The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 88, June 2026 Page 9 From the series Pages from the history of the workers’ movement The Weimar Republic took shape in the first six months of 1919, as Gustav Noske's Freikorps suppressed the revolution. The bourgeois parties of Weimar In the elections for the Constituent Assembly on January 19 th , 1919, the large corporate groups of German capital financed and steered the political forces. The four major banks alone contributed at least 30 million marks to the election funds of the various parties. At the head of the bourgeois forces were the great electricity magnates Walther Rathenau of AEG and Carl Friedrich von Siemens for the Democrats; Karl Helfferich of Deutsche Bank and Alfred Hugenberg of Krupp for the far-right nationalists; and major industrialists such as Hugo Stinnes for Gustav Stresemann's People's Party. Th...

Internationalism No. 87, May 2026 Page 9 From the series Pages from the history of the workers' movement The Munich Soviet Republic With the Munich Soviet Republic, the German Revolution, which began on November 9 th , 1918, seemed to be flickering its last. In the Bavarian capital, after the fall of the Wittelsbachs, power had fallen into the hands of Kurt Eisner, a pacifist intellectual, member of the USPD, and contributor to the revisionist newspaper Münchner Post since 1910. Eisner had managed something unheard of in Germany – to gain the support of the farmers, in particular Karl Gandorfer, head of the Bavarian Peasants' League. Workers, soldiers, and peasants "Traditionally a stronghold of Catholicism and reaction" , Bavaria "had declared early for the November Revolution, largely because its people hated the Prussians and re...

Internationalism No. 86, April 2026 Page 9 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 b...

Internationalism No. 77, July 2025 Page 6 From the series Pages from the history of the workers’ movement The depth of the contradictions within the German SPD, brought to a climax by the war, erupted in the Reichstag over the vote on war credits. Karl Liebknecht, who had reluctantly bowed to party discipline on August 4 th , 1914, openly expressed his rift with the Executive during the subsequent vote on December 2 nd when, acting alone, he rejected the war credits. On this occasion, the centrists, headed by Hugo Haase, maintained respect for party discipline. A legal opposition On February 3 rd , 1915, exploiting this centrist trend (which also gripped many old radicals), the Executive decided to authorise a legal internal opposition, thus allowing the deputies whose conscience rebelled against party discipline to absent themselves at the moment of the vote on...