8. The German Revolution

Russia was not alone among the nations of Europe in being shaken by revolution towards the end of the war. The same violent social contradictions and crisis of the regime could be found in all the belligerent nations. Similar conditions created similar revolutionary results. On 9 November, a workers’ and soldiers’ council was set up in Berlin. The German Revolution had begun.

The revolutionary crisis expressed itself first at the top of society, as is so often the case in history. The autocratic regime could feel the earth shift beneath its feet and, in the words of the minister Hintze, sought to “forestall an upheaval from below by a revolution from above.”^[1]

By introducing certain democratic reforms, and forming a government encompassing the majority parties in the Reichstag, the bourgeoisie hoped to avert revolution. On 3 October, the cousin of the emperor, Prince Max von Baden, was appointed chancellor. In order to cover the left flank of the new government, ministerial portfolios were granted for the first time ever to social democrats: Phillip Scheidemann and Gustav Bauer. The latter were drawn into government only in order to give the regime stability and to confuse the working class – a tactic that has been used effectively on numerous occasions ever since.

It was clear, however, that a new government was insufficient to stem the revolutionary tide. The SPD leaders were of the opinion that revolution was now inevitable unless the emperor himself abdicated. Konrad Haenisch of the SPD expressed their fears well in a personal letter:

The problem is to resist the Bolshevik Revolution, which is rising, ever more threatening, and which means chaos. The Imperial question is closely linked to that of Bolshevism. We must sacrifice the Kaiser to save the country.^[2]

The SPD also urged that political prisoners be granted amnesty as quickly as possible in order to convince the workers that the new government was sincere in its promise to ‘democratise’. The release of Karl Liebknecht was particularly important if the new government wished to avoid the latter being converted into a martyr of the movement. The SPD had their way and Liebknecht was released on 21 October, with 100 other political prisoners released over the following days. On 23 October Liebknecht arrived in Berlin where he was received by a crowd numbering thousands. He immediately threw himself into the struggle, giving a speech in the very same square where he was arrested two years earlier. In that speech, he praised the Russian Revolution and spoke of the coming proletarian revolution in Germany.

His speech expressed the perspectives of the Spartacists who, at their conference on 7 October, judged the situation in Germany to be revolutionary. They declared their solidarity with the Russian Revolution and elaborated a programme that included a number of demands, including: the abolition of forced labour; an end to the state of emergency; cancellation of all war loans; the expropriation of the banks, mines and factories; a shorter working week; the transfer of responsibility for discipline in the army to delegates elected by soldiers; the right of soldiers to organise and hold meetings; and the abolition of the monarchy. In order to realise this programme, the conference called for “the formation of councils of workers and soldiers where they do not already exist”.^[3]

For its part, the USPD immediately offered Liebknecht a seat on the party’s leading body. This, they hoped, would assist the party in walking a political tightrope by borrowing some of Liebknecht’s enormous prestige. As a precondition, however, Liebknecht demanded that the party call a congress, certain that the membership would reject the former policy of the USPD leaders. The leadership rejected this demand, and so Liebknecht remained outside the party. Instead, he began working more closely with the Revolutionary Stewards (Revolutionäre Obleute).

Despite the fact that hundreds of political prisoners had been set free, Rosa Luxemburg remained in prison for a further few weeks. The amnesty did not extend to those under so-called ‘protective custody’. To remain behind bars whilst events beyond the prison walls were rapidly accelerating was pure torture for Luxemburg. On 18 October 1918 she wrote to Sophie Liebknecht from her prison cell:

The conversations under surveillance, the impossibility of discussing what really interests me, by now has become so annoying that I would rather forego all visits until we can see each other as free human beings.

After all, it can’t last much longer.^[4]

Only on 9 November, when the revolution reached Breslau, where she was imprisoned, would Rosa Luxemburg finally be released.

The November Revolution

The number of strikes taking place across Germany was on the rise throughout 1918. As far back as April 1917 Germany was rocked by a second wave of strikes against the war with 200,000 workers coming out in Berlin and Leipzig. In January 1918, it was followed by Germany’s largest wartime strike in which more than a million workers from the armament factories downed tools in protests against the conditions being forced upon the Bolshevik government during the Brest-Litovsk negotiations. The Revolutionary Stewards were principally responsible for its organisation. On the back of the defeat of the strike, more than 100,000 strikers were enrolled into the army and sent to the front. Lenin later said that these events marked a change in the mood of the German proletariat. This was the build up to the German Revolution, which erupted in early November 1918, beginning with a mutiny of the sailors of Kiel.

The peace treaty signed at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 had given the German regime a small amount of breathing space and, with renewed energy, the German army conducted an assault on the Western Front led by General Ludendorff. The push quickly ran out of momentum, however. In the course of the offensive, 300,000 German soldiers were killed and, by the summer, the German army was encountering serious problems on the Western Front.

By September 1918, even the German general staff had come to realise the necessity of pursuing peace negotiations with the Allied Powers. Despite this, they then ordered a North Sea offensive on 28 October. The aim of this offensive, regardless of its outcome, was to salvage the honour of the German navy by demonstrating its courage. However, the tens of thousands of sailors whose lives the admirals were gearing up to sacrifice were not quite ready to die to save their officers’ honour.

The crew of the dreadnought battleships Thüringen and Helgoland refused to up-anchor. The sailors had mutinied. Rapidly, the mutiny spread to other ships. The admiralty of the fleet demanded that the mutiny be crushed and, in the face of being sunk by torpedo boats, the crew surrendered. Roughly 1,000 men were arrested and now faced the danger of being executed. However, the repression did not nip the revolution in the bud. On the contrary, it escalated it. In the harbour cities of Wilhelmshaven and Kiel, the workers refused to deliver provisions for the ships and the sailors made contact with the workers. On 3 November, a demonstration was held in Kiel at which nine were killed and twenty-nine were wounded.^[5] The snowball was now rolling – by this point, there was no way back for the sailors. In the evening, meetings were held on the ships. The officers were disarmed and arrested by their subordinates, and the soldiers elected representatives that organised as a network. The red flag was hoisted above the warships. The mutiny spread across the length and breadth of the 100,000-man strong German fleet.

The revolution spread at the speed of light around the rest of Germany. On 6 November, workers’ and soldiers’ councils seized power in Hamburg, Chemnitz, Magdeburg, Braunschweig, Frankfurt, Cologne, Stuttgart, Nuremberg, and Munich. On 9 November, a workers’ and soldiers’ council was set up in Berlin. In the morning on that same day, fliers calling for an uprising were distributed at every workplace in Berlin. The workers held meetings all over the city and marched from the industrial areas towards the city centre. The revolution happened peacefully. Most of those soldiers deployed against the movement were quickly convinced not to shoot the protesters. Only four people died, one of whom was a Spartacist.

As in Russia, the workers’ and soldiers’ councils in Germany were a spontaneous creation of the movement that emerged from the need to coordinate and organise the struggle. As in Russia, delegates were directly responsible to those who elected them and could be recalled at any moment. Delegates enjoyed no privileges, and as such there was no careerism. What had emerged was the germ of true workers’ democracy.

The SPD was desperate to prevent ‘Russian conditions’ coming home to Germany. Above all, they wished to lead the revolution into safe channels. But in order to do so, they were obliged to tail the movement to a certain extent, lest they lose the support that they had among the workers. The SPD leaders were aware from early on that the situation was getting out of hand. Therefore, even before the revolution arrived in Berlin, they placed an ultimatum before the government: either the emperor abdicated before 8 November, or else the SPD would not be held responsible for what might follow.

At the same time, the SPD proposed forming a government with the USPD. Their aim in attempting to drag the latter into government was to use the USPD’s authority among left-wing workers to keep the movement under control. The leaders of the USPD were slow to respond to the advance. While this proposal was under discussion, the SPD called a meeting with Max von Baden,^[6] who informed the social democrats to their surprise that the emperor had abdicated. Before announcing this news, Max von Baden had directly posed the question to Ebert, the leader of the SPD: could he rely on his support in fighting the revolution should the emperor abdicate? Ebert responded: “If the Kaiser does not abdicate the social revolution is inevitable. I do not want it – in fact, I hate it like sin.”^[7] With this assurance, Max von Baden transferred the office of chancellor to Ebert. The leaders of the USPD, meanwhile, were utterly divided, and the question of participating in the government or otherwise was postponed to the following day.

In Berlin, a protest of workers arrived at the Reichstag building at which the social democrat, Scheidemann, was eating lunch in the canteen. He was unable to evade addressing the assembled workers, and gave a short, impromptu speech from the balcony. The mood was clearly extremely radical, and Scheidemann was afraid of losing the trust of the masses. He therefore proclaimed the republic from the Reichstag balcony, and named Ebert chancellor. Upon learning what had happened, Ebert was furious – he was of the firm opinion that the SPD had no wish to proclaim a republic. Meanwhile, from another balcony, addressing another crowd assembled at the Imperial Palace at almost exactly the same time, Liebknecht proclaimed the socialist republic. However, events had not gone this far yet.

On the evening of 9 November, hundreds of representatives of the armed workers met in Berlin. They appealed for mass meetings to be held in all the factories and barracks the following day at ten o’clock, at which representatives would be elected – one for every 1,000 workers, and one for each battalion. They would then reconvene on the same day at four o’clock at Busch Circus with the purpose of appointing a revolutionary government.

The masses held power in their hands. But as in Russia in February 1917, they did not know what to do with it. A vacuum had opened up, and the leadership of the SPD emerged – in the beginning at least – as that political force that was the best prepared and most clear in exactly how it would fill this vacuum. During the night of 9-10 November, the SPD mobilised support among the soldiers for the meeting the following day. The infantrymen, who were typically recruited from among the peasantry, were more politically backward than the workers, and the majority of them supported the SPD. By moving quickly, the SPD managed to mobilise many of its supporters for the meeting of the workers’ and soldiers’ council the following day.

On 10 November, 1,500 delegates assembled for the planned meeting at Busch Circus. A mood of excitement ran through the gathering. Shortly before the meeting assembled, the vacillating USPD finally notified the SPD that they would indeed be willing to form a government with them. Each party appointed three ministers, which they called ‘people’s commissars’ as a nod to the overwhelming mood in support of the Russian Revolution among the German workers. Ebert, Scheidemann, and Landsberg were nominated by the SPD, and Dittmann, Haase, and Barth were nominated by the USPD. The composition and nature of the new government was fiercely debated by the delegates in Busch Circus. The SPD had successfully whipped up the soldiers against any and all opposition towards the new government. Every time a delegate spoke up against it, they were drowned out by the same chorus from the armed soldiers: “Unity, unity!”

