3/14 The German Revolution of 1918 & Spartacus Uprising 1919

We are now beginning the second part of this course where we will focus more on the political context of the times. Prior to this we have discussed some major artistic and cultural responses to nihilism, to the loss of traditional morals and values which had provided a sense of stability to German life right up until World War I. The aftermath of the war has been the backdrop in which we've discussed most of the works, now we are shifting more to discussing the political aftermath of the war. The first essay, "The Junius Pamphlet," written in 1915 when Luxemburg was in jail is a great essay to read to 1) gain an understanding of the central conflicts in Germany during World War I; 2) to understand the historical developments that led up to the war; 3) an understanding of Marxist or social democratic ideology.

Still one of the most influential books to study political revolution is The Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Brinton, first published in 1938. As the title suggests the author attempts to dissect political revolutions and to reveal its insides with the hopes of understanding what causes revolutions. Brinton limited his study to four important revolutions: the English, American, French, and Russian. He breaks down the revolutionary process into four stages: the fight against the "old regime"; the establishment of a moderate regime; the radical regime; a conservative backlash, in some cases leading to dictatorship (France, Russia). Brinton compares this pattern to  a fever that reaches a peak of intensity before starting to decline. In the case of Germany we see can this pattern play out in the following way: the revolt against the Empire in November 1918; a provisional government led by the social-democratic party; the Spartacus uprising and rise of worker's councils (a failed radical regime); the suppression of this movement and the establishment of the Weimar Republic. 

The major difference would be that in the case of Germany the radical stage never really developed being very quickly crushed by the provisional state. Brinton tends to analyze revolution from the perspective of internal class dynamics, in other words the major causes leading to revolution itself are traced to class conflicts within society. This tends to underestimate the extent where external factors like war contribute to the weakening of the old regime.

A more recent and equally influential work is by another Harvard professor, Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolution (1979). Looking at the French, Chinese, and Russian revolutions, Skocpol isolates two main developments that she says leads to revolutions. The first being competition between states, thus taking an international focus that Brinton lacks. Competition, Skocpol argues, reveals the weaknesses of states who are unable to compete in the international political and economic environment. This leads to a second development which is a process of "reforming the state", which she argues, weakens the state structures enough for a revolutionary movement to potentially seize power. 

Losing the war was an extremely traumatic event in itself. Losing a war is after all a collective humiliation of sorts and the trauma induced and the failure to come to terms with this trauma can partially explain why movements like the Nazis were able to take off. On top of this the peace terms set in the Treaty of Versailles which ended the war were extremely harsh to the Germans and very short-sighted when you consider the reactions this created. Germany had to accept sole responsibility for starting the war and had to make massive payments of reparations amounting to billions of dollars to every nation that they fought in the war; they also had to give up territory on their Western border which is where most of their industry was concentrated; and to dismantle their military and industries that produce for the military. It is during this time that German bankers start promoting German "culture industries" like film to make up for this loss and provide distractions.

In the last days of the war, the political system established in 1871 collapsed. The military: the army and the navy began to refuse to take orders anymore. People were terrified at the idea of “infinite war” waged by nations that were so large and powerful they would never run out of money, manpower, or equipment. By all accounts it would appear as if the German "Supreme Command" did not intend to surrender even though the situation was hopeless. At the same time, mass strikes are occurring throughout the industrial cities of Germany and its capital Berlin. 

Independent councils were formed of soldiers and workers designed to take direct control of their army bases, naval depots, or factories. With no choice left, the Kaiser (Caesar), the "Emperor of the German Empire" stepped down from power and fled the country on Nov. 9th, 1918. The Armistice ending the war is signed Nov. 11th, Armistice Day, celebrated in the U.S. as Veterans Day.

Between the removal of the Kaiser in late 1918 and the establishment of what became known as the Weimar Republic in August 1919, major uprisings took place that lasted for months.

This led to massive repression and massacres as the authorities released returning soldiers to crush these uprisings. More shocking, the party leading the effort to crush the revolution was the Social Democratic Party (SPD) world-wide leader of the "revolutionary" labor movement. 

