1. The Rise of Organised Labour¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter traces the transformation of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) from the leading revolutionary force of the Second International into an instrument of class mediation, culminating in its capitulation to German imperialism in August 1914. Germany had been the cradle of Marxism, and the SPD by 1912 commanded one million members, over 15,000 full-time officials, 90 daily newspapers, and 4.3 million parliamentary votes — dwarfing the Bolshevik Party on the eve of October 1917. Yet this immense strength was not turned against capitalism. The long period of relative social peace between the Paris Commune (1871) and 1912 allowed the labour bureaucracy to develop a vested interest in the status quo. As trade unions expanded and living standards rose, the leadership’s income and conditions diverged from the rank and file. In Marx’s formulation, social being determined social consciousness: the labour leaders adapted to bourgeois society, reserving Marxist phrases for ceremonial occasions while practising compromise daily.
Eduard Bernstein articulated this shift theoretically in the late 1890s, arguing that capitalism had overcome its contradictions and that class struggle was obsolete. His slogan — “the final goal is nothing; the movement is everything” — foreshadowed every subsequent reformist leader. Karl Kautsky’s defence of Marxism against Bernstein was itself a vulgarised centrism, Marxist in words but reformist in deeds, reconciling revolution with parliamentary gradualism. The party congresses of 1901, 1903, and the 1904 International Congress condemned revisionism formally, but the SPD secretary Ignaz Auer wrote privately to Bernstein: “One does not formally decide to do these things… one simply does them.” Lenin at this stage regarded himself as a follower of Kautsky; only Rosa Luxemburg recognised the limits of his pseudo-Marxism from close quarters.
The test came with the outbreak of world war in August 1914. Despite the Stuttgart (1907) and Basel (1912) congress resolutions pledging to fight imperialist war by every means including a general strike, the SPD leadership voted for war credits on 4 August, invoking Marx and Engels quotations ripped from context. Lenin initially believed the news a forgery by the German general staff. Rosa Luxemburg called the International a “stinking corpse”. The internationalist opposition was reduced to a handful: Lenin, Trotsky, Liebknecht, Luxemburg, John MacLean, James Connolly. The Zimmerwald Left in 1915 became the embryo of the future Third International.
Within Germany, Karl Liebknecht voted alone against war credits in December 1914. By 1916, the Spartacist group — named after the Roman slave rebel — emerged around Luxemburg, Mehring, and Liebknecht, publishing a clandestine journal. Mass opposition grew: 10,000 demonstrated on Potsdamer Platz on May Day 1916; 50,000 munitions workers struck on Liebknecht’s trial day. In January 1917 the opposition was expelled from the SPD, forming the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) with 120,000 members, a classical centrist formation containing both revolutionaries like Luxemburg and pacifists like Bernstein. The Spartacists remained an autonomous section within it.
War weariness engulfed Germany by 1917: rations fell to 1,000 calories daily, infant mortality rose 50 per cent since 1913, and the French calculated one Frenchman killed every minute between August 1914 and February 1917. News of the Bolshevik revolution in November 1917 electrified the German working class. The Soviet government’s decree for an immediate democratic peace and its publication of secret treaties had a profound psychological effect. In January 1918, over one million German armament workers struck against the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, organised by the Revolutionary Shop Stewards (Revolutionäre Obleute), an opposition trade union group within the USPD. Lenin described this action as marking “a turn of sentiment among the German proletariat.” The chapter argues that centrism — defined by Trotsky as the unstable terrain between reformism and Marxism — was now moving towards revolution, but the outcome depended on the direction of the USPD and the Spartacists’ capacity to lead.