Even Liebknecht was met with the same shouts when he spoke against the proposed government and exposed the SPD as being representatives of the counter-revolution:

[…] these people who today are with the Revolution, and were its enemies only the day before yesterday […] The counter-revolution is already on the move, it is already in action, and is here in our midst.^[8]

The revolution had awoken millions to political life, the majority of whom had never been politically active before. As in Russia, the awakened masses turned first to those political parties that they already knew. In Russia, following the February Revolution, power was handed over to the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. In Germany, the masses initially followed the SPD, and to a lesser extent the USPD. Only on the basis of practical experiences could the broader masses learn that neither the leadership of the SPD nor the USPD could solve their problems.

At the meeting in Busch Circus, the delegates decided to elect an executive committee for the newly formed workers’ and soldiers’ council. The initial list put before the delegates actually included a majority of USPD representatives on account of the fact that this was the party that enjoyed the highest level of support among factory workers. Among others, the list included Liebknecht and Luxemburg. But at the behest of the SPD, the soldiers obstructed this proposal, demanding that an executive committee be formed on the basis of an equal number of representatives of both parties. If this demand was not met, they threatened to withdraw from the council and form their own. Such methods were successful in forcing through an executive composed of twelve soldiers’ representatives under the influence of the SPD, and six SPD and six USPD representatives of the workers. Liebknecht, whose name had been proposed on this list, refused to participate in protest at the serious breach of basic democratic procedure. Six further representatives were chosen from among the revolutionary delegates as non-party ‘independents’. The meeting also acknowledged the proposed government. The result was a government made up of the SPD and the USPD, alongside an executive committee of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils composed of representatives of the exact same parties. The newly elected executive committee of the workers’ and soldiers’ council immediately handed power over to the six ‘people’s commissars’ who headed the new government. As Pierre Broué explained:

Thus the second day of the German Revolution found the Majority Social Democrats [the SPD – MF], who had done their utmost to prevent it, winning an indisputable victory. Their leader Ebert, Chancellor of the Reich by the grace of Max of Baden, People’s Commissar by that of the general staffs of the two Social-Democratic Parties, found his position endorsed by the first assembly of the councils in the capital, so that he became, at one and the same time, head of the legal government and of the revolutionary government!^[9]

The news was met with enormous enthusiasm by the workers of Russia. Radek later described the scenes in Moscow:

Tens of thousands of workers broke out into wild cheers. I have never seen anything like it. Late in the evening, workers and red soldiers were still parading. The world revolution had come. Our [Soviet Russia’s]^[10] isolation was at an end.^[11]

The new government carried through a series of reforms, including freedom of assembly, the repeal of censorship, and the promise to implement a six-hour working day commencing on 1 January 1919. They even promised to nationalise various companies. The SPD regarded its role as being that of stabilising the situation, and hemming the movement into the limits strictly imposed by capitalism. To the workers, they presented themselves as radicals, while behind the scenes they based themselves on the old state apparatus and, in particular, the army. Ebert entered into an alliance with the general staff to jointly combat Bolshevism and maintain ‘law and order’.

Luxemburg immediately welcomed the revolution but at the same time issued a warning. In Die Rote Fahne (the newspaper of the Spartacists which recommenced publication on 18 November after some difficulties) she wrote:

What is called for now is not jubilation at what has been accomplished, not triumph over the beaten foe, but the strictest self-criticism and iron concentration of energy in order to continue the work we have begun. For our accomplishments are small and the foe has not been beaten.^[12]

The monarchy had been toppled, but Luxemburg was careful to warn against the belief that the monarchy was the real enemy. No, the real enemy was the imperialist bourgeoisie. In the same article she wrote:

What has been achieved? The monarchy has been swept away, supreme governing power has been transferred into the hands of the workers’ and soldiers’ representatives. But the monarchy was never the real enemy; it was only a facade, the frontispiece of imperialism. […] The monarchy, like every bourgeois government, was the executive of the ruling classes. The imperialist bourgeoisie, the rule of the capitalist class – this is the criminal who must be held accountable for the genocide.

For Luxemburg, the goal of the revolution was not the establishment of a bourgeois-democratic regime, but the carrying through of the socialist revolution:

The abolition of the rule of capitalism, the realisation of the social order of socialism – this and nothing less is the historical theme of the present revolution.^[13]

And the road to socialism passed directly through the workers’ and soldiers’ councils.

The path of the revolution follows clearly from its ends, its method follows from its task. All power in the hands of the working masses, in the hands of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, protection of the work of revolution against its lurking enemies – this is the guiding principle of all measures to be taken by the revolutionary government.

Luxemburg posed a number of concrete demands to advance the movement: for new elections to the workers’ and soldiers’ councils; a national congress of the councils; the organisation of the agrarian proletariat and the smallholding peasants; the formation of a proletarian Red Guard and a workers’ militia; and the confiscation of dynastic wealth and large properties for the purpose of feeding the hungry. Beyond these points, she advanced the call for a workers’ world congress to be called immediately in Germany in order to “emphasise clearly and distinctly the socialist and international character of the revolution”, in distinction to the SPD–USPD government, which had taken the opposite course.

By the end of the first week of the revolution, the revolutionary workers had handed power over to the SPD – the very same party that had stood in opposition to the revolution. But in Luxemburg’s opinion, this was a wholly understandable state of affairs:

The picture of the German revolution corresponds to the inner ripeness of the German situation. The government of the German revolution at its present stage is in the hands of Scheidemann and Ebert.^[14]

The revolution had only just begun, but:

[…] revolutions do not stand still. Their vital law is to advance rapidly, to outgrow themselves. It is already being driven forward by its inner contradictions from this initial stage. The situation can be comprehended as a beginning, as a condition untenable over the long haul. […]

What happens next is not in the hands of the dwarfs who would hold up the course of the revolution, who would put a spoke in the wheel of world history. It is the realisation of the ultimate goal of socialism which is on today’s agenda of world history.^[15]

The National Assembly and the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils

A period characterised by dual power had begun. On the one hand, there was the government. On the other, there were the workers’ and soldiers’ councils. It was obvious that both could not coexist alongside one another in the long run. As in Russia, sooner or later the question would have to be posed: either the workers would seize power through the councils and break the repressive machine of the bourgeois state apparatus; or the bourgeoisie would triumph and the counter-revolution would swing into action, crushing the workers’ and soldiers’ councils.

The leadership of the SPD didn’t have the least intention of doing away with capitalism. Their goal was the establishment of a bourgeois parliamentary democracy. The old state apparatus remained intact, and the SPD wished to preserve and protect it whilst it could, once again, establish itself in power unchallenged. Given their immediate predicament, the SPD leaders leaned on the most backward layers of the soldiers, who were essentially peasants in uniform. The SPD focused on the call for what they named a ‘National Assembly’, but which functionally would serve as a constituent assembly. They intended that such an assembly should undermine the soldiers’ and workers’ councils, causing the latter to dissolve. The USPD were less clear in their intentions. Some within the party believed that the councils and the National Assembly ought to exist side by side. Meanwhile, the revolutionary left wing argued that the councils had to seize power alone.

For their part, the Spartacists roundly rejected the call for a National Assembly, denouncing the SPD’s insistence upon the demand as an attempt to derail the revolution by eliminating the soldiers’ and workers’ councils. In their programme, ‘What Does the Spartacus League Want?’, written by Luxemburg, they put forward the demand for the “[e]limination of all parliaments and municipal councils, and the takeover of their functions by workers’ and soldiers’ councils”.^[16] The Spartacists posed the choice point-blank: either the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, or the National Assembly.

In an article dated 20 November 1918, Luxemburg described the National Assembly as “an outmoded legacy of bourgeois revolutions, an empty shell” and a “detour”, which would help the elements that would betray the revolution:

What is gained, then, with this cowardly detour called the National Assembly? The bourgeoisie’s position is strengthened; the proletariat is weakened and confused by empty illusions; time and energy are dissipated and lost in ‘discussions’ between the wolf and the lamb; in a word, one plays into the hands of all those elements whose intent is to defraud the proletarian revolution of its socialist goals and to emasculate it into a bourgeois democratic revolution.^[17]

According to Luxemburg, therefore, anyone who promoted the National Assembly was effectively acting as “a secret agent of the bourgeoisie or an unconscious spokesman of petty-bourgeois ideology.” She believed it was “a ridiculous petty-bourgeois illusion” to imagine that one could implement socialism through parliament:

The moment the great National Assembly decides to realise socialism fully and completely, to extirpate the rule of capitalism root and branch, at that moment the struggle begins. Once the bourgeoisie is touched in the heart – and its heart beats from within a fire-proof safe – it will fight a life-and-death battle for its rule and will develop thousands of open and covert methods of resistance against the socialist measures.

All this is inevitable. All this must be fought through, warded off, beaten down – with or without the National Assembly. The ‘civil war’ which some have anxiously tried to banish from the revolution cannot be dispelled. For civil war is only another name for class struggle, and the notion of implementing socialism without a class struggle, by means of a majority parliamentary decision, is a ridiculous petty-bourgeois illusion.^[18]

The National Congress of Councils

A national congress of workers’ and soldiers’ councils was convened in Berlin on 16 December, which took place over five days. The congress gathered representatives from the local workers’ and soldiers’ councils across Germany and was elected on the basis of one delegate per 1,000 workers, or per one battalion. Here too, the SPD focused its energy on building support for its call for the National Assembly.

The overwhelming majority of delegates at the congress supported the SPD. Of the 488 delegates, 289 supported the SPD, 90 supported the USPD amongst whom there were ten Spartacists, and the Bremen left also had a further ten delegates.^[19] The composition of the congress was in many ways out of step with the situation in the proletarian centres. This was due to several factors: the rules for electing delegates had been established regionally, and the SPD knew how to exploit them. The soldiers, who politically lagged behind the workers from the factories, had a relatively higher representation, which was expressed in the fact that, of the 488 delegates, only 187 were workers. Meanwhile, a total of 95 delegates held positions or were employees of the trade unions or parties, and particularly of the SPD.

Neither Liebknecht nor Luxemburg, on the other hand, were delegates. In Berlin, rules for the election of delegates clearly stated that only if a person actually worked at a factory or belonged to a military unit could they be elected as its representative. The proposal for Liebknecht and Luxemburg to be invited as guests (as were six members of the provisional government and several other prominent leaders such as Karl Kautsky) was placed twice before the congress, but was rejected by large majorities on both occasions. The influence of the SPD prevailed, and they were certainly not prepared to welcome the presence of these two revolutionaries.

The mood of the workers from the larger cities, however, was much more radical than that of the congress. This was particularly evident in Berlin. Together with the Revolutionary Stewards, the Spartacists were able to mobilise a demonstration of 250,000 people in the capital under the banner of very radical slogans in order to pressure the congress delegates. The demonstration was far larger than that organised by the SPD in support of the congress. Again, on 18 December, while the congress was still ongoing, the Spartacists and the Revolutionary Stewards organised another huge protest and a number of strikes. The congress, however, remained unmoved.

