The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 85, March 2026 Page 7 From the series Pages from the history of the workers’ movement The January 1919 uprising has gone down in history as the Spartacist uprising , but in his biography of Rosa Luxemburg, Paul Frölich contests this definition: The truth is that there was no Spartacus uprising . As he explains, the leaders of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in fact counted on a gradual revolutionary process, and certainly not on immediate armed struggle on the streets of Berlin . Actually, indicates Frölich, the truth is that the January fighting was carefully prepared and cunningly launched by the leaders of the counter-revolution . Consciousness brought from without What therefore emerges is a party unable to hold back the masses in the face of provocation or to organise a conscious action or an orderly retreat. In this way, the Spartacist leaders themselves were swept along by the party b...

The Analysis of a Defeat From the special series 1919-2019. One hundred years from the foundation of the Communist International It was in Lenin’s legacy that the generation of the ’20s and ’30s could have found the theoretical tools to deal with the unprecedented Stalinist counter-revolution and execute an organised retreat for the world party. Socialism in one country? Lenin had already framed the essential characteristics of that issue in 1915: given that Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism , it could be assumed that the victory of socialism would be possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone . What that first unequivocally means is that either the socialist revolution is replicated internationally, or it is inevitably defeated. Moreover, since the revolution had begun in backwards Russia, in 1917 it was already predictable that the time given to this inception in one country would be very short. Of course, ext...