From the series Pages from the history of the workers’ movement
Revolution is a dramatic and oscillating historical process, marked by brutal accelerations, sudden freezes, and deceptive moments of dead calm. Hence the need to develop the party in the preceding years, so that it can act consciously as a vanguard rooted in the masses — as the premise for the revolutionary process rather than the result. Arrigo Cervetto wrote in his article “The General Task”, now in Opere, vol. 2: If the party does not want to fall into adventurism, it cannot regulate its conduct on accelerated and unexpected movements but must always continue in its systematic work of organisation and education of the proletariat. The more the party is able to work according to this plan [...] the more it will have the possibility of not being caught off guard by the turn of events
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In Germany, the party capable of carrying out this task should have been the Social Democratic Party (SPD), but the severity of its degeneration into opportunism became evident with its unexpected collapse on August 4th, 1914. The German revolution thus lacked a sufficiently developed and organised class party, and the belated founding of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) failed to make up for the delay. The revolutionary minority found itself tragically subject to the initiative of others.
The second phase of the revolution
At the KPD’s founding congress in December 1918, Rosa Luxemburg identified in the bloody Christmas
the end of the first phase of the revolution — what she described as a period of initial childish steps
and of the illusion of unity under the banner of so-called socialism
. In her opinion, this first phase would give way to a second, deeper, economic phase, with the development and spread of strike action: This is then an economic revolution and, thanks to that, it becomes a socialist revolution
.
Faith in the spontaneity of the masses re-emerged, in this case in the form of a wage struggle. Lenin’s view was thus underestimated. According to Lenin, there can be no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory
, and not without a party able to bring class consciousness from outside the immediate relations of production. Nevertheless, Luxemburg’s assessments proved correct in two respects: the events of December 24th and the repression in January brought the first phase of the revolution – that of the illusions in every direction
– to a bloody end; at the same time, economic struggles arose as a widespread phenomenon, with strikes occurring all over Germany.
“The hangman’s work”
However, the inadequacy of the party was also confirmed, with tragic consequences. The murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht was only the beginning of the repression. The following months are known as the Noske era
, called after Gustav Noske, the Social Democratic commander of the counterrevolutionary troops and subsequently War Minister. In his memoirs, Von Kiel bis Kapp [1920], he took credit for the sentence pronounced in the Chancellery on January 6th, when the plans for the repression in Berlin were decided upon. Impatience was growing in Ebert’s study; time was growing short and our men in the street were loudly demanding arms. I demanded a decision and someone objected: ‘But then you’ll be taking care of it yourself.’ I replied decisively: ‘I think that someone will have to do the hangman’s work. Personally, I’m not afraid of this responsibility’
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In the German cities, the social effects of the war weighed on the population: people were dying of cold and hunger as in the hardest years of the conflict. The victorious powers’ naval blockade remained in place. Factories were closing down and unemployment was increasing. The struggle therefore increasingly took on an economic form: hard-fought, long-drawn-out strikes replaced demonstrations and rallies.
However, the KPD was not at the head of these strikes, partly because it had itself been decapitated: the news of the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht broke the remaining spirit of Franz Mehring, already old and ill. Johann Knief, the head of Bremen’s left-wing radicals, who had suffered from tuberculosis since the war, died in hiding. The fate of Karl Radek, arrested on February 12th, remained in the balance for several days: in the end, his life was spared because he could be used as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the Bolsheviks. Leo Jogiches, Luxemburg’s comrade in life and struggle, though severely shaken, managed to reveal the truth about the death of the two revolutionary leaders, publishing it in Die Rote Fahne together with the witnesses’ statements and the photograph of the murderers. However, in doing so he secured his own death sentence: he escaped from the police for more than two months, but on March 10th, in the massacre of the Berlin proletariat, he was arrested and killed while attempting to escape
from police officer Tamschick. Eugen Leviné, after narrowly escaping the January massacre of the Vorwärts defenders and being sent to Bavaria, was arrested after the end of the Munich Council Republic, sentenced to death, and shot.
The Bremen Council Republic
In the month of January, there were improvised attempts at revolutionary coups de main in various German cities, always put down with violence and often nipped in the bud, as was the case in Dresden, Stuttgart, Leipzig, Duisburg, and Hamburg. In this wave, the revolutionaries were able to seize power only in Düsseldorf and Bremen.
