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...

Internationalism No. 83, January 2026 Page 7 From the series Pages from the history of the workers’ movement After November 9 th , 1918, two powers were competing in Germany, the Council of People’s Deputies and the Berlin Executive Council. The Spartacus League fought to make the latter the Petrograd Soviet of the German revolution. Since the body was largely made up of SPD majoritarians and independents, Jacques Droz notes in his Histoire générale du socialisme , a real paradox is observed: the Spartacists demand total power for an institution that is clearly satisfied with a strictly reformist program . In truth, even the Bolsheviks in April 1917 launched the slogan All Power to the Soviets when these were dominated by Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and Mensheviks. The difference was in the reluctance of German revolutionaries to equip themselves with the organisation to steer that outcome. Centrist spontaneity and Bolshevism ...

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...