The SPD focused all of its energies on ensuring that the congress of councils’ main clarion call was for elections to a National Assembly. To no one’s surprise, they easily achieved this. The decision of the congress to explicitly oppose “council power” also demonstrated the SPD’s majority at the gathering. On the surface, the situation appeared to be rather paradoxical: the revolutionaries were arguing in favour of “all power to the workers’ and soldiers’ councils”, while the congress of these very same workers’ and soldiers’ councils had just rejected seizing power, and had instead handed it over to the government.

But the revolution had only just begun. A large section of the masses continued to follow the lead of the SPD, thus enabling the latter to attain its large majority at the congress. However, as events unfolded over time, the masses were radicalising. Even during the congress, the fact that the SPD was not in complete control was quite evident. A series of other resolutions passed that were far more radical than the policy of the SPD. For instance, the council congress adopted multiple resolutions demanding the abolition of the standing army and the establishment of a peoples’ militia, which passed by large majorities. Resolutions were adopted demanding the abolition of all signs of rank in the army, for the election of all officers by the soldiers with the right of immediate recall, and for the transfer of responsibility for discipline in the army to the soldiers’ councils. These were demands that were all sternly opposed by the general staff, with whom the SPD were closely connected.

In many ways, the period of November 1918 to January 1919 resembled the spring of 1917 in Russia, where the masses had secured the overthrow of the Tsar but were beginning to realise that nothing had fundamentally changed in their own lives. In Germany, the workers had toppled the Kaiser, but here too, society had fundamentally remained unchanged. In response to this growing realisation, the German workers came out on strike with demands for improved conditions. Luxemburg’s perspective was that these strikes would sharpen the class struggle and expose the leaders of both the USPD and the SPD:

The conclusion to be drawn is not only that during the second act of the revolution strikes will become increasingly frequent but, further, that strikes will become the central feature and the decisive factor of the revolution, thrusting purely political questions into the background. You understand that the inevitable consequence of this will be that the economic struggle will be enormously intensified. The revolution will thus come to the point at which it will be no joke to the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie are quite agreeable to mystifications in the political domain, where masquerades are still possible, where such creatures as Ebert and Scheidemann can pose as socialists; but they are horror-stricken where profits are concerned. When it comes to that, they will present the alternative to the Ebert–Scheidemann government: either put an end to the strikes, stop this strike movement which threatens to strangle us; or we have no more use for you.^[20]

At the outset of the revolution, the SPD and the centrists of the USPD had enjoyed the highest levels of support among the German masses. The Spartacists were far from having won the masses to a revolutionary programme. Incidentally, their perspective was that they would only win the majority at the culmination of the revolution:

The victory of the Spartacus League comes not at the beginning, but at the end of the Revolution: it is identical with the victory of the great million-strong masses of the socialist proletariat.^[21]

But the Spartacists were trailing behind when the revolution first erupted: they had no revolutionary organisation. Such an organisation would have to be built in the midst of the revolution itself.

The Counter-Revolution

While the SPD supported the revolutionary process in words, behind the scenes they were preparing a counter-revolutionary offensive to finally bring an end to the ‘anarchy’ of the revolution. As early as November, when the first revolutionary wave was beginning to ebb, the German general staff and Ebert jointly hatched a plan to besiege Berlin with counter-revolutionary forces. Two divisions under General Groener’s leadership would march into Berlin, seize power from the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, establish a puppet government and disarm the Spartacists.

But before Groener’s troops could arrive in Berlin, another coup attempt unfolded. Reactionary troops marched to Ebert’s office on 6 December and proclaimed him president, although he would eventually decline the post offered to him. Another group of reactionary soldiers simultaneously arrested the Executive Committee of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, primarily consisting of USPD members. Meanwhile, other government troops razed the office of the Spartacists’ newspaper, Die Rote Fahne, arresting Liebknecht, and attacking a protest led by Spartacists, killing sixteen people. The attempt backfired. Furious sailors and workers spontaneously marched against the troops, freeing the arrested members of the Executive Committee. The coup was scuppered.

The main organ of the SPD played down these events, throwing blame onto a few individuals in the army and on the Spartacists, whom they accused of having provoked the incident. The Spartacists responded by organising protests and strikes against the coup attempt. The Berlin working class gave vent to its anger in a 150,000-strong protest of armed workers and soldiers on 8 December. The Spartacists put out an urgent appeal:

Workers, soldiers, comrades! Attention! The revolution stands in great danger! Be on your guard! Our most vital interests are at stake! Everything for the revolution and socialism!

Everything – even life! Defeat the attack! Down with the conspirators! Long live socialism! In the future, the final victory will be ours!^[22]

General Groener’s detachment – the shock troops of the counter-revolution – began arriving in Berlin in the days that followed, and they were welcomed by Ebert. But the soldiers began fraternising with the radicalised workers. The counter-revolution was losing its grip on the soldiers and it had to give up on its aim of disarming the workers. Their commander-in-chief, General Lequis, admitted that “the influence of the extraordinary propaganda of the Spartacists is making itself felt”.^[23] The generals had to pull back and wait for a more opportune moment. Momentum was still with the revolution. But there could be no doubting the intentions of the generals: they wished to implement a military dictatorship.

However, the rank-and-file soldiers of the army were increasingly demobilising themselves – they were sick and tired of war and simply returned home. The regime could not trust the regular troops, and as such it came increasingly to depend upon the Freikorps – volunteer forces drawn from the most reactionary layers of society. Many of them had fought on the side of the counter-revolution against the Bolsheviks in Russia. Now they hoped to cleanse Germany of Bolshevik influence. Incidentally, many of those who would later form the backbone of Hitler’s fascist Sturmabteilung (‘stormtroopers’, or SA) would be drawn from the Freikorps.

In Berlin, the revolutionary unrest continued. There were continuous strikes and protests. The government regarded the capital as being completely infected with anarchy. All Ebert’s efforts were directed towards the restoration of ‘law and order’. Once again, Ebert and the military decided to launch a renewed counter-revolutionary campaign. The occasion for implementing their plans came on 23 and 24 December, when the regular army clashed with revolutionary sailors from the People’s Naval Division. The People’s Naval Division was primarily composed of sailors from Kiel, who had arrived in Berlin and established themselves at the centre of the capital in order to defend it from reaction. Their presence was the cause of much apprehension on the part of the government, which regarded them as a threat to its authority. The government therefore resolved to withhold the sailors’ wages, hoping that doing so would cause their organisation to disintegrate.

The angry sailors responded by kidnapping the Prussian social democratic minister Otto Wels, whom they held ransom until their salary was paid. But negotiations with the government broke down, and Ebert ordered regular troops to intervene and free Wels. Shortly after the sailors had received Ebert’s ultimatum, government troops began bombarding them with artillery. A part of the building that had been occupied by the sailors was damaged, killing more than ten. Their deaths only inflamed the sense of outrage felt by the workers and soldiers of Berlin, a large crowd of whom surrounded and fraternised with the government soldiers. The latter vacillated. Several of them laid down their arms and refused to follow the commands of their officers – the government could no longer trust its troops and as such the attack on the sailors was brought to a chaotic end. The sailors had won, and they were paid what they were owed. The general staff were seething and demanded revenge for this humiliating defeat. According to official sources, in the days that followed, troops loyal to the government killed 156 people.

The workers were in uproar at the deployment of soldiers against the Kiel sailors defending the revolution and, on 29 December, the USPD withdrew from the government in protest at the “bloodbath”. The government was plunged into crisis. The SPD had lost its left cover. The USPD ministers who quit their posts were replaced by SPD ministers, which included Gustav Noske – the man who would style himself as the “bloodhound” of the counter-revolution. The government was now even weaker than it had been and as such was ever more dependent on the general staff.

The creation of a new government, composed exclusively of right-wing social democrats, gave further encouragement to the counter-revolution. The witch hunt of the Spartacists had begun. The SPD was an active participant in this, spreading smears through its newspaper, Vorwärts, among other things.

The smear campaign was particularly focused on Liebknecht and Luxemburg, the two most well-known leaders of the Spartacists.

Enormous posters were thrown up, which had messages such as:

Workers! Citizens!

The downfall of the Fatherland is imminent!

Save it!

It is not being threatened from without, but from within:

By the Spartacist Group.

Strike its leader dead!

Kill Liebknecht!

You will then have peace, work and bread!

Signed: Soldiers from the Front.^[24]

A murderous mood was whipped up against Liebknecht, Luxemburg, and the Spartacists, in which they were accused of being bloodthirsty instigators of violence and anarchy, and the sole cause of all the problems in the country. The question of killing Liebknecht and Luxemburg was openly discussed, and a bounty was placed on their heads.

Bloody Rosa?

The German press had long presented Luxemburg as ‘bloody Rosa’. Such propaganda only increased from this point on. But Luxemburg had no desire to see the revolution carried through a bloodbath. In ‘What Does the Spartacus League Want?’, she describes the Spartacist view on violence and terror:

The proletarian revolution requires no terror for its aims; it hates and despises killing. It does not need these weapons because it does not combat individuals but institutions, because it does not enter the arena with naïve illusions whose disappointment it would seek to revenge. It is not the desperate attempt of a minority to mould the world forcibly according to its ideal, but the action of the great massive millions of the people, destined to fulfil a historic mission and to transform historical necessity into reality.^[25]

Luxemburg was absolutely clear that a socialist revolution had nothing in common with a coup carried out by a minority – on the contrary, it was a vast movement of the overwhelming majority. However, this by no means meant that she harboured pacifist illusions about the peaceful character of the revolution. Instead, she placed blame for any violence that should ensue squarely on the shoulders of the ruling class:

But the proletarian revolution is at the same time the death knell for all servitude and oppression. That is why all capitalists, Junkers, petty bourgeois, officers, all opportunists and parasites of exploitation and class rule rise up to a man to wage mortal combat against the proletarian revolution.

It is sheer insanity to believe that capitalists would good humouredly obey the socialist verdict of a parliament or of a national assembly, that they would calmly renounce property, profit, the right to exploit. All ruling classes fought to the end, with tenacious energy, to preserve their privileges. […] [T]hey all shed streams of blood, they all marched over corpses, murder, and arson, instigated civil war and treason, in order to defend their privileges and their power.

