not only with the chauvinists of the right wing, but also the so-called ‘centre’ (Kautsky, Haase, Ledebour). Henceforth, a new International would have to be built. From 4 August 1914 Lenin’s focus was above all on the education of the revolutionary cadres, i.e., that small minority that had stayed true to its internationalist, socialist principles in August 1914. The internationalists were extremely isolated from the masses. The latter had been overwhelmed by the nationalistic, defencist and patriotic mood that had swept Europe at the beginning of the war. Revolutionaries had to contend, therefore, with being isolated from and unable to reach the masses. In the midst of the patriotic frenzy, it was necessary to achieve clarity of thought regarding the key questions of the day: the war, its causes and its consequences. Lenin therefore expressed himself in the sharpest possible manner, with such slogans as “turn the imperialist war into a civil war”, and unleashing a relentless polemic against pacifism (which would have led to impotence and paralysis), and at the same time against any concession towards defencism. Internally to Russia, he expressed opposition to capitulating to social patriotism through the slogan, “Russia’s defeat is the lesser evil”.

Few understood Lenin at this time. His slogans were met with distrust and scepticism even among the leadership of the Bolshevik party. Trotsky did not understand his position either, and criticised Lenin for being unable to connect with the masses. But that was not the point of his slogans. Lenin’s slogans were given such sharp edges in order to slice away even the slightest hint of national chauvinism, which had penetrated the Second International to such a catastrophic extent, as was fully exposed by the events of 4 August. The cadres of the new International had to be re-educated on solid theoretical foundations and on the basis of the cleanest possible break from the chauvinism of the Second International. Not for the first time, Lenin went far to one extreme in his polemics in order to hammer his points home. This certainly left his statements open to misinterpretation if taken out of context and simply repeated in a simplistic or abstract way. Lenin’s slogan that defeat was the lesser evil was simplified in a crude form, for example, by Zinoviev and taken to mean, “we are for the defeat of Russia”. However, Lenin’s position was that all belligerent sides in the imperialist war were reactionary. What Lenin advocated was the need for the Marxists to reject any form of national chauvinism, and to expose fully and firmly the reactionary, imperialist nature of the war and the forces that supported or capitulated to it. This was in order to win over the revolutionary vanguard to the perspective of international socialist revolution and organise them around an independent revolutionary programme rooted in the working class, which would then be capable of transforming the imperialist war in a revolutionary uprising of the masses.

The same ideas of irreconcilable opposition to chauvinism, defencism and any form of subordination of the revolutionary masses to the liberal bourgeoisie would be expressed through different words and slogans, but the content and Lenin’s method would not change. The difference was that Lenin at this stage was not addressing just a very restricted circle of revolutionaries as in the previous period. Lenin recognised the change in the situation brought about by the Revolution and correspondingly set the task for the growing but still small forces of Bolshevism to connect to the masses and patiently explain, for example, that the change of regime had not changed the imperialist character of the war, and that an end to the war without annexations could be achieved only by a workers’ government based on the power of the Soviets. Lenin summed up the tasks for the Bolshevik Party in the Revolution in the ‘April Theses’, securing the crucial political reorientation of the party in the new situation.

The problem was that in Germany, Luxemburg and her fellow revolutionaries lacked an organisation when the war broke out. Unlike Lenin, she had no organisation of cadres on which to focus her educational efforts. Instead, she wrote for the broad, undefined masses, posing the task as one of regenerating the SPD. Lenin concluded his critique of the Junius Pamphlet by pointing out precisely this weakness: the revolutionaries in Germany were isolated, although he noted that they were moving in the right direction:

Junius’ pamphlet conjures up in our mind the picture of a lone man who has no comrades in an illegal organisation accustomed to thinking out revolutionary slogans to their conclusion and systematically educating the masses in their spirit. But this shortcoming – it would be a grave error to forget this – is not Junius’ personal failing, but the result of the weakness of all the German Leftists, who have become entangled in the vile net of Kautskyist hypocrisy, pedantry and ‘friendliness’ for the opportunists. Junius’ adherents have managed, in spite of their isolation, to begin the publication of illegal leaflets and to start the war against Kautskyism. They will succeed in going further along the right road.^[25]

The Left Wing of the SPD

In his critique, Lenin had touched upon a sore spot: the opponents of the war – the revolutionary left wing in the SPD – were few in number, isolated, and more akin to a loose network of like-minded individuals than a real organisation. But there was opposition to the war. On 3 August 1914, when the SPD’s Reichstag fraction met to discuss whether or not to support the government’s war credits, several of its members wished to vote against. Of the SPD’s 110 Reichstag deputies, fourteen advocated voting against, including Karl Liebknecht. They were voted down, however, and their request to be exempted from party discipline was rejected. As a result, the entire SPD Reichstag fraction voted in favour of war funds on 4 August. From the outside, it looked like a united party in full support of the war.