To discuss the revolution in Germany in 1918-1919 you have to understand the the conflict between the different political parties operating in Germany at this time. 

National Liberals represented the business interests and favored expansion and militarism. Although called liberals in reality they represented a conservative element in society. Liberals are really "homeless" in Germany, as represented by the homeless liberal lawyer in M. Catholics in Germany made up a large segment of the population and like many Catholics today tended to be conservative on social issues but more liberal on economic issues and so more critical of business. Most of the time it sided with the National Liberals. 

The present day ruling party in Germany the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is a descendant of this party. It is still conservative but still favors government intervention in economic matters. The modern day version has unified Catholics and Protestants (divided along Southern and Northern regions in Germany), who were still separate during the early 20th century. The SPD or social democratic party is supposed to represent the working class. Since the 1970s, there has also been a Green Party in Germany that formed a "coalition government" (cooperative party government) with the SPD between 1998-2005, the "Red-Green coalition." 

The first "welfare state" was created in Germany in the 1870s by the first Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, and provided services like unemployment insurance and disability insurance. It is interesting that the first welfare state was created basically to control the poor and the working class, and to neutralize the criticisms of more radical Marxists by giving in to certain demands. Since Germany had developed one of the first real organized labor movements in the 19th century they were able to put pressure on the political system. Bismarck (an arch-conservative German noble) then designed the welfare state to respond to the pressures created by the SPD and to relieve public pressure generated by economic hardship. 

As a consequence of this, today most Germans even the conservatives accept a certain amount of state involvement in the economy that would seem more involved than what most Americans are used to. There is also a much stronger presence of labor unions in the economy. One of the most striking differences between Germany and the United States is that by law union officials are required to sit on the corporate board of directors in some cases having equal representation, this is known as "codetermination." In the United States labor unions negotiate with management as two separate parties negotiating a contract. 

Although there was a party system and "universal suffrage" (actually only men over 25 could vote), Germany was not a democracy but an authoritarian country that placed some limits upon the government's exercise of power. Executive power was concentrated in the hands of the Chancellor and the Kaiser.

Reichstag 1889

The various parties competed in the Reichstag  or German Parliament. Although the Kaiser had powers, the Reichstag, like most Legislative bodies had the power over financing in the government and had to approve of all budgets. It was the parliament's approval of the financing of the war the led to the crisis in social democracy that Luxemburg speaks of in her essay. 


There was also a second body, the Bundesrat that represented the 25 states that made up the German empire. Germany is similar to the United States in that it has a federal system, meaning that there is a division of power between a centralized national government and smaller state governments. This is in contrast to nations like France, Great Britain, or Japan which have a unitary state meaning there is no division of power and lower officials are usually appointed by higher officials in the central government. Unlike the United States however which was a federal system of republics, the German system was a federalism of smaller monarchs. This meant that for the average German living in this period that you had to deal with multiple layers of upper classes all of whom claim privilege and superiority by birth right. These upper classes were allied with the new industrial upper classes in iron and steel production, mechanical engineering, and mining.

After the revolution of 1918 the Political Structure shifted:

Now the Social Democratic Party represented the conservative elements in society. The experiences of the war destroyed the National Liberals and the feudal monarchies. However these groups who became the conservatives in Germany continued to exert power behind the scenes. The SPD was the only party from the old system that had any credibility with the people so they assumed power after the Kaiser fled. New parties had formed. The USPD (Independent Worker’s Party) split off from the SPD during the war. It tended to side more with the SPD but had alliances with the far left worker’s movement, the Spartacists, who always tried to recruit more USPD members into its ranks. Finally, the communist wing led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht named themselves Spartacus after the Roman slave who led a slave revolt against the Romans (c. 71BCE). Liebknecht was the son of Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826-1900) one of the founders of the Social Democratic party and a disciple of Karl Marx. The communists were opposed to German militarism from the start. Most of their leadership including Luxemburg and Liebknecht were arrested during the war. It is during this time in 1915 when Luxemburg writes “The Junius Pamphlet” while in prison.