The imperialist capitalist class, as the last offspring of the caste of exploiters, outdoes all its predecessors in brutality, in open cynicism and treachery. […] [I]t will turn the country into a smoking heap of rubble rather than voluntarily give up wage slavery.^[26]

But Luxemburg did not respond by turning the other cheek or by giving up in advance. On the contrary, she argued for decisive action to break the resistance of the counter-revolution:

All this resistance must be broken step by step, with an iron fist and ruthless energy. The violence of the bourgeois counter-revolution must be confronted with the revolutionary violence of the proletariat. Against the attacks, insinuations, and rumours of the bourgeoisie must stand the inflexible clarity of purpose, vigilance, and ever ready activity of the proletarian mass. Against the threatened dangers of the counter-revolution, the arming of the people and disarming of the ruling classes. Against the parliamentary obstructionist manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie, the active organisation of the mass of workers and soldiers. Against the omnipresence, the thousand means of power of bourgeois society, the concentrated, compact, and fully developed power of the working class.^[27]

The ruling class has always tried to ward off the masses from rebellion through fearmongering. Their message is: rebellion will mean violence and bloodshed – something all normal-thinking people naturally wish to avoid. But throughout history, it has always been the ruling classes who have unleashed bloodshed and violence. They have put down revolutions with the utmost brutality, with the intention of beating down the working class so frightfully that the memory persists and a new rising becomes impossible for generations. The ruling class showed in the course of the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, and again in the German Revolution that it will stop at precisely nothing to defend its power and privileges. If the counter-revolution gains victory, it will drown the revolution in blood. It will seek to crush the workers’ hope and deter the masses from taking the road of revolution ever again.

The outbreak of revolution is something that lies completely outside the control of revolutionaries. Rather, it depends upon objective conditions. But once they do break out, the stronger the revolutionary organisation the greater its chance of ensuring the revolution is carried through in an organised and disciplined manner – and therefore the likelihood and degree of bloodshed is minimised. And, most importantly of all, a strong revolutionary organisation is the best guarantee of a revolution’s victory and of the defeat of the counter-revolution, which would otherwise seek to drown it in blood.

The Spartacists

Upon the outbreak of the German Revolution, the Spartacists were far from being in a position of strength. Radek had travelled to Germany as a representative of the Soviet government for the council congress, but was refused entry at the border. He nevertheless managed to cross into Germany illegally and arrived on 20 December 1918. Upon his arrival, one of his first actions was to meet with the Spartacists, where he received quite a jarring picture of the situation. He described the impression in his diary:

How many people had we at the congress [the workers’ and soldiers’ councils’ congress – MF]? There was not even a Spartakus caucus. […] And in the Berlin Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council? There too we had no organised group. In the provinces things were better here and there. In Bremen we had managed to capture a substantial portion of the council under the command of Knief. In Chemnitz, Brandler was working. “And how large is our organisation in Berlin?” I asked. “We are only collecting our forces. When the revolution began we did not have more than fifty people organised in Berlin.”^[28]

There were no more than fifty Spartacists in Berlin and maybe a couple of thousand in the whole of Germany when the revolution broke out. Beginning from a very low level, they were thus forced to commence the construction of an organisation in the middle of the revolution itself. On 11 November – two days after the arrival of the revolution in Berlin – the Spartacists held a conference in which they officially decided to change their name from the Internationale Group to the Spartacus League. At the same conference they also elected a leadership – the Zentrale – which consisted of Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Mehring, Jogiches, Ernst Meyer, Hermann and Käthe Duncker, Wilhelm Pieck, Paul Levi, Paul Lange, Thalheimer, and Eberlein. They also laid the plans for publishing a daily newspaper, a theoretical magazine, magazines for women and youth, a propaganda publication for the soldiers, and a press bulletin. Considering their strength, this was a very ambitious plan – one which was never destined to be carried out.

The day before, on 10 November, a group of armed Spartacists had occupied the printing house of the Berliner Zeitung in order to print their own newspaper, Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag). The paper was published on 11 November, but the owner of the printing house appealed to the government and the Executive Committee of the councils, and it was not published again until 18 November – and at a very steep price to boot. All the energy of the Spartacists was thrown into publishing a daily newspaper. Luxemburg was the paper’s editor, and all articles went through her. In these months – from her liberation from prison by the revolution until she was murdered – the revolution completely engulfed her in hectic activity.

The Spartacists had contact with almost all the important centres outside Berlin. But to a large extent, they remained a more-or-less loose network, organised around a small core of leaders, rather than a real organisation:

Nowhere did the Spartacists form an organised faction, nowhere did they undertake systematic work to build their faction or even an organised tendency either in the workers’ councils or in the USPD, where their work rested on the propaganda of Die Rote Fahne and on the prestige and activity of their most prominent members. At the same time, however, the League [The Spartacists] held to its conception of revolutionary agitation and moving the masses into action, and worked to mobilise the broad masses of workers whose spontaneous action it hoped to enlighten and inspire. To this effect it organised many meetings and demonstrations.^[29]

At the beginning of the revolution, the Spartacists remained part of the USPD. Luxemburg’s perspective was to win support and members from the party and – in the long term – to win the majority of the party over. Liebknecht had also argued in favour of this perspective, particularly on account of the fact that the Revolutionary Stewards were also a part of the USPD. The party drew in a broad layer of those who had been radicalised by the revolution, and particularly the workers of the larger cities.

On behalf of the Soviet government and with the prestige of the Bolsheviks behind him, Radek argued that the Spartacists had to break with the USPD and form their own party. Luxemburg was very sceptical – she continued to fear isolating herself from the masses. On the other hand, many of the younger Spartacists wanted to form a new party because, in their eyes, that was precisely what ‘real revolutionaries’ like the Bolsheviks would do. But to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the question of an independent party was not a matter of principle. Rather, it was a tactical question. Organising the revolutionaries independently, however, was a matter of necessity.

In reality, the main problem was not so much whether the revolutionaries were organised in their own party or as a faction inside the USPD. The main problem was that they lacked a cadre organisation – an organisation of revolutionaries educated and tested not only in Marxist theory but in tactics, the lessons of Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution, etc. Initially, such an organisation might have been formed as a faction inside the USPD. Under such circumstances, that might have meant that a mass split in the USPD, in which a large part of the membership went over to the Communists, would have taken place much earlier. In the end, that split took place in October 1920. How events might have unfolded differently under other circumstances is impossible to tell. The essential point is that the lack of a revolutionary organisation at the outbreak of the revolution gave rise to enormous difficulties for Luxemburg and her fellow revolutionaries.

The Spartacists drew in the most radicalised individuals and groupings. They were all honest revolutionaries, but they were also young, politically uneducated, and impatient. They looked to the Russian Revolution, but then equated Bolshevism with armed uprising. They knew little of Lenin’s approach to party building, nor the tactics and slogans that the Bolsheviks raised in the period from February to October 1917, and even less about the period that preceded it. For them, the lesson of Bolshevism could more-or-less be summed up in the following words: proclaim the revolutionary party and the masses will follow. But things had not been so easy in Russia.

In his book ‘Left-Wing’ Communism, an Infantile Disorder, published in 1921, Lenin attempted to educate these young, impatient layers among the Communists whom he described as “ultra-left”:

Would it not be better if the salutations addressed to the Soviets and the Bolsheviks were more frequently accompanied by a profound analysis of the reasons why the Bolsheviks have been able to build up the discipline needed by the revolutionary proletariat?^[30]

Lenin generalised the lessons of the history of Bolshevism in the following terms:

Only the history of Bolshevism during the entire period of its existence can satisfactorily explain why it has been able to build up and maintain, under most difficult conditions, the iron discipline needed for the victory of the proletariat.

The first questions to arise are: how is the discipline of the proletariat’s revolutionary party maintained? How is it tested? How is it reinforced? First, by the class-consciousness of the proletarian vanguard and by its devotion to the revolution, by its tenacity, self-sacrifice and heroism. Second, by its ability to link up, maintain the closest contact, and – if you wish – merge, in certain measure, with the broadest masses of the working people – primarily with the proletariat, but also with the non-proletarian masses of working people. Third, by the correctness of the political leadership exercised by this vanguard, by the correctness of its political strategy and tactics, provided the broadest masses have seen, from their own experience, that they are correct. Without these conditions, discipline in a revolutionary party really capable of being the party of the advanced class, whose mission it is to overthrow the bourgeoisie and transform the whole of society, cannot be achieved. Without these conditions, all attempts to establish discipline inevitably fall flat and end in phrase-mongering and clowning. On the other hand, these conditions cannot emerge at once. They are created only by prolonged effort and hard-won experience. Their creation is facilitated by correct revolutionary theory, which, in its turn, is not a dogma, but assumes final shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement.^[31]

The youth among the Spartacists had no experience of revolutionary work, having been radicalised by – and to a certain extent, dazzled by – the revolution itself. They wished to see the abolition of the old system and everything connected to it, including the old parties, organisations and trade unions, and for them, it could not come fast enough. For this layer of young people, revolutionary tactics could be more-or-less summed up in one word: forward! And these layers naturally pushed for the founding of a new Communist Party.

The Spartacists were supported by the Bremen left radicals who formed a new organisation, the International Communists of Germany (IKD), on 23 November. They enjoyed a certain influence in Bremen, especially among the workers of the shipyards and the harbour. They remained outside the USPD, but they were quite aware that they were too few in number to form the core of a new party, instead giving critical support to the Spartacists and declaring their willingness to support every initiative by the latter towards the establishment of an independent revolutionary organisation, breaking with the centrists of the USPD. The left radicals in Hamburg also joined the IKD. This new organisation, however, was characterised by ultra-left tendencies. When the left radicals in Dresden, for instance, found themselves in a minority in the workers’ and soldiers’ council on 16 November, they abandoned it, declaring it to be a counter-revolutionary council.

Luxemburg remained hesitant over the question of founding a new party. But the Spartacists were increasingly clashing with the USPD leadership. At a meeting of USPD members in Berlin on 15 December, following shortly on the back of the national congress of councils, the Spartacists raised their demand for an extraordinary party congress. This was rejected by the USPD leadership, which feared to do so lest it lose its majority to the growing left wing.

The meeting discussed the entire political situation then unfolding. Haase put forward the policy of the USPD leadership, defending the party’s cooperation in government with Ebert and Scheidemann, and advancing the idea that the councils had a place alongside a constituent assembly. Luxemburg was the main speaker in opposition to the leadership, and she launched a fierce attack against Ebert’s government and the USPD’s participation in it. She agreed with Haase that the masses supported Ebert and the government. But she laid responsibility for that fact at the feet of Haase and the leadership of the USPD. It was precisely their cooperation in government with the SPD that had given the latter legitimacy rather than exposing them.

The USPD leadership manoeuvred in such a way as to have the Spartacist proposal voted down. They replied to Luxemburg’s call for an extraordinary congress with a resolution from Haase, stating that the main focus of the party ought to be the National Assembly election – artificially creating an opposition between two proposals that were not at all in conflict with one another. Luxemburg lost the vote, with 185 votes cast in favour of her resolution, against 485 cast in favour of Haase’s. Haase used the occasion to call upon the Spartacists to walk out of the party. The USPD was on the verge of an explosion. Similar votes took place across Germany, with revolutionary delegates putting forward similar motions to that moved by Luxemburg, and in most cases, the vote ended up splitting the USPD into two camps of almost equal size. Scepticism towards the USPD leadership was also developing among the Revolutionary Stewards, whom the Spartacists hoped to be able to win over to the formation of a new party, thus securing the support of the most advanced layer of workers in Berlin: the factory leaders.

