Postscript¶
Core Argument¶
The postscript to this account of the German Revolution does not merely summarise; it delivers a sweeping, polemical judgement on the entire revolutionary epoch from 1918 to 1923, framing it as a series of catastrophic missed opportunities whose consequences shaped the twentieth century. The core argument is that the German working class repeatedly demonstrated its revolutionary potential and capacity to seize power, but was betrayed or led astray at every critical juncture by a combination of reformist Social Democratic treachery, the murderous violence of the counter-revolution, and—most damningly—the sectarian impatience, inexperience, and ultimately fatal hesitancy of the Communist Party leadership itself.
The chapter traces this tragic arc through a sequence of escalating confrontations. After the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, the narrative shows the working class continuing to shift leftwards, with the USPD and KPD winning majorities in the workers’ councils by February 1919, passing resolutions for a workers’ militia and the abolition of the Freikorps, and paralyzing Berlin with a general strike. The counter-revolution, personified by SPD Defence Minister Gustav Noske, responded with mass terror, deploying 30,000 Freikorps to slaughter between 2,000 and 3,000 workers in Berlin alone and over 1,000 in Munich, smashing every workers’ council by summer 1919. Yet the revolution was not dead. The Kapp Putsch of March 1920—an attempted military dictatorship by the general staff—was crushed by a united, armed working-class counter-mobilisation, but the movement failed to reach its full potential due to the lack of a strong revolutionary leadership.
The text then pivots to a sustained critique of the KPD’s ultra-left errors. Lenin’s ‘Left-Wing’ Communism is cited as a direct intervention against these tendencies, but the warning went unheeded. The ‘March Action’ of 1921 is presented as a catastrophic voluntarist blunder: the KPD leadership, believing a vanguard action would ‘electrify’ the masses, launched isolated armed struggles that left hundreds of communists dead and 200,000 workers quitting the party in protest. The chapter contrasts this with the correct tactic of the ‘united front’, advocated by Lenin and Trotsky, which called for unity with reformist workers in daily struggles to win them over through experience. The 1923 crisis, triggered by the French occupation of the Ruhr and hyperinflation that saw a loaf of bread cost 201 billion marks by November, is portrayed as the decisive moment. Trotsky urgently advised naming the day for insurrection, but the KPD leadership, backed by Stalin, Zinoviev, and Radek, hesitated fatally, calling off the uprising at the last moment. Only Hamburg’s isolated communists fought for three days before being crushed. The result was “the most terrible kind of defeat – a defeat without having waged a battle,” causing widespread demoralisation.
The postscript’s most significant polemical thrust is its linkage of this German defeat to the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union. It argues that the isolation of the Russian Revolution, prolonged by the failure in Germany, destroyed the hope of the Russian workers and created the basis for Stalin’s bureaucracy to seize power, imposing the anti-Marxist theory of “socialism in one country.” This degeneration then spread to every party of the Communist International. The final, devastating consequence is traced to the Stalinist ‘Third Period’ policy of the late 1920s, which labelled social democrats ‘social fascists’ and directed communists to fight them rather than the rising Nazi threat, even cooperating with the Nazis to break up SPD meetings. This fratricidal insanity, the text argues, allowed Hitler to seize power in 1933 without serious resistance.
The chapter closes by invoking Rosa Luxemburg’s famous dictum—“socialism or barbarism”—and declaring that history proved her correct. The defeat of the revolution led directly to Hitler, the Holocaust, and the slaughter of 60 million in the Second World War. The postscript is thus not a neutral summary but a political lesson: a call to learn from these catastrophic errors so that the working class may be victorious in the revolutionary epoch now opening.