Already by the very evening of that fateful vote, however, a small group of comrades of the left wing of the party gathered at Rosa Luxemburg’s apartment to discuss the mighty tasks that lay ahead. At the outbreak of the war, Luxemburg thought that it might perhaps be possible to provide an impetus for a spontaneous outbreak of discontent among party members by publishing a manifesto signed by prominent individuals in the party. The main purpose of the meeting on the evening of 4 August was precisely to work out the details of such a manifesto. But only two party members of national prominence turned up: Franz Mehring and Paul Lensch, and the latter did not even wish to put his signature to anything. He would shortly thereafter desert to the side of the party leadership. Having already accepted party discipline over the question of war credits, Liebknecht too was unwilling to now break it. He too was unwilling to sign such a manifesto.

Yet Luxemburg still held onto the idea, sending out more than 300 invitations ahead of a new meeting. Only Clara Zetkin answered her call in the affirmative and without reservations.

It was characteristic of Rosa Luxemburg to hope that she might influence the party, if only she possessed the correct ideas. But the right wing was well-organised and controlled the entire party apparatus. Once again, it was shown that no matter how correct the left wing’s analysis and slogans might be, they were no replacement for a real organisation of the revolutionaries. The course of the party, much less the course of history, could never be changed by appeals and manifestos alone.

To the rest of the world, it had seemed in August 1914 that the SPD was united. The first public expression of opposition to SPD’s policies came in September, in the form of a statement signed by Karl Liebknecht, Franz Mehring, Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg. Luxemburg was the intellectual driving force of the group. But the group of SPD dissidents was heterogeneous, and it now became evident why it is precisely necessary to have an organisation of revolutionaries in place before great events unfold:

In private Rosa gave full vent to her frustrations of getting the motley group of oppositionists together for any concerted and effective action. For their cohesion was a negative one, dislike of the attitude of the party, without any compensatory agreement on what to do instead. It was a rocking boat in which the foursome sailed into the official wind, and Rosa had her work cut out at the helm.

“I want to undertake the sharpest possible action against the activities of the [Reichstag] delegates. Unfortunately I get little co-operation from my [collection of] incoherent personalities… Karl [Liebknecht] can’t ever be got hold of, since he dashes about like a cloud in the sky; Franz [Mehring] has little sympathy for any but literary campaigns, [Clara Zetkin’s] reaction is hysteria and the blackest despair. But in spite of all this I intend to try to see what can be achieved.”^[26]

The group around Rosa Luxemburg was a collection of individuals who, through different paths, had arrived on the left wing of the party, although each had a long history in the party. Besides Luxemburg herself, Karl Liebknecht, Franz Mehring, and Clara Zetkin were the most well-known members of the group.

Karl Liebknecht was the son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the founders of the SPD. Karl was a lawyer by trade and an active organiser in the party. He was a man of action rather than a theoretician. He became particularly occupied by the struggle against militarism, and his 1906 pamphlet ‘Militarism and Anti-Militarism’ was officially adopted at the first social-democratic youth congress. For the trouble of writing it, Liebknecht was rewarded with eighteen months in prison, turning him into a symbol of the struggle of Social Democracy against militarism and war. He also became the object of a seething hatred from nationalists. He was particularly active in the youth organisation of the party, which he defended against the executive committee.

A few weeks after the war broke out, Liebknecht realised that he had made a mistake by voting for war credits. When the government demanded the Reichstag approve new war credits in early December, Liebknecht broke with party discipline and voted, alone, against granting new funds. His example immediately made Liebknecht a point of reference for everyone who opposed the war, both inside Germany and internationally. Within a short space of time, opposition to the war spread inside the SPD. Public meetings and protests were banned by the government. Their job was helped by the SPD leadership who did everything in their power to prevent meetings, whilst censoring the party’s own press.

In February 1915, Liebknecht was called up for military service. However, he continued his revolutionary activity in the military, and in May 1915 he circulated a leaflet that raised the slogan ‘The main enemy is at home!’ This slogan and his brave stand in the Reichstag made Liebknecht the symbol of opposition to the war. In the words of the Marxist historian, Pierre Broué:

History has essentially retained two names, those of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, whom their shared struggle during the First World War and their tragic deaths during the same night of January 1919 were to link forever.^[27]

Nonetheless, they were accompanied by other important leaders of the left.