The actions of the SPD during and after the war would definitely qualify as being conservative. I had already mentioned previously that the SPD in what is referred to now as the "Great Betrayal" voted to support the war in direct contrast to the supposedly international character of socialism–"Workers of the World Unite"–was one of their slogans, itself a quote by Karl Marx. 

Just to put things in perspective, the party itself had over a million members at this time, and the unions that were associated with the party had around 2.5 million members. You cannot wage a war without workers in factories producing war materials and had they refused to cooperate Germany would not have been able to wage a war of this magnitude, but in one of the most momentous decisions probably in Germany history the party voted to support the war effort by approving the military’s request for financing, referred to as “war credits”.

After the Kaiser fled, the SPD, the socialist party, stepped in to fill the void. However to many on the radical left, the new regime looked like the old regime. In the climate of 1918 many on the left believed that they had a good opportunity to really take power. Unlike the SPD which was trying to restore order, the Spartacists were trying to foment even more strikes and uprisings. Luxemburg was torn because she did not want Spartacus to challenge the government directly, but on the other hand she felt that what the SPD was doing was a fundamental betrayal of their core principles and had effectively become the defenders of the status quo they were originally trying to overthrow. The following is a quote by Luxemburg explaining the importance of the masses in revolutions as opposed to the leadership, and the educational process of revolution, going back and forth between spontaneity and organization:  

Social democracy is simply the embodiment of the modern proletariat's class struggle, a struggle which is driven by a consciousness of its own historic consequences. The masses are in reality their own leaders, dialectically creating their own development process. The more that social democracy develops, grows, and becomes stronger, the more the enlightened masses of workers will take their own destinies, the leadership of their movement, and the determination of its direction into their own hands. And as the entire social democracy movement is only the conscious advance guard of the proletarian class movement, which in the words of the Communist Manifesto represent in every single moment of the struggle the permanent interests of liberation and the partial group interests of the workforce vis à vis the interests of the movement as whole, so within the social democracy its leaders are the more powerful, the more influential, the more clearly and consciously they make themselves merely the mouthpiece of the will and striving of the enlightened masses, merely the agents of the objective laws of the class movement. (“The Political Leader of the German Working Classes, Collected Works 2, 280)

Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919)

Unfortunately, in January 1919 Luxemburg and Liebknecht (also lovers) were captured by soldiers used by the SPD to crush the rebellion (many of the these squads, freikorps contributed many members to the Nazi party). They were beaten and shot and their bodies dumped in a river. 

With the leadership more or less dead or in jail, the Spartacist Uprising was put down. In August 1919, the Weimar Republic was officially proclaimed after putting down several other revolutionary movements throughout Germany. Their whole strategy focused on power remaining with the soldier’s and worker’s councils. Yet it seemed as if the members of these councils were only too willing to hand over control to the authority of the SPD. It seems that most workers in Germany were less interested in revolution than in stability and security. 

"A Winter's Tale," George Grosz 1918

 By the Spring the revolution had more or less died down although it remained active in some areas especially in Southern German like Munich. The same place where Nazism originally flourished in the early 1920s as if in response to the strong presence of the communists. Nazism was in many ways a reaction against communism.

The reaction to the actions of the German working classes were far reaching. In Russia, Luxemburg's counterpart Vladimir Lenin found further confirmation that his highly centralized, highly bureaucratic approach to revolution, which he termed the vanguard was superior to Luxemburg's spontaneous mass based uprising, with its anarchist tones that Lenin hated. The German Communists now known as the KPD or Communist Party of Germany turned to the Communist party in Moscow.

In the first essay, "The Junius Pamphlet," Luxemburg explains the catastrophic scene in Germany at this time. A scene that follows what she says is a fleeting euphoria over the idea of war:

Gone is the euphoria. Gone the patriotic noise in the streets, the chase after the gold-colored automobile, one false telegram after another, the wells poisoned by cholera, the Russian students heaving bombs over every railway bridge in Berlin, the French airplanes over Nuremberg, the spy hunting public running amok in the streets, the swaying crowds in the coffee shops with ear-deafening patriotic songs surging ever higher, whole city neighborhoods transformed into mobs ready to denounce, to mistreat women, to shout hurrah and to induce delirium in themselves by means of wild rumors. Gone, too, is the atmosphere of ritual murder, the Kishinev air where the crossing guard is the only remaining representative of human dignity.

