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German Socialism in 1917

From the series Pages from the history of the worker’s movement

 According to Arrigo Cervetto [Opere, Vol. 7], “paracentrism” is “the biggest obstacle to the formation of the worldwide Bolshevik party”.

The Spartacists at Zimmerwald and Kiental

Cervetto was analysing Lenin’s battle against centrism for the creation of the Third International, a battle which saw him isolated at Zimmerwald. He wrote down one of Zinoviev’s quotations from Histoire du parti communiste russe. “We were in the minority at Zimmerwald [1915]. […] In the years 1915 and 1916, we were nothing but an insignificant minority”.

“But what is more serious?” – observed Cervetto – “is that the Zimmerwald Spartacists also said they were opposed to us”. In the strategic perspective of the “two separate halves” of socialism – the political conditions in Russia and the economic, productive, and social conditions in Germany – “for Lenin and Zinoviev […] the fate of a future International depended essentially on the German ‘Left’”, Cervetto commented.

At the following Kiental Conference [April 24th–30th], the German delegation was made up of three groups: Paul Frölich representing Bremen’s Linksradikalen, a fraction of the internationalist opposition led by Johann Knief and Frölich; the Spartacists Ernst Meyer and Bertha Thalheimer; and members of the SPD opposition who would later join the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), such as Hoffmann and Fleissner.

At Kiental, the Zimmerwald Left was represented by Lenin, Zinoviev, and Frölich. Cervetto wrote that “Lenin staked everything on the Radek group in Poland-Germany and the Bremen group (Frölich), and not the Luxemburg group. […] In fact, Frölich criticised the Die Internationale group regarding national defence and its relations with centrism”.

Tying a new knot in the thread

Pointing out the strategic inadequacy of Luxemburgism does not mean underestimating the extreme difficulty the German Left had to face: in fact, it meant breaking with the party which until August 4th, 1914, had been the guiding light of both the International and Lenin himself. Furthermore, given that the party has to be developed in counter-revolutionary periods, what is to be done when that party, forged in the long preceding decades, repudiates internationalism and joins forces with its class enemy? What is to be done in the heat of the war crisis?

Faced with the failure of the Second International, Lenin exhorted Luxemburgists to break with opportunism: in fact, even in the most difficult conditions, one must not stop fighting for class autonomy and a new International which preserves revolutionary strategy. Trotsky’s testimony is significant in this regard. In My Life, he recalled the Zimmerwald Conference as follows: “The delegates, filling four stagecoaches, set off for the mountains. The passers-by looked on curiously at the strange procession. The delegates themselves joked about the fact that half a century after the founding of the First International, it was still possible to seat all the internationalists in four coaches. But they were not sceptical. The thread of history often breaks, then a new knot must be tied. And that is what we were doing in Zimmerwald”.

A fatal misunderstanding

However, the Spartacists hesitated to abandon the party in which they had grown up and which, through decades of battle, had grown roots in the working class. Moreover, they refused to develop an organisation of their own, as they fell into a fatal misunderstanding: diffidence towards organisation tout court, which they mistook for the bureaucratic apparatus of opportunism. They countered it with trust in the masses’ spontaneity and their capacity to reaffirm, under the pressure of war, the SPD’s old revolutionary tradition.

The same misunderstanding cropped up in the USPD. After the scission at its founding congress in Gotha on April 6th, 1917, the new party solemnly re-adopted the Erfurt Programme, with the explicit wish to revive the old party. Nevertheless, Pierre Broué stresses that “the new party was to be different to the prewar organisation in one important respect. This was its structure, its degree of centralisation, and the role of its apparatus. The majority of the delegates were convinced that all the deleterious aspects had been due to the way in which the old party had been organised” [The German Revolution 1917-1923].

This is where the divergences arose with the Bolsheviks and the Zimmerwald left at an international level, and with the Bremen left-wing radicals at a national level.

An immediate result of the Social Democratic scission was a second scission within German socialism. A conference of the left-wing radical groups for the creation of an “international socialist party” not affiliated to the USPD was held in August 1917 in Berlin, with the participation of delegates from Bremen, Berlin, Frankfurt-am-Main, Rüstringen, Moers, and Neustadt.

A decisive year

Broué observes that “the year 1917 marked the fundamental turning point in the First World War”. After unleashing the submarine war that precipitated the subsequent American intervention, Germany gradually saw the possibility of victory diminish. Meanwhile the two Russian revolutions, in February and October, combining with the German military stalemate and the harshness of living conditions, were crucial events for the German workers’ movement, contributing first to the USPD scission and then to the mobilisation of workers, sailors, and soldiers, leading up to the outbreak of the 1918 revolution.

The SPD and the trade unions acted to curb and discourage the strike movement, which reached vast dimensions in the month of April. The Vorwärts of April 27th urged: “Strikes must be avoided […] An early peace is dependent upon the improvement of Germany’s capacity to resist”. Faced with this attitude, the prestige of the USPD delegates grew among the workers.