Franz Mehring, born in 1846, had been at the centre of weekly meetings of the left wing in Berlin since as early as 1910. For a long time, he had been the editor of Leipziger Volkszeitung, and for a period he wrote editorials for Die Neue Zeit. However, in 1910 he broke with Kautsky and moved closer to Luxemburg. In December 1913, he and Luxemburg began publishing Sozialdemokratische Korrespondenz as a point of reference for the party’s left wing.

Clara Zetkin, born in 1857, was the leader of the socialist women’s organisation, and was the editor of its magazine, Die Gleicheit. She was linked to Luxemburg through close political and personal friendship.

The group that had gathered in Luxemburg’s apartment on 4 August slowly began expanding to include others. Besides the four previously mentioned individuals, the work of the group was carried out by Jogiches, Marchlewski (Karski), Paul Levi (Luxemburg’s lawyer since 1913), Meyer and Ströbel (both of whom were journalists for Vorwärts), and Wilhelm Pieck (vice-secretary of the party in Berlin, who had a number of useful contacts), as well as Paul Lange, Hermann and Käthe Duncker.

Besides Jogiches, none of them had much experience in conducting underground work. Nevertheless, after making contact with the Niederbarnim branch in Berlin, they began publishing illegal literature. The group had two purposes. First of all, they wished to break the silence and show that the party was not, in fact, united in its support for the war and, secondly, they aimed to build an organisation, although the reality was that it more closely resembled a network. By the middle of 1915, the group had established contacts in more than 300 localities. Several local party leaders joined the group, and its first conference was held on 5 May at Pieck’s apartment in Berlin.

Luxemburg had twelve months of jail time pending. She had been sentenced before the war but it had been postponed due to ill-health. The sentence was due to begin on 1 March 1915, but on the evening of 18 February, just before setting off to meet Clara Zetkin in order to plan out an international women’s conference, she was suddenly arrested and thrown into the women’s prison at Barnimstrasse in Berlin. There, she would secretly write the Junius Pamphlet, which she succeeded in smuggling out.

While Luxemburg was serving her sentence, Die Internationale was published for the first and only time in April 1915. In it, Luxemburg declared the SPD and the International dead. The magazine was edited by Luxemburg and Franz Mehring. Immediately, however, following its first edition, the magazine was banned and the public prosecutor accused Mehring, Luxemburg, Zetkin, the publisher and the owner of the printing house of high treason.

Most of the other left-wing leaders, much like Liebknecht and Luxemburg, were either imprisoned or conscripted. Clara Zetkin was arrested in July 1915 and was seriously ill by the time she was released in October of the same year.

Inside the SPD, however, opposition to the war was steadily growing. In June 1915, more than 750 well-known activists, editors of local party newspapers, trade union leaders and others signed a protest against the political line of the executive committee. The text had been written by Karl Liebknecht and those around him.

On 1 January 1916, the Internationale group (named after its short-lived publication) gathered for its first conference at Liebknecht’s apartment. The twelve delegates at the conference adopted Luxemburg’s Junius Pamphlet as the political foundation of the group, and on 19 March a larger conference was held with seventeen delegates from Berlin. The group decided to launch an underground newspaper named Spartacus, after the revolutionary leader of the slave rebellion that shook the Roman Empire. Members of the group soon came to be known as the Spartacists.

Other left-wing groups also emerged within the party. A secret conference was held in Easter 1916 by oppositionists from the socialist youth with the aim of splitting the youth organisation. The conference adopted Liebknecht’s theses. The left succeeded in establishing a number of both legal and illegal magazines. The left wing had a wide influence locally in the SPD in several places, and in some areas it even formed a majority. Broué mentions Pannekoek in Bremen, where there was an actual left wing, Marchlewski, Parvus and several others. For various reasons, including the long-term reverberations of the so-called ‘Radek Affair’,^[28] these groups failed to link up in the first year of the war. They shared the belief that socialist revolution was the only answer to imperialism and war, and that the spontaneous action of the masses would be the decisive force. Nevertheless, they did not formally unite into a common faction or organisation.

From the factories in Berlin a left-wing group known as the ‘Revolutionary Stewards’ sprang up in the trade unions, led by the social democrat and leader of the Berlin metalworkers’ branch, Richard Müller. The group worked semi-secretly and recruited dependable members from among Berlin’s shop stewards. Out of all the left-wing groupings, theirs had the best contact with the workers. The core of their group never consisted of more than fifty people, but through delegate meetings they exerted influence over thousands and later hundreds of thousands of Berlin workers. Müller leaned towards the SPD ‘centre’, but many of the other group leaders were far closer to the Spartacists, with many later joining the Communist Party in 1919-20.

