The German Revolution and Political Theory [1st ed.] 978-3-030-13916-2;978-3-030-13917-9

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xviii
The “Forgotten” German Revolution: A Conceptual Map (Gaard Kets, James Muldoon)....Pages 1-22
Front Matter ....Pages 23-23
Women in the German Revolution (Helen L. Boak)....Pages 25-44
The German Revolution and the Radical Right (Robert Heynen)....Pages 45-68
Revolutionary Berlin: Fulcrum of the Twentieth Century (Donny Gluckstein)....Pages 69-90
Working-Class Politics in the Bremen Council Republic (Gaard Kets)....Pages 91-111
Revolutionary Principles and Strategy in the November Revolution: The Case of the USPD (Nicholas Vrousalis)....Pages 113-134
Front Matter ....Pages 135-135
Eduard Bernstein and the Lessons of the German Revolution (Marius S. Ostrowski)....Pages 137-158
Karl Kautsky and the Theory of Socialist Republicanism (Michael J. Thompson)....Pages 159-181
Democracy and Dictatorship: Rosa Luxemburg’s Path to Revolution (Mayra Cotta)....Pages 183-197
Richard Müller, Ernst Däumig and the “Pure” Council System (Ralf Hoffrogge)....Pages 199-214
Gustav Landauer and the Revolutionary Principle of Non-violent Non-cooperation (Christian Bartolf, Dominique Miething)....Pages 215-235
Persistent Memories: Jewish Activists and the German Revolution (Stephen Eric Bronner)....Pages 237-254
Front Matter ....Pages 255-255
A Theory of Council Democracy (Yohan Dubigeon)....Pages 257-276
Insurgent Democracy and the German Councils (Paul Mazzocchi)....Pages 277-297
Forgotten Uprisings and Silent Dialogues: Hannah Arendt and the German Revolution (Shmuel Lederman)....Pages 299-317
Rosa Luxemburg on the Dialectic of Spontaneous and Party Politics (Paulina Tambakaki)....Pages 319-338
The Birth of Council Communism (James Muldoon)....Pages 339-360
Back Matter ....Pages 361-363

Citation preview

MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

The German Revolution and Political Theory

Edited by Gaard Kets · James Muldoon

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms Series Editors Marcello Musto York University Toronto, ON, Canada Terrell Carver University of Bristol Bristol, UK

The volumes of this series (edited by Marcello Musto and Terrell Carver, with Babak Amini and Kohei Saito as Assistant Editors) challenge the ‘Marxist’ intellectual traditions to date by making use of scholarly discoveries of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe since the 1990s, taking on board interdisciplinary and other new critical perspectives, and incorporating ‘reception studies’. Authors and editors in the series resist oversimplification of ideas and reinscription of traditions. Moreover, their very diversity in terms of language, local context, political engagement and scholarly practice mark the series out from any other in the field. Involving scholars from different fields and cultural backgrounds, the series editors ensure tolerance for differences within and between provocative monographs and edited volumes. Running contrary to 20th century practices of simplification, the books in this innovative series revitalize Marxist intellectual traditions. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14812

Gaard Kets · James Muldoon Editors

The German Revolution and Political Theory

Editors Gaard Kets Institute for Management Research Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

James Muldoon Department of Politics University of Exeter Penryn, UK

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131  (electronic) Marx, Engels, and Marxisms ISBN 978-3-030-13916-2 ISBN 978-3-030-13917-9  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13917-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019932946 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: dpa picture alliance/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Foreword

The Marx Revival The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Whether the puzzle is the economic boom in China or the economic bust in ‘the West’, there is no doubt that Marx appears regularly in the media nowadays as a guru, and not a threat, as he used to be. The literature dealing with Marxism, which all but dried up twenty-five years ago, is reviving in the global context. Academic and popular journals and even newspapers and on-line journalism are increasingly open to contributions on Marxism, just as there are now many international conferences, university courses and seminars on related themes. In all parts of the world, leading daily and weekly papers are featuring the contemporary relevance of Marx’s thought. From Latin America to Europe, and wherever the critique to capitalism is remerging, there is an intellectual and political demand for a new critical encounter with Marxism.

Types of Publications This series bring together reflections on Marx, Engels and Marxisms from perspectives that are varied in terms of political outlook, geographical base, academic methodologies and subject-matter, thus challenging many preconceptions as to what ‘Marxist’ thought can be like, as opposed to what it has been. The series will appeal internationally to intellectual communities that are increasingly interested in rediscovering v

vi   

Series Foreword

the most powerful critical analysis of capitalism: Marxism. The series editors will ensure that authors and editors in the series are producing overall an eclectic and stimulating yet synoptic and informative vision that will draw a very wide and diverse audience. This series will embrace a much wider range of scholarly interests and academic approaches than any previous ‘family’ of books in the area. This innovative series will present monographs, edited volumes and critical editions, including translations, to Anglophone readers. The books in this series will work through three main categories: Studies on Marx and Engels The series will include titles focusing on the oeuvre of Marx and Engels which utilize the scholarly achievements of the on-going Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, a project that has strongly revivified the research on these two authors in the past decade. Critical Studies on Marxisms Volumes will awaken readers to the overarching issues and world-changing encounters that shelter within the broad categorisation ‘Marxist’. Particular attention will be given to authors such as Gramsci and Benjamin, who are very popular and widely translated nowadays all over the world, but also to authors who are less known in the Englishspeaking countries, such as Mariátegui. Reception Studies and Marxist National Traditions Political projects have necessarily required oversimplifications in the twentieth century, and Marx and Engels have found themselves ‘made over’ numerous times and in quite contradictory ways. Taking a national perspective on ‘reception’ will be a global revelation and the volumes of this series will enable the worldwide Anglophone community to understand the variety of intellectual and political traditions through which Marx and Engels have been received in local contexts. Toronto, Canada Bristol, UK

Marcello Musto Terrell Carver

Series Foreword   

vii

Titles Published 1. Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014. 2.  Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach chapter,” 2014. 3. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism, 2015. 4. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A Critique of Marxism, 2016. 5. Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History, 2016. 6. Frederick Harry Pitts, Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx, 2017. 7. Ranabir Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age, 2017. 8. George Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, 2018. 9.  Jean-Numa Ducange and Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of the Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st Century, 2018. 10. Robert Ware, Marx on Emancipation and the Socialist Transition: Retrieving Marx for the Future, 2018. 11.  Xavier LaFrance and Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism, 2018. 12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, 2018.

Titles Forthcoming Vladimir Puzone and Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian Left in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral Capitalism. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Sabadini (Eds.), Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits: A Marxist Analysis. Michael Brie, Rediscovering Lenin: Dialectics of Revolution and Metaphysics of Domination. Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile: The Possibility of Social Critique. Spencer A. Leonard, Marx, the India Question, and the Crisis of Cosmopolitanism. Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature. Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Department of Political Science at the Radboud University Nijmegen for the translation of Yohan Dubigeon’s “A Theory of Council Democracy.” We also thank Olivier Ruchet for his excellent translation of this chapter. We are also grateful for the permission to republish material from the following works: Stephen Eric Bronner, “Persistent Memories of the German Revolution: The Jewish Activists of 1919,” New Politics (1995) 5 (2). Ralf Hoffrogge, Working Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Müller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement (London: Brill, 2014).

ix

Praise

for

The German Revolution and Political Theory

“This is a superb collection of essays covering the events of 1918–1920 in Germany from a wide variety of new perspectives. Light is shed on important figures such as Gustav Landauer and Rosa Luxemburg and, at the same time, original ideas about radical democracy and state building are discussed with scholarly detail and acute contemporary relevance. The book will be of great interest to students, academics, and activists seeking to learn more about modern German history, political theory, and strategies for the democratisation of society.” —Darrow Schecter, University of Sussex, UK, and author of Critical Theory & Sociological Theory (2019)

xi

Contents

The “Forgotten” German Revolution: A Conceptual Map 1 Gaard Kets and James Muldoon Part I  Rethinking the Revolution Women in the German Revolution 25 Helen L. Boak The German Revolution and the Radical Right 45 Robert Heynen Revolutionary Berlin: Fulcrum of the Twentieth Century 69 Donny Gluckstein Working-Class Politics in the Bremen Council Republic 91 Gaard Kets Revolutionary Principles and Strategy in the November Revolution: The Case of the USPD 113 Nicholas Vrousalis

xiii

xiv   

Contents

Part II  Political Theorists of the German Revolution Eduard Bernstein and the Lessons of the German Revolution 137 Marius S. Ostrowski Karl Kautsky and the Theory of Socialist Republicanism 159 Michael J. Thompson Democracy and Dictatorship: Rosa Luxemburg’s Path to Revolution 183 Mayra Cotta Richard Müller, Ernst Däumig and the “Pure” Council System 199 Ralf Hoffrogge Gustav Landauer and the Revolutionary Principle of Non-violent Non-cooperation 215 Christian Bartolf and Dominique Miething Persistent Memories: Jewish Activists and the German Revolution 237 Stephen Eric Bronner Part III The German Revolution in Contemporary Political Theory A Theory of Council Democracy 257 Yohan Dubigeon Insurgent Democracy and the German Councils 277 Paul Mazzocchi Forgotten Uprisings and Silent Dialogues: Hannah Arendt and the German Revolution 299 Shmuel Lederman

Contents   

xv

Rosa Luxemburg on the Dialectic of Spontaneous and Party Politics 319 Paulina Tambakaki The Birth of Council Communism 339 James Muldoon Index 361

List

of

Contributors

Christian Bartolf  Gandhi Information Center (Research and Education for Nonviolence), Berlin, Germany Helen L. Boak  University of Hertfordshire, Hertfordshire, UK Stephen Eric Bronner Department of Political Science, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA Mayra Cotta  New School for Social Research, New York, NY, USA Yohan Dubigeon  IEP (Sciences Po) Paris, Paris, France Donny Gluckstein  Edinburgh College, Edinburgh, UK Robert Heynen  York University, Toronto, ON, Canada Ralf Hoffrogge  Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany Gaard Kets Institute for Management Research, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Shmuel Lederman  The Weiss-Livnat International Center for Holocaust Research and Education, The University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel Paul Mazzocchi  York University, Toronto, ON, Canada Dominique Miething  Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany James Muldoon Department of Politics, University of Exeter, Penryn, UK xvii

xviii   

List of Contributors

Marius S. Ostrowski  All Souls College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Paulina Tambakaki Centre for the Study of Democracy, DPIR, University of Westminster, London, UK Michael J. Thompson  William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, USA Nicholas Vrousalis Institute of Political Science, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands; Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

The “Forgotten” German Revolution: A Conceptual Map Gaard Kets and James Muldoon

The German Revolution of 1918–1919 marks an important turning point in European politics, yet it remains neglected in historical scholarship. This oversight is surprising given its significant impact on the history of Europe and indeed the world. The revolution led to the end of the First World War, transformed the German Kaiserreich into a fledgling democratic republic, and created a spiral of conflict and violence that ultimately contributed to the rise of Nazism (Jones 2016, p. 4). The lack of popular memory of this historic event led a recent editor to name this political transformation of Germany the “Forgotten Revolution” (Gallus 2010). Older German textbooks often mention the defeat of Germany in the war and the establishment of the Weimar Republic without reference to the period of upheavals and political G. Kets  Institute for Management Research, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] J. Muldoon (*)  Department of Politics, University of Exeter, Penryn, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Kets and J. Muldoon (eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13917-9_1

1

2  G. KETS AND J. MULDOON

contestation that occurred in between (Pelz 2018, p. xix). What remains neglected is the key role a mass movement of soldiers and workers played in challenging the German Admiralty and bringing an end to the war. It was primarily through the political agency of ordinary people that Germany was transformed from an autocratic and deeply hierarchical society into a democratic republic with universal suffrage and social rights. However, the revolution was immediately overshadowed by the seismic events of the rise of Nazism and the Second World War. The centenary anniversary of the revolution offers an opportunity to reflect on this important event and to take stock of the significance of the revolution on the development of political thought. This book aims to examine the political theorists and actors of the German Revolution in order to assess their contribution to the history of political thought and to contemporary debates in political theory. The intention is to fill the current lacuna in historical knowledge of the political thought of this period. We claim that the German Revolution was a decisive event that challenged many of the assumptions of socialist thought and led to a wide range of new political strategies, theoretical insights and institutional proposals. Returning to the political events of the German Revolution enables a more nuanced understanding of the development of political thought during this era. It sheds light on important developments as they unfolded in Europe following the collapse of the Second International and the growing division of international socialist thought. It also broadens the terms of debate from a canonical set of socialist theorists (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky) to other important contributors to left-wing political thought. In geographic terms, it expands the focus of political analysis from the Russian Revolution to consider the widespread revolutionary struggles occurring across Europe from 1917 to 1923. Important political debates were occurring in Berlin, Bremen, Munich, Hamburg, Amsterdam and Vienna, which were all closely connected to political events as they unfolded in Germany and neighbouring states. It also challenges the view of “Orthodox Marxism” as a fixed and stable ideology characterised by economic determinism and teleological development. Re-examining debates between Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein and Rosa Luxemburg, among others, calls into question the view that the Second International had a single official doctrine that was widely accepted within the European socialist parties. In the early twentieth century, socialists across Europe expected Germany to spearhead the international revolution. With the largest and

THE “FORGOTTEN” GERMAN REVOLUTION: A CONCEPTUAL MAP 

3

most organised industrial working class in the world, Germany had been anticipated by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto to be the most likely starting point for a proletarian revolution. Germany was, in both strategic and symbolic terms, the centrepiece of socialist plans for ushering in an age of world revolution. Lenin (1965, p. 72) famously noted that “without revolution in Germany we shall perish.” Trotsky (1929) also considered that “[o]nly the victory of the proletariat in the West would protect Russia from bourgeois restoration and ensure the establishment of socialism.” The establishment of a democratic republic in Germany created a political order that was more democratic than any previous system in Germany. Yet the failure to achieve a socialist society had dramatic effects on the course of the Russian Revolution and the possibilities of the international spread of socialism. Arguably it was the defeat of the German Revolution rather than the success of the Russian that proved more influential over the development of Western Marxism, initiating a “dialectic of defeat” that generated a variety of alternative Marxisms (Jacoby 2002). From Antonio Gramsci to Karl Korsch, Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt School, the need to explain why socialist revolution had failed in Europe occupied a central position in their political analyses. The German Revolution was an unstable and contradictory period in which hopes for political transformation were intermingled with fears of violence and a longing for peace and stability. This book returns to this important event in order to examine its impact on the development of political thought.