The Berlin meeting of USPD delegates had not brought an extraordinary congress any closer to realisation. Meanwhile, pressure for a split with the USPD was growing among the Spartacist rank-and-file. As early as 14 December, the Spartacists had published their own programme, ‘What Does the Spartacus League Want?’, co-authored by Luxemburg and Levi. On 22 December, the Spartacists issued an ultimatum to the leadership of the USPD demanding they put out the call for a party congress within three days to be held before the end of the month. When the leadership of the USPD predictably rejected the demand, the Spartacists called their own separate congress, in the course of which the Communist Party would be founded.

Founding of the Communist Party

In a revolutionary situation, the consciousness of the masses changes rapidly. But in order for the working class to seize power, history has demonstrated that a revolutionary party able to lead the masses is necessary. Luxemburg was faced with a difficult task. What had taken the Bolsheviks two decades to build, she now had to build in a couple of months. It is next to impossible to build a revolutionary organisation in the midst of the revolution itself. And yet, that was the task.

Luxemburg was eventually convinced of the necessity of founding a new party, although Jogiches was opposed to doing so. She was nevertheless against calling the party ‘communist’. In her opinion, it would have been preferable to call the party ‘socialist’ as doing so, she believed, would make it easier to win over members of the socialist parties in the Second International. She was concerned that by taking on the name ‘communist’ the new party would be too closely connected with the Russians, which would scare some away. She was very cautious, and her orientation was towards the ranks of the Second International. Lenin, meanwhile, argued that a firm break with social chauvinism in all its colours was an absolute necessity, and that the name ‘communist’ was therefore far preferable. However, Luxemburg’s proposed name was voted down by the Zentrale – the Spartacist leadership – which instead adopted the name ‘communist’. On 29 December, the Spartacists decided, by eighty votes for and three votes against, to leave the USPD.

The following day, 129 delegates from the Spartacists, the Free Socialist Youth, and the IDK met and founded the Communist Party of Germany, the KPD. The ‘Spartacists’ moniker nevertheless continued to be used colloquially.

In her speech, ‘Our Program and the Political Situation’, Luxemburg outlined the new party’s political principles and its analysis of the situation. She explained how a thread connected the party all the way back to Marx and Engels and the Communist Manifesto, and how the SPD had degenerated from its revolutionary roots. It was high time, in Luxemburg’s opinion, for revolutionaries to jettison the legacy of the SPD.

Our program is deliberately opposed to the standpoint of the Erfurt Program; it is deliberately opposed to the separation of the immediate, so-called minimal demands formulated for the political and economic struggle from the socialist goal regarded as a maximal program. […] For us there is no minimal and no maximal program; socialism is one and the same thing: this is the minimum we have to realise today.^[32]

She explained that the first phase of the revolution had commenced on 9 November when the workers and soldiers had shown the way forward and formed councils, but this was over now. The weakness of the revolution meant that power had begun to slip from their hands. This phase had been marked by illusions: among the proletarians and soldiers of “unity under the banner of so-called socialism”; and among the ruling class that the Ebert–Scheidemann government could hold back the workers with the help of the soldiers. These illusions were now shattered:

One and all, [these illusions] have now been dissipated into nothingness. It has been shown that the union between Haase and Ebert–Scheidemann under the banner of “socialism” serves merely as a fig leaf for the veiling of a counter-revolutionary policy.^[33]

She explained it was wholly positive that the illusions dissipated. A new phase must then open, in which support increasingly tends to drain from the government – not only from the workers, but also from the petty bourgeoisie and the soldiers. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie itself will also lose its faith in the government. As such, Luxemburg explained, the government would go over to the side of undisguised counter-revolution in the coming period: “they are sailing under full steam into the second phase, that of the declared counter-revolution, or, as I may even say, that of the restoration of the earlier pre-revolutionary conditions.”^[34] But, she concluded, this could only lead to a sharpening of the class struggle:

The circumstances will force Ebert and Scheidemann to the expedient of dictatorship, with or without the declaration of a state of siege. But this, however, as an outcome of the previous development, by the mere logic of events and through the operation of the forces which control Ebert and Scheidemann, will imply that during the second act of the revolution a much more pronounced opposition of tendencies and a greatly accentuated class struggle will take place. [“Hear! Hear!”] This intensification of conflict will arise, not merely because the political influences I have already enumerated, dispelling all illusion, will lead to a declared hand-to-hand fight between the revolution and the counter-revolution; but rather because the flames of a new fire are spreading upward from the depths of the totality, the flames of economic struggles.^[35]

She proved to be completely correct in her prognosis that counter-revolution was rearming itself. But in her speech to the founding congress of the party, Luxemburg was sure to warn against belief in an inevitable or easy victory. She attempted to instil a sense of reality into the minds of the young communists, and to awaken them to the difficulties that they would meet. The entire ruling class, with the help of the state apparatus and especially the tops of the SPD, would do everything in its power to fend off the revolution. The communists were still far from enjoying the support of the majority of the masses. True, the workers in the cities had become radicalised, but the revolution was yet to make itself felt in the countryside:

In the form that I depict it, the process may seem rather more tedious than one had imagined it at first. It is healthy, I think, that we should be perfectly clear as to all the difficulties and complications of this revolution. For I hope that, as in my own case, so in yours also, the description of the difficulties of the accumulating tasks will paralyse neither your zeal nor your energy. On the contrary, the greater the task, the more will we gather all of our forces. And we must not forget that the revolution is able to do its work with extraordinary speed. I make no attempt to prophesy how much time will be needed for this process. Who among us cares about the time; who worries, so long only as our lives suffice to bring it to pass.^[36]

Ultra-Left Tendencies

The majority of the delegates at the founding congress of the Communist Party were young. Three quarters of them were under the age of thirty-five years old, and only one (Jogiches) was older than fifty. Half of them were industrial workers. Characteristic of the young members of the new party was a tendency towards ultra-leftism. Frölich described the party’s composition:

The Spartacus League was a loose organisation of a few thousand members only. Its core was the old Left Wing of Social Democracy, a Marxist elite schooled in Rosa Luxemburg’s tactical ideas. The majority of the Socialist Youth joined forces with the League, which then recruited additional supporters amongst the many young people who had been driven to the Left Wing of the working-class movement by their opposition to war. During the war years, all these elements had run risks and incurred dangers quite new to the working-class movement in Western Europe. They were all enthusiastic adherents of the Revolution, though many of them still had very romantic ideas about it.^[37]

When Karl Radek had arrived in Germany in mid-December 1918, he was shocked by the shrill tone that the Spartacists struck:

Dirty and ragged, I feverishly bought a copy of Rote Fahne. As I drove to the hotel I looked the paper over. I was seized with alarm. The tone of the paper sounded as if the final conflict were upon us. It could not be more shrill. If only they can avoid overdoing it! …

It was the question of how to relate to the National Assembly that sparked controversy… It was a very tempting idea to counter-pose the slogan of the councils to that of a National Assembly. But the congress of councils itself was in favour of the National Assembly. You could hardly skip over that stage. Rosa and Liebknecht recognised that… But the party youth were decidedly against it, “we will break it up with machine guns”.^[38]

One of the first debates at the founding congress of the new party was precisely that discussion on whether to participate in the election to the National Assembly. Paul Levi put forward the case of the leadership: despite the fact that the German bourgeoisie intended to use the National Assembly to liquidate the revolution with the help of the SPD, the communists had to participate in the elections, as they had now been called by the councils. The elections would draw the focus of the masses’ attention towards the National Assembly for months to come, and the communists had to exploit this fact. There was widespread disagreement from young delegates towards the proposal to participate in the election, and indeed Levi faced repeated interruptions by hecklers when trying to move the proposal.

Luxemburg had sharply condemned the National Assembly as a diversion, and had contrasted it with the workers’ and soldiers’ councils. However, she agreed with Levi and the rest of the leadership that, once the workers’ and soldiers’ councils had called National Assembly elections, the Communists had no choice but to participate in them and present their political programme if they were serious about attempting to reach the masses.

But Luxemburg and the rest of the leadership were unable to convince the majority of the members of the new-born Communist Party of the correctness of this tactic. As such, their proposal to participate in the elections was voted down. Luxemburg answered the congress in the following terms:

We understand and value the motives from which stems the opposition to the executive’s point of view. Our pleasure is, however, not wholehearted. Comrades, you take your radicalism rather too easily. With all our stormy impatience we must not lose the necessary seriousness and the need for reflection. The Russian example against the Constituent [Assembly] does not apply. When the Constituent [Assembly] was driven out, our Russian comrades already had a Trotsky–Lenin government. We still have Ebert–Scheidemann.^[39]

On the surface, it might seem as though the young communists had simply followed the example set by revolutionary Russia. Had the Bolsheviks not dissolved the Constituent Assembly? But, as Luxemburg pointed out, the difference was that the Bolsheviks had dissolved the Constituent Assembly after they had won the majority in the soviets, and after the soviets had seized power through an insurrection and a Soviet Congress. In Germany, a majority of the masses still supported the SPD and the USPD, and this majority still regarded the calling of the National Assembly as a step forward. The task of the communists was, therefore, still that of winning over the workers from the grip of the SPD and the USPD. The young communists had not yet acquainted themselves with the lessons of Bolshevism. As Lenin later explained in ‘Left-Wing’ Communism, an Infantile Disorder:

At the beginning of the period mentioned [February to October 1917 – MF], we did not call for the overthrow of the government but explained that it was impossible to overthrow it without first changing the composition and the temper of the Soviets. We did not proclaim a boycott of the bourgeois parliament, the Constituent Assembly, but said – and following the April (1917) Conference of our Party began to state officially in the name of the Party – that a bourgeois republic with a Constituent Assembly would be better than a bourgeois republic without a Constituent Assembly, but that a “workers’ and peasants’” republic, a Soviet republic, would be better than any bourgeois-democratic, parliamentary republic. Without such thorough, circumspect and long preparations, we could not have obtained victory in October 1917, or have consolidated that victory.^[40]

And:

In the first place, contrary to the opinion of such outstanding political leaders as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the German “Lefts”, as we know, considered parliamentarism to be “politically obsolete” even in January 1919. We know that the “Lefts” were mistaken.^[41]

The boycott of the National Assembly by the KPD isolated the party from the masses, who looked towards these elections, especially because they were the first since universal suffrage had been introduced. Despite the communists’ boycott there was an 83 per cent turnout – the highest in German history.

On the question of how to approach the government, the young communists likewise adopted an ultra-left attitude. They believed that the Communist Party had to put forward the slogan of toppling the Ebert–Scheidemann government. At the congress, Luxemburg warned them against the belief that this would actually solve anything. The government could not simply be toppled. It had to be undermined from below by the movement of the masses. Purely putting forward the slogan of toppling the government without being in a position to replace it with something could not advance the movement so much as a millimetre. This would become clear just a couple of weeks later.