Within the SPD left, disagreements arose particularly over the question of whether to break away from the SPD and form an independent organisation, or whether to stay in the party. Luxemburg was firmly of the latter opinion. In her opinion, breaking with the SPD meant breaking with the masses, which she believed would reduce the revolutionaries to a sect. Amongst the aforementioned radical left groups, there were some who were opposed not only to the idea of splitting from the SPD, but even of formally forming an independent organisation, even as a faction inside the party:

The German left radicals had been in conflict for years with the authoritarian organisation of their own party. They concluded that centralisation was the main obstacle to the radicalisation of the masses and to the development of revolutionary activity. In this they disagreed with Lenin. They were aware that revisionism was advancing in the ranks of the Party, and particularly in its leadership. They knew that the trade-union bureaucrats and their conservative views were gaining influence in its leading bodies. However, they were convinced of the revolutionary character of the imperialist period, and were tireless critics of the opportunism of the leaders and of their authoritarian methods. Like Luxemburg, they believed that there were no recipes for organisation: 

“We cannot secure ourselves in advance against all possibilities of opportunist deviation. Such dangers can be overcome only by the movement itself – certainly with the aid of Marxist theory, but only after the dangers in question have taken tangible form in practice.”

This fundamental conception of activity, this identification of the Party with the mass movement, and their deep devotion to the organisation in which, despite its bureaucratic excrescences, they continued to see as the expression of the revolutionary social-democratic workers’ movement, led them to reject the prospect of organising in a faction. They rejected the possibility of setting up, even in an informal and loosely-defined manner, a revolutionary tendency in German or international social democracy which would bring them into association with the Bolsheviks. Consequently they had even more reason to oppose any split in the Party or the International.^[29]

In theory, the Spartacists favoured the founding of a new, Third International. In practice, they were not prepared to take steps towards preparing a split away from the SPD. They believed that the new International could only be formed on the basis of a mass movement. Until that movement broke out, they believed it was their task to remain inside the SPD, educating the masses through propaganda. When the internationalists who opposed the war met at the Zimmerwald conference of 1915, five Germans participated. Meyer and Thalheim represented the Internationale group. Borchardt was the only German who supported Lenin’s position, advocating for a clear break with the Second International and the foundation of a new, communist International. The four other German participants voted with the majority of Zimmerwald delegates, who leaned towards centrism and pacifism, and who spoke in favour of re-establishing a reformed Socialist International.

Opposition to the War and the Founding of the USPD

The leadership of the SPD, Kautsky included, covered up their support for the war by pointing to the patriotic wave that had swept Germany at the start of the war and the “apathy of the masses”.

Kautsky certainly was not wrong when he noted that a patriotic wave swept the country at the outbreak of the war. That is usual at the outbreak of any war. It was certainly true that the SPD’s support for the war met no resistance worthy of mention from the masses, or indeed from SPD ranks. But as Luxemburg pointed out, how could the masses have possibly expressed their opposition to the war? Their own organisation was now riding the patriotic wave. It was no coincidence that it was precisely in those sections of the party where left-wing opponents of the war were in the leadership, that opposition to the parliamentary truce and the party’s support for the war were first expressed.

The parliamentary truce by which the SPD had bound itself stipulated that the party leaders must keep opposition within the party under control, and that strict limits must be placed on internal democracy. Already as of 5 August, for example, the executive had voted to postpone holding any new congress until after the war. One by one, the executive closed down all the party’s radical local newspapers.

The war placed heavy burdens on the German working class, yet the social-democratic leaders assisted the German state in maintaining class peace. In the first two years of the war, food prices skyrocketed by 50 per cent, whilst wages remained stagnant. A lack of food and rationing were widespread. All workers were forced onto an absolute minimum diet. In the winter of 1915-16, ration cards entitled a person to 1.5 kilograms of bread, 2.5 kilograms of potatoes, 80 grams of butter, 250 grams of meat, 180 grams of sugar, and half an egg a week – and that depended on those wares even being available. The ration corresponds to one-third of the required calorie intake of an adult. Workers and soldiers were starving. Thousands upon thousands of young people were dying daily at the front lines, while the profits of the capitalist piled higher and higher.^[30] The Reichstag adopted a new law that forced all men between the ages of seventeen and sixty to remain at their current job or else accept new employment assignments from the state. Everything that the social-democratic movement had achieved in previous years was rolled back with the help of the SPD leadership.