Historical Introduction The extended suffering created by the First World War placed enormous pressure on the legitimacy of state governments, which eventually led to the fall of the Russian Tsar in February 1917. The rise of Bolshevism sent out shockwaves across Europe and threatened the military elite which had been governing Germany throughout the war. The year of 1918 witnessed a rapid intensification of political and social tensions in Germany that divided German society and led to increased pressure to end the war. While emperor Wilhelm II had appointed liberal aristocrat, Prince Max von Baden, as the new Chancellor to lead peace negotiations with the Allied Powers, the German Admiralty was vehemently opposed to an unconditional surrender. On 24 October 1918, Reinhardt Scheer,

4  G. KETS AND J. MULDOON

Chief of Naval Staff, issued an order for the navy fleet in Kiel to engage in a final Todesfahrt [suicide mission] against the superior British Royal Navy. The sailors in Kiel refused and mutinied against their officers, and were soon accompanied by revolutionary soldiers and workers. By the evening of 4 November 1918, the city of Kiel had been taken by the revolutionaries. What started as a localised mutiny quickly spread across the country through workers’ and soldiers’ councils and led to the abdication of the Kaiser and the declaration of a republic on 9 November 1918. Indicative of the divided nature of the revolutionary forces, two separate declarations were announced on the same day. The first was by Philipp Scheidemann of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) who pronounced Germany a republic from a window of the Reichstag in Berlin, against the wishes of politically conservative SPD party leader, Friedrich Ebert, who held hopes that the monarchy might still be preserved (Jones 2016, p. 13). The second declaration was by revolutionary socialist and member of the Spartacus League, Karl Liebknecht, who declared Germany a free socialist republic from the Royal Palace in the same city (Kuhn 2012, p. 27). The revolution took both the authorities and revolutionaries by surprise, leaving established political parties and trade unions struggling to come to terms with the rapid pace of unfolding events. It was initially met with praise by liberals and progressives, although there were also fears about the potential for violence and bloodshed. Theodor Wolff, liberal editor of the Berliner Tageblatt, wrote: The greatest of all revolutions, like a suddenly rising storm, has crushed the Imperial regime with everything that belonged to it, above and below. It can be called the greatest of all revolutions, because never has such a sturdily built, solidly walled Bastille been taken in such a siege. Only a week ago there was a military and civil administrative apparatus that was so branched, so interlinked, so deeply ingrained that it seemed to have secured its rule beyond the changing of times. The grey cars of the officers were speeding through the streets of Berlin, in the squares stood policemen like the pillars of power, a giant military organization seemed to embrace everything, a seemingly invincible bureaucracy sat enthroned in the offices and ministries. Yesterday morning, at least in Berlin, everything was still there. Yesterday afternoon, none of it existed anymore. (Wolff 1918)

THE “FORGOTTEN” GERMAN REVOLUTION: A CONCEPTUAL MAP 

5

Soldiers and workers had spontaneously formed councils, which held de facto power across the country during the initial weeks of the revolution. The day after the declaration of the republic, elections were held in the Circus Busch assembly hall, which led to the creation of two new institutions. The first was a Council of People’s Deputies, consisting of six deputies, which acted as a provisional government. The second was the Executive Council of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, which was chaired by Revolutionary Shop Steward Richard Müller, and represented the power that had developed within the council movements. The Executive Council had the authority to appoint and dismiss the six People’s Deputies and the right to supervise the operation of the ministries, but in practice, the Council of People’s Deputies assumed governmental functions and often disregarded resolutions made in the Executive Council. The growing discord between the moderate People’s Deputies, largely controlled by the SPD, and the more radical leaning Executive Council was the source of ongoing political tension. The primary political division of the progressive forces was between the SPD leadership, led by Friedrich Ebert, who sought to prevent the development of a more radical revolution along the lines of the Bolshevist model, and radical council delegates, who pushed for the democratisation and socialisation of the country. The SPD were influenced by the threat of a Bolshevisation of the German Revolution and a descent into what they called “Russian conditions” of violence and scarcity. On 9 November 1918, Ebert made a secret pact with General Groener to prevent more radical reforms in exchange for Ebert’s protection of the privileged position of the armed services. This deal was to prove decisive in the struggle over the future form of the German state and the relationship between the council movements and existing state authorities. Friedrich Ebert issued a statement on 10 November 1918 for all government officials to remain at their posts. In practice, various compromises were reached in different local settings between workers’ councils and local authorities, with the vast majority of officials remaining in place and many councils exercising only “control” functions over their activities. This meant that while the councils retained the right of a final say in the activities of government officials, in practice, these officials continued to carry out their work as before. The SPD and the radicals were divided over plans for the future German state. The Ebert leadership argued for the creation of a parliamentary republic without significant changes to the economic system

6  G. KETS AND J. MULDOON

or military. The radical delegates, on the other hand, advocated for power to be placed in a council system controlled by worker delegates with imperative mandates subject to immediate recall. They considered that more thoroughgoing measures of democratisation to the civil service, army and workplaces would be necessary to ensure the creation of a socialist republic. This question of “National Assembly or Council System” was to be decided at the First German Congress of Workers and Soldiers’ Councils, which commenced on 16 December 1918. The weeks between the start of the revolution in November 1918 and the National Congress in December 1918 are often characterised as the first phase of the German Revolution. When representatives from the councils met at the Congress, a large majority supported the Social Democrats’ policy of organising elections for a national parliament which were to take place on 19 January 1919. The provisional government had been divided between delegates of the majority faction SPD and a minor party, the Independent Socialist Party of Germany (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, USPD), which had split from the SPD during the war. Growing disputes between the SPD and USPD led to the USPD leaving the joint provisional government, which increased instability and led to more anti-government demonstrations in early January. The outcome of the Congress outraged radicals who thought that the revolution had been betrayed by the SPD leadership. In January 1919, many left radicals united in the newly founded German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD) and decided to boycott the upcoming parliamentary elections. This second phase of the revolution was characterised by bloody confrontations between the central government and revolutionaries. As part of the “Spartacus Uprisings” in January 1919, the Social Democrats’ newspaper office was occupied by armed workers leading Ebert’s government to issue orders to crush the rebellion with force. Several days later Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were arrested and killed by far-right paramilitary Freikorps that cooperated with government troops. It remains disputed the extent to which the SPD ordered or approved of these specific executions. In the National Assembly on 19 January 1919, a majority of voters supported non-socialist parties, although the SPD achieved the highest vote of any party with 163 seats and 37.9% of the vote. The assembly sat in Weimar to avoid the revolutionary tumult of Berlin and drafted a Constitution which came into effect in August 1919. The communists

THE “FORGOTTEN” GERMAN REVOLUTION: A CONCEPTUAL MAP 

7

regarded the revolution as derailed and betrayed and were dismayed by the role of the Social Democratic Party. The Social Democrats, on the other hand, also distanced themselves from the revolutionary origins of their government, in order to present themselves as a serious, mature governing party. Illustrative of this contested legacy of the German Revolution, Germany’s founding was never celebrated on the 9 November, but with a national Verfassungstag [Constitution Day] on 11 August, commemorating the day President Friedrich Ebert signed the new constitution in 1919 (Gallus 2010, p. 17).

Political Parties During the Revolution The political ideologies of participants in the German Revolution have not been unpacked with the same rigour and insight as other key historical eras. While differences between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks or the Federalists and anti-Federalists are well known in political theory, the same could not be said about the strategic and ideological differences between political parties and groups—the SPD, USPD, Spartacus League and Revolutionary Shop Stewards—who played significant roles in the German Revolution. The largest socialist party in Germany, the SPD, had split in 1916 over ongoing conflicts about the war in April 1914 into a majority group (the SPD) and a minority group (the USPD, founded in 1917). The USPD contained members who represented a broad constellation of radical political ideologies. At one end, the International Group (renamed Spartacus League on 11 November 1918) and left-wing radicals (Linksradikalen) from Bremen and Hamburg were formally members of the USPD, although they frequently organised independently of the party and split from the party on 31 December 1918 to form the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschland, KPD). The Revolutionary Shop Stewards were a group of organised labourers in Berlin, probably numbering 80–100, who were formally members of the USPD, but also acted independently. We identify six main ideological formations during the first weeks of the Revolution: 1. The pro-Russian Spartacus Group with the Bremen and Hamburg radicals 2. The Revolutionary Shop Stewards (left-wing USPD)

8  G. KETS AND J. MULDOON

3.  The Marxist “centre” of Karl Kautsky and Hugo Haase (right-wing USPD) 4. The Ebert-Scheidemann-led SPD 5. Liberal and progressive political parties 6. Conservative and restorative forces in support of the old Empire. The Spartacus League, whose most notable members included Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin, Paul Levi and Leo Jogiches, were a radical faction within the USPD who had opposed the war and organised anti-war protests and strikes. Their goal during the revolution was to create a council republic along the lines of the Bolshevik model. They called for the “replacement of all political organs and authorities of the former regime by delegates of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils” (Luxemburg 1918). Their programme at the outset of the revolution was to empower workers’ councils and act with haste to destroy the power base of the old elite. They believed that the realisation of socialism required widespread social and political transformation carried out by the masses. For this reason, they opposed the establishment of a national assembly as an attempt by the bourgeoisie to limit the ongoing spread of the revolution and hinder efforts to transform Germany into a socialist republic. On 20 November, The newspaper of the Spartacus League, Die Rote Fahne, published the following: The national assembly is a means to rob the proletariat of its power, to paralyze its class dynamics, and to let its socialist objective evaporate in blue haze. The alternative is to put all power into the hands of the proletariat, to turn the revolution into a decisive class struggle, and to pave the way for a socialist society. For this purpose, the political rule of the great masses of the workers, the dictatorship of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, has to be established. One is either for or against socialism, for or against the national assembly—there is no in between. (Quoted in Kuhn 2012, p. 71)

In contrast to the Spartacists, the left-wing radicals in Hamburg and Bremen had remained outside the USPD and in fact opposed the Spartacists who did join. The radicals organised around the journal Arbeiterpolitik (Workers’ Politics, founded in the summer of 1916). Its editor was Johann Knief who published articles of theorists such as Anton Pannekoek and Karl Radek. As a result, the radicals were weary of disciplined and centralised party leadership and instead advocated

THE “FORGOTTEN” GERMAN REVOLUTION: A CONCEPTUAL MAP 

9

independent, bottom-up working-class action and thought. Instead of party and union, the International Communists of Germany (Internationale Kommunisten Deutschlands, IKD), as the group called itself from 10 November 1918 onwards) called for the creation of “unity organisations” that combined party and union in one. During the first month of the revolution, this led to a distance between the Spartacists and radicals, until they finally decided to merge in the final days of 1918 (Engel 2017). The Revolutionary Shop Stewards held a similar position to the Spartacus League insofar as they also advocated for the establishment of a council republic, but there were differences in their approach to tactics and strategy. Karl Liebknecht criticised the Stewards for meeting secretly, acting as an underground group and failing to publicise their revolutionary activities. In turn, the Stewards argued that they had an organised base of workers who they could turn out to protests, whereas the Spartacus League lacked a strong following among the workers and consistently failed to mobilise large numbers of workers (Müller 2012a, p. 78; Jones 2016, p. 82). The Revolutionary Shop Stewards were strongly rooted in the factory floors and among an organised and skilled section of the workers, particularly metal workers, who had proved significant in revolutionary actions in Berlin. With notable members including Richard Müller, Ernst Däumig and Emil Barth, the Stewards held one seat on the Council of People’s Delegates (Barth) and the chair of the Executive Council (Müller). They issued their political programme on 17 November 1918, which set out the following guidelines for the revolution: Workers and soldiers have removed the old governmental system. In the revolutionary organization of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils the new state power is taking shape. This power must be secured and expanded so that the achievements of the revolution will benefit the entire working class. This cannot happen by transforming the German state into a bourgeois democratic republic. The German state has to become a proletarian republic on the grounds of a socialist economy. The wish of the bourgeoisie to elect and install a national assembly as soon as possible is destined to rob the workers of the fruits of the revolution. (Müller 2012b, p. 33)

While the Spartacus League never developed institutional designs of a council system, Müller and Däumig produced a number of models

10  G. KETS AND J. MULDOON

during 1919 for a “pure” council system, which they published in their journal, Der Arbeiter-Rat (The Workers’ Council) among other publications (Hoffrogge 2014, p. 109). The council system was intended to replace liberal parliamentary institutions with a dual system of economic and political councils that would be organised in a pyramidal scheme. They argued that the current revolutionary workers’ councils could become state institutions which would only be open to workers and would represent the dominance of the working class. The USPD contained another faction represented by Hugo Haase, Karl Kautsky and Rudolf Hilferding. This right-wing faction with the USPD split with the SPD, but did not support the establishment of a full council system. They supported a national assembly, but also saw a role for the workers’ councils in a parliamentary republic. Hilferding argued that a continuation of a council system would exclude other classes from participation in government and was not a superior alternative to universal suffrage and parliamentary democracy. The council system suffered from problems of democratic exclusion with peasants, the unemployed, women engaged in unpaid labour and some professions excluded from decision-making. He also argued that in strategic terms it would likely lead to terror and civil war. In “National Assembly and Council Assembly,” Karl Kautsky also argued for the benefits of elections with universal suffrage to a national assembly, but saw an ongoing role for workers’ councils in a parliamentary republic: it is no less important that the popular masses energetically participate in this activity, strengthening the power of the representatives in parliament and spurring on their zeal with constant pressure from without. … Moreover, the workers councils are uniquely competent to safeguard proletariat class interests … the actual workers’ councils would retain important political functions. … Therefore it is not a question of either national assembly or workers councils, but both. (Kautsky 1986, pp. 100–101)

Kautsky believed that workers’ councils would establish an important basis for institutionalised pressure from below on parliamentary institutions in addition to advocating for the interests of workers. The right-wing USPD supported socialisation, but argued for a more cautious approach than the Spartacus League and emphasised the need for careful planning and an increase in overall levels of production. Yet during the revolution, this group exercised little influence as they were

THE “FORGOTTEN” GERMAN REVOLUTION: A CONCEPTUAL MAP 

11

isolated between moderates and radicals with only a limited connection to organised workers. The party that exercised the most decisive influence over the course of the revolution was the SPD. Led by Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann, the SPD controlled three of the seats of the Council of People’s Deputies and a majority of delegates who attended the National Congress in December 1918. The following pamphlet details their support for elections to a national assembly: Every day that delays the constituent national assembly also delays peace, prolongs the occupation of German territory, and deepens the food crisis. If we want bread, we need peace. If we want peace, we need the constituent national assembly and freely elected representatives of the German people. Peace, freedom, and bread were the goals of the proletarian uprising of November 9. Peace, freedom, and bread were the demands that brought victory. Those who prevent the constituent national assembly from forming rob the workers of peace, freedom, and bread; they take away the immediate fruits of the revolution; they are counterrevolutionaries. (Quoted in Kuhn 2012, p. 66)

Their goal was for the return to peace and order through a parliamentary democracy supported by independent trade unions, but with little change to the army, civil service of workplaces. They sought to avoid comprehensive structural reforms and opted instead for limited social reforms such as an 8-hour workday, unemployment benefits and increased protections for labourers. The SPD strove to direct the election away from revolutionary transformation and “as rapidly as possible into the calmer channel of an election campaign” (Kolb 1988, p. 11). The SPD were supported by the liberal and progressive parties of the middle class who saw the SPD as the best vehicle to deliver parliamentary elections and to avoid more thoroughgoing economic reforms. There were a number of liberal and progressive parties who changed their name immediately after the revolution. Parts of the National Liberal Party and the Progressive People’s Party combined to form the German People’s Party, while other members of these groups formed the German Democratic Party. The liberal parties all supported calls for a national election and opposed the continuation of the workers’ councils. Richard Müller noted that “they demanded quiet, order, security, individual freedom, freedom of conscience, protection of private property, protection of the middle class, etc.” (Müller 2012b, p. 72).

12  G. KETS AND J. MULDOON

There was a strong influence of neo-Kantian philosophy among liberals as well as social democrats, which had developed in academic circles. According to this ideology, workers were new citizens that were given control over their lives through new rights of self-government. The Weimar Republic was based on the enlightenment ideals associated with this body of thought, which conceived of citizens as endowed with certain rights and responsibilities. Carl Lindow wrote in Vorwärts on 22 December 1918 of the “Revolution Verpflichtet!” [duty-bound Revolution]: “Restrictions, to which one voluntarily decides, bear only half the weight of forced ones. Therefore be moderate with wage demands!” (Lindow 1918). There was an expectation among liberals that workers would become new citizens able to participate in a system of self-governance and self-control (Föllmer 2018). One strategy of the liberal bourgeoisie was to develop councils, committees and interest groups that mimicked the revolutionary forms of organisation of the working class. Although the main aim of most of these organisations was to steer the revolution towards a national assembly and to resist the power of the radical workers’ councils, there were groups of liberals and democrats that were genuinely concerned with democratising German politics and saw a future for councils in the new German state (Bieber 1992). Other centrist and right-leaning parties also stood for election to the National Assembly. The SPD joined into a coalition with the German Democratic Party and the German Centre Party to form the first government of the Weimar era. Richard Müller argued that there was a degree of opportunism in the actions of many of the liberal and centrist parties at the time: Only four weeks before the revolution, these people still opposed general, equal, and secret suffrage. Suddenly, their love for equal rights and democracy—the ‘fundamental rights of the people’—knew no boundaries. This, of course, included dramatic demands to respect their own rights as “equals”; after all, each citizen had a right to express his opinion in speech and writing. (Müller 2012b, p. 72)

Finally, there were still groups within Germany that held restorative ambitions and supported the monarchy and the old institutions and values of the German Empire. The German National People’s Party drew supporters from rural populations but also conservative forces in Germany’s eastern provinces. It was supported by the large industrialists

THE “FORGOTTEN” GERMAN REVOLUTION: A CONCEPTUAL MAP 

13

and Junkers and also catered to anti-Semitic sentiment in the middle classes. Although it outwardly supported a parliamentary republic in 1918, during 1919 it quickly cemented into an anti-Weimar party.