The sailors’ revolutionary organisation

Thanks to its revolutionary nature within the context of the 1917 agitations, the movement which developed within the wartime navy is particularly significant.

Broué, who offers a reconstruction of it, observes: “A wide range of factors coincided to produce active centres of agitation aboard the warships. The crews included a majority of skilled workers, most often metalworkers, who were class-conscious and had experience of class struggle. The circumstances of the War, which kept the ships in port, enabled the sailors to maintain close contacts with the workers in the docks and shipyards, to circulate books, leaflets, and newspapers, to exchange ideas, and to organise discussions. The conditions of life, the concentration of proletarians in confined spaces, and the qualities of daring and the collective spirit which they promoted rendered the harsh conditions endured by the sailors and stokers increasingly intolerable".

As early as 1914 there were readers of the radical press, above all the Leipziger Volkszeitung among the fleet's sailors. But it was in 1917, with the Russian Revolution, that this latent movement gained strength. Willy Sachse, a stoker, and Max Reichpietsch, a sailor in the navy, circulated pamphlets by Marx and Bebel and copies of the Erfurt Programme on board the "Friedrich der Große" battleship. They established contact with sailors on other ships in Wilhelmshaven. When, in June 1917, they learnt about the institution on all the warships of "provisioning committees", charged with controlling supplies and including representatives of the crews, they made the most of the opportunity to create a clandestine organisation, the Soldiers' and Sailors' League. Its aim was to set up "sailors' councils" following the Russian model.

In mid-June, Reichpietsch met the USPD leaders Haase, Dittmann, Vogtherr, and Luise Zietz in Berlin. They hoped that the agitation for peace within the German fleet would be reflected at the socialist conference announced by the International in Stockholm on May 15th. However, this conference never took place, also because of the reservations of the socialist parties of the powers of the Triple Entente.

The sailors' struggle, observes Broué, was "extremely dangerous" and required "perfect organisation, clandestinity and secrecy, substantial financing, and many other precautions". But the USPD parliamentarians "had not the slightest idea of these requirements", because they remained faithful to centrist reformism and parliamentary rites. Nevertheless, Reichpietsch returned to the ship believing that the deputies were in favour of a revolutionary struggle. The organisation spread to the "Prinzregent" and other ships anchored in Kiel, under the leadership of Albin Köbis and H. Beckers. On July 25th a general leadership, the clandestine *Zentralleitung*, was created, grouping together 5,000 sailors. The strikes and unofficial walkouts multiplied leading up to the "great disembarkation" of August 2nd: 400 sailors abandoned the "Prinzregent Luitpold" battleship in Kiel and held an anti-war meeting, with Köbis as the main speaker. Subsequently, the repressive apparatus sprang into action. Five sailors were sentenced to death at the trial on August 26th, another four were sentenced to 10-15 years in jail, and a further fifty or so received jail sentences amounting to 400 years in all. On September 5th, Reichpietsch and Köbis were executed.

A month later, in a "Letter to the Bolshevik Comrades Attending the Congress of Soviets of the Northern Region", Lenin would write that "it cannot be doubted that the revolt in the German navy is indicative of the great crisis – the growth of the world revolution".

The navy's involvement is a recurring feature of revolutionary processes: as well as the Russian sailors' action from 1905 to 1917, the mutiny of the Kiel fleet, which refused orders to launch a last desperate attack, would trigger the revolution in Germany. This exploded essentially as a consequence of the incipient military defeat but lacked a revolutionary party to lead it.

The position vis-à-vis the war of the SPD and the trade unions, siding with the interests of their own imperialism, varied with the ups-and-downs of the war. In *A History of Socialist Thought*, the Fabian historian G.D.H. Cole observed that, when the prospects of a German victory diminished and, indeed, defeat seemed probable, a negotiated peace without annexations or indemnities became increasingly attractive, not only for the majoritarian SPD, but also for many bourgeois parties, such as Deputy Matthias Erzberger’s Catholic Centre Party. The peace resolution passed at the Reichstag on July 19th, 1917, reflected this change of mood.

Race against time

In his October 1917 pamphlet “The Crisis Has Matured”, Lenin pointed to “the beginning of mutinies in the German army” as “indisputable symptoms that a great turning point is at hand, that we are on the eve of a worldwide revolution”. But, at the same time, in the aforementioned “Letter”, he stressed the huge difficulty faced by the German revolutionaries who, unlike the Russians, lacked a deep-rooted party: “They can say to us: We have only Liebknecht who openly called for a revolution. His voice has been stifled in a convict prison. We have not a single newspaper which openly explains the necessity for a revolution; we have not got freedom of assembly. We have not a single Soviet of Workers’ or Soldiers’ Deputies. Our voice barely reaches the real, broad mass of people”.

From August 4th, 1914, the battle for the working class’s revolutionary organisation in Germany was a bitter race against time, in prohibitive conditions. The German Left would ultimately fail to establish its own organised core. “Peace and revolution overtook” the revolutionaries, commented Broué.

Lotta Comunista, April 2025

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