However, opposition began building. On 28 May 1915, more than 1,000 women protested for peace in front of the Reichstag. In autumn of the same year, protests erupted in Stuttgart and Leipzig. On 2 February 1916, there were protests in front of empty shops. The mood in society was changing, and social tensions were beginning to surface. Luxemburg could feel the change when she was released from prison in mid-February 1916, and found herself being welcomed with open arms by the workers of Berlin, and especially the women. She was immediately plunged into a whirlwind of meetings, speeches, and writing.

In May 1916, among others, she wrote an illegal leaflet titled ‘A Dog’s Policy’. The title made reference to the remarks of one of the leading SPD revisionists who compared Liebknecht to a dog that barks but does not bite. In it, she portrayed the SPD as bootlickers of the German government:

A dog is someone who licks the boots of his master for serving him out kicks for many years.

A dog is someone who gaily wags his tail in the muzzle of martial law and faithfully gazes up to his masters, the military dictators, quietly whining for mercy.

A dog is someone who barks at a person – particularly in his absence – and who fetches and carries for his immediate masters.

A dog is someone who, on the orders of the governments, covers the entire sacred history of a party with slime and kicks it in the dirt.

Dogs are and always were the Davids, Landsbergs and comrades and they will get their well-earned kick from the German working classes when the day of reckoning comes.^[31]

The Spartacists decided to test the degree of opposition in the working class by calling a demonstration on 1 May 1916 in the centre of Berlin. Thousands responded to the call. At the mass gathering, Liebknecht roused the assembled workers with the slogan: “Down with the government, down with the war!” He was immediately arrested. The Reichstag, including a majority of social-democratic deputies, voted to repeal his parliamentary immunity. But when Liebknecht’s case came before the courts, 55,000 workers in Berlin’s munitions factories and other workplaces came out on strike. This was the first political strike of the war, and it was organised by the Revolutionary Stewards.^[32] Liebknecht was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison. After an appeal, his sentence was extended to four-and-half years. The regime escalated its repression, and multiple left-wing leaders were arrested. But the repression could not stop the rising wave of opposition. From the summer of 1916, the number of strikes and hunger riots steadily increased.

Although the organised supporters of the Spartakus movement were still few in number, they were already making themselves heard. The Burgfrieden^[33] had lost its taming force. The nationalist frenzy was at an end. The awakening was beginning.

But German militarism took its revenge: many hundreds of Spartakus militants were arrested. The factories were ‘combed out’, and thousands conscripted in punishment, but as a result of this move revolutionary ideas were carried to all parts of the front. Increasingly severe sentences were passed, and mass trials took place. For the time being the military could credit itself with a victory. Because the political movement in the factories was temporarily robbed of its leaders, there were no protest actions when Liebknecht was sentenced by a higher military court to four years hard labour. However, his magnificent words, “No general ever wore a uniform with so much honour as I shall wear the convict’s garb”, made a deep impression on people.^[34]

And then Luxemburg was arrested again. This time, however, she was not convicted by a court, but rather was placed under ‘protective arrest’ on 10 July 1916. She was told this was “for her own safety”, but it meant that she was now detained without the right to appeal and without a release date. Not until the outbreak of the German Revolution in November 1918 would she be released. Initially, she was once more thrown into Barnimstrasse. However, suspicions that she was continuing a correspondence with her comrades on the outside led to the authorities increasing her isolation. In September 1916, she was moved to the police headquarters, which she described as pure hell. After a month-and-a-half there, she was transferred to the Wronke prison in the Province of Posen, where conditions were more bearable. The cell was open the entire day, and she had access to the prison garden. But in July 1917, she was transferred to Wrocław, where conditions were far harsher. But even under such constant persecution, Luxemburg was far from giving up her political work.

With many of the leaders now in prison, Jogiches took up the work of organising the Spartacists. He organised the regular publication of Spartacus Letters, most of the contents of which had been written by Luxemburg prior to her detention. In its pages, the true character of the war was exposed, and both the right wing and the centre of the SPD were unsparingly criticised.