Before the war, Bremen, the Hanseatic city on the banks of the Weser, was a stronghold of left-wing radicals, and the Bremer Bürgerzeitung, Alfred Henke’s Social Democratic newspaper, printed the writings of Luxemburg, Mehring, Radek, and Pannekoek. The Linksradikalen had a strong influence over the 10,000 workers in the shipyard, the city’s busiest industrial complex. Furthermore, Bremen was one of the main centres of revolutionary activity in the navy, and it was there that Independents and Communists won a majority in the January 6th re-election of the workers’ council and proclaimed the Council Republic. They gained the solidarity of Hamburg and, above all, of the Ruhr miners, who threatened to strike if the Freikorps attacked Bremen. In any case, Noske, who had been War Minister since January 19th, decided to use force and occupied the city at the beginning of February with the Gerstenberg division, causing about a hundred deaths.
Strike in the Ruhr and central Germany
At that point, the Ruhr, Germany’s productive heartland, where class conflicts were acute and the industrial magnates Hugenberg, Vögler, Krupp, and Thyssen had always taken an iron-fisted approach with their wage-earners, sprang into action. Workers’ agitation was now placing the question of socialisation on the agenda, beginning with the coal mines. The Lichtschlag Freikorps entered Münster, where they arrested the members of the soldiers’ councils, and then headed towards Heverst-Dorsten, taking over the city and causing 36 deaths. The president of the workers’ council, the communist Fest, was arrested and killed by the soldiers. A conference of the more radical councils of the Ruhr, gathering in Mülheim on February 16th, called for a general strike in response. In the following days, there were clashes throughout the region, in Elberfeld, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, and Bochum, resulting in about a hundred casualties. General Oskar von Watter demanded the disarmament of the workers and the resumption of work, leading to the end of the general strike, and to an armistice.
The momentum of the Ruhr revolt was thus halted, but workers’ agitation broke out again elsewhere. In Bavaria, after the killing of Kurt Eisner by a fanatic on February 21st, the short-lived Munich Council Republic began. In May, Noske’s white terror launched against it the most savage ‘purge’, its brutality worse than the March massacre in Berlin
wrote Paul Frölich, with about a thousand victims. Meanwhile, on February 24th, the delegates of the councils of central Germany met in Halle to announce a general strike and to exhort the Berlin workers to follow them.
In The German Revolution, 1917-1923, Pierre Broué stresses the fragmentation of the German workers’ movement and the lack of an organised centre: Since December, the left Independents in central Germany, [Wilhelm] Koenen, Bernhard Düwell, the Berliners with Richard Müller, and the Ruhr people with Otto Brass, had been trying to coordinate their activities. In fact, in the absence of a solid revolutionary organisation, they were to fail, and their plans to build a general movement remained unfulfilled
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Nevertheless, the mobilisation of central Germany was quite widespread and there was a real risk that it might spread to Greater Berlin. Noske therefore sent General Georg Maercker, the most politically gifted among his military leaders, to Saxony-Anhalt. Maercker’s military expedition went to Halle, where the general imposed a state of siege. The end of the general strike in central Germany was proclaimed on March 7th, but its upsurge had already reached Berlin a few days earlier.
Among the reasons for the National Assembly’s flight to Weimar is the fact that Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann did not believe they had defeated the Berlin proletariat once and for all in the January battles.
The March massacre in Berlin
On March 3rd, Die Rote Fahne published a call for a general strike signed by the KPD Central Committee. At the same time, the communist leaders recommended that the workers should restrict their struggle to within the factories: Don’t let yourselves be dragged into further gunfights! Noske would like nothing more than to cause further bloodshed!
. The general strike was decided upon by a large majority. The government then declared a state of siege. As early as the night of 3rd March there were clashes between the workers and the police. Noske’s Freikorps therefore arrived to support the police. On the morning of March 9th, the government spread the news that the police headquarters in Lichtenberg, a district of Berlin, had been attacked and its 70 occupiers savagely massacred. The truth was that five policemen had died during scuffles in the streets. The bourgeois press, with Vorwärts in the lead, unleashed a campaign against the Lichtenberg atrocities
. Noske brandished this fully-constructed fiction as a pretext. The real massacre then began: in his memoirs, Noske admitted to as many as 1,200 victims; the revolutionaries calculated that the real number was closer to 3,000. The corpse of Leo Jogiches was found among the victims.
With the strike put down in Berlin, the Ruhr again took industrial action. On April 1st, the miners decided on a general strike, which would last for the whole month. Meanwhile, Maercker eliminated the other hotbeds in central Germany, in Magdeburg and Braunschweig, in Thuringia and working-class Saxony: Eisenach, Erfurt, Leipzig, and Chemnitz. Meanwhile, the strike movement in the Ruhr was slowly dying out beneath the blows of a prompt and bloody
repression [Rudolf Coper, Failure of a Revolution], with fatalities in Düsseldorf, Dortmund, and Bochum. At the beginning of May
— Broué comments — the order of Hugenberg, Vögler, Krupp, and Thyssen once more reigned in the Ruhr
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