It would be unfair to blame the young communists themselves entirely for their ultra-left tendency. In the articles she had written, Luxemburg herself argued very forcefully against the calling of the National Assembly as well as against the government. She personally understood the necessity of connecting with the masses and that therefore the Communists needed to adopt a flexible approach regarding both the government and the National Assembly. However, she had done little in the way of educating the young communists in terms of how to actually connect with the masses.

The ultra-left trend was also expressed at the party congress in two further motions that proposed to make membership of the trade unions and membership of the newly founded Communist Party incompatible. The delegates moving these motions called upon the communists to leave the unions, and furthermore to do everything in their power to work against them, as they were dominated by the right-wing Social Democrats. With great difficulty, the Communist Party leadership managed to avoid a vote on this question by referring it to the party’s trade union commission.

The leadership of the party understood that a boycott of the trade unions would mean serious isolation from the masses. Precisely in the manner Luxemburg had described the events that unfolded in Russia in 1905, the revolutionary movement that swept across Germany politically awakened great masses of the population for the first time, and these masses poured into the trade unions, which are the most basic form of workers’ organisation. Before the revolution, the membership of the trade unions numbered about 1.5 million. By the end of December 1918, that figure had risen to 2.2 million, and by the end of 1919 it stood at a staggering 7.3 million members. According to the leadership of the Communist Party, it was the task of communists to work inside the trade unions, and through them to connect to the masses and wrest political influence away from the social democrats. But a whole year would pass before the KPD decided to actively work inside the SPD-dominated unions on account of the opposition among the rank-and-file.

Throughout the duration of the founding party congress, negotiations were ongoing with the representatives of the Revolutionary Stewards. The latter were worried about the ultra-left tendencies visible among the communists. They therefore posed a number of demands as a precondition for their joining the party, which included: that the decision to boycott the elections must be scrapped; that there should be parity on the commission dealing with the party programme; and that all references to ‘Spartacus’ or ‘Spartacist’ be removed from the party name. As Broué notes, these were demands that no old Bolshevik, and probably no old Spartacists, would object to.

But, to the majority of the Congress, they were not acceptable, and their ironic attitude towards these negotiations was, moreover, one of the symptoms which Radek found to be most alarming.^[42]

The result was that the Revolutionary Stewards remained outside the new Communist Party and continued to be attached to the USPD. This was a hard blow that seriously weakened the communists. The Revolutionary Stewards were the group that enjoyed the best contacts with the workers in the factories of Berlin and so, without them, the communists had no real foothold within the industrial working class. For the most radical workers of the factories in Berlin, it likewise meant that they lacked a revolutionary political leadership, leaving them under the influence of the vacillating left leaders of the USPD.

Luxemburg was quite aware of the problem, but it didn’t cause her too much concern. She likened the problems that the party was facing to the wailing of a new-born child. She wrote to Clara Zetkin, describing the leadership’s defeat over its proposal to participate in the constituent assembly:

Our ‘defeat’ was merely the triumph of a somewhat childish, half-baked, narrow-minded radicalism. In any case that happened at the beginning of the conference. Later contact between us [the executive] and the delegates was established … an entirely different atmosphere [Resomanz] than at the start. … Spartakisten are a fresh generation, free from the cretinous traditions of the ‘good old party’. … We all decided unanimously not to make the matter into a cardinal question [Kabinettsfrage] and not to take it too seriously.^[43]

Despite the young party’s evident weaknesses, the foundation of a communist party in Germany had a huge impact internationally. The Russian party was no longer alone, and it renewed feelings of hope that the isolation of the young Soviet republic would soon be broken. Finally, a party that fully supported the Russian Revolution existed, and it clearly posed the choice:

In this hour, socialism is the only salvation for humanity. The words of the Communist Manifesto flare like a fiery menetekel^[44] above the crumbling bastions of capitalist society: Socialism or barbarism!^[45]

The party was founded but it was far from being in a position to lead the working class to power. Luxemburg and the rest of the leadership could do nothing but wait and hope that events would confirm their correctness before the young members, and that the latter would learn through their own experience, giving up their ultra-left tendencies. The problem was that the revolution had only just begun, and time was not on the side of the communists. The counter-revolution in Germany, led by the Social Democrats, was far better organised than its Russian counterpart had been in 1917. The counter-revolution did not simply sit and wait for events to take their course. Instead, shortly after its foundation, the young party would be tested by the counter-revolution.

The ‘Spartacist Uprising’

The ruling class and the leadership of the SPD had grown impatient. The revolutionary unrest had lasted for too long and, as far as they were concerned, it was high time for the counter-revolution to swing into action. But the workers had also grown impatient – particularly in Berlin – and they sensed that power was slipping from their hands. Growing impatience on both sides set the stage for what would come next: events that have since been dubbed the ‘Spartacist Uprising’, despite the fact that the Spartacists neither initiated nor organised the movement.

The situation had grown dire by the beginning of January 1919 – the USPD had just withdrawn from government and there were rumours that a military coup was being hatched. Meanwhile, the witch hunt against the Spartacists continued apace. The general staff and the Social-Democratic ministers were preparing a bloody showdown with the Spartacists who had campaigned for the toppling of the government since the Communist Party’s foundation. The SPD and the general staff intended to put a halt to the revolution and prepare the way for their own kind of military ‘solution’ to the crisis. The new minister of defence, the Social Democrat Gustav Noske, was to lead the offensive of the counter-revolutionary forces.

It was a secondary question that gave the government its occasion for a clash with the revolution: the dismissal of Emil Eichhorn from his post as the left-wing chief of police of Berlin. Eichhorn was a member of the USPD, and he was regarded as being a threat to the government for having organised a left-wing police force of some 2,000 workers and soldiers loyal to the revolution. His dismissal served two purposes: on the one hand, the government would rid itself of a left-wing chief of police, but more than this, his dismissal might also serve to provoke the left-wing workers of Berlin. The government counted on the workers rising up as a pretext for its sending in the military to crush their rebellion.

A number of false accusations against Eichhorn were conjured up, and on 4 January he was told to step down. Eichhorn, however, refused, claiming that he enjoyed the support of the masses, that he answered to the revolution itself and would only step down if the revolution demanded it.

In the evening of 4 January, the leadership of the KPD met to discuss the government’s provocation. It decided that a response was necessary, but that it would be crazy to attempt to topple the government in the given circumstances. Instead, they proposed calling a general strike. Broué quotes an unnamed communist who was present and later recorded his memories of the meeting:

There was complete agreement on how to appreciate the situation. Everyone present thought that it would be senseless to try and take over the government: a government supported by the proletariat would not have lasted for more than a fortnight. Consequently, the members of the Zentrale [KPD leadership – MF] all agreed that they had to avoid any slogans which necessarily would have meant overthrowing the government at that time.^[46]

Luxemburg was of the opinion that even if they managed to topple the Ebert government, doing so would be pointless, as the rest of Germany was not ready to follow the workers of Berlin. It was a situation that, in many ways, resembled the July Days in Russia in 1917. Now, in January 1919, it was the workers of Berlin who were about to rush ahead without the support of the rest of the country.

When the Executive Committee of the USPD learned of the dismissal of Eichhorn, it immediately adopted a resolution in support of him. A meeting was convened between the USPD leaders, the representatives of the Revolutionary Stewards, and the leaders of the KPD in order to discuss united action. The three groups decided to call a protest on 5 January. On that day, hundreds of thousands of workers came out into the streets of Berlin and marched on the police headquarters.

Meanwhile, armed workers occupied the editorial offices of Vorwärts – they had not yet forgiven the SPD for ‘stealing’ their newspaper. They were talked round to abandoning their occupation, but only a short while later the offices were occupied a second time. The situation was repeated at the offices of the bourgeois papers and other buildings including, briefly, the Reichstag itself, were also occupied by the workers. Whilst the events had not been organised by the Spartacists, many of the participants were indeed Spartacists. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, provocateurs would also have been present in the crowds. However, the events of that week undoubtedly reflected the mood of frustration among the workers of Berlin.

The next day, 500,000 people took to the streets – many of them armed. In many factories, workers came out on strike. This was one of the largest single protests of the revolution. The situation was reaching its climax. The Social-Democratic minister, Gustav Noske, later wrote:

Great masses of workers… answered the call to struggle. Their favourite slogan “Down, down, down” (with the government) resounded once more. I had to cross the procession at the Brandenburg Gate, in the Tiergarten, and again in front of general staff headquarters. Many marchers were armed. Several trucks with machine guns stood at the Siegessaule. Repeatedly, I politely asked to be allowed to pass, as I had an urgent errand. Obligingly, they allowed me to cross through. If the crowds had had determined, conscious leaders, instead of windbags, by noon that day Berlin would have been in their hands.^[47]

With the masses in the streets, the representatives of the USPD, KPD (Pieck and Liebknecht), and the Revolutionary Stewards met to discuss the next steps. They had no plan and no idea of the direction they should lead the masses.

The same anonymous communist quoted above described the situation:

The masses were there very early, from nine o’clock, in the cold and the fog. The leaders were in session somewhere, deliberating. The fog grew heavier, and the masses were still waiting. But the leaders deliberated. Midday came, bringing hunger as well as cold. And the leaders deliberated. The masses were delirious with excitement. They wanted action, something to relieve their delirium. No one knew what. The leaders deliberated. The fog grew thicker, and with it came twilight. The masses returned sadly homeward. They had wanted some great event, and they had done nothing. And the leaders deliberated. They had deliberated in the Marstall. They continued in the police headquarters, and they were still deliberating. The workers stood outside on the empty Alexanderplatz, their rifles in their hands, and with their light and heavy machine guns. Inside the leaders deliberated. At the police headquarters, the guns were aimed, there were sailors at every corner, and in all the rooms overlooking the street there was a seething mass of soldiers, sailors and workers. Inside the leaders were sitting, deliberating. They sat all evening, and they sat all night, and they deliberated. And they were sitting at dawn the next morning – and still deliberating. The groups came back to the Siegesallee again, and the leaders were still sitting and deliberating. They deliberated and deliberated and deliberated.^[48]

At the meeting, a ‘revolutionary committee’ was established, with representatives of the USPD, the KPD, and the Revolutionary Stewards. It was led by Georg Ledebour, Karl Liebknecht, and Paul Scholze.

The leaders were overwhelmed by the enormity of the movement and felt that the time was right for an offensive. They received a message – which was later shown to be dubious – that they could count on military support in a number of places. In this atmosphere, a resolution was passed concerning the toppling of the government, but it was never issued. Liebknecht found himself carried away by the mood and supported the proposal. In the end, the only concrete proposal to come from this committee was the call for renewed protests the next day, on 6 January.