Historiography of the German Revolution There are a number of early German studies on the revolution dating from the 1920s (Bernstein 1921; Gutmann 1922; Müller 1924–1925). However, after the 1920s, studies of the German Revolution suffered a significant decline. In the years up to and immediately following the Second World War, the revolution in Germany remained a largely neglected topic of research for historians. Walter Tormin’s (1954) excellent study remains an exception. He argued that the takeover of power by Bolsheviks had never been a serious danger in Germany and that the councils were actually an attempt to radically democratise German society. In the 1960s, historians such as Kolb (1962), Oertzen (1963) and Rürup (1968) began to demonstrate that the German revolutionaries were animated not by a desire to follow the example of the Russian Revolution, but to democratise authority structures and increase citizen control over social institutions. The wave of publications in the 1960s coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the councils and was inspired by the growth of the student and democratic movements at the time. These publications sought new interpretations of the revolutionary movements as a way of exploring different possibilities for democratic socialist politics. However, after this short burst of publications, there was again a decline in historical scholarship. With the exception of a few important studies by Ulrich Kluge (1975), Wolfgang Mommsen (1978) and Heinrich August Winkler (1984), there has only been a recent revival of historical interest in the German Revolution (Niess 2013; Führer et al. 2013). Ralf Hoffrogge (2014) published a groundbreaking study of Richard Müller and the Revolutionary Shop Stewards. Mark Jones (2016) examined the role of fear and violence in the German Revolution, with a meticulous study of newspapers and egodocuments written during the events. William A. Pelz (2018) highlighted the important role played by ordinary citizens in the uprising and has stressed that the council movements were animated by the passions and desires of everyday workers. With the centenary of the revolution in 2018, the revolutionary events of 1918–1919 will inevitably be viewed from a new historical lens. Some interesting new

14  G. KETS AND J. MULDOON

pathways for historical research are the issue of gender and the revolutionary subject, questions of media and communications, and questions of culture, symbolism and rhetoric in the revolution (Stalmann 2016). However, little of this historical research on the German Revolution has focussed specifically on the political theories of the Revolution or examined its contribution to contemporary debates.

Structure of the Book The book is divided into three parts reflecting different thematic concerns. The first part contains chapters that offer a new historical perspective on the revolution, seeking to open new issues up to theoretical analysis. The chapters in this part analyse topics and areas traditionally overlooked within the historiography. For example, the German Revolution is often told (by men) as a tale of a male revolutionary subject, which overlooks women’s important contribution to revolutionary events. In the first chapter, Helen Boak seeks to divert attention away from the focus on male revolutionary leaders and politicians by examining the crucial role of women in revolutionary events. The chapter investigates the role of activist women in Berlin, Munich, Brunswick; as well as women in the Spartacus Group, later the German Communist Party, and the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. It also considers women’s action as part of large street protests and in middle-class women’s associations. The overall objective is to provide women with a more prominent place in the historical narrative of the German Revolution. Robert Heynen contends that the German Revolution gave rise to new forms of organising on the radical right through the role of rightwing paramilitary units (Freikorps) in suppressing the revolutionary socialists. The political violence which followed from this event was shaped by the homosocial and profoundly misogynist culture of the right, which had roots in a longer colonial history. German colonialist narratives were bound up with anti-socialist discourse and found powerful expression in the revolutionary period of 1918–1921. With many of the Freikorps having served in colonial wars, the radical right movements adopted quasi-exterminationist political, economic and biopolitical strategies towards the left, while at the same time attempting to form a new “socialism” for the right. The significance of the German Revolution is also often downplayed as a betrayed revolution which failed to have a significant influence on

THE “FORGOTTEN” GERMAN REVOLUTION: A CONCEPTUAL MAP 

15

world events. Donny Gluckstein argues that the German Revolution had a decisive impact on twentieth-century European politics and should also be given a greater prominence in the development of socialist political thought. At the centre of the German Revolution, he argues, was organised metalworkers in Berlin. He returns to events as they unfolded in factories in Berlin and examines the role of Revolutionary Shop Stewards in organising workers and striving towards a council republic. Gluckstein claims that it was the defeat of the so-called “Spartacist putsch” involving communists against the Social Democratic-backed military forces that sealed the fate of Germany’s revolution. Political narratives of the revolution also focus on events in Berlin without adequate examination of other political struggles that occurred outside the capital, which were shaped by their own local histories and political divisions. Gaard Kets analyses the minutes of meetings of councils in Bremen in addition to eyewitness accounts and newspaper coverage to examine the early experiences of council delegates and the self-conceptualisation of their political activities. Kets demonstrates that the development of council communist ideology emerged along three sets of political questions: firstly, how should the councils function, particularly in relation to other political institutions? Secondly, how should the demos be constituted? Thirdly, what should be the structure of a post-revolutionary society? The chapter shows that initially workers and soldiers came to their own conclusions with only limited influence from party theorists and intellectuals. The political conflict that occurred between the SPD leadership and the Spartacus Group is well known, but more research is needed on the politics of the USPD, whose factions and political conflicts have received far less attention within the scholarship. Nicholas Vrousalis undertakes a reassessment of the principles and strategies of the USPD during the revolution. Following Arthur Rosenberg, he argues that a third option outside of the “national assembly versus council republic” debate was possible in November 1918, which he labels “council Erfurtianism.” This consisted of a parliament sitting alongside workers councils with universal suffrage, an eight-hour day and protections of civil rights. The right wing of the USPD (Haase, Hilferding, Kautsky) supported such a programme and did not hold as many substantive differences of principle with the left wing of the USPD as has usually been assumed. Vrousalis contends that such differences were mainly over political strategy rather than a vision of a post-capitalist society. In addition, he argues

16  G. KETS AND J. MULDOON

that USPD Left and Right shared a conception of revolutionary principles which differentiated them both from the Bolsheviks. The historical contextualisation of the political experiences of the early council movements that occurs in the first part of the book serves as a valuable building block for the later theoretical chapters. Part II of the book analyses the theoretical contribution of key socialist theorists in Germany with a particular focus on their writings during and around the German Revolution. In the cases of Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky, the issue is that their contributions to the politics of the German Revolution have been overlooked even while both are recognised as important political figures within the socialist movement. Bernstein has traditionally been seen to have said little of originality or significance after the “reform or revolution” debates of the 1890s, while Kautsky has been dismissed by revolutionary socialists as a “renegade” and liberal by the time of the German Revolution. Both of these assumptions are challenged. In this part, we also republish an important contribution analysing the overlooked political group, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards, and their theorisation of a council system during the German Revolution. Rosa Luxemburg’s writings are mined for her insights into revolutionary strategy based on an analysis of her writings on the Russian and German revolutions. Gustav Landauer and other Jewish intellectuals also receive treatment in this part for their role as leading political theorists of the revolution. Marius Ostrowski demonstrates that Eduard Bernstein played a central role in the German Revolution, which re-ignited old questions of “reform or revolution” that had split the social democratic movement since the 1890s. Bernstein was a treasury minister in the interim Council of People’s Deputies during the early days of the revolution and published several theoretical and historical works after the revolution reflecting on its consequences. Ostrowski argues that Bernstein made several advances on his early reformism but maintained a consistent position of opposition to violent revolution and preference for a gradualist approach to social and political reform. The chapter outlines Bernstein’s (highly prophetic) admonitory comments regarding the threats facing the Republic, and suggests that similar concerns continue to confront progressive politics today. Michael J. Thompson returns to Karl Kautsky’s theory of a socialist republic developed in a number of texts during the German Revolution. He defends Kautsky’s vision of a socialist republic and compares it to

THE “FORGOTTEN” GERMAN REVOLUTION: A CONCEPTUAL MAP 

17

contemporary theories of radical democracy, finding Kautsky’s theory a more robust and compelling alternative. He also defends Kautsky’s idea of the “democratic-proletarian method” as a means for social transformation and the democratisation of society and state. The chapter ends with a critique of postmodern theories of radical democracy and defends a return to class as a means to reanimate socialist political theory. Mayra Cotta argues that Luxemburg’s central theoretical contribution during the German Revolution was to outline a method of revolutionary transformation in which the socialist revolution was understood not merely as a struggle for institutional power, but as the construction of a new way of life and new cultural understandings which would guarantee the liberation of a people’s “spirit.” Rather than envisaging the revolution as a single act, Luxemburg imagined a long process of economic and social change in which an active and mobilised population would overthrow the bourgeois social order and create new institutional and cultural forms for a post-capitalist society. For this process not to collapse into civil war or counter-revolution, it was essential for Luxemburg that it be carried out by a majority of workers with a commitment to basic political freedoms and democratic socialist institutions. Ralf Hoffrogge offers an overview of the activities of the Revolutionary Shop Stewards within the council movements and reconstructs the theoretical model of council socialism outlined by Richard Müller and Ernst Däumig in their newspaper, Der Arbeiter-Rat [The Workers’ Council], established in February 1919. Hoffrogge explores their writings on a “pure council system” which were developed out of the practices of the workers’ councils. These writings constitute the first attempt to sketch a lasting institutionalisation of the council system as an alternative to parliamentary democracy. Christian Bartolf and Dominique Miething examine a long tradition of non-violent non-cooperation which stretches back to Étienne de La Boétie’s conceptualisation of the problem of “voluntary servitude” and which finds expression in Kurt Eisner’s organising efforts for the Bavarian Revolution of 1918 and in Gustav Landauer’s leading role in the Munich Council Republic of April 1919. In addition to analysing its influence over revolutionary events in southern Germany, Bartolf and Miething trace the evolution of the concept and the strong impact it had on the “No-More-War” movement in the early 1920s, particularly through Carl von Ossietzky and Kurt Tucholsky’s activities and the writings of Ernst Toller and Erich Mühsam.

18  G. KETS AND J. MULDOON

Stephen Eric Bronner analyses the role of Jewish writers and activists in the revolutionary events of 1918–1919, including Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches, Paul Levi, Gustav Landauer, Erich Mühsam, Ernst Toller and Eugen Leviné. The visibility of these Jewish intellectuals during the revolution prompted right-wing ideas of a “Jewish-Bolshevik” conspiracy and the association of the Weimar regime with a “Jew Republic.” Bronner contends that the German Revolution and its direct aftermath was a catalyst for the intensification of anti-Semitism in Germany. This chapter traces the contributions of Jewish intellectuals in this contested and increasingly violent environment. The third and final part attempts to connect the theories and practices of political groups in the German Revolution to contemporary debates in political theory with a particular focus on the political experience of workers’ councils. Chapters examine the influence of insurgent democratic practices of the council movements on subsequent political thinkers. Part III also contains an analysis of the development of forms of council communism based on thinkers inspired by the workers’ and soldiers’ councils. Yohan Dubigeon identifies three constitutive levels of a theoretical model of council democracy drawn from the experiences of councilist forms of politics. The chapter first addresses the political dimension of the organisation of the councils as they arose in Germany and Russia. It then reflects on the strategic reasons for the collapse of councils, arguing for three different grounds in a fetishism of the form (Paris Commune), instrumentalisation (Russian soviets) and institutionalisation (German councils). Finally, the legacy of the councils of the German Revolution raises the problem of organisation and the shifting articulation between substitutionism and spontaneity in the relation between a revolutionary movement and its political organisations. Paul Mazzocchi interprets the German Revolution through Miguel Abensour’s theory of insurgent democracy, and in the context of two major criticisms of radical democratic theory. Insurgent democracy posits a radical version of democracy that exists against the state and is founded in the emergence of a subject (the demos) asserting its political capacity. But two persistent and interlinked criticisms are levelled against this type of vision of democracy: it is inattentive to institutions and it lacks a mechanism for maintaining its radical or insurgent nature. Mazzocchi claims that Abensour responds to these criticisms through a reconceptualisation of institution and an exploration of the possibility of an

THE “FORGOTTEN” GERMAN REVOLUTION: A CONCEPTUAL MAP 

19

institutional right to insurrection. Drawing on these insights, this chapter reflects on the German Revolution from the perspective of an “insurgent institution” which, by producing a sens (meaning and direction) to revolt, acts as the condition of possibility of revolutionary action. Shmuel Lederman examines the distinctive influence of the German Revolution on Arendt through various personal and intellectual connections. He suggests that despite its relative absence in Arendt’s writings, it constituted an important part of a broader “silent dialogue” Arendt had with the European socialist left. Through interaction with a number of historical sources, Arendt implicitly incorporated various aspects of socialist and councilist thought into her reflections on modern revolutions while reframing them to fit her own political theory. Paulina Tambakaki places Rosa Luxemburg in dialogue with contemporary theorists of radical democracy. She distinguishes between two approaches to spontaneous politics, as moment and as beginning, and identifies their limits. She argues that whereas the first approach (exemplified in the work of Wolin and Rancière) empties spontaneous politics of its creative potential, the second approach (exemplified in the work of Hardt and Negri) asserts the creativity of spontaneous politics, yet reduces it to one form: self activity. Seeking to escape the narrowness of these two projections of radical democracy, the paper turns to Rosa Luxemburg’s work. It argues that in the synthesis she draws between spontaneity and organisation, reform and revolution, there is a compelling third option for radical politics. In the final chapter, James Muldoon demonstrates the pivotal importance of the German Revolution on the development of council communist thought, which retains a small but persistent influence over radical political theory. The chapter claims that differences between the Bolsehviks and “left” or “council” communists emerged initially through questions of revolutionary strategy for Europe and only later through a critique of the centralisation and bureaucratisation of the Russian Revolution. This chapter also traces a shift in theorists’ understanding of workers’ councils during and after the German Revolution. It argues that while participants in the revolution such as the Revolutionary Shop Stewards were more inclined to view the councils as the initial structures of a post-capitalist society, this shifted in the later council communist ideology towards a more open principle of workers’ self-emancipation. Contributors to this volume all seek to rejuvenate interest in the German Revolution and its influence on the development of political

20  G. KETS AND J. MULDOON

thought. While there are disagreements between authors on the importance of particular political strategies and the causes of political divisions, there is a general consensus on the value of returning to the partially forgotten political debates of this period. The volume shows that the German Revolution functioned as a catalyst for the development of innovative political thought and practice and remains an important touchstone for certain political projects today. The notable research presented in the following chapters serves not only as proof of the value of the German Revolution for political theory over the past hundred years, but will hopefully open up pathways for further research.

References Bernstein, Eduard. 1921. Die deutsche Revolution von 1918/19. Geschichte der Entstehung und ersten Arbeitsperiode der deutschen Republik. Berlin: Verlag für Gesellschaft und Erziehung. Bieber, Hans-Joachim. 1992. Bürgertum in der Revolution: Bürgerräte und Bürgerstreiks in Deutschland 1918–1920. Hamburg: Christians. Engel, Gerhard. 2017. The International Communists of Germany, 1916–1919. In Weimar Communism as Mass Movement 1918–1932, ed. Ralf Hoffrogge and Norman LaPorte, 25–44. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Föllmer, Moritz. 2018. The Unscripted Revolution: Male Subjectivities in Germany, 1918/19. Past & Present 241: 161–192. Führer, Karl Christian, Jürgen Mittag, Axel Schildt, and Klaus Tenfelde (eds.). 2013. Revolution und Arbeiterbewegung in Deutschland 1918–1920. Essen: Klartext. Gallus, Alexander (ed.). 2010. Die vergessene Revolution von 1918/19 Erinnerung und Deutung im Wandel. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Gutmann, Franz. 1922. Das Rätesystem: Seine Verfechter und seine Probleme. München: Drei Masken Verlag. Hoffrogge, Ralf. 2014. Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Müller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movements. Leiden: Brill. Jacoby, Russell. 2002. Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, Mark. 2016. Founding Weimar: Violence and the German Revolution of 1918–1919. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kautsky, Karl. 1986. National Assembly and Council Assembly. In The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power, ed. John Riddell, 94–107. New York: Anchor Foundation.

