John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

Although the Spartacists were a small minority within the German working-class movement, they and the Stewards brought 250,000 people on to the streets of Berlin on 16th December to demand “all power to the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils”. As a result of Ebert’s concession, SPD and USPD supporters won majorities in the First Congress of the Council of Workers and Soldiers, held in Berlin on 16th-21st December, 1918. Of 489 delegates, the SPD had 291, the USPD 90 and the Spartacists 10. The Congress debated what form of society the delegates wished to see. The SPD and USPD sought a parliamentary republic based on universal suffrage, while the Spartacists and most of the Stewards wanted a “Council Republic”. Although the Congress referred the question to a future National Assembly the Spartacists and Stewards jumped the gun and began to take local and police powers to themselves.

This was a direct challenge to the new Republic for which the new German Communist Party (KPD)–formed on 1st January, 1919 out of the Spartacist League and the Stewards–was not remotely prepared. As even Donny Gluckstein’s sympathetic work on European Workers’ Councils between 1915 and 1920 admits, the enthusiastic young revolutionaries of the KPD “had never confronted the difficulties of winning workers to their ideas, or tried to lead them in the daily class struggle”. 8They totally underestimated the hold the SPD and the USPD had on the loyalties of most German workers.

From November 1918 to January 1919, Germany was governed by a “Council of People’s Deputies”, under the leadership of Ebert and Haase. Amongst other things, the Council appointed a “Socialisation Commission” headed by Kautsky and Hilferding to prepare proposals for the nationalisation of German industry. Although the Commission proposed socialisation of monopolistic sectors such as coal and iron and the involvement of German trade unions in setting wage rates and other conditions, the SPD had no intention of implementing these policies. Nevertheless it did implement an eight-hour work day and employment and labour reform, including protection from arbitrary dismissal, industrial works councils, agricultural labour reform, national health insurance, re-instatement of demobilised workers, regulated wage agreements and universal suffrage from age 20. Whatever the motivation for this raft of governmental decrees–and of course it was partly to offset the appeal of the radical socialists and the Workers’ Councils–the result was that great numbers of German workers saw the Republic under the SPD as far more likely to deliver a better life for them and their families than those urging violent insurrection.

The situation escalated in early January when Ebert used military units against some of the Councils. In response, on 6th January, 1919 the most revolutionary elements of the Councils launched an insurrection against the SPD-USPD government. But this was no October. The German military had not disintegrated. The SPD-USPD had successfully replaced the imperial government and it had the support of the majority of the German working class. The Revolutionary Stewards movement was divided, with Muller and Barth opposed to an uprising. The Spartacists, strong in “Red Berlin”, had little support elsewhere. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were reluctant to support an armed uprising against the government, but once it had started they felt they had no choice but to back it. At the same time Ebert and the thuggish Gustov Noske organised loyal military forces and mercenary Friekorps units to crush the revolt.

Between 9th and 12th January, 1919 over 200 people were killed in fierce fighting in Berlin. Luxemburg and Liebknecht, captured by Friekorps irregulars, were brutally murdered. The German Revolution was dead before it got off the ground. As the Spartacists were being annihilated in Berlin their newspaper Rote Fahne asked in incredulity, “Where are the Workers’ Councils, the organs called to lead the revolutionary masses? They do not exist. They are not even meeting”. 9But the Councils, as Muller and Barth realised, were not ready to support the Spartacists.

Kautsky, one of the founders of the USPD, was appalled that the Spartacists had divided the forces of the democratic left at a crucial moment and gifted the far-right a perfect excuse to mobilise against the new Republic. “There can be no doubt about the result”, he wrote in 1919:

There was no doubt from the very beginning of the movement, at least amongst those who had preserved the capacity to view the real relation of forces clearly. On the one side stood a minority of the proletariat, on the other its majority in the Reich and the entire bourgeois world, together with the remains of the apparatus of military power that survived the period of the war.

This was not an endorsement of Noske, whom Kautsky loathed, but an acknowledgment that through their adventurist tactics the Spartacists had allowed Noske to inject the poison of the Freikorps into German political life. Of the new socialist government, Kautsky lamented “its ability to defend itself against bourgeois and military influences, which was slim to begin with, have been further reduced. The bourgeois elements and professional officers have acquired new energy. The danger of counter-revolution is becoming real”. 10

Two months after the only genuine attempt to repeat the Bolshevik insurrection in a major European country went down in flames, the preliminary meeting of what would become the Third International took place in Moscow. In March 1919 this consisted of about 40 representatives from small foreign socialist parties and groups. To the Bolsheviks, cut off from Western Europe by the Civil War, these visiting socialists appeared as harbingers of the revolution they hoped would rescue them. Greeting the small gathering, Lenin told them:

Not only in Russia, but even in the most advanced capitalist countries in Europe, for instance in Germany, civil war has become a fact. Revolution has begun and is gaining strength in all countries. The Soviet system has won not merely in backward Russia, but even in Germany, the most developed country in Europe, and also in England, the oldest capitalist country. 11

Even allowing for the temporary surge of hope provided by the formation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in March 1919, this was pure fantasy. The Soviet system died in Germany along with Luxemburg and Liebknecht. It never even existed in England. The spasms of revolution in post-war Britain were real but fleeting. In June 1917, enthused by the Russian Revolution of February 1917, the Leeds Convention brought together 1,150 delegates from British trade unions and socialist groups to discuss and offer support to the revolutionary process in Russia, attracting Labour leaders like MacDonald and Snowden, trade union leaders Tom Mann and Bob Smillie, and intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell. MacDonald exhorted the convention to emulate the February Revolution and to “lay down our terms, make our own proclamations, establish our own diplomacy, see to it that we have our own international meetings”. The Convention’s Fourth Resolution, passed by a large majority, called for the assembled delegates to “establish at once in every town, urban and rural district, Councils of Workmen and Soldiers’ delegates for initiating and co-ordinating working class activity in support of the policy set out in the forgoing resolutions”. 12

This was excitable rhetoric. The only ones to genuinely attempt to put it into practice were the militant shop stewards of the Clyde Workers Committee (CWC) in Scotland, who established democratic workplace forums outside the standard trade union apparatus. In January 1919 the CWC led a strike in Glasgow against the imposition of a 48-hour working week in the engineering industry. The stewards demanded a 40-hour week. Under their direction the entire Clyde Valley came to a halt. Gas, electricity and tramway workers joined the engineers in mass strike action which quickly spread to Edinburgh and Belfast. By 1st February over 100,000 workers were on strike and the CWC’s newspaper boldly declared, “We British Bolsheviks have the Russian precedent to guide us”. So did the government. That night thousands of troops arrived by train and Glasgow woke up to find itself surrounded by a ring of machine gun nests and tanks, with battleships sitting off the docks. 13This show of force intimidated the engineering union leaders into backing down, leaving the stewards isolated.