However, by the following day, a cooler mood prevailed in the committee and its revolutionary illusions were dissipating. It was obvious that, whilst the majority of the workers of Berlin were ready to strike and protest, they were not yet inclined towards an armed uprising. By the evening of 6 January, the movement was in decline. Both the central and executive committee of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils in Berlin approved of Eichhorn’s dismissal. The Social Democrat Noske installed himself at the headquarters of the Freikorps and prepared his counter-attack. The vacillating leaders had allowed the movement’s peak to pass it by.

In the revolutionary committee, there was now a majority that favoured opening negotiations with the government, a proposal that Liebknecht opposed. The USPD, nonetheless, unilaterally initiated negotiations of its own on the night of 6-7 January. They wished to secure a ceasefire in which the occupied buildings could be evacuated. The strength of the government grew by the hour in proportion to the dying down of the movement, and it therefore opted to protract the negotiations. Liebknecht visited the workers who had occupied Vorwärts and declared that, in opening negotiations, the USPD had betrayed the movement – the only choice left was to fight to the end. On 8 January, negotiations broke down and the government announced that it would retaliate with force. A ‘social-democratic’ army unit consisting of two regiments of six companies each was organised and billeted at the Reichstag building. Meanwhile, the revolutionaries had established a league of red soldiers who now appealed to the armed workers, calling on them to take to the streets. Events had arrived at the brink of civil war. But whilst violent clashes were erupting on the streets of Berlin, overwhelming majorities at mass meetings in the factories were calling for an end to the fighting.

On 8 and 9 January, government forces retook several occupied buildings and laid siege to the offices of Vorwärts with orders to take the building – if necessary, by force. In the evening of 10 January, while negotiations were still ongoing, one of the negotiators, Ledebour from the USPD, was arrested, along with the Communist leader Ernst Meyer.

In the morning of 11 January, government forces began firing upon the Vorwärts building. After a firefight lasting two hours, the occupiers hoisted the white flag and sent a delegation to negotiate their surrender. The members of the delegation were immediately arrested. The rest were given 10 minutes to surrender. A number of the prisoners were summarily executed.

The Communists were in a state of crisis. Radek spoke in favour of the party calling for a retreat, appealing for the workers to return to work and to begin a campaign for new elections to the workers’ councils. Luxemburg agreed that a retreat was necessary but she was of the opinion that the Communists could not call for such a retreat openly, as doing so would give the USPD leaders the excuse they needed to capitulate to the government.

Luxemburg made a critical assessment of the uprising. She regarded positively the fact that “the broadest masses of the proletariat in Berlin and the main centres of revolution beyond the kingdom”, had realised that the choice was either: abandon socialism or chase the Ebert–Scheidemann government from power. But the movement also showed weakness – how was the fight to be continued? On 8 January 1919, she wrote:

But what is yet far from clear, in which the weakness and immaturity of the revolution is still evident, is the question of how the struggle to get rid of the Ebert government should be carried out, how one translates the inner maturity that the revolution has already reached into deeds and power relations. Nothing has revealed these weaknesses and deficiencies as clearly as the last three days.^[49]

She sharply criticised the bodies that stood at the head of the masses during the January uprising. Specifically, she condemned the Revolutionary Stewards and the leadership of the USPD in Greater Berlin for leaving the masses to themselves. They had entered into negotiations with the same government that they were in open struggle against without consulting the masses. The masses were out on the street, but, she explained, there was a lack of the necessary leadership:

When the masses have been called on the streets and are on alert, you must clearly tell them what to do or at least what is being done and planned by friend and foe. In times of revolutionary crisis, the masses should of course be on the street. They are the only safeguard, the only security for the revolution. When the revolution is at risk – and it is now more than ever! – then it is the duty of the proletarian mass to be on guard where their power is expressed: on the street! Their presence, their mutual contact, is already a threat and a warning to all evident and hidden enemies of the revolution: Beware!^[50]

Luxemburg called for action, not words:

The experience of the last three days is loudly calling on the leaders of the workers’ movement: Don’t deliberate endlessly! Do not negotiate! Take action!^[51]

Although she was not openly critical of the KPD’s own representatives who were among the “leaders of the workers’ movement”, the story goes that when Luxemburg subsequently met with Liebknecht at the party office after a meeting of the revolutionary executive committee, she exclaimed furiously: “But Karl, how could you, and what about our programme?”^[52]

Radek was sternly critical of the KPD. In a letter to the party leadership written on 9 January, he pointed out that the party had, quite correctly, written in its programme, ‘What Does the Spartacus League Want?’, that it would only seek to take power once it had won over a majority of the workers to its position. That was not yet the case. He was particularly critical of the party’s representatives in the revolutionary committee:

In this situation, the action on which the revolutionary delegates decided on Saturday, as a reply to the attack by the social-patriotic government upon the police headquarters, should have had the character only of an act of protest. The proletarian vanguard, exasperated by the policy of the government and badly led by the revolutionary delegates, whose political inexperience made them unable to grasp the relation of forces in the Reich as a whole, has in its zeal transformed the movement of protest into a struggle for power. This permits Ebert and Scheidemann to strike a blow at the movement in Berlin which can weaken the movement as a whole.^[53]

Radek insisted that the Communists had to honestly and openly inform the masses of their retreat, and thereby limit the damage:

The only force able to call a halt and to prevent this disaster is you, the Communist Party. You have enough perspicacity to know that this struggle is hopeless. Your members Levi and Duncker have told me that you know this… Nothing can stop him who is weaker from retreating before a stronger force. In July 1917, we [the Bolsheviks – MF] were infinitely stronger than you are today, and we held back the masses with all our might, and, when we did not succeed, with a tremendous effort we then led a retreat from a hopeless struggle.^[54]

But the leaders of the KPD, including Luxemburg, assessed the situation differently. She evaluated the movement in her article ‘Order Prevails in Berlin’ – which would turn out to be her last. She wrote that it was natural that the movement had ended in defeat. The defeat was mainly on account of the political immaturity of the mass of soldiers, which was in itself a “symptom of the common immaturity of the German revolution”. But at the same time, she said the workers could have acted no differently given the provocation of the government:

Faced with the shameless provocation of the Ebert–Scheidemanns, the revolutionary working class was forced to take up arms. Yes, it was a matter of honour for the revolution to repel the attack immediately and with all due energy, lest the counter-revolution be encouraged to advance further, and lest the revolutionary ranks of the proletariat and the moral credit of the German revolution in the International be shaken.^[55]

The KPD and Luxemburg did not believe that the movement was yet ready to overthrow the government. It must be said, however, that alongside her pointed attacks on the government, Luxemburg’s articles also expressed a point of view, prevalent inside the KPD, which posed perhaps the greatest obstacle for further advance of the revolution.

According to Luxemburg, the workers could have acted in no other way than by taking up arms in resistance against the provocation to the revolution. It was a matter of saving the “honour of the revolution” and of not encouraging the counter-revolution to take new steps forward. According to Luxemburg, the revolution could only advance. She could not conceive of the possibility of a temporary, tactical defensive action. Rather, the final victory would be prepared by a series of defeats:

Now it is an internal law of the life of the revolution never to stand still in inaction, in passivity, once a step has been taken. The best parry is a forceful blow. Now more than ever this elementary rule of all struggles governs each step of the revolution.^[56]

Here we see a clear contradiction between Luxemburg’s position, and the advice of Radek and the tactics of the Bolsheviks. In July 1917, the Bolsheviks had attempted to convince the workers of Petrograd not to take to the streets lest they become isolated. When they failed to do so, they participated in the demonstrations, side by side with the workers, and attempted to give the demonstrations the utmost organisation and discipline. When it became apparent that they could not take a stand against the counter-revolution, they organised a retreat in the most orderly fashion possible. Radek wrote to the KPD Central Committee to convince them that a withdrawal organised by the party would prove far less demoralising than encouraging further struggle, which could only end in defeat.

In his advice, Radek drew upon the lessons of the Bolsheviks from 1917. The Bolsheviks did not go all out to mobilise the masses in the streets when they regarded the conditions as unripe for victory. Rather, they attempted to hold them back whilst simultaneously educating the masses and winning them over politically. Of course, this by no means meant that the Russian Revolution was without its struggles and defeats. But the Bolsheviks attempted to minimise defeats to the degree that they could, and as such won the trust of the masses through their honest assessment of the situation and by clearly stating things as they stood. By such means, the Bolsheviks were able to organise the seizure of power once the time arose for it and the balance of power tipped in their favour.

Rosa Luxemburg could not bring herself to call a retreat, although it was obvious to her that, for now, the struggle could not be won. According to Luxemburg, the defeat was not just down to a lack of maturity on the part of the revolution, but was also down to the question of the leadership of the movement. She was convinced, however, that the masses would correct these shortcomings:

The leadership failed. But the leadership can and must be created anew by the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the crucial factor; they are the rock on which the ultimate victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were up to the task. They fashioned this ‘defeat’ into a part of those historical defeats which constitute the pride and power of international socialism. And that is why this ‘defeat’ is the seed of our future triumph.^[57]

The Murders

The SPD and the counter-revolutionary troops stepped up their witch-hunt against Luxemburg and Liebknecht. It was no longer safe for them to sleep at home. Instead, they had to keep moving, sleeping at different hotels and at accommodation provided by supporters. On 13 January, the SPD’s newspaper Vorwärts printed a poem accusing the Spartacist leaders of cowardice, hiding while workers were killed:

Many hundreds of corpses in a row,

Proletarians,

Karl, Rosa and Co.,

Not one of them is there,

Proletarians.^[58]

Luxemburg knew she was in grave danger. As early as 25 December she wrote to Clara Zetkin that she had received “urgent warning from ‘official sources’ that the assassins are looking for Karl and myself and we shouldn’t sleep at home…”^[59] Although they were aware of the danger, Luxemburg and Liebknecht refused to leave Berlin and go into hiding. They felt it was their duty to stay with the workers. This decision would prove fatal.

After the July Days in Russia, the Bolsheviks were in a similar situation: the party was banned and arrest warrants were issued for several of the party leaders. Lenin wanted to appear in court and use the trial to represent the political views of the Bolsheviks. But his fellow party members persuaded him to hide in Finland. This had nothing to do with cowardice: it was a matter of practical necessity.

Countless examples throughout history have demonstrated that the presence of a revolutionary party is vital in a revolutionary situation. Within that party, the role of leadership is paramount. Men and women cannot act beyond the limits imposed by their material conditions – no matter how much the revolutionaries want to, they cannot create revolutions. But when the masses move, parties and even individuals can play a decisive role in determining a revolution’s outcome. Lenin, for instance, was crucial to the outcome of the Russian Revolution. In October, when the Bolsheviks were discussing whether to launch an insurrection, parts of the party leadership were still putting up resistance. It was the intervention of Lenin, whose authority within the party was enormous, that overcame this resistance. His authority was not authority in the military sense of the term. Rather, it was a moral and political authority built over decades, in the course of which Lenin’s ideas and analysis had been put to numerous practical tests.