The growing influence of the Spartacus League was becoming an increasing cause of concern for the SPD centre. In a letter to the Austrian social-democratic leader Victor Adler, Kautsky wrote: “Extremism corresponds to the present needs of the uneducated masses. Today in the trenches, Liebknecht is the most popular man.”^[35] Lenin had been absolutely correct when he criticised Kautsky and the centre of the party as “lacking backbone”, and for their submissiveness towards opportunism. Now the party’s centre could feel itself being squeezed. It could feel that its support was at risk of slipping away towards those around Liebknecht and Luxemburg. As such, the centre concluded that they had to begin increasingly openly expressing opposition to the war. One of the leaders of the centre, Wurm, wrote to Kautsky on 21 April 1915:

The editors of Neue Zeit, especially you [Kautsky], none the less have a duty to answer the attacks of the group I[nternationale]; silence will be taken as abandonment of the position… the fact remains that the I[nternationale] is now being distributed throughout Germany; thanks to the devoted work of Rosa’s friends it was being handed out at all the local meetings [Zahlabende] in Greater Berlin last Tuesday. The masses are restive about the war and especially over the rising cost of living, they have no one on whom to vent their rage and since they can’t get at the government the party becomes the scapegoat. That is the ‘action’ which Rosa is screaming for…^[36]

Terrified that it would lose support to the Spartacists if it acted otherwise, the SPD centre began voicing public opposition to the war. Several of the old party leaders including Kautsky, Bernstein, and Hugo Haase (the chairman of the party and of the Reichstag group) signed a critique of the party executive committee. The executive committee, meanwhile, considered there to be an advantage in maintaining the centre as a loyal opposition. They gave the executive a left cover at a time of increasing opposition to the war among German workers. The executive decided therefore to open up a little room for opposition. In February 1915, it allowed Reichstag members who did not wish to vote in favour of war funds to absent themselves from the voting. On 20 March, Otto Rühle joined Liebknecht in voting against new war credits, while Haase and others left before the vote took place.

When war broke out, those who took the position of the SPD centre supported the war but also claimed to favour a peace without annexations. Liebknecht denied that such a peace was possible as long as capitalism and imperialism continued to exist, and exposed the centre for deceiving the public. Liebknecht was vindicated early on in the war. When the executive committee declared openly that it supported the government’s annexation policy in 1915, Bernstein, Kautsky and Haase, as the party’s loyal opposition, wrote a manifesto laying out the position of the ‘centre’, which was published in the Leipziger Volkszeitung. They refrained from criticising the party’s actions on 4 August 1914, and instead claimed that Germany’s safety was now secured, and as such that it was high time the party ceased its support for the government and began campaigning for peace. The government took fright at the appearance of prominent names at the foot of the manifesto, and promptly shut the paper down. It was clear that the executive committee not only intended to support war credits but that its support extended to direct support for the annexationist programme of the government. This only increased opposition towards the granting of new war credits inside the SPD Reichstag fraction. When a new round of voting on the funding of the war took place on 29 December 1915, twenty-two SPD deputies absented themselves before the vote, whilst a further twenty stayed and voted against.

This was the first break between the executive committee and the centre. More and more sections of the party apparatus appeared to go over to the opposition. The executive committee responded by launching a massive campaign to regain control of the party. In October 1916, the executive committee, with the help of the military authorities, seized Vorwärts, the central organ of the party. The news was received angrily by the rank-and-file workers of the party in Berlin, who sympathised with the opposition. It had all become too much for Haase, and on 24 May 1916, he delivered a speech in the Reichstag condemning the restriction of civil rights during the state of emergency. A large minority of SPD deputies then joined him in voting against the renewal of the state of emergency. The SPD deputies then voted by a majority of fifty-three votes to thirty-three to immediately expel all those who voted against the extension of the state of emergency from the party’s Reichstag fraction. The Reichstag group was now split in two. The thirty-three excluded deputies formed the Socialdemokratische Arbeitsgemeinschaft in the Reichstag – the precursor to the USPD.

The leaders of the centre and of the left wing by no means drew closer to each other politically on account of the split. On the contrary, the centre regarded itself as a counterpoint to the left wing, which was growing in influence. They believed that this growth was in turn assisted by the behaviour of the right wing of the party. On 28 February 1917, Karl Kautsky wrote to Victor Adler:

The boy Karl has become a real menace [fürchterlich]. If we in the Arbeitsgemeinschaft had not appeared and proved that we too exist, the irresistibly growing opposition would simply have gone over to Spartakus altogether. If a break has been avoided and Spartakus held at bay, that is entirely to our credit. The right wing has not helped us but has only helped Spartakus.^[37]

However, only in Berlin was there a clear line of differentiation between the centre and the Spartacists in the opposition, on account of the fact that it was in Berlin that the leaders of the two factions were based. In the rest of the country, the split occurred organically. Despite the theoretical differences, a national conference of the collective opposition in the SPD was organised on 7 January 1917 in Berlin on the initiative of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft. All of the oppositional tendencies were represented. Of the 157 present, thirty-five were Spartacists. Items on the agenda included the defence of party members threatened with expulsion, and the defence of opposition newspapers, yet no one proposed splitting from the SPD. Indeed, the majority rejected a proposal from the Spartacist, Meyer, to refuse the payment of party subscriptions on account of the fact that they feared such a move would lead to a split.