THE “FORGOTTEN” GERMAN REVOLUTION: A CONCEPTUAL MAP 

21

Kluge, Ulrich. 1975. Soldatenräte und Revolution. Studien zur Militärpolitik in Deutschland 1918/19. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Kolb, Eberhard. 1962. Die Arbeiterräte in Der Deutschen Innenpolitik, 1918– 1919. Düsseldorf: Kommission für Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien. Kolb, Eberhard. 1988. The Weimar Republic. London: Routledge. Kuhn, Gabriel (ed.). 2012. All Power to the Councils! A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918–1919. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Lenin, Vladimir I. 1965. Collected Works, Vol. 27, February–July 1918. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Lindow, Carl. 1918. Revolution Verpflichtet! Vorwärts 35, 351, 22 December 1918. Luxemburg, Rosa. 1918. What Does the Spartacus League Want. Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/14.htm. Mommsen, Wolfgang J. 1978. Die Deutsche Revolution 1918/19. Geschichte und Gesellschaft 4 (3): 362–391. Müller, Richard. 1924–1925. Vom Kaiserreich zur Republik. Wien: Malik. Müller, Richard. 2012a. Revolutionary Gymnastics. In All Power to the Councils!, ed. Gabriel Kuhn. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Müller, Richard. 2012b. Report by the Executive Council of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils of Great Berlin. In All Power to the Councils!, ed. Gabriel Kuhn. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Niess, Wolfgang. 2013. Die Revolution Von 1918/19 in Der Deutschen Geschichtsschreibung. Deutungen Von Der Weimarer Republik Bis Ins 21. Jahrhundert. Berlin and Boston: Gruyter. Oertzen, Peter von. 1963. Betriebsräte in Der Novemberrevolution. Eine Politikwissenschaftliche Untersuchung Über Ideengehalt Und Struktur Der Betrieblichen Und Wirtschaftlichen Arbeiterräte in Der Deutschen Revolution 1918/19. Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag. Pelz, William A. 2018. A People’s History of the German Revolution. London: Pluto Press. Rürup, Reinhard. 1968. Probleme Der Revolution in Deutschland 1918/19. Wiesbaden: Steiner. Stalmann, Volker. 2016. Die Wiederentdeckung Der Revolution Von 1918/19: Forschungsstand Und Forschungsperspektiven. Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 64 (6): 521–541. Tormin, Walter. 1954. Zwischen Rätediktatur Und Sozialer Demokratie: Die Geschichte Der Rätebewegung in Der Deutschen Revolution 1918/19. Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag. Trotsky, Leon. 1929. The Permanent Revolution. Accessed at https://www. marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/index.htm.

22  G. KETS AND J. MULDOON Winkler, Heinrich August. 1984. Von der Revolution zur Stabilisierung. Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimar Republik 1918 bis 1924. Berlin and Bonn: JHW Dietz Nachf. Wolff, Theodor. 1918. Der Erfolg Der Revolution. Berliner Tageblatt und Handels-Zeitung 47: 576, 10 November 1918.

PART I

Rethinking the Revolution

Women in the German Revolution Helen L. Boak

In the early hours of Saturday, 9 November 1918, Cläre CasperDerfert, a manual worker and member of Germany’s Independent Social Democratic Party (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, USPD) who had been on the Action Committee during the January 1918 strike, woke up a fellow party member, Arthur Schöttler, with the words, “Get up, Arthur, today is revolution!” They had been tasked with distributing leaflets to workers going into the first shift at the munitions factory on Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee in Charlottenburg, Berlin, asking them to down tools at 9 a.m., and join a demonstration into the city centre (Glatzer and Glatzer 1983, pp. 434–435; Fritzsche 1998, p. 85). They were to join thousands of other workers, soldiers and sailors converging on the city in processions, which included, observers noted, large numbers of women and children (Fritzsche 1998, p. 86; Blücher 1920, p. 281). The presence of large numbers of proletarian women among the marchers would have come as no surprise to the authorities, who would have become accustomed to women protesting publicly about the deficiencies in the food provisioning system from late October 1915, and participating in the waves H. L. Boak (*)  University of Hertfordshire, Hertfordshire, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Kets and J. Muldoon (eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13917-9_2

25

26  H. L. BOAK

of strikes that shook German industry in spring 1917 and January 1918 (Davis 2000; Stibbe 2010, pp. 52–53). Benjamin Ziemann has, however, claimed that “[w]hen the revolution came in 1918, its gender was male” and, indeed, the historiography of the German revolution is overwhelmingly male, with the notable exception of Rosa Luxemburg (Ziemann 2011, p. 387). And yet, it is now over forty years since Bill Pelz claimed that if it had not been for proletarian women, “there might have been no revolution in Germany” (Dunayevskaya 1996, p. 85). This paper seeks to explore women’s role in the German revolution of 1918/1919. The fact that women participated in the German revolution of 1918/19 is evident from memoirs, eye-witness accounts and photographs, although it is also clear that few women obtained positions of power during the revolution and hence are absent from many political accounts. Some women were activists, while others were enthusiastic bystanders and, of course, there were many women from the middle and upper classes anxiously watching events unfold, fearful that their property might be attacked. Evelyn, Princess Blücher, from her house near the Brandenburg Gate “with its iron blinds pulled down and doors locked” watched from the one open window on 9 November: when at about two o’clock a perfect avalanche of humanity began to stream by our windows, walking quietly enough, many of them carrying red flags. I noticed the pale gold of young girls’ uncovered heads, as they passed by with only a shawl over their shoulders. It seemed so feminine and incongruous, under the folds of those gruesome red banners flying over them. One can never imagine these pale northern women helping to build up barricades and screaming and raging for blood. (Blücher 1920, p. 280)

The last sentence is, of course, how she envisaged a revolution, and the Germans had been expecting a revolution for months, and many expected it to be violent (Davis 2000, pp. 97, 118–119, 229, 234; Jones 2016, p. 72). The fact that the uprising started with a sailors’ mutiny in Kiel came as a surprise, but very quickly the revolution spread across the coastal towns and cities of Northern Germany, often facilitated by the arrival of groups of revolutionary sailors and soldiers. The format seemed to be the same everywhere: strikes would be called, mass demonstrations held and workers’ and soldiers’ councils set up. Public buildings were occupied and political prisoners freed; policemen and loyal troops were

WOMEN IN THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

27

disarmed and the councils took over the administration (Bouton 1921, pp. 142–143; Storer 2013, p. 33). There were reports from Kiel that common criminals, including sexually infected prostitutes and the mentally ill, had been freed, too (Jones 2016, p. 76). The revolution was not the work of a single, uniform movement sweeping all before it, though a social democratic delegate to the Soldiers’ Council Congress of Württemberg on 17 November 1918 acknowledged that the Independent Socialists, aided in part by the Spartacists, had been the revolution’s shock troops (Berlin 1979, p. 170). The USPD had been formed in April 1917 by former members of the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD), who had been expelled because of their failure to support the party’s backing for the war and the war credits; the Spartacists were an independent, loose grouping of revolutionary socialists within the USPD who believed that the SPD had betrayed international socialism in August 1914 (Morgan 1975). Ernst Toller later wrote: The people wanted peace but what they got was power which fell into their hands without a struggle. The people shouted for Socialism, yet they had no clear conception of what Socialism should be […]. They knew well enough what they did not want; but they had little idea of what they did want. (Toller 1934, pp. 133–135)

Days of Revolution The revolution spread swiftly—Hamburg, Bremen, Wilhelmshaven, Rostock on 6 November, Hannover, Braunschweig, Cologne, Munich on 7 November, and Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Dresden, Leipzig and Magdeburg on 8 November and the early days of revolution witnessed little violence, after troops had misguidedly opened fire on protesters, including women and children, in Kiel on 3 November, killing seven and injuring 29. A woman also died, having fallen under a tram (Lindau 1960, pp. 228–230; Harman 1997, p. 42). Mark Jones claims that five people died in Hamburg and none in Munich (Jones 2015, p. 38). In Berlin the authorities were doing their utmost to stave off the revolution. The SPD, part of Prince Max von Baden’s government since early October, publicly emphasised the achievements of the October reforms which included the ending of Prussia’s three-tier election system and making the Chancellor and government responsible to the Reichstag, the

28  H. L. BOAK

national parliament, while stressing to their cabinet colleagues that unless the Kaiser abdicated there would be revolution, which Friedrich Ebert, their leader, claimed to “hate like sin” (Harman 1997, p. 42; Smaldone 2009, p. 3). Military presence was strengthened, rail links between Berlin and Hamburg and Hannover were cut, and telephone and telegraph communications interrupted (Bouton 1921, p. 151; Luban 2009). But it was to be the mass of workers asked to strike on the morning of 9 November who were to bring the revolution to Berlin. On 8 November, Revolutionary Shops Stewards from the metal industry met with representatives of the USPD, to finalise arrangements for the general strike and demonstration the next day. Lucie Gottschar-Heimburg, a youth leader, was present and allocated to one of the processions. After the meeting, she went with others to a local pub on Alexanderplatz and was shown how to take apart and clean a revolver and then to load it. At first, they were reluctant to give girls guns, she said, but she was eventually given a revolver (Glatzer and Glatzer 1983, p. 428). The procession containing Cläre Casper-Derfert, who after handing out leaflets went to a local pub and helped unpack guns and put cartridges into magazines, marched to the Reichstag, joined briefly en route from the Brandenburg Gate by the artist Käthe Kollwitz (Glatzer and Glatzer 1983, p. 434; Fritzsche 1998, pp. 42–43). Another group, with the Spartacist leader Karl Liebknecht at its head, walked to the Imperial Palace, while yet another, with the Independent Socialist Emil Eichhorn at its head, marched on police headquarters, where a woman, Helene Zirkel, raised the red flag (Luban 2009; Grebing 1994, p. 6). The processions had armed men at the front, furnished with guns and rifles, many bought with Russian funding, then unarmed men, then women and children (Glatzer and Glatzer 1983, p. 434). While the demonstrators had taken over the streets, facing little or no opposition, changes were taking place at the heart of government. Prince Max von Baden handed over the Chancellorship to the SPD’s Friedrich Ebert and that afternoon, at 2 p.m., his colleague Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the Kaiser’s abdication and that Germany was now a Republic to the crowds amassed before the Reichstag. Two hours later Karl Liebknecht, the Spartacist leader, proclaimed the Free Socialist Republic of Germany from the Imperial Palace (Harman 1997, pp. 44–45). Ebert set about forming a government, the Council of People’s Representatives, composed of three members of the SPD and three of the USPD, “men who enjoy the trust of the working

WOMEN IN THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

29

people in the cities and in the countryside, of workers and soldiers”; the government would remain in power until a Constituent Assembly could be elected (Vorwärts 1918). Karl Liebknecht, invited to join the Council, refused when his demand that “power should reside exclusively in the hands of elected representatives of the entire working population and soldiers” was rejected (Glatzer and Glatzer 1983, pp. 458–459). The next day, following elections held in the morning, representatives of workers’ and soldiers’ councils met at the Circus Busch in Berlin to elect an Executive Council, comprised of 14 soldiers’ and 14 workers’ representatives, the latter made up of seven from the SPD and seven from the USPD (Glatzer and Glatzer 1983, p. 475; Bouton 1921, pp. 170–173). It, too, claimed political authority and oversight over the work of Ebert’s Council. The two councils wanted fundamentally different things; while the SPD wanted a parliamentary democracy, the Executive Council sought “a transformation of Germany’s political and economic institutions through a republic of councils.” The Executive Council could not, however, claim to represent the councils throughout Germany (McElligott 2014, pp. 28–30). The relationship between the two councils was fraught, and Ebert, who had secured the support of the military on 10 November, came to dominate. On Monday, 11 November 1918 Evelyn, Princess Blücher had written: “one cannot help admiring the disciplined and orderly way in which a revolution of such dimensions has been organised with until now the least possible loss of life” (Blücher 1920, p. 290). On 15 November, the very first edition of the USPD’s newspaper Die Freiheit claimed that 63 people had died throughout Germany during the revolution, some of whom had been mere observers. Its 20 November edition claimed that fifteen had died in Berlin on 9 and 10 November 1918 (Baudis and Roth 1968, pp. 75, 78). Two of those killed in Berlin were women: 17-year-old Charlotte Nagel, a worker killed in fighting at the Alexanderplatz and 19-year-old Paula Plathe, a domestic servant (Glatzer and Glatzer 1983, p. 575). On 12 November 1918, the Council of People’s Delegates published its programme, lifting the state of siege, reintroducing freedom of expression, abolishing censorship and introducing the eight-hour day and universal suffrage for men and women over the age of 20 (Stackelberg and Winkle 2002, p. 49). By that date, the revolution, or some might say the first stage, was over, with cities like Freiburg am Breisgau quietly following Berlin’s example; here the setting up of a soldiers’ council was quickly

30  H. L. BOAK

followed by a workers’ council which together combined with four city councillors to administer the city (Chickering 2007, pp. 567–568). Just as there was no uniform experience of the revolution, so, too, the composition, powers and aims of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils who took over local administration varied (Berlin 1979, p. 183; Hagemann and Kolossa 1990, p. 48). The councils have been referred to as a man’s movement, perhaps not surprisingly as the soldiers’ councils were exclusively male (Hagemann and Kolossa 1990, p. 47). The tasks of the councils were fairly uniform; while the soldiers’ councils tended to take responsibility for matters of security, law and order and troop demobilisation, the workers’ councils oversaw the provisioning of food and accommodation, employment, welfare, transport and sanitation. In some areas, particularly where the USPD was strong, such as Stuttgart, Magdeburg, Leipzig, Halle and Braunschweig, the councils saw themselves as vehicles for the promotion of public ownership of industry, or for the dictatorship of the proletariat (Stibbe 2010, p. 57). In several places, economic interest groups also formed their own councils, or the middle classes set up Bürgerräte to stand up for their interests vis-à-vis the soldiers’ and workers’ councils (Fritzsche 1998, pp. 96, 99–100, 104; Bieber 1992). Gertrud Baümer, the head of the middle-class women’s umbrella organisation, the Federation of Women’s Associations, sat on the Teachers’ Council in Hamburg where women held eight of the 28 seats, joining in order not to leave the discussions to unbridled radicalism (Weberling 1994, pp. 14, 40). In Jena a housewives’ council was formed, while in Madgeburg the heads of 36 middle-class women’s organisations formed a women’s council on 20/21 November 1918 (Sternsdorf-Hauck 2008, p. 50; Weberling 1994, p. 58; Gohlke 1999, p. 80).

Women in the Councils The number of women on the councils was small and, indeed, the women’s supplement of Die Freiheit on 8 December 1918 called for more women to be elected (Roß 1999, p. 333). Of around 800 workers’ councillors across Greater Berlin, 37 were women; no woman sat on the 28-strong Executive Council. In Greater Stuttgart, there were 19 women among 370 workers’ councillors (Weberling 1994, p. 15; Weill 2003, p. 413). We know the names of very few of the women and those we do know of had generally been active in political life before 1914 and continued after 1919, particularly if they were later members of

WOMEN IN THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

31

the Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD) or they left written testimonies, some of which were elicited by the East German state after 1949 (Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus 1960). Nor do we know in what capacity a woman had come to serve on a council, whether she had been elected as a worker, or nominated as the representative of a factory or a political grouping (Weill 2003, p. 44). Erna Halbe, just released from prison where she had been sentenced to serve two-and-a-half years on 27 March 1918 for producing and distributing anti-war literature, was the only woman on the 30-strong Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council’s Executive in Hamburg, one of three left-wing radical representatives, serving until March 1919; Frieda Düwell, a left-wing radical, arrested on 21 October 1918 for distributing Spartacus leaflets, was a member of the broader workers’ council in Hamburg; Gertrud Morgner, a tailoress and head of the local USPD branch, was deputy chair of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council in Jena; Auguste Lewinsohn, a member of the Spartacus League and Minna Naumann, a housewife who had attended the socialist women’s conference in Bern in 1915, a member of the USPD sentenced to one-and-a-half years in prison on 5 May 1918 for distributing anti-war propaganda, sat on the workers’ council in Dresden; Roberta Gropper, a cigarette factory worker and member of the USPD, was on the workers’ council in Ulm, while Herta Geffke, a member of the USPD, sat on the workers’ council in Stettin; Martha Schlag, a former domestic servant, a housewife and member of Spartacus, served in Chemnitz; Rosi Wolfstein, a former office worker and a friend of Rosa Luxemburg, sat on the council in Düsseldorf and Valeska Meinig, a textile worker so well-liked locally that the police would tip her off before they searched her property for Spartacus leaflets, served in Limbach (Hagemann and Kolossa 1990, pp. 47–48; Ullrich 1982, pp. 136, 149; Weill 2003, p. 413). As can be seen from Gaard Kets’ chapter in this volume, three women served on the soldiers’ and workers’ council in Bremen: the left-wing radicals Käthe Ahrens and Gesine Becker, and Minna Otto, who also served on the executive council. There were only two women among 496 delegates to the National Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils meeting in Berlin from 16 to 19 December: Käthe Leu, a housewife from Danzig and member of the USPD, and Klara Noack, a Social Democrat and housewife from Dresden. No woman was sent to the second National Congress in April 1919 (Roß 1999, pp. 210–211).