Thus, Trotsky described the authority Lenin held in the Bolshevik Party:

Numerous puny sects and splinter groups, peddling their own cheap little offerings, often deliver sweeping repudiations of authority in principle. In its place we hear them praising abstract principles of democracy. It is of course an axiom that a revolutionary party is not revolutionary unless it is democratic – i.e., grounded in majority rule concretely, and not abstractly. But that does not eliminate the problem of authority and what it represents. For us, it is the distillation of experience, that is, the accumulated lessons learned from past battles and defeats. In the Bolshevik Party, not only the personal prestige of Lenin, but the prestige of its leaders collectively made up the authority of the Central Committee. […]

Tempered and tested by experience, authoritative leaders represented a tremendous accumulation of capital for the Party. In moments of doubt, hesitation or lack of clarity, the words of experienced leaders focus the attention of the Party on the essential issues, eliminating misunderstandings and errors without much friction and waste of time. Moreover, on occasions where immediate action is required, when there is little time to debate the matter before the Party and take a decision, the leader with the necessary authority is able to take responsibility even when the fate of the Party is at stake. Having carefully weighed all the circumstances, the Party’s confidence in him and his confidence in the Party will normally [ensure] approval for his actions.

It is likewise true that such authority not only streamlines deliberations within the Party, but there is a danger that this may also weaken critical thought within the Party and lead to an over-confidence towards the Party’s leading bodies. […]

Needless to say, the solution to this problem is not the complete denial of all authority. All the processes that we are analysing are rooted by their very nature in the contradictions of real life. The problem should be solved in such a way as to allow the replacement of one leader by another more qualified. […]

The genius of Lenin was expressed in the fact that he pioneered new historical methods. […]

However, men like Lenin are not born in a vacuum. His authority was not imbibed with his mother’s milk, nor was it inspired by school textbooks and church prayers. Every Bolshevik, from Lenin’s closest collaborators to the provincial comrades, had to convince themselves of the superiority of Lenin’s ideas and methods through the experience of countless discussions, political events, and concrete actions.^[60]

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, Luxemburg was the individual who enjoyed the highest political authority in the newly founded German Communist Party, an authority that she had built up through many years of experience, and one that could not simply be replaced. She was perhaps the only leader who might have been able to overcome the ultra-left tendencies within the party. Only on the basis of overcoming these infantile tendencies could the party connect with the masses, on the basis of which the German Revolution might have finally been crowned with victory. But history was destined to play out differently.

On 12-13 January, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were residing first at an apartment in Neukölln, Berlin, and then with a sympathiser in Wilmersdorf. It was here that they were arrested on the evening of 15 January, together with Pieck, who was also in the apartment. They were taken to Hotel Eden, the Freikorps headquarters, where they both endured rough treatment. Liebknecht was brought out first. On the way out, he was struck on the back of the head with a rifle belonging to a soldier named Otto Runge. He was driven to the Tiergarten park, where he was shot. Afterwards, the soldiers claimed that he had been killed “during an escape attempt”.

Luxemburg was next. She too received a blow to the head from the butt of a rifle, after which she was placed in a waiting car, and shot in the head. Her body was thrown into the Landwehr Canal in Tiergarten and wasn’t found until late May.^[61]

The main leaders of the German Revolution were murdered in cold blood. The counter-revolution had severed the head of the revolutionary movement.

There was no serious attempt to hold the guilty responsible for their murders. In May, a parody of a trial was held, during which a soldier named Horst von Pflugk-Harttung admitted that he had shot Liebknecht “while trying to escape”. However, Pflugk-Harttung was acquitted with great applause. Kurt Vogel, who was responsible for the entire operation, admitted that he had thrown Rosa Luxemburg’s body in the canal in Tiergarten, but claimed that another had shot her. The jury could not decide if she had already died from the blow to the head, and Vogel faced only two years and four months in jail. He escaped from prison, however, and fled to Holland, where he stayed until things cooled down. He then returned to Germany a free man. Runge, who had slaughtered the prisoners, was sentenced to two years in prison.

The Communists threw political responsibility for the murders onto the SPD, and it became a line of blood that has divided Social Democrats and Communists ever since. Whether the order came from the top of the SPD has not been established. There can be no doubt, however, that the SPD leadership helped whip up an atmosphere which clearly revealed the government’s attitude and so would have given encouragement to those who directly orchestrated the killings. The soft penalties testify to this fact. Political responsibility rests solely with the leadership of the SPD. They betrayed the revolution and they were responsible for the murders of Liebknecht and Luxemburg.

[N]o direct responsibility of any Social-Democratic leader can be established. But their moral responsibility is overwhelming. Two days before, Vorwärts had published what was nothing less than a call for the murder of “Karl, Rosa and partners, not one dead, not one, amongst the dead”. It was men gathered, armed, and in the end protected by Noske and the Social-Democratic ministers who carried out the assassinations. Scheidemann was to say: “You see how their own terrorist tactic has done for them themselves!”^[62]

The murders were received with shock and anger. During a meeting that same day, the workers’ and soldiers’ council of Berlin expressed its profound disgust and protested the government’s excessive use of terror in the wake of its victory over the Communists. The revolutionary movement did not end with the murders on 15 January and so the government initiated a terrorist campaign in which several Communist leaders were arrested and murdered, among whom Leo Jogiches, Rosa’s life-long comrade, killed on 10 March. Demonstrations and uprisings were crushed with the utmost brutality and thousands of workers were killed in clashes with the army and the Freikorps under the leadership of the SPD.

For now, the counter-revolution had brought the revolution to a halt and murdered its leaders. But the ‘order’ that they had apparently established was merely temporary. The words of Rosa Luxemburg’s last article were almost prophetic in its prediction of the mighty revolutionary struggles that were still to come in the years that followed:

“Order reigns in Berlin!” You stupid lackeys! Your “order” is built on sand. The revolution will “raise itself up again clashing”, and to your horror it will proclaim to the sound of trumpets:

I was, I am, I shall be! ^[63]

Endnotes

[1] Quoted in P. Broué, The German Revolution 1917-1923, p. 130.

[2] Quoted in P. Broué, The German Revolution: 1917-1923, p. 144.

[3] Quoted ibid., pp. 131-2.

[4] R. Luxemburg, ‘To Sonja Liebknecht, Breslau, 18 October 1918’, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg [1978], p. 256.

[5] The figures in this section are from P. Broué, The German Revolution, 1917-1923.

[6] Prince Maximilian of Baden (1867-1929) – briefly served as the last chancellor of the German Empire in November 1918.

[7] Quoted in R. Sewell, Germany 1918-1933: Socialism or Barbarism, p. 98.

[8] Quoted in P. Broué, The German Revolution 1917-1923, p. 153.

[9] Ibid., p. 154.

[10] Radek was the representative of Soviet Russia.

[11] Quoted ibid., p. 155.

[12] R. Luxemburg, ‘The Beginning’, Marxist Internet Archive [website].

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] R. Luxemburg, ‘What Does the Spartacus League Want?’, Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, p. 373.

[17] R. Luxemburg, ‘The National Assembly’, Marxist Internet Archive [website].

[18] Ibid.

[19] The remaining delegates either came from different political groups or did not have a defined political affiliation.

[20] R. Luxemburg, ‘Our Program and the Political Situation’, Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, pp. 397-8.

[21] R. Luxemburg, ‘What Does the Spartacus League Want?’, Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, p. 376.

[22] Quoted in R. Sewell, Germany 1918-1933: Socialism or Barbarism, p. 127.

[23] Quoted in P. Broué, The German Revolution: 1917-1923, p. 230.

[24] Quoted in R. Sewell, Germany 1918-1933: Socialism or Barbarism, p. 130.

[25] R. Luxemburg, ‘What Does the Spartacus League Want?’, Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, p. 370.

[26] Ibid., pp. 370-1.

[27] Ibid., p. 371.

[28] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 747.

[29] P. Broué, The German Revolution: 1917-1923, p. 203.

[30] V. I. Lenin, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder, The Classics of Marxism: Volume Two, pp. 107-8.

[31] Ibid., p. 108.

[32] R. Luxemburg, ‘Our Program and the Political Situation’, Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, p, 387.

[33] Ibid., p. 391.

[34] Ibid., pp. 394-5.

[35] Ibid., pp. 395-6.

[36] R. Luxemburg, ‘Our Program and the Political Situation’, Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, pp, 407-8.

[37] Quoted in R. Sewell, Germany 1918-1933: Socialism or Barbarism, p. 134.

[38] Quoted ibid., p. 112.

[39] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 757 (additions are made by Nettl).

[40] V. I. Lenin, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder, The Classics of Marxism: Volume Two, p. 114.

[41] Ibid., p. 145.

[42] P. Broué, The German Revolution, 1917-1923. p. 224.

[43] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 758 (additions are made by Nettl).

[44] Menetekel – a sign of impending doom. Derived from the “writing on the wall” that appears in Daniel 5:25-29: “Mene Tekel” – “God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end; You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting.”

[45] R. Luxemburg, ‘What Does the Spartacus League Want?’, Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, pp. 367-8.

[46] Quoted in P. Broué, The German Revolution, 1917-1923, p. 240.

[47] Quoted in R. Sewell, Germany 1918-1933: Socialism or Barbarism, p. 146.

[48] Quoted in P. Broué, The German Revolution, 1917-1923, p. 242.

[49] R. Luxemburg, ‘Neglected Duties’, Politiske skrifter, p. 310 (quotes from the Danish translation of ‘Neglected Duties’ have been translated into English by the author).

[50] Ibid., pp. 311-2.

[51] Ibid., p. 313.

[52] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 767.

[53] Quoted in P. Broué, The German Revolution, 1917-1923, p. 251.

[54] Quoted ibid.

[55] R. Luxemburg, ‘Order Reigns in Berlin’, Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, p. 412.

[56] Ibid.

[57] Ibid., p. 415.

[58] Quoted in J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, p. 770.

[59] Quoted ibid., p. 759.

[60] L. Trotsky, Stalin. p. 678-80.

[61] In the past few years, some doubt has been cast on whether the body in the canal really was that of Rosa Luxemburg. The discovery of a body in the basement of the Charité hospital resembling Luxemburg has raised a number of questions. Whilst we may not be certain about the fate of her corpse, this does not alter the fundamental point which is amply proven: that Luxemburg was murdered by the counter-revolution. See, for example, Comenetz, ‘Mysterious Berlin corpse probably Rosa Luxemburg’, Reuters [website].

[62] P. Broué, The German Revolution, 1917-1923, p. 257.

[63] R. Luxemburg, ‘Order Reigns in Berlin’, Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, p. 415.