In this environment only the military industrial complex benefits from the devastation an resulting nihilism:

Business thrives in the ruins. Cities become piles of ruins; villages become cemeteries; countries, deserts; populations are beggared; churches, horse stalls. International law, treaties and alliances, the most sacred words and the highest authority have been torn in shreds. Every sovereign “by the grace of God” is called a rogue and lying scoundrel by his cousin on the other side. Every diplomat is a cunning rascal to his colleagues in the other party. Every government sees every other as dooming its own people and worthy only of universal contempt. There are food riots in Venice, in Lisbon, Moscow, Singapore. There is plague in Russia, and misery and despair everywhere.

In this situation Luxemburg can only argue that this disaster offers the opportunity to learn from the experience. This refers to the previous passage where she refers to the historical dialectic but you will also remember that Siddhartha emphasizes the importance of experience for learning and development:

The modern proletariat comes out of historical tests differently. Its tasks and its errors are both gigantic: no prescription, no schema valid for every case, no infallible leader to show it the path to follow. Historical experience is its only school mistress. Its thorny way to self-emancipation is paved not only with immeasurable suffering but also with countless errors. The aim of its journey – its emancipation depends on this – is whether the proletariat can learn from its own errors. Self-criticism, remorseless, cruel, and going to the core of things is the life’s breath and light of the proletarian movement. The fall of the socialist proletariat in the present world war is unprecedented. It is a misfortune for humanity. But socialism will be lost only if the international proletariat fails to measure the depth of this fall, if it refuses to learn from it.

However, besides the sheer devastation of the war, something which is universally experiences, she refers specifically to the crisis of "social democracy" underpinning this war. To provide context she first describes, the preeminent role the German Social Democratic party had:

German Social Democracy, as the Vienna Arbeiterzeitung wrote on August 5, 1914, was “the jewel of class-conscious proletarian organizations.” In her footsteps trod the increasingly enthusiastic Social Democrats of France, Italy, and Belgium, the labor movements of Holland, Scandinavia, Switzerland, and the United States. The Slavic countries, the Russians, the Social Democrats of the Balkans looked upon [German Social Democracy] with limitless, nearly uncritical, admiration. In the Second International the German “decisive force” played the determining role. At the [international] congresses, in the meetings of the international socialist bureaus, all awaited the opinion of the Germans. Especially in the questions of the struggle against militarism and war, German Social Democracy always took the lead. “For us Germans that is unacceptable” regularly sufficed to decide the orientation of the Second International, which blindly bestowed its confidence upon the admired leadership of the mighty German Social Democracy: the pride of every socialist and the terror of the ruling classes everywhere.

Luxemburg emphasizes the radical break with the past this crisis has created. This is an important nihilistic theme while also suggesting the necessity to adapt and to change tactics, in part to prepare for even greater disasters that might come after:

One thing is certain. The world war is a turning point. It is foolish and mad to imagine that we need only survive the war, like a rabbit waiting out the storm under a bush, in order to fall happily back into the old routine once it is over. The world war has altered the conditions of our struggle and, most of all, it has changed us. Not that the basic law of capitalist development, the life-and-death war between capital and labor, will experience any amelioration. But now, in the midst of the war, the masks are falling and the old familiar visages smirk at us. The tempo of development has received a mighty jolt from the eruption of the volcano of imperialism. The violence of the conflicts in the bosom of society, the enormousness of the tasks that tower up before the socialist proletariat – these make everything that has transpired in the history of the workers’ movement seem a pleasant idyll.

Like with any great crisis, Luxemburg tries to make sense of it by suggesting that it somehow represents the force of history pushing mankind forward. However she suggests that human will can alter this process somewhat by the kind of action it takes:

Did it have to come? An event of this scope is certainly no game of chance. It must have deep and wide-reaching objective causes. These causes can, however, also lie in the errors of the leader of the proletariat, the Social Democrats, in the waning of our fighting spirit, our courage, and loyalty to our convictions. Scientific socialism has taught us to comprehend the objective laws of historical development. Men do not make history according to their own free will. But they make history nonetheless. Proletarian action is dependent upon the degree of maturity in social development. However, social development is not independent of the proletariat but is equally its driving force and cause, its effect and consequence. [Proletarian] action participates in history. And while we can as little skip a stage of historical development as escape our shadow, we can certainly accelerate or retard history.

In the last chapter of the essay, Luxemburg sums up the situation in the present moment (1915, still early on in the war). She notes, the collapse of the authority and the seeming uncertainty that comes in a nihilistic world where you no longer know who to trust. She interprets this as creating the objective necessity for revolutionary action:

Thus proletarian policy is locked in a dilemma when trying to decide on which side it ought to intervene, which side represents progress and democracy in this war. In these circumstances, and from the perspective of international politics as a whole, victory or defeat, in political as well as economic terms, comes down to a hopeless choice between two kinds of beatings for the European working classes. Therefore, it is nothing but fatal madness when the French socialists imagine that the military defeat of Germany will strike a blow at the head of militarism and imperialism and thereby pave the way for peaceful democracy in the world. Imperialism and its servant, militarism, will calculate their profits from every victory and every defeat in this war – except in one case: if the international proletariat intervenes in a revolutionary way and puts an end to such calculations.

Unlike the other social classes in German society, the proletariat according to Luxemburg is the only one that recognizes the break with the past and does not mourn its loss:

The class-conscious proletariat cannot identify with any of the military camps in this war. Does it follow that proletarian policy ought to demand maintenance of the status quo, that we have no other action program beyond the wish that everything should be as it was before the war? But existing conditions have never been our ideal; they have never expressed the self-determination of peoples. Furthermore, the earlier conditions are no longer to be saved; they no longer exist, even if historic state borders continue to exist. Even before its results have been formally established, the war has already brought about immense confusion in power relationships, the reciprocal estimate of forces, of alliances, and conflicts. It has sharply revised the relations between states and of classes within society. So many old illusions and potencies have been destroyed, so many new forces and problems have been created that a return to the old Europe as it existed before August 4, 1914 is out of the question. [It is] as out of the question as a return to pre-revolutionary conditions even after a defeated revolution.

Luxemburg returns to the idea of historical dialectic as the driving force in history, a process that reaches its climax at the same time it reaches the peak of oppression and exploitation. In this case, the unity of opposites represents the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in the form of the class struggle, the synthesis of which produces socialism according to Marxist theory:

The historical dialectic moves forward by contradiction, and establishes in the world the antithesis of every necessity. Bourgeois class domination is undoubtedly an historical necessity, but, so too, the rising of the working class against it. Capital is an historical necessity, but, so too, its grave digger, the socialist proletariat. Imperialist world domination is an historical necessity, but, so too, its destruction by the proletarian international. Step for step there are two historical necessities in conflict with one another. Ours, the necessity of socialism, has the greater stamina. Our necessity enters into its full rights the moment that the other - bourgeois class domination – ceases to be the bearer of historical progress, when it becomes an obstacle, a danger to the further development of society. The capitalist world order, as revealed by the world war, has today reached this point.

The theory of imperialism was actually developed by Lenin who we will discuss more next class. This theory was meant to explain a failure within social democratic theory which presumed that the socialist revolution would be completed in the most developed countries first. Lenin argued that Marx overlooked the importance of imperialism as a way to indefinitely stall socialism in the developed countries, at the same time, it "exports" revolution to the less developed countries which included Russia. Both Lenin and Luxemburg than reinterpret this theory to state that socialist revolution will occur when imperialism has developed to its highest level:

The expansionist imperialism of capitalism, the expression of its highest stage of development and its last phase of existence, produces the [following] economic tendencies: it transforms the entire world into the capitalist mode of production; all outmoded, pre-capitalist forms of production and society are swept away; it converts all the world’s riches and means of production into capital, the working masses of all zones into wage slaves. In Africa and Asia, from the northernmost shores to the tip of South America and the South Seas, the remnant of ancient primitive communist associations, feudal systems of domination, patriarchal peasant economies, traditional forms of craftsmanship are annihilated, crushed by capital; whole peoples are destroyed and ancient cultures flattened. All are supplanted by profit mongering in its most modern form.

Again she argues that the war represents a critical juncture in the development of imperialism:

The world war is a turning point. For the first time, the ravening beasts set loose upon all quarters of the globe by capitalist Europe have broken into Europe itself. A cry of horror went through the world when Belgium, that precious jewel of European civilization, and when the most august cultural monuments of northern France fell into shards under the impact of the blind forces of destruction. This same “civilized world” looked on passively as the same imperialism ordained the cruel destruction of ten thousand Herero tribesmen and filled the sands of the Kalahari with the mad shrieks and death rattles of men dying of thirst; [the “civilized world” looked on] as forty thousand men on the Putumayo River [Columbia] were tortured to death within ten years by a band of European captains of industry, while the rest of the people were made into cripples; as in China where an age-old culture was put to the torch by European mercenaries, practiced in all forms of cruelty, annihilation, and anarchy; as Persia was strangled, powerless to resist the tightening noose of foreign domination; as in Tripoli where fire and sword bowed the Arabs beneath the yoke of capitalism, destroyed their culture and habitations. Only today has this “civilized world” become aware that the bite of the imperialist beast brings death, that its very breath is infamy. Only now has [the civilized world] recognized this, after the beast’s ripping talons have clawed its own mother’s lap, the bourgeois civilization of Europe itself. And even this knowledge is grappled with in the distorted form of bourgeois hypocrisy. Every people recognizes the infamy only in the national uniform of the enemy. “German barbarians!” – as though every people that marches out to do organized murder were not transformed instantly into a barbarian horde. “Cossack atrocities!” – as though war itself were not the atrocity of atrocities, as though the praising of human slaughter as heroism in a socialist youth paper were not the purest example of intellectual cossack-dom!

 In the second essay, "What Does the Spartacus League Want," written in December 1918 only a month before she was murdered , she lays out the goals of the doomed revolutionary movement. Again she stresses the importance of experience for the development of the masses, and again returns to the ideas of spontaneity and organization:

From dead machines assigned their place in production by capital, the proletarian masses must learn to transform themselves into the free and independent directors of this process. They have to acquire the feeling of responsibility proper to active members of the collectivity which alone possesses ownership of all social wealth. They have to develop industriousness without the capitalist whip, the highest productivity without slavedrivers, discipline without the yoke, order without authority. The highest idealism in the interest of the collectivity, the strictest self-discipline, the truest public spirit of the masses are the moral foundations of socialist society, just as stupidity, egotism, and corruption are the moral foundations of capitalist society.

We will look more at the spread of communism in the 1920s and the political structure of the Weimar Republic. Perhaps one of the most direct consequences of the failure of the Spartacus movement was the emergence of Berlin dada. Dadaism as a worldwide movement had begun during the war, but German dada especially was known for being more political. Many of the dada "anti-artists" were former members of the KPD. Georg Lukacs, an important Marxist literary critic and theorist, argued that Expressionism was the art form of the more centrist USPD. However the change in "tactics" from revolutionary seizure of power in the state to artistic production is relevant in itself as it suggests a retreat from more direct modes of confrontation with political authorities. Finally, the development of Marxist thinking to take into account cultural and psychological factors to better explain the resistance of the workers to revolutionary politics was one of the prime motivations for the establishment of institutions like the Institute for Social Research, also known as the Frankfurt School.

Assignment (Due 3/21 ): Please choose a passage from one of Luxemburg's essays. Write out the passage. Explain the meaning of the passage and how it relates to politics today.

References:
Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution, Vintage Books, [1938] (1965)
Rosa Luxemburg, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Pathfinder Press, [1970] (1986)
Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China, Cambridge University Press, (1979)