32  H. L. BOAK

One of the best-known women elected to serve on an executive of the soldiers’ and workers’ councils was Toni Sender in Frankfurt, a member of the USPD who during the revolution chaired the meeting of the shop stewards organising the general strike, ordering the arrest of the chief of police, writing the proclamation of the Republic and taking it to all the newspapers (Sender 1940, pp. 93–97, 103). She was one of several women, from across the political spectrum, including Clara Zetkin, a leading member of the Spartacist group, Marie Juchacz, the head of the SPD’s women’s movement, the radical feminists, Anita Augspurg and Lida Gustava Heymann, and Gertrud Bäumer to express concern not just about the paucity of women on the councils but also about the lack of women in the demobilisation committees set up by the councils and the fact that large numbers of women, such as housewives and domestic servants, could not participate in the council system (Weberling 1994, pp. 36–43, 59–63, 73–80; Sternsdorf-Hauck 2008, pp. 50–51; 56–59). By early spring, 1919, however, the power and influence of the councils had waned as elected representatives at national, state and local levels took over the government and national and local administration, while in left-wing, USPD strongholds, the councils had been forcibly repressed.

Women’s Participation in the Revolution Beyond Berlin While few women had been elected to serve on the workers’ councils, thousands had offered their services to them, and they were to be found primarily in clerical positions. Maria Saran, a student, offered her services to the workers’ and soldiers’ council in Göttingen, paying for a rubber stamp (“Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council, Göttingen”) herself, and stamping the papers of returning soldiers to enable them to get food ration cards (Saran 1976, p. 38). In Munich 18-year-old Hilde Kramer, a socialist who developed links to the left-wing radicals in Bremen and who had attended the mass demonstration on the Theresienwiese on 7 November, offered her services as a secretary to the soldiers’ council. Within days she was working in the council’s propaganda section, and on 30 November was one of four signatories (the writer and left-wing activist Erich Mühsam was another) to a proclamation from the Alliance of the Revolutionary Internationalists of Bavaria, expressing unhappiness with the way in which the revolution had developed and calling upon Bavarians and Germans to unite with people of all countries to smash international capitalism and imperialism (Kramer 2011,

WOMEN IN THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

33

p. 50). In Munich the Independent Socialists’ Kurt Eisner, a journalist, declared Bavaria a free state, with himself as Minister President, setting up a Soldiers’, Workers’ and Peasants’ Council, and on 8 November the Provisional National Council of the People’s State of Bavaria met in the state parliament building; it was made up of representatives of the councils, members of the parties in the existing state parliament and representatives from a range of organisations. Out of 256 members, eight were women, including Anita Augspurg representing the Association for Female Suffrage, Rosa Kempf from the organisation of Bavarian Women’s Associations, and Marie Sturm of the Association of Catholic Bavarian Women Teachers (Sternsdorf-Hauck 2008, p. 47). On 8 November, Eisner proclaimed female suffrage and the abolition of religious supervision of schools. At Eisner’s instigation, a Section for Women’s Rights was established within the Ministry for Social Welfare, headed by Gertrud Baer who began work in February 1919 (SternsdorfHauck 2008, pp. 24–25). At least eight women were delegates to the Congress of Workers’, Peasants’ and Soldiers’ Councils meeting in Munich between 25 February and 8 March 1919, one of whom was a Fräulein Kleinhaas representing a Peasants’ Council (Sternsdorf-Hauck 2008, pp. 47–48). In the power vacuum created by Eisner’s assassination on 21 February and the wounding of the leader of the SPD, Erhard Auer, disorder reigned and in April two Soviet Republics were set up, overthrown by government troops in early May. Women also served in the Soviet Republics. One woman, Hedwig Kämpfer of the USPD, who sat on the Provisional National Council and was a delegate to the councils’ Congress, sat as a judge on the revolutionary tribunal, created by the first Soviet to handle cases of counter-revolutionary activity and another two women served as assessors. Heymann believed that it was thanks to women’s presence on the tribunal that no death sentences were passed (Sternsdorf-Hauck 2008, pp. 27–28). Three women served on the Commission for Fighting the Counter-revolution, two on the Economics Commission. Even Augspurg and Heymann continued in public life, serving on the Commission examining Conditions in Prisons and Care Facilities (Sternsdorf-Hauck 2008, p. 26). Hilde Kramer worked as secretary to the city’s commander Rudolf Egelhofer and became known as “the revolutionary girl with the Titus head,” thanks to her short, blond hair. Arrested at the end of Soviets, she was charged with abetting high treason, but acquitted through lack of evidence (Johnson 2000, pp. 543–548; Kramer 2011, pp. 62–76). Other

34  H. L. BOAK

women were not quite so fortunate. An unknown number of women were arrested following the ending of the Soviet—Lessie Sachs, a secretary in the War Office, was sentenced to fifteen months in jail, for example, and it is not known how many were killed (Sternsdorf-Hauck 2008, pp. 29, 64–65, 158). Marie Kling, a 23-year-old office clerk, was one of two women killed by troops in the Stadelheim prison in Munich on 4 May, having been captured working as a nurse with the Red Army. Arrested on 2 May, she was acquitted on 3 May but when her father went to collect her she had already been taken to Stadelheim, where she was used as target practice, being shot first in the foot, then in the calf, then the thigh, then the head (Arendt 1984, p. 232). This was, apparently, not an isolated incident in Stadelheim. Mark Jones has noted that [d]uring the winter of 1918-1919, the idea that German women should be protected from military violence was partially reversed as supporters of the government accepted unprecedented levels of violence against proletarian German women and civilians. (Jones 2016, p. 55)

Not only proletarian women were killed: 33-year-old Countess Hella von Westarp, a member of the right-wing Thule Society, was one of ten “hostages” killed by the Red Guards on 30 April in the Luitpold Grammar School in Munich (Jones 2016, pp. 298, 302). In Braunschweig huge demonstrations on 7 and 8 November led to the creation of the Socialist Republic of Braunschweig under the leadership of the Independent Socialist August Merges and the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council set up a government of eight people’s commissioners, one of whom, Minna Fasshauer, a member of the Spartacus group, was elected to be the People’s Commissioner for Education, thus becoming the first ever female government minister in Germany (Grebing 1994, p. 12). The American journalist, Miles Bouton, referred to her as “a charwoman who had been discharged by a woman’s club for which she had worked for petty peculations” (Bouton 1921, p. 222). On 22 November, she abolished religious oversight of schools and championed comprehensive schooling and co-education of the sexes. She left her post on 22 February 1919 when a new coalition government was formed (Janicki, n.d.). Maria Saran was not alone in feeling tremendous “excitement at the news about the November revolution […]. We saw the dawn of a better era and were filled with great hopes,” she wrote (Saran 1976, p. 37).

WOMEN IN THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

35

Bouton noted that, “[i]n their rejoicing at the revolution and the end of the war, the great mass of the people forgot for the moment that they were living in a conquered land” (Bouton 1921, p. 183). Reality soon returned as the blockade continued. Soldiers began to return, and with them a change in the cityscape, as old imperial flags replaced the red flags of the revolution. Toni Sender had to deal with the disruption caused by soldiers streaming through Frankfurt—60,000 in one day alone. “What bothered us as much as board for the soldiers was their political tendencies,” she wrote. She had already noted that “[i]n the first hours of the revolution we encountered what was to prove to be its main handicap, the Soldiers’ Councils.” The soldiers, completely untrained politically, just wanted to go home and work (Sender 1940, p. 92). Freikorps units were set up, irregular paramilitaries who operated outside the normal military hierarchy, ostensibly to protect the fatherland but increasingly to prevent Germany falling prey to Bolshevism (Storer 2013, p. 40). Across Germany, among left-wing activists, members of the USPD and the Spartacus Group, there was a belief, aired even as early as 10 November, that the revolution had stalled, and there were calls for a republic of councils, and a dictatorship of the proletariat rather than a parliamentary democracy for which the elections to the Constituent National Assembly were crucial (McElligott 2014, pp. 31–32; Berlin 1979, pp. 168–169).

Rosa Luxemburg as Symbol and Actor Spartacists leaders had been imprisoned during the war and the best known, Karl Liebknecht, was released on 23 October 1918, arriving in the late afternoon at Anhalter station in Berlin to a tremendous reception (Glatzer and Glatzer 1983, pp. 404–406). Princess Blücher writes of seeing “his triumphal procession passing by,” going to the Russian Embassy where he gave a speech “tainted with Bolshevism.” In the following days, he was often seen going in and out of the Embassy when he was not giving speeches urging preparations for the revolution (Blücher 1920, p. 256). Mark Jones has written that in the months following his release “even though he was peripheral to so much of what took place, he was the most important focal point for German fears of disorder and revolutionary violence” (Jones 2016, pp. 69–70). He might have added Rosa Luxemburg’s name to Liebknecht’s, for in the public imagination their names were always coupled, though unknown to the masses the two had fundamental disagreements (Laschitza 2009). Miles Bouton,

36  H. L. BOAK

who claimed that Liebknecht possessed “the indifferent recklessness of fanaticism combined with great egotism and personal vanity,” wrote of Luxemburg that she was a woman of unusual ability; perhaps the brainiest member of the revolutionary group in Germany, male or female; she possessed marked oratorical talent and great personal magnetism. Her contribution to the overthrow of the German Empire can hardly be overestimated. (Bouton 1921, pp. 77, 79)

And yet Luxemburg was not in Berlin on 9 November, arriving late on the evening of the 10th, having been released from prison in Breslau on 8 November. The following day, 11 November, the Spartacus League was formed with a Central Committee of thirteen; Liebknecht and Luxemburg were entrusted with the editorship of Die Rote Fahne, while Käte Duncker was given the task of agitation among women and the young (Glatzer and Glatzer 1983, pp. 486–487). In essence, Luxemburg was editor-in-chief of Die Rote Fahne, an extraordinarily time-consuming job which restricted her time for public speaking, although her poor health may also have impeded her (Laschitza 2009, p. 8; Luban 2017, p. 51). On 14 December, Luxemburg published “What does the Spartacus League want?,” stating that “[t]he Spartacus League will only ever seize power if it has a clear unambiguous mandate from the vast majority of Germany’s proletarian masses” (Luxemburg 2012, p. 106). It is important to distinguish between Luxemburg’s actions and the rumours and fears that surrounded her. Major Maercker, a Freikorps commander speaking to his troops in mid-December said: The Ebert government is threatened by the Spartacists, especially Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The threat is huge. This Rosa Luxemburg is a female devil […] Rosa Luxemburg can today destroy the German Empire without punishment, since there is no powerful institution in the Empire which can oppose her. (Jones 2016, pp. 132–133)

Leaflets claimed that a Spartacus government would bring the break-up of the Reich, civil war, terror, hunger and anarchy (Glatzer and Glatzer 1983, p. 564). There were leaflets calling for Liebknecht to be killed and Mark Jones believes that “since at least early December 1918 the idea that it was necessary to kill Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg circulated in Berlin” (Jones 2016, p. 233).

WOMEN IN THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

37

In Berlin “demonstrations and counter-demonstrations were the order of the day,” according to one of Princess Blücher’s correspondents. On 6 December, three small groups of Spartacus demonstrators were met by about 60 soldiers on the Invalidenstrasse, and some sixteen people were killed. In the cross-fire, a tram was hit and 17-year-old Martha Komarowski, referred to in a letter to Princess Blücher, as “the little pale milliner’s girl,” died (Blücher 1920, 305; Arendt 1984, p. 229). The press blamed the Spartacists and their leader, Karl Liebknecht, for the deaths. The Spartacists were blamed, too, when government troops failed to force the Marine Division, formed in November to protect government buildings and housed in the royal palace and stables, to leave before Christmas. The sailors were now accused of being Spartacist sympathisers and of having looted the palace’s treasures. On 24 December, the generals in charge of government troops claimed that during a ceasefire, thousands of women and children, at the instigation of the Spartacists, had flooded the area, and their troops refused to fire on them (Jones 2016, pp. 109–111, 138–157). This event, and the realisation of Ebert’s agreement with the military, led to the Independent Socialists withdrawing from the Council of People’s Representatives. Things were to come to a head in early January 1919, when representatives of the Revolutionary Shop Stewards, the USPD and two men from the newly formed Communist Party, Karl Liebknecht and Wilhelm Pieck, called for a demonstration to protest against the dismissal of Emil Eichhorn, the Independent Socialist who was Chief of Police. To their surprise, several hundred thousand people protested on 5 January, with some spontaneously occupying the offices of several newspapers, including those of the SPD’s Vorwärts. That evening a Revolutionary Committee decided to call for a general strike the next day with the aim of toppling the government, an aim recorded in a document declaring that the government had been deposed and that the Revolutionary Committee was now in charge which Liebknecht, without the knowledge of his party, signed. Rosa Luxemburg saw the need to remove the government, but only with the active participation of the masses and when it became clear that this was not going to materialise, withdrew her support for the action, and the KPD formally withdrew its support on 10 January (Luban 2004). The following day, government troops swiftly retook the Vorwärts building and of the 200–300 people who surrendered, between fifteen and twenty were women. Jones writes of one woman, Frau Steinbring, reportedly from Neukölln,

38  H. L. BOAK

who claimed to be a first aider, being attacked by soldiers who mistook her for “the red Rosa.” The prisoners were taken to the Dragoon barracks where, according to witnesses, six or seven women prisoners, all first-aiders in the Vorwärts office “had their clothes practically torn off their bodies.” Steinbring testified that she had been shown the bodies of the seven men who had tried to negotiate the surrender of the building who had been taken to the barracks and shot out of hand; she had been slapped and shoved against a wall with soldiers threatening to shoot her. The troops’ commander, Major Franz von Stephani, stopped them. Jones tells us of soldiers’ accounts, where they claim to have come under intense machine gun fire, and that the machine gun had been operated by Rosa Luxemburg (Jones 2016, pp. 216–219). Helga Grebing claims that Hilde Steinbrink, from Neukölln, had indeed fired the machine gun; one assumes that when the soldiers saw this small woman they did, indeed, believe that she was Rosa Luxemburg (Grebing 1994, p. 6). This story tells us of the hold Rosa Luxemburg had over the imagination, and how a fear of her had permeated the public consciousness; it also highlights some of the difficulties faced in trying accurately to track individual women during the revolution. Arendt believes that ten women lost their lives in Berlin during the so-called Spartacist Uprising (out of a total of 156) (Arendt 1984, p. 230). The right-wing press was quick to claim “victory over terror” and “the end of Spartacist rule” and that “order now rules in Berlin,” titles mocked by Rosa Luxemburg in Die Rote Fahne where she also took issue with the atrocities committed in the Dragoon barracks (Jones 2016, pp. 220–227). On the evening of 15 January 1919 Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who for months had been regularly changing their overnight accommodation, were arrested at a flat in Wilmersdorf, taken to the Hotel Eden, the headquarters of the Guards Division, and from there to their deaths. Luxemburg was beaten with rifle butts and shot in the head. Her body was dumped in the Landwehr canal, not to be recovered until 1 June (Jones 2016, pp. 234ff.). In a letter to his daughter, Gustav Landauer, a philosopher and left-wing writer, noted that the news of the deaths of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg had been “received with open happiness by the bourgeoisie and even by many workers.” Vorwärts proclaimed that “they were the victims of the civil war which they themselves” had instigated (Landauer 2012, p. 186; Serge 2011, p. 38). In an obituary to Rosa Luxemburg, Erich Mühsam called her “the flame of the revolution” (Kuhn 2012, p. xiii). But what precisely did

WOMEN IN THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

39

she contribute? She was not in Berlin on 9 November and thereafter was busily engaged with producing Die Rote Fahne, restricting her speaking engagements. Her petition to the Berlin USPD’s conference on 15 December calling for the USPD to leave the Council of People’s Representatives, to give complete power to the soldiers’ and workers’ councils, to reject the National Assembly and to call a full party conference before the year’s end was rejected (Luban 2017, p. 52). Luxemburg and Liebknecht were refused entry to the National Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils meeting in Berlin on the following day (16 December) as either delegates or guests, and the Communist Party rejected her call to stand in the National Assembly elections (Laschitza 2009, pp. 16–17). These events would not enable one to claim influence or power for her. How many people were reached by Die Rote Fahne or Spartacist propaganda leaflets? And were those who were reached able to engage fully and intellectually with her rhetoric and arguments? Detlev Peukert has claimed that “the revolutionary workers turned ‘Karl and Rosa’ into a unifying symbol of martyrdom that was far more potent than the two leaders themselves had ever been while they were alive” (Peukert 1991, p. 32). It is perhaps ironic that her greatest contribution to the revolution may well have been for the social democrats, who, in portraying her and her fellow Spartacists as wanting to bring Bolshevism to Germany, and in its wake civil war, anarchy, hunger and ruin, were able to rally moderate socialists around calls for unity and to get the German people to accept the levels of violence perpetrated by government troops on German civilians in putting down any attempt to challenge the government. Unrest in Berlin did not cease in January 1919 but government troops crushed opposition when and where they found it. Arendt details examples of women killed in incidents across Germany, such as the female bystander killed during a strike in Königshütte on 4 January, or the three women among the five dead in fighting at Munich station on 10 January, or the 14-year-old girl shot dead during disturbances between workers and government troops in Bottrop on 14 January. Sixty-two women and girls, of whom seven were children, were killed during the unrest in Berlin in March 1919 and four women were among the 34 people killed between 16 and 23 April in Augsburg (Arendt 1984, p. 230). Little is known of these women, or whether they were active participants or unfortunate bystanders.

40  H. L. BOAK

Meaning of the Revolution for Women Women who actively participated in the events of 1918/1919 were in the minority. But the weeks and months following the revolutionary days of early November 1918 were to witness huge increases in both women’s actual participation in public life and in propaganda targeted at women, as the political parties sought to win women’s votes and women sought public office (Sneeringer 2002). Middle-class women’s organisations worked together to educate women about the importance of voting and the voting procedure, and to train women in public speaking, while Catholic and Protestant women’s organisations cooperated in educating Christian women politically (Woodfin 2004; Boak 2013, p. 67). Women prominent in the middle-class women’s movement quickly joined the political party of their choosing and along with women from the SPD and USPD held meetings and gave speeches, though some found the physical demands of electioneering demanding (Boak 1990). The streets were awash with colourful political posters targeting women voters, and women were inundated with leaflets addressed to them as wives, mothers, country women and women in a large variety of jobs (Rigby 1984, pp. 33–39). On 19 January 1919, 82.3% of women eligible to vote in 34 of Germany’s 37 electoral districts cast their vote, and 37 women were elected to serve in the National Assembly (Boak 2013, p. 89). Women were keen to participate in the nation’s political life at all levels and the mood was one of optimism and hope for a better future, full of possibilities. And that mood pervades many women’s memories of the revolutionary period. Lida Gustava Heymann wrote: Now a new life began. Looking back the following months seemed like a beautiful dream, so improbably splendid were they. The heavy burden of the war years had gone; one stepped forward elated, looking forward to the future. (Sternsdorf-Hauck 2008, p. 17)

During November and December 1919 there was a very febrile atmosphere across many places in Germany. It was a time of great dislocation, as soldiers returned, many women left their war-time occupations and returned to their homes and the occupation of part of the country made aspects of everyday life difficult for some. The elections to the National Assembly and its convening granted some stability to German political life though the Republic was to be subject to several years of

WOMEN IN THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

41

localised unrest and insurgencies. It was women of the left, particularly of the USPD and the Spartacus League, who were active in the revolutionary events of 1918 and 1919, while in areas where the revolution passed peacefully, women continued their daily struggles, to work, and to feed, clothe and care for themselves and their families. Women were keen to benefit from the gifts the revolution had brought them and went to the ballot box in large numbers in 1919. It was the revolution that gave them political equality and it was to be the Weimar Constitution that furnished further opportunities and possibilities for them in the areas of education, employment and public life.

References Arendt, Hans-Jürgen. 1984. Weibliche Opfer militaristischen Terrors in Deutschland (1918–1920). Beiträge zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung 26 (2): 228–237. Baudis, Dieter, and Hermann Roth. 1968. Berliner Opfer der Novemberrevolution 1918/19. Eine Analyse ihrer sozialen Struktur. Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte 9 (3): 73–149. Berlin, Jörg (ed.). 1979. Die deutsche Revolution 1918/19. Quellen und Dokumente. Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag. Bieber, Hans-Joachim. 1992. Bürgertum in der Revolution: Bürgerräte und Bürgerstreiks in Deutschland 1918–1920. Hamburg: Christians. Blücher, Evelyn, Princess. 1920. An English Wife in Berlin. New York: E.P. Dutton & Company. Boak, Helen. 1990. Women in Weimar Politics. European History Quarterly 20 (3): 369–399. Boak, Helen. 2013. Women in the Weimar Republic. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bouton, S. Miles. 1921. And the Kaiser Abdicates. The German Revolution November 1918–August 1919. New Haven: Yale University Press. Chickering, Roger. 2007. The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davis, Belinda. 2000. Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War 1 Berlin. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. Dunayevskaya, Raya. 1996. Women’s Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution: Reaching for the Future. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Fritzsche, Peter. 1998. Germans into Nazis. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

42  H. L. BOAK Glatzer, Dieter, and Ruth Glatzer (eds.). 1983. Berliner Leben 1914–1918. Berlin: Rütten & Loening. Gohlke, Martin. 1999. Die Räte in der Revolution von 1918/19 in Magdeburg. PhD dissertation, University of Kiel. Grebing, Helga. 1994. Frauen in der deutschen Revolution 1918/19. Heidelberg: Stiftung Reichspräsident-Friedrich-Ebert-Gedenkstätte. Hagemann, Karen, and Jan Kolossa. 1990. Gleiche Rechte – Gleiche Pflichten? Hamburg: VSA-Verlag. Harman, Chris. 1997. The Lost Revolution. Germany 1918 to 1923, rev. ed. London: Bookmarks. Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus. 1960. Vorwärts und nicht vergessen. Erlebnisberichte aktiver Teilnehmer der Novemberrevolution 1918/1919. Berlin: Dietz. Janicki, Heide. n.d. Minna Fasshauer – eine Frau in der Novemberrevolution 1918. Mitteilungen der Deutschen Kommunistischen Partei (Bezirk Niedersachsen). http://www.DKP-Niedersachsen.de. Accessed 8 Apr 2018. Johnson, Eliza. 2000. The “Revolutionary Girl with the Titus-Head”: Women’s participation in the 1919 Revolutions in Budapest and Munich in the Eyes of Their Contemporaries. Nationalities Papers 28 (3): 541–550. Jones, Mark. 2015. The Crowd in the German November Revolution 1918. In Germany 1916–1923: A Revolution in Context, ed. K. Weinhauer, A. McElligott and K. Heinsohn, 37–57. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Jones, Mark. 2016. Founding Weimar: Violence and the German Revolution of 1918–1919. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kramer, Hilde. 2011. Rebellin in München, Moskau und Berlin 1900–1924. Berlin: BasisDruck Verlag. Kuhn, Gabriel (ed.). 2012. All Power to the Councils: A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918–1919. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Landauer, Gustav. 2012. To Charlotte Landauer. In All Power to the Councils: A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, trans. G. Kuhn, 186. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Laschitza, Annelies. 2009. Rosa Luxemburg und Karl Liebknecht in den Wochen der Revolution. www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/dokumentationen/090116_RL-Konferenz/beitraege/Annelies_Laschitza.pdf. Accessed 8 Apr 2018. Lindau, Rudolf. 1960. Revolutionäre Kämpfe 1918–1919. Aufsätze und Chronik. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Luban, Ottokar. 2004. Rosa at a Loss: The KPD Leadership and the Berlin Uprising of January 1919, Legend and Reality. Revolutionary History 8 (4): 19–45. Luban, Ottokar. 2009. Die Novemberrevolution 1918 in Berlin – Eine notwendige Revision des bisherigen Geschichtsbildes. Jahrbuch für Forschungen zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung 8 (1): 55–78.

WOMEN IN THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

43

Luban, Ottokar. 2017. The Role of the Spartacist Group after 9 November 1918 and the Formation of the KPD. In Weimar Communism as Mass Movement 1918–1933, ed. R. Hoffrogge and N. Laporte, 45–65. London: Lawrence and Weishart. Luxemburg, Rosa. 2012. What Does the Spartacus League Want? In All Power to the Councils: A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, trans. G. Kuhn, 99–106. Oakland, CA: PM Press. McElligott, Anthony. 2014. Rethinking the Weimar Republic: Authority and Authoritarianism 1916–1936. London: Bloomsbury. Morgan, David. 1975. The Socialist Left and the German Revolution: A History of the German Independent Social Democratic Party, 1917–1922. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Peukert, Detlev J. 1991. The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. R. Deveson. London: Allen Lane. Rigby, Ida K. 1984. German Expressionist Political Posters 1918–19—Art and Politics: A Failed Alliance. Art Journal 44 (1): 33–39. Roß, Sabine. 1999. Politische Partizipation und nationaler Räteparlamentarismus: Determinanten des politischen Handelns der Delegierten zu den Reichsrätekongressen 1918/1919; eine Kollektivbiographie. Historical Social Research Supplement 10: 1–390. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0168ssoar-285933. Saran, Mary. 1976. Never Give Up. London: Oswald Wolff. Sender, Toni. 1940. The Autobiography of a German Rebel. London: Labour Book Service. Serge, Victor. 2011. Witness to the German Revolution, trans. I. Birchall. Chicago: Haymarket. Smaldone, William. 2009. Confronting Hitler: German Social Democrats in Defense of the Weimar Republic, 1929–1933. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Sneeringer, Julia. 2002. Winning Women’s Votes: Propaganda and Politics in Weimar Germany. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Stackelberg, Roderick, and Sally A. Winkle. 2002. The Nazi Germany Sourcebook. London: Routledge. Sternsdorf-Hauck, Christiane. 2008. Brotmarken und rote Fahnen: Frauen in der bayerischen Revolution und Räterepublik 1918/19. Cologne: Neuer ISP Verlag. Stibbe, Matthew. 2010. Germany 1914–1933: Politics, Society and Culture. Harlow: Pearson. Storer, Colin. 2013. A Short History of the Weimar Republic. London: I.B. Tauris. Toller, Ernst. 1934. I Was a German. London: Paragon House. Ullrich, Volker. 1982. Kriegsalltag. Hamburg im ersten Weltkrieg. Cologne: Prometh Verlag. Vorwärts, 19 November 1918. https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/ image/socialist-newspaper-november-9-1918. Accessed 10 Apr 2018.

44  H. L. BOAK Weberling, Anja. 1994. Zwischen Räten und Parteien. Frauenbewegung in Deutschland 1918/19. Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft. Weill, Claudie. 2003. Women in the German Revolution: Rosa Luxemburg and the Workers’ Councils. In Political and Historical Encyclopedia of Women, ed. C. Fauré, 412–423. London: Routledge. Woodfin, Carol. 2004. Reluctant Democrats: The Protestant Women’s Auxiliary and the German National Assembly Election of 1919. Journal of the Historical Society 4 (1): 71–112. Ziemann, Benjamin. 2011. Germany 1914–1918: Total War as a Catalyst of Change. In The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, ed. H.W. Smith, 378–399. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The German Revolution and the Radical Right Robert Heynen

“In the late autumn of 1918 the German soul collapsed” (Stadtler 1920, p. 143). This diagnosis of the end of the First World War and the outbreak of the German Revolution comes from Eduard Stadtler, the founder of the Anti-Bolshevik League and, as editor of their journal Das Gewissen [Conscience], a prominent member of the Young Conservative movement associated most commonly with Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. His Anti-Bolshevik League was one of a number of organisations, including paramilitary groups that fought the dangers posed by the “chaos” (as he repeatedly put it) of the post-war period, funded by prominent German industrialists (“Aus dem Bericht” 1966). The revolution, he argued, was a symptom of “humanity’s mental illnesses,” with “Bolshevism” the “outer form” of “[t]he world revolutionary anarchic dissolution of the World War” (Stadtler 1920, p. 5). As with many on the German far right, Stadtler proclaimed an opposition to party politics, demonstratively invoking a number of figures across the political spectrum as inspiration for his project, from Paul Lensch of the Social Democratic Party (SPD)

R. Heynen (*)  York University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Kets and J. Muldoon (eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13917-9_3

45

46  R. HEYNEN

to the racist writer Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Opposing mechanistic materialisms of all kinds, he proclaimed an ostensibly grassroots politics in phrases that might come from one of his communist opponents: “Renewal from below, from the people, from the masses” (Stadtler 1920, p. 121). In his account, however, these masses act solely on instinct and his solution to the problems faced by a revolutionary Germany is thus dictatorship (a “central economic dictatorship” [Stadtler 1920, p. 146]) and a Young Conservative “national socialism.” Stadtler was an enthusiastic supporter of the violent anti-communism that marked the post-war period, although his later claims of having the ear of Gustav Noske, the most rabidly anti-communist of the SPD leaders, and of inspiring Waldemar Pabst to organise the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht are dubious. For Stadtler, the post-war order was rotten. In fact, the whole system rests of the power of volunteer associations [Freiwilligen-Verbände]. Without Noske and the military, the revolutionary transitional system would long ago have been swept away by the revolutionary circles on the left as well as the counterrevolutionary forces on the right. (1920, p. 139)

These volunteer associations holding the country together were the Freikorps, paramilitary units that had formed in order to fight the many different revolutionary groups and movements that, in the context of German defeat, the abdication of the Kaiser, and the establishment of Germany’s first SPD-led government, sought deeper social change. Stadtler’s charge of “bolshevism” was the widely used term for such movements, especially the council movement that, at least in its radical moments, sought to establish Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ councils as an alternative to the parliamentary system. Few of the revolutionaries were Bolshevik in any meaningful sense (Luxemburg’s critique of Lenin and the Bolsheviks is well known, for example), but the term, evoking as it did the purported chaos of Russia, was a useful tool in attacking the left. As Stadtler stresses, those attacks were led by radical right paramilitaries, and their consolidation was one of the most significant and fateful outcomes of the 1918–1923 period. Those on the radical right often evoked the violence of war as their ideal, most famously in Ernst Jünger’s novel Storm of Steel, and the Freikorps are often interpreted as a movement of soldiers who did not want to stop fighting. Certainly,

THE GERMAN REVOLUTION AND THE RADICAL RIGHT 

47

there was a profound desire for the male trench community of the front. If, as Kathleen Canning argues, “[t]he perception that the gender order had ruptured at the end of the war forms an important backdrop for the writing and enactment of citizenship in 1919–20” (Canning 2008, p. 209), it also produced a violently misogynist reaction. However, while the experience of war and the shattering impact of defeat was an important context for what followed, it was the paranoid struggle against a perceived Bolshevik threat that allowed the radical right to consolidate and take on a central role. As Geoff Eley suggests, the fundamental break with the norms of civil society came after the war. Radical right paramilitary violence was a medium for “counter-revolutionary anger” in which, “enraged by the apparent disrespect for property and privilege, the opponents of the left […] took recourse to a new kind of extreme response.” Indeed, this “amounted to the most radical of departures. The brutality of this break can hardly be exaggerated” (Eley 2015, pp. 96–98). As a number of historians have argued, challenging claims that both left and right engaged in violent acts, the violence from the right was of a qualitatively different scale and nature (Jones 2016; Schumann 2009). Indeed, by comparison with other revolutionary contexts, violence from the left was minimal. The post-war wave of radical right violence subsided by 1921, the work of containing revolutionary movements largely complete, but that violence had profound longer-term impacts, not least in setting in place precedents and practices that enabled the rise of Nazism. If violence declined, it was also institutionalised in the paramilitary culture of veterans’ associations like the Stahlhelm that employed a violence aimed not at killing or maiming but at threatening and intimidating their political opponents. By claiming, conquering, and defending public space, these organizations gradually made limited violence a ubiquitous feature of political culture. In the process, the anti-Republican Right was the driving force while the Left mainly reacted. (Schumann 2010, p. 236)

This chapter will trace the development of paramilitary violence, new forms of radical right organising, and the role of paramilitaries in the suppression of the left. Here the broader context is important, as this violence was enabled by military and state institutions that remained largely unreformed in the aftermath of the war and, crucially, by the new SPD government led by the conservative social democrat Friedrich Ebert. As Karl Liebknecht wrote as early as 21 November 1918,

48  R. HEYNEN the ‘socialist’ [SPD] government has maintained or even reinstated the entire administrative apparatus and the old military machinery—institutions which are nearly impossible to control for the workers’ and soldiers’ councils; the enormous economic power of the ruling classes has not been touched, and some of their social powers will continue for a long time. (Liebknecht 2012, p. 93)

Implicit here is a recognition of the relative weakness of the councils and other radical movements; the putative disorder represented by the Bolshevik threat was the focus of sustained and lurid media campaigns that overestimated the danger, misrepresented the nature of those movements, and legitimised increasingly extreme forms of counter-revolutionary violence (Jones 2016). This chapter thus begins by outlining the development of the Freikorps and the rise of radical right counter-revolutionary violence. The focus is on understanding the dynamics of that violence, its political role and its legitimisation. This was an anti-Bolshevik violence, but it also drew on a range of other social dynamics. Klaus Theweleit’s (1987, 1989) study of the writings of the radical right and the Freikorps in the 1920s remains crucial in highlighting the extent to which a virulent misogyny drove the violence. The racist dimensions of the rise of the right is also a theme in most studies, in particular anti-Semitism. Especially in studies of the immediate post-war years, however, almost entirely absent is a consideration of the significance of colonial histories in the post-war counter-revolution. I take this up in the second section, arguing that an understanding of these colonial histories, in particular Germany’s genocidal wars against the Herero and Nama in the colony of German South West Africa (GSWA), offers important qualifications to Eley’s claim that paramilitary violence was fundamentally new. Building on the preceding arguments, in the final section I develop an analysis of radical right politics that returns to Stadtler’s desire for a “central economic dictatorship.” The social and political dynamics of the revolutionary period were shaped by a complex and often contradictory set of arguments around “socialism.” Not only was the left split between reformist and revolutionary conceptions of socialism, but the radical right also proclaimed a desire for an alternative, national form of socialism. The violent contestations over “socialism” cemented the splits on the left, precluded forms of solidarity between the SPD and its opponents to the left, stabilised existing state and military structures, closed down spaces where debates over more profound social changes may have

THE GERMAN REVOLUTION AND THE RADICAL RIGHT 

49

occurred, and opened up the space for the formation and legitimation of radical right organisations.

The Freikorps: Enacting a CounterRevolutionary Violence The outbreak of the First World War produced a seemingly universal feeling solidarity in Germany, one proclaimed by the Kaiser as a Burgfrieden (a “fortress peace” in which party-political differences would be set aside), and mythologised by many as the “Spirit of 1914.” The actual extent of this initial unity is much debated (see Verhey 2000), and it quickly fractured as the hardships of war set in. The SPD leadership had reversed its internationalist position and voted for war credits in August 1914, initiating a split within the party that led to the 1917 formation of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD). On the ground, protests against the lack of food grew, led primarily by women, and by April 1917 mass strikes broke out in factories, primarily in Berlin and Leipzig, followed by a much larger strike wave across the country in January 1918. These laid the groundwork for the first Workers’ Councils that were to play a major role in the revolutionary upsurge after the war, but it was the revolt of sailors in Kiel beginning on 3 November that provided the initial spark. Urged on by a military and civilian leadership that wanted to contain revolutionary ferment, the Kaiser abdicated on 9 November, and the SPD-led government of Friedrich Ebert was installed. There is much debate about the SPD’s potential options in this revolutionary context, but, as Werner Bramke (2009) argues, the contention that they had no choice but to try to maintain order is unconvincing. Ebert, who was opposed even to the Kaiser’s abdication, came from the right wing of the party, and proved quite willing to work with the old order, in particular the German Army High Command (Oberste Heeresleitung, or OHL). Headed during the war by Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg, but largely controlled by the Quartermaster general Erich Ludendorff, the OHL had taken control of the state as a whole in 1917. While they continued to believe in the possibility of victory, the threat of a potential revolution in the war’s aftermath was also increasingly a part of deliberations. Those fears likewise spurred the formation in 1917 of the hard right nationalist Fatherland Party. Already before the end of the war, in other words, containment of the left was

50  R. HEYNEN

on the agenda. Ebert and others in the SPD’s leadership shared many of these concerns, and on 10 November he spoke with Wilhelm Groener, Ludendorff successor as head of the OHL, to cement a cooperation that was to continue through the revolutionary events of the following years. As Groener later stated of these conversations, “[i]n my experience, Majority Social Democracy could completely and securely be harnessed to the cause of national defense” (quoted in Cossmann 1925, p. 220). It is important to stress that the SPD’s vision of “order” was not the same as that of Groener or even less the radical right groups with which they also proved willing to cooperate. They were committed to the expansion of a parliamentary democracy and labour reforms, although socialism remained only a vague and distant possibility. They were also faced with the challenges posed by demobilisation and the deprivation that still stalked Germany (Stephenson 2009). However, they shared with the right a paranoid fear that the left presented the primary danger to the new republic, this despite the left’s rather weak and fragmented state, and the growing power and violence of the right. Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and the small Spartacist group were held up as the primary enemies, but other enemies were the USPD, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards, various anarchist groups, the Communist Party (KPD) after its formation, and, even though many were dominated by the SPD, the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council movement. The military was also seen as infected by revolutionary sentiment, and it was for this reason that the SPD government encouraged the formation of paramilitary units. James Diehl thus suggests that the government thus gave up its monopoly on violence by “supporting the creation of a system of volunteer forces and then failing to control it” (Diehl 1977, p. 28). Right-wing organisations like the veterans’ Kyffhäuser-Bund had existed already before the war, but the demobilising army provided recruits for new kinds of paramilitary forces. The largest were the Civil Guards (Einwohnerwehren) found mainly in smaller towns and the countryside, but it was the Freikorps that acted as the shock troops of the counter-revolution. Many were undoubtedly attracted more by the promise of community and the lure of violent action than by deep political commitments, but their allegiance was to the right. In his analysis of Freikorps writings, primarily from the 1919–1933 period, Matthias Sprenger finds that 30% were oriented to a more traditional imperial Prussian conservatism, 20% to a soldierly nationalism like that of Jünger and 50% were Nazi-oriented (Sprenger 2008, p. 28). Granted those who wrote tended to have more developed

THE GERMAN REVOLUTION AND THE RADICAL RIGHT 

51

political views, but what virtually all fighters shared was an implacable hostility to socialism. That included the SPD, but in the context of the revolution stabilising the SPD-led government against the greater Bolshevik evil was the primary goal. The impulse for the formation of the Freikorps came in the aftermath of clashes in Berlin, first on 6 December 1918 when sixteen left-wing protesters were killed by irregular units, and then with battles on 24–25 December (Stephenson 2009). Radical sailors from Kiel had formed the People’s Naval Division that was then installed in Berlin, but, after they seized SPD officials in a dispute with the government, Ebert sent in the army’s Guard Division to root them out. This attack met with a surprise defeat, which prompted the military and government to consider the formation of paramilitary forces as an alternative. The bloody attack also spurred USPD members of the Council of People’s Commissars to resign, and the SPD further consolidated their control of government in the aftermath. Gustav Noske became the face of the SPD’s counterrevolutionary push, along with Ebert directing cooperation with the Freikorps. As Mark Jones argues, in these events “anti-revolutionary violence had its founding act […] This was the historical moment when the new Republic gained the ability to use Western Front-style military force in parts of urban Germany” (2016, p. 172). By early 1919 the landscape on the left had changed. The KPD was founded at the turn of the year, and the USPD continued to be pushed out of any governing roles. On 4 January Berlin’s USPD-affiliated chief of police Emil Eichorn was dismissed, leading to protests and the occupation of the building housing Vorwärts, the main SPD newspaper, by revolutionary activists. This provoked a massive outcry in much of the media, and the Freikorps were mobilised in response. By 11 January they had routed the workers occupying the Vorwärts building, and for the first time, machine guns and artillery were used on a significant scale in counter-revolutionary urban warfare, with seven surrendering occupiers brutally executed in the aftermath. Noske entered the city at the head of Freikorps units. The KPD’s Rote Fahne newspaper along with the USPD’s Freiheit sought to hold the government to account, but the rest of the news media highlighted a purported left-wing violence that then legitimised any violence in response (Jones 2016). The vision of a nefarious, powerful, and organised left was largely fantasy, however. The protests and occupation were relatively spontaneous and undirected, and, Karl Retzlaw, a Spartacist participant at the time argued in his memoir, it became clear that

52  R. HEYNEN

“[t]he counterrevolution formed faster than we could organize our new party” (Retzlaw 1971, p. 123). Freikorps went on the offensive in the period that followed. The most infamous fruit of the expanded scope for violence was the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht on 15 January 1919 by Freikorps troops under Waldemar Pabst, a sign of the new boldness and impunity with which the paramilitaries could now act. As was the case more broadly, the unreformed judiciary treated radical right fighters exceptionally leniently. Two low-ranking soldiers were charged, but served paltry jail terms. Urging them on were posters from organisations like Stadtler’s Anti-Bolshevik League or the Association for Combatting Bolshevism. The counter-revolution grew in organisational complexity, resources, scope of action and levels of violence in the months that followed. A familiar pattern developed as left-wing actions and attempts to establish alternative administrations were met by massive paramilitary violence. Berlin was most active, the suppression of a general strike in early March leading to the killing of well over 1000 purported communists, including many after Noske authorised on the spot executions, but a similar dynamic also played out in Bremen, Mühlheim, Halle and Hamburg. It was in Munich in April and May 1919, as I discuss elsewhere as well (Heynen 2015), that events arguably reached their peak. Kurt Eisner’s USPD had led Bavaria after the revolution, but by 21 February had negotiated the transfer of power to the SPD. On his way to do so, Eisner was murdered by the conservative law student Count Anton Arco-Valley. In the ensuing chaos, a Soviet Council Republic was declared. It was led by a motley collection of radicals, with the KPD only reluctantly participating, Paul Levi (1919) and others denouncing it as an example of revolutionary adventurism. Again the Freikorps led the response against a hastily organised and rather ineffective Red Army, the pitched battles in this case resembling more closely a situation of civil war. The left executed a number of prisoners, many members of the radical right Thule Society, but the Freikorps response was on a different scale. By early May they controlled the city, their rampage killing over 1000 suspected communists. Leaders like the Expressionist playwright Ernst Toller only survived by going into hiding, but he and many others were given lengthy prison sentences in the aftermath. The atrocities here and elsewhere, along with the profoundly unequal application of justice, were meticulously documented by Emil Julius Gumbel (1980), whose Four Years of Political Murder, first published in 1922, offered a powerful indictment of radical

THE GERMAN REVOLUTION AND THE RADICAL RIGHT 

53

right violence. Especially notable in Munich was the extent to which the Freikorps targeted women, the “male fundamentalism” (Weisbrod 2000) that structured their politics generating a profoundly misogynist violence. Erich Mühsam, who both participated in and was one of the most perceptive analysts of the Munich events, reflected in 1931 on the brutality of a sexualised mutilation visited upon women who were killed, a practice we will see again in the Freikorps’ Baltic campaigns (Mühsam 1980). In the aftermath of the Munich uprising the SPD government was restored to power in Bavaria, but it was fatally weakened. Bavaria, where the Einwohnerwehren were especially powerful, became a centre for radical right organising in subsequent years. The Kapp-Lüttwitz putsch took place in Munich in March 1920 and, while it failed in its goal of overthrowing the national government, the SPD administration in Bavaria was removed, the first time this had happened. The impacts were felt elsewhere as well, with events in the Thuringian town of Mechterstädt providing one of the most striking instances of what Gumbel called “class justice.” In the aftermath of the Kapp-Lüttwitz putsch fifteen striking workers were murdered by the Marburg Student Fraternity (Studentenkorps). As Dietrich Heither and Adelheid Schulze (2015) describe in their exhaustive study, fraternities were key nodes in “prefascist” networks in Thuringia and elsewhere, and while fourteen radical right students were charged in the case, they were acquitted when the court accepted their claim that they had been forced to kill the workers when they attempted to flee. The case generated national outrage on the left, although the right lauded the students as heroes of the anti-Bolshevik struggle. The suppression of the Munich Soviet was the last time such massive levels of paramilitary violence was seen. The state attempted to reclaim a monopoly on violence, and over time Freikorps units were disbanded. Some joined the army, others participated in the Stahlhelm and other veterans’ organisations, and a committed few went underground. The need for further consolidation of the Weimar order was highlighted by the OHL, however. On 27 June 1919 the high command argued for “first and foremost the complete restoration of state authority and then the restoration of our economic life,” which would require that “[t]he workers’ Council nonsense must disappear from the administration quickly and completely” (‘Richtlinien’ 1987, pp. 76–77). If the Freikorps were no longer as central to suppressing those movements, their influence continued to be felt. The Organisation Consul was one of the underground groups that formed out of the disbanded

54  R. HEYNEN

Marinebrigade Ehrhardt, the most prominent of the Freikorps units. It perpetrated a number of spectacular political murders, including Hans Paasche, a former colonial soldier turned anti-war and anti-colonial activist, and Matthias Erzberger, a member of the Catholic Centre Party and briefly Finance Minister who was despised on the right in particular for signing the Treaty of Versailles. Most shocking was the murder of the prominent industrialist, writer and state official Walter Rathenau, whose role in the period I will revisit in the final section of the chapter. The significance of paramilitary violence in the 1918–1921 period is difficult to overstate. The Freikorps enabled the stabilisation of the new republic, ensuring that, for all of the important changes that were implemented, its institutions looked rather too much like those of the old German Reich. On trial for high treason in the wake of his participation in the Munich Soviet, Erich Mühsam bitterly outlined the role of the SPD in facilitating the counter-revolution: The only contribution that the party made to the revolution was first to exploit and then to sabotage it… The communists had nothing to do with the proclamation of the council republic. They are not responsible for the consequences. Those who have brought civil war to Munich are responsible. (Mühsam 2011, p. 132)

Even when the SPD recognised the danger from the right, as they did in passing the Law for the Protection of the Republic on 18 July 1922 to combat right-wing terror, the persistence of pre-war officials and institutions meant that such laws were used primarily against the left. The SPD’s counter-revolutionary politics also did little to lessen the profound disdain in which they and the new republican order were held by the radical right. A powerful mythology built up around the Freikorps, sustained by the many popular accounts that their members published in subsequent years (see Sprenger 2008). A peculiar relationship with violence developed. In Adolf Ehrt’s (1933) Armed Insurrection!, for example, published just after the Nazi seizure of power, he presents the reader with graphic photographs of the dead and mutilated corpses of Freikorps fighters that act as a call to action. There are two forms of violence here, one the bloody horror perpetrated by communism we see in the photos, the second the purifying violence of the counter-revolution. Especially by 1933, but already in the early Weimar years, the latter violence was characterised by its profound lack of restraint spurred by the purported existential threat

THE GERMAN REVOLUTION AND THE RADICAL RIGHT 

55

posed by Bolshevism, by then encompassing the SPD as well. Read in relation to colonial history, however, the deeper roots of that anticommunist violence also become visible.

Colonialism, Race, and the Roots of Radical Right Violence German colonial histories generally play little or no role in analyses of the revolutionary period. Certainly a number of scholars, most famously Hannah Arendt, have linked German colonialism to Nazism, generally drawing links between the genocide against the Herero (or Ovaherero) and Nama (or Namaqua) in German South West Africa (GSWA) that began in 1904. Those genocidal campaigns led to the murder of up to 80% of the Herero population (following the infamous extermination order of General Lothar von Trotha) and half of the Nama. As Susanne Kuß (2010) notes, however, given the gap of over 30 years, it is in fact difficult to establish concrete connections between these genocides and the Holocaust. Generally these interpretive problems are overcome by turning to indirect connections, for example in Isabel Hull’s (2005) contention that a genocidal tendency was rooted in a German military culture that gravitated to “extreme” solutions. I would suggest, however, without having space to develop the argument further here, that bringing in a consideration of the German revolutionary period helps to bridge some of these interpretive gaps. Setting aside these larger questions, what is clear is that the virulence and quasi-exterminationist drive of the anti-socialist radical right violence of the 1918–1923 period was profoundly shaped by these colonial histories. Colonial racism shaped anti-socialism more broadly, and a colonial logic was especially evident in the Freikorps campaign in the Baltics that paralleled the anti-Bolshevik fight in Germany. Even more striking that the conceptual linkages, we find remarkable continuities in personnel, with many Freikorps leaders having served in the colonial military. The colonial experience thus provides a crucial historical and analytical backdrop to understanding counter-revolutionary violence in post-war Germany. Andrew Zimmerman argues that colonial rule was inextricable from class politics in the metropole. Class struggle, he says, pitted a bourgeois modernity against a proletarian modernity. Bourgeois politics was not premised on a fundamental distinction between the domestic and the colonial spheres, but rather involved the “problem of dominating

56  R. HEYNEN

a spectrum of workers domestically and overseas” (2016, p. 122). Although some pre-war SPD leaders offered support for “progressive” colonial ideas, most recognised the connections between their struggles and those of colonised peoples. Karl Kautsky for example, and “unlike virtually every liberal critic of imperialism—understood colonialism as part of a counterrevolution against allied struggles to overthrow slavery, capitalism, imperialism, and state power” (2016, p. 131). As John Phillip Short notes, that awareness extended throughout the party: “At the local level, in terms of everyday political discourse and practice, the SPD was forcefully anticolonialist—in 1907, as over the preceding ten years, and beyond” (2012, p. 222). Short’s highlighting of 1907 refers to the elections of that year. Widely called the “Hottentot Election” (Hottentot being the derogatory term for the Nama), it was fought on the question of support for German colonial policy, with SPD denunciations of the genocidal violence of the previous years provoking virulent attacks from the right. In this moment, then, the intersections between a colonial and an anti-socialist politics became clear. Defenders of the colonial project saw the genocide as necessary and even noble, the colonies providing, as the colonial propagandist Paul Dehn put it, an “educational school [Erziehungsschule] for a people” (1907, p. 118). To Dehn, SPD opposition stemmed “not out of aversion to colonies, but out of a hatred of the Reich” (1907, p. 120). Similar claims of the SPD’s national and racial treason can be found throughout the period. As the conservative newspaper Kreuz-Zeitung put it in the lead-up to the election, social democracy was “more dangerous than the enemy abroad, because it poisons the soul of our people and wrests the weapons from our hands before we have even lifted them” (quoted in Liebknecht 1973, p. 4). This passage was quoted by Wilhelm Liebknecht, father of Karl and one of the founders of the SPD, in his 1907 analysis of the interconnections between militarism, capitalism and colonialism. The association of socialism with a quasi-racialised treason retained its force throughout the years that followed, most evident after 1918 in the myth of the “stab in the back.” Fostered by Ludendorff and the right, the claim was that the military was undefeated on the field of battle, but had been betrayed by the revolution and the SPD’s signing of the Treaty of Versailles (Barth 2003). The Treaty had not only imposed a humiliating demilitarisation and reparations payments on Germany, but had also formalised the loss of Germany’s colonial empire along with lands on its eastern border.

THE GERMAN REVOLUTION AND THE RADICAL RIGHT 

57

The colonial question thus became central to many of the widely held grievances around with the radical right mobilised. These more conceptual connections link colonial violence and Freikorps campaigns of the post-war period, but the extent to which Freikorps leaders had served in colonial campaigns, in particular the genocidal campaigns in GSWA, is even more striking (see Madley 2005; Kuß 2010). General Georg Maercker had served in German East Africa, the Chinese colony of Qingdao, and then GSWA during the genocide. He suggested the idea of forming Freikorps in 1918, and went on to be a leader of the anti-Semitic current in the Stahlhelm. Arnold von Lequis served in various colonial campaigns, including on the General Staff during the war against the Herero, before leading the forces that, at Ebert’s behest, attacked the People’s Naval Division during the night of 23–24 December 1918. Franz von Epp served first in China, then in GSWA, including at the Battle of Waterberg where the German military drove the last of the free Herero into the desert to die. In February 1919 he formed the Freikorps Epp that participated in the crushing of the Bavarian council republic, briefly proclaimed himself dictator of Bavaria, and then employed Hitler as an informer and “educator.” Subsequently his unit was reformed as the Battalion Epp in the Reichswehr, with Hess, Strasser and Röhm all serving under him. Hermann Ehrhardt served in GSWA beginning in 1904, later leading the Marinebrigade Ehrhardt whose members, as we saw, then established the murderous Organisation Consul. Finally, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck was especially significant in the mythology of the right. He was commander of the Schutztruppe in German East Africa from 1914 to 1918, where his mixed force of German and local Askari soldiers held off much larger Allied forces until after the Armistice in Europe. His heroism embodied the mythology of the undefeated military spirit that was stabbed in the back, his unit’s carefully choreographed parade through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin in March 1919 a defining moment in the construction of this alternative history. His popular memoir Heia Safari! cemented this mythology. These colonial connections were not limited to the right, however. One of the most prominent liberal politicians of the early Weimar years was the banker and industrialist Bernhard Dernburg, who co-founded the German Democratic Party (DDP) in November 1918, and served briefly as Minister of Finance and Vice Chancellor from April to June 1919. Supporting the assault on the People’s Naval Division in the Deutsche Zeitung, he proclaimed:

58  R. HEYNEN We can tolerate it no longer, that 2,000 Spartacists terrorize all of Berlin, and we must demand that the government immediately use the forces available to them and cease from, as they have done up to now, leaving them hanging on the wall. If they cannot do that, then we will all once again pull on the old grey fieldcoat, to restore order and quiet. (quoted in Jones 2016, p. 167)

Dernburg had cut his political teeth as Secretary of State for Colonial Affairs and head of the German Colonial Office beginning in 1907, when, in the aftermath of the genocide and the “Hottentot election,” he was brought in to modernise and rationalise the colonial project. Within the SPD, it was the right wing dominating post-war policy that was most likely to offer support for an “enlightened” colonialism, suggesting a strong connection between pro-colonial and anti-left politics. Noske (1914) had authored the book Colonial Politics and Social Democracy arguing for this position. Paul Lensch, who, as we saw earlier, was praised by Eduard Stadtler, argued that a colonial empire was fundamental “for [Germany’s] entire national economy and especially out of consideration for the welfare of its working classes” (Lensch 1918, p. 85). Colonial advocates acknowledged the SPD’s support. Hans Poeschel’s foreword to a collection of documents publicising the injustices of Germany’s loss of colonies in the Treaty of Versailles, for example, stated: “The German government and the entire German people—with the sole exception of a part of the most extreme left—have raised the sharpest objections to the seizure of colonies as an obvious violation” (1920, p. iii). Wilhelm Solf, a former governor of German Samoa, offered similar praise after leaving his briefly held post as Foreign Minister in 1918. He resigned, he said, not because of differences of opinion between the [SPD-led] People’s Government and myself about our colonial war aims; for the new government is of the opinion that the colonial aim of the war must continue to remain directed towards the recovery of our colonies, and agrees with the old government that the possession of colonies is a vital issue for Germany, not an indulgence. (Solf 1919, p. iii)

The colonial question was central as well to German conflict with the French, who were the primary occupying force after the war. The most visible manifestation of this came in the racist campaign against the so-called “Black Shame on the Rhine” [schwarze Schmach am Rhein]. Stoked by the media, the campaign objected to the French stationing of

THE GERMAN REVOLUTION AND THE RADICAL RIGHT 

59

African colonial troops in Germany as part of their occupation. Only the KPD consistently rejected this rhetoric. The SPD did not use the virulently racist language deployed on the right, but Ebert argued that this French provocation (and there was a deliberateness to it) “constituted an infringement of the laws of European civilization” (quoted in van Laak 2007, pp. 95–96). As in the pre-war accusations against the left, the argument here was that the French were committing racial treason in stationing Black troops in Germany, with fears turning on the purported sexual violence perpetrated by the Black soldiers and on fears of miscegenation. If the French occupation represented a reversal of the proper colonial order, in the Baltic states the Freikorps sought to re-establish a form of colonial rule closer to home. As Annemarie Sammartino (2010) outlines, the political and symbolic meanings of Germany’s eastern border were complex and fraught. It was the site of expansionist aims, partially fulfilled during the war. That expansion also produced a greater awareness of German communities in the Baltics and in Russia, Auslandsdeutsche who, along with settler communities especially in GSWA who had been “abandoned” after the Treaty of Versailles, were claimed by the right (Wildenthal 2010). At the same time, border anxieties were generated by migratory movements that peaked during the war, and included significant numbers of Eastern European Jews (Ostjuden) who were particular targets of anti-Semitic nationalism (Wertheimer 1987). The armistice of 1918 meant that eastern territory was lost, although the border remained undefined until the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922. “The East” thus became a powerful symbolic, political and military site especially for the radical right. Nominally by Latvian invitation, and approved by Noske in early January 1919, somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 Freikorps fighters joined the campaign to claim Baltic territory for Germany. Carried in part by the promise of land, the Freikorps were driven by another familiar concern: the spread of Bolshevism from the east. Even more than in Germany, the Baltic campaign was marked by horrific levels of violence, the purported existential threat posed by the Bolsheviks legitimising a campaign of indiscriminate mass killing, often overlaid with a profound anti-Semitism, of those suspected of communist sympathies. As we saw in Munich, this was also a profoundly misogynist violence. In his memoir of his participation, Erich Balla writes that when faced with young women, “The Baltic Germans [the Freikorps fighters]

60  R. HEYNEN

showed no mercy. They did not see their youth or their charm. They saw only the face of the devil and hit, shot, stabbed them dead (schlugen, schossen, stachen), whenever they saw them” (quoted in Sammartino 2010, p. 58). Sammartino stresses the extent to which, as in Germany, this extreme violence was experienced as cleansing: the Freikorps Baltic campaign was saturated in blood. This violence must be read as a key component of Freikorps creativity. The form of the territorial boundaries of Germany, the nature of its state, and the constitution of its people were all up for grabs in 1919, the year of the Freikorps’ Baltic adventure. Violence was both a symptom and constitutive element of this chaos. (Sammartino 2010, p. 46)

Ernst von Salomon, who participated in the campaign, later wrote: “Germany was at her frontiers” (Salomon 1931, p. 58). The frontier struggle linked the domestic fight against Bolshevism to the threat from the east, both deeply embedded in a colonial logic and history that was intimately familiar to many of the Freikorps leaders and soldiers. Experienced in exterminationist colonial violence, they once again acted to cleanse the land and make it safe for a racially constituted and politically homogenous national order.

Anti-Bolshevism as Revolutionary Ideal In a speech to the Constituent National Assembly on 6 February 1919, Friedrich Ebert proclaimed: “A German has gifted scientific socialism to the workers of the world. We are on the way to advancing the world once again in a socialist direction.” Contrasting the SPD with those further left, he continued: “Socialism is for us organization, order, and solidarity, not arbitrariness, egoism, and destruction” (Ebert 1981, pp. 207–209). Ebert’s desire for “order” and his virulent opposition to those to his left reflected the dynamics that I have been tracing in this chapter. The powerful enmity that developed between the SPD and its leftist counterparts had its roots in the pre-war debates over reform and revolution, was sharpened by the SPD’s voting for war credits in 1914, and turned to a mobilisation of violence perpetrated especially by the Freikorps in the post-war period. This dynamic was perhaps the most important legacy of the post-war years in Germany. Admittedly under pressure from the established authorities, especially the OHL,

THE GERMAN REVOLUTION AND THE RADICAL RIGHT 

61

and faced with a challenging post-war situation, the SPD helped stabilise older institutions, and create the space within which the radical right could organise. By consistently putting the containment of “Bolshevism” above other concerns, the splits on the left quickly became intractable. In 1921–1922 there were attempts to forge a united front across the left, in particular in response to Rathenau’s murder, but, as with the other moments when solidarity seemed possible, ran aground (Wilde 2017). These conflicts impacted the left parties in different ways. The right wing of the SPD was strengthened, and parliamentary politics became the party’s focus. Under pressure from the violent mobilisation on the right, which, as noted earlier, was institutionalised in the Stahlhelm and other such groups, both the SPD and KPD developed their own defense organisations in 1924 (Voigt 2009), and the party culture of the KPD in particular, under constant attack, became more masculinist and militarised. Partly in response, elements within the KPD even sought to appropriate elements of the nationalist program, most evident in Karl Radek’s infamous “Schlageter speech” on 21 June 1923 during a discussion on resisting fascism at a plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International. Leo Schlageter was a Freikorps fighter who had participated in the Kapp-Lüttwitz putsch, the Baltic campaign, and in crushing workers in the Ruhr in 1920, before being executed by the French during their reoccupation of the Ruhr in 1923. He instantly became a radical right hero, but Radek sought to reclaim him for the left, presenting him as misguided and proclaiming that “we believe that the large majority of the nationalist-minded masses do not belong to the capitalist camp, but rather to the camp of the workers” (Protokoll 1923, p. 244). Ruth Fischer likewise made a misguided appeal to the right on their own terms in a debate with radical right students in Berlin on 25 July 1923: Anyone who rails against Jewish capital, gentlemen, is already a class warrior whether he knows it or not. They are against Jewish capital and want to overcome the stock exchange dealers—rightly so. Stamp down on the Jewish capitalists, hang them from the lampposts, crush them. But gentlemen, how do you feel about the big capitalists like Stinnes and Klöckner? (quoted in Hoffrogge 2017, p. 100)

Still others turned explicitly to the right, most notably Ernst Niekisch, a leader of the Munich Soviet who became a proponent of what he called “National Bolshevism.”

62  R. HEYNEN

Drawing attention to these influences is not intended to suggest a deeper similarity between radical left and right. This claim, central to totalitarian theory, is unconvincing in even more subtle and careful accounts (for example, Brown 2009), ignoring the profoundly different political positions and social locations of the different parties. What is far more striking than the sporadic left attempts to speak the language of nationalism is the reverse. The right’s projects for a new Germany were profoundly anti-socialist, anti-democratic and racist and anti-Semitic (Ciupke 2007). But, they also staked a claim to an alternative “socialism from the right,” as I have called it elsewhere (Heynen 2012). We saw this with Stadtler’s “national socialism” (which was friendly to but distinct from the Nazi version of the same), but it was a widely held position. For the anti-Semitic nationalist Wilhelm Stapel, for example, member of the Hamburg Circle of conservative revolutionaries that included Carl Schmitt, this entailed “a moral-religious socialism. A socialism as an educational task” (Stapel 1919, p. 5). As Thomas Rohkrämer puts it, the right shared a “wish for a strong basis of shared cultural ideals and political goals to integrate the masses, unite the nation and mobilize it for grand heroic achievements,” thereby constructing “its own visions of an alternative modernity in attempting to construct a new communal German faith” (Rohkrämer 2007, pp. 1, 21). These visions were often framed as “socialist.” While useful, however, arguments like Rohkrämer’s focus on an internal analysis of radical right ideology, missing the political significance of the right’s violent mobilization in the early Weimar years. The claim for a radical right socialism was largely incoherent, but it was premised on a certain recognition of the contradictions in, and exploitative nature of, capitalist social relations around which they sought to ground support. Stadtler, for example, explicitly rejected the nostalgia of a traditional conservatism as it failed to respond to the legitimate anger of the working class. Any “new communal faith” would require an attention to the new social, political and economic conditions, violently rejecting and acting to suppress the empty materialism of left socialism, but seeking to co-opt its political energies. It was not only communism that Stadtler and Stapel rejected, but also bourgeois materialisms. Here Walter Rathenau was a key figure. Rightwing antipathy to Rathenau ran deep, as was clear from his murder by the Freikorps in 1922. Prior to the war he ran the industrial conglomerate AEG (Allgemeine Electricitäts-