Red November
This November is the seventieth anniversary of the German socialist revolution of 1918. Here
PHIL HEARSE tells the story of the German workers' struggle, and analyses the lessons for the
BACA socialist movement today. IT IS A notorious myth that there has never been a socialist revolution in the advanced capitalist west. There has. In November 1918, 70 years ago this month, the German workers rose up and created soviet power - the power of' elected workers' councils - all over
For several months, until early 1919, it was touch and go whether this developing German revolution would win out. Its eventual defeat, compounded by further defeats in the 1920s, paved the way for Hitler's rise to power, the second world war, and ensured the isolation of the young workers' state in Russia. It was a pivotal event in twentieth century history.
The November 1918 uprising came at the end of more than a year of increasing turmoil in Germany, as the defeat of the German army at the front became obvious and the privations of the workers at home became unbearable.
In April 1917 there were mass strikes against food price increases, and then in January 1918 came a mass political strike against the annexations being demanded by the German government at the Brest Litovsk peace negotiations with the Soviet government. Fifty thousand workers were sent to the front as a reprisal,
The world war had led to a split in the mass German workers" party, the SDP (Social Democrats). The anti-war left wing had been expelled in January 1917, and in April of that year formed the Independent Social Democrats (USD). This party had hundreds of thousands of members, in the main revolutionary-minded workers. The Spartakusbund of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht was the extreme left wing of the USPD, but only had a few thousand
At the end of September 1918, with the German armies on the point of collapse, the General Staff officers visited the Kaiser, and demanded the handing over of power to a 'democratic' government (led by Prince Max von Baden) -as the only way to prevent 'anarchy'.
But before this government could be stabilised, the sailors of the Kiel naval base mutinied on November 4. To prevent the sailors being crushed, the USPD leaders in Kiel decided to seize power in the town.That evening a Workers and Sailors Council was formed to administer the local area. The signal for
IK O B AIS revolution had been given.
In the following days the revolution spread all along the northern coast. Hamburg rose on 5 November; Bremen, Altona, Rendsburg and Lockstedt on the 6th; Cologne, Munich, Hanover and Braunsweig on the 7th. In each of these places, workers and soldiers councils declared themselves the legitimate power.
The focus of events now moved to the capitai, Berlin.The key forces here were the USPD left wing, led by Spartacists Liebknecht and Meyer, and the powerful revolutionary shop stewards movement, the non-party Obleute.
The Obleute decided to wait for 11 November to act, but Liekbnecht pre-empted them with a call for action on the 8th. The indecision about the date was immaterial: the workers rose on the 9th. Thousands rushed to the Reichstag, the parliament building. It was now that the right wing leaders of the 'old party' - the Social Democrats (SPD) intervened, and a fatal blow was struck against the revolution.
As the workers besieged the Reichstag, at 2pm one of the two main SPD leaders, Scheidemann, rushed out and 'proclaimed' a republic - and his support for the workers. The SPD was taking the leadership of the movement in order to head it off. At 4pm Karl Liebknecht arrived at the Riechstag to proclaim the socialist republic — but some of his thunder had already been stolen by the SPD leaders.
Now the question of government - who was to lead the revolution - was posed. The SPD, led by Ebert and Scheidemann, proposed a coalition SPD-USPD government based on
• all power to the workers' councils;
• socialisation of industry.
Their proposal was for three ministers from each party. After painful indecision, the USPD accepted this proposal. Counter-revolution had been brought into the heart of the leadership of the revolution. Instead of taking all power themselves, the USPD allowed a government to be formed which, with three SPD and two from the right wing of the USPD, gave effective control to the SPD.
It was a fateful mistake. The SPD leadership, which had collaborated with the war, now presented itself as 'revolutionary'. SPD leaders joined the workers councils everywhere and in many places took the leadership of them. In a revolution, the worst social democratic traitors can become revolutionaries' - for the moment. Although a separate revolutionary executive' of seven SPD, seven USPD and seven soldiers was set up, this was a only a pressure group on the six-person government, led by Ebert, which held the real power. Because of SPD prevarication, by December no moves in favour of the workers, for example socialisation of industry, had in fact been taken. The bourgeois state and economy were still intact. A crucial conflict now developed between the SPD leaders and the left. A nafional congress of workers' and soldiers" deputies was due to be held in Berlin on December 30-31. The SPD leaders decided to propose the election of a 'constituent assembly'. This body was clearly going to be counterposed to the power of the the workers' councils - in effect it would be a bourgeois parliament which would be used to crush the councils.