Luxemburg maintained her opposition to splitting from the SPD. On 6 January 1917, the day prior to the conference, she wrote the following in an article, which she managed to smuggle out of prison:

Understandably and praiseworthy as the impatience and bitter anger of our best elements may be… flight is flight. For us it is a betrayal of the masses, who will merely be handed over helpless into the stranglehold of a Scheidemann^[38] or a Leigen^[39]… into the hands of the bourgeoisie, to struggle but to be strangled in the end. One can ‘leave’ sects or conventicles^[40] when these no longer suit and one can always found new sects and conventicles. But it is nothing but childish fantasy to talk of liberating the whole mass of proletarians from their bitter and terrible fate by simply ‘leaving’ and in this way setting them a brave example.^[41]

The conference’s only result was the decision to maintain “permanent contact” between the opposition groups in order to develop their influence “within the framework of the party statutes”.^[42] The SPD executive committee had other ideas, however, and on 16 January it announced that in holding its own conference, the opposition had “placed itself outside the party”. It instructed all local organisations to exclude the “saboteurs” as quickly as possible. In the places where the executive committee held the majority, the minority was excluded. In the places where the oppositionists held the majority, the local organisations were excluded en bloc and new organisations were formed by people who were loyal to the executive. Ninety-one local organisations were excluded in this manner, and with them the great majority of party members in Berlin, Leipzig, Bremen, and Brunswick.

There was nothing the opposition could do but accept the established fact of a split. In the Easter of 1917 they met and formed the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). The SPD had been split almost right down the middle. 170,000 members stayed in the old SPD, while the newly-founded USPD took 120,000 members. Almost all of the party’s pre-war leaders found themselves together in the USPD. The spectrum stretched from Luxemburg and Liebknecht on the one hand, to people like Haase, Bernstein, and Kautsky on the other. None of these leaders had wished for a split, nor had they prepared for one. There was no agreement on the political principles upon which the new party was founded.

The left wing in Bremen preferred an independent path and argued for the founding of a new party without the centrists. Others on the left, including some Spartacists, shared this opinion, arguing likewise for the building of a new revolutionary party. The choice taken by the Spartacists would decide whether such a course was possible. But the Spartacist leaders opted to join the USPD. They were afraid of being cut off from the masses and of being silenced by the authorities should they be deprived of the cover of a party with legal status. As such, the radical left groups across Germany remained divided: some outside and others inside the USPD. The entry of the Spartacists into the USPD also allowed the centrist leaders to shelter under the colossal authority that Karl Liebknecht had won in his struggle against the war.

The USPD was clearly an extremely politically heterogeneous organisation. One wing, under the leadership of Kautsky and co., was striving to turn the clock back to the days of the pre-1914 SPD. The revolutionary wing, on the contrary, was grasping towards the formation of a real revolutionary party. The former defended the principle of ‘defence of the fatherland’, while the latter was fighting for an end to the war through a socialist revolution. The majority, however, favoured reviving the old SPD – which was underlined by the fact that the USPD adopted the old Erfurt programme of the SPD at its founding congress. Indeed, the only difference with the SPD of yesteryear was that the USPD had a much weaker apparatus and was far less centralised, a characteristic of the SPD that the majority blamed for its degeneration. The historian Carl Schorske^[43] described the self-imposed limits of the USPD as follows:

The Independents [USPD] thus deprived themselves of any organisational instrument by which the spontaneous mass actions of the revolution, once begun, could be unified and consolidated into a single political striking force. The frustrating experience of yesterday had blinded the revolutionary leaders of tomorrow.^[44]

As mentioned, several of the radical left groups were strongly opposed to the decision of the Spartacists to join the USPD. In March 1917, radical left groups in Bremen, Hamburg, Hanover, and Rüstringen declared their intention to break with the centre and form an independent revolutionary party. However, there was a great deal of political confusion among these groups.

Nonetheless, despite the fact that confusion reigned in some parts of the left, at the same time new channels were forming through which Bolshevik ideas were beginning to make headway among sections of the German left. Many German émigrés in Switzerland had come into contact with the Bolshevik leaders also exiled there, including Lenin himself. They were impressed by the ideas of the Russian exiles. The Youth International, led by Willi Münzenberg, smuggled Bolshevik literature into Germany. As such, many of the young activists of both the radical left groups outside the USPD as well as among the Spartacists, were increasingly influenced by Lenin’s ideas. Paul Levi accepted an invitation to become a German representative in the bureau of the Zimmerwald Left, a position which brought him into close contact with the Bolsheviks. He soon returned to Germany, becoming an important leader of the Spartacus League.

So, despite seething opposition towards the war and towards the opportunism of the SPD leaders, the German revolutionaries had no organisation capable of leading the masses when the revolution broke out in Germany in November 1918. But before then, revolutionaries in Germany and the world over would be provided with a dazzling example: Russia’s October Revolution.

Endnotes

[1] J.P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 398.

[2] Quoted ibid., p. 400.

[3] Quoted ibid., p. 401.

[4] Eduard David (1863-1930) – German social democrat, member of the Reichstag 1903-1918. Central supporter of the parliamentary truce during the war.

[5] Quoted in P. Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 148.

[6] Quoted in R. Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis of the German Social Democracy, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, p. 270.

[7] Quoted in P. Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, p. 193.

[8] Junius was a pseudonym used by an influential English pamphleteer in the eighteenth century, and perhaps also a reference to Lucius Junius Brutus, the legendary republican hero of ancient Rome

[9] R. Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis of German Social Democracy, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, pp. 269-70.

[10] Ibid., pp. 297-8.

[11] Ibid., p. 304.

[12] Ibid., p. 314.

[13] Ibid., p. 312.

[14] Ibid., pp. 316-8.

[15] Ibid., p. 323.

[16] Ibid., p. 324.

[17] V. I. Lenin, ‘The Junius Pamphlet’, LCW, Vol. 22, p. 305.

[18] Ibid., p. 306.

[19] Ibid., p. 308.

[20] Ibid., p. 312.

[21] Ibid., pp. 316-7.

[22] Ibid., pp. 306-7.

[23] R. Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, pp. 264.

[24] V. I. Lenin, ‘The Junius Pamphlet’, LCW, Vol. 22, pp. 317-8.

[25] Ibid., p. 318.

[26] J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 611 (additions are made by Nettl).

[27] P. Broué, The German Revolution, 1917-1923, p. 28.

[28] The case is summarised in J. P. Nettl’s Rosa Luxemburg, p. 316. During the split in the Polish party in 1911, an old and baseless accusation of theft was revived against Radek by the leadership of the SDKPiL, spearheaded by Jogiches, after he opposed them. He was excluded from the party, and the party also demanded that he be excluded from the SPD, arguing that he could not be excluded from one party in the International whilst remaining a member of another. The executive committee of the SPD used the accusation to rid itself of one of its strongest critics on the left. Luxemburg, who had no personal liking for Radek, supported the decision of the SPD executive committee in this case. Many on the left wing of the SPD were discontented with the behaviour of the Poles, and Lenin and Trotsky intervened in support of Radek as well. Radek later became a Bolshevik, and in 1918 he was sent to Germany as a representative of the new Soviet power in order to help the German left wing during the revolution.

[29] P. Broué, The German Revolution, 1917-1923, pp. 39-40.

[30] See ibid., p. 59.

[31] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 614.

[32] Revolutionary Stewards [Revolutionäre Obleute] – An organisation of German shop stewards during the First World War, which opposed the war and acted independently of official trade unions and the SPD. Explained in more detail in pages 166-167.

[33] Translator’s note: Burgfrieden – the parliamentary truce.

[34] P. Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 198.

[35] Quoted in P. Broué, The German Revolution: 1917-1923, p. 60.

[36] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 638 (additions are made by Nettl).

[37] Quoted in ibid., pp. 659-60 (additions are made by Nettl).

[38] Philipp Scheidemann (1865-1939) – member of the SPD in the Reichstag from 1898. Led the support of the SPD to the war in 1914, central leader of the party from 1913, and co-chairman of the party in 1917.

[39] Carl Legien (1861-1920) – SPD Reichstag member. Throughout the war he displayed an unwavering chauvinism.

[40] Conventicle – a religious gathering in a private home.

[41] Quoted ibid., pp. 656-7.

[42] P. Broué, The German Revolution: 1917-1923, pp. 78-9.

[43] Carl E. Schorske (1915-2015) – American cultural historian and professor emeritus at Princeton University. Author of German Social Democracy 1905-1917: The Development of the Great Schism.

[44] C. E. Schorske, German Social Democracy 1905-1917: The Development of the Great Schism, p. 321.