While the Spartacist left demanded all power to the councils, the USPD leaders wavered. At the congress itself, which the SPD packed with its supporters and to which Luxemburg and Liebknecht were unable to gain admittance, some USPD delegates voted both for the resolutions in favour of 'all power to the councils' and for national elections to a constituent assembly. In consequence Ebert and Scheideman won the day. National elections were called: the 'democratic counter-revolution' was under way.
Political events were moving rapidly. Frustrated by the government's paralysis, the USPD withdrew from the government on 29 December, leaving the SPD in power alone.
B A C The Spartacist left of the USPD, exasperated by the compromises of the party leadership, left the party, to declare an independent Communist Party (together with the ultra-left IKD based in the north of the country. The masses, especially in Berlin, were growing more and more embittered by government's betrayal of their struggle.
Capitalising on their victory at the congress of workers councils, the SPD leaders now moved to provoke the left and inflict a further defeat on it. On 4 January 1919, the Berlin police chief, a USPD member called Eichhorn, was dismissed. The workers in Berlin saw the sacking as a direct attack on them - because Eichhorn was a supporter of the revolution.
Eichhorn's dismissal was met by demonstrations of hundreds of thousands • of workers, many of them armed. In this situation, sections of the USPD, Spartacists and revolutionary shop stewards decided to try to seize power. A 'revolutionary committee' was set up which appealed forthe workers to rise up in armed revolt and overthrow the government. Although Spartacist leaders like Liebknecht signed the appeal, it was not sanctioned by the party Central Committee. Rosa Luxemburg, in particular, opposed the move as an ultra-left adventure.
Revolutionary insurrection is not to be undertaken lightly. The revolutionaries in Berlin were intoxicated by the sight of tens of thousands of armed workers demanding that the government be got rid of. But they over-estimated the relationship of forces. The workers outside Berlin were not yet ready for armed insurrection.
The Bolshevik leader Karl Radek - secretly in Germany co-ordinating with the Spartacists - was firmly against the uprising. He compared it to the Russian 'July days' in 1917, when secRosa: murdered as the revolution was crushed
K the
Rising of the (armed) proletariat we were much stronger than you are today."
republic.
tions of the Petrograd workers wanted an uprising, but the Bolsheviks opposed them. 'We led the masses into a retreat then,' said Radek, 'and
The Berlin revolutionary committee' made a second fatal mistake : it dithered. While SPD leaders Ebert, Noske and Scheidemann plotted with the army generals to crush the uprising, the revolutionary committee allowed itself to be drawn into "negotiations' with Ebert. Once a revolution has been called, then it has to be deed it was fatal.
fought out to the finish - not stopped for negotiations. Luxemburg, although an opponent of the action, demanded that it be carried out to the end, once it had been launched:
It was one of her last actions: on January 15 she and Karl Liebknecht were arrested. Instead of being taken to prison, they were taken to the Eden Hotel, headquariers of the infamous
Garde-Kavallerie Schutzen
Division, one of the few regiments still fiercely loyal to the old Imperial regime. Luxemburg and Liebknecht had their skulls smashed in by rifle butts while 'trying to escape'.
The January uprising initiated civil war. Fifty thousand workers lost their lives in the struggle. Ilwas March before the workers uprising was quenched throughout Germany. The crushing of the uprising by the army's bullets signalled the end of the revolution, and the establishment of a bourgeois lan, 1984.
What lessons are to be drawn marks, 1982.
from the experience of Red
November? The biggest error was that of the USPD in allow-
S ing the SPD leadership to muscle in on the November uprising and form a joint government. But the majority of the Spartacist left in the USPD was consistently ultra-left, despite the efforts of leaders like Rosa Luxemburg and Paul Levi. Splitting the USPD in the middle of the revolutionary upsurge was arguably premature - perhaps it would have been better for the revolutionary marxist leaders to remain in the USPD and try to win it over from the left. The January uprising was certainly premature; in-
The German workers went into the November revolution led by the old SPD, a reformist party, and the USPD — a centrist party divided between a semi-revolutionary left, and a non-revolutionary right wing.
The mass revolutionary party of the German workers was to be created only after the 191819 revolution - the German Communist Party (KPD), formed after the split of the USPD in 1920, (the left going over to the Spartacists to form the KPD, and the right going back to the
The defeat of the 1918-19 revolution showed that social democracy, when the crunch comes, will side with the brutal repression of the workers, rather than with socialist revolution. It was the vivid demonstration of this fact which split the USPD and created a revolutionary Communist party of hundreds of thousands.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 10 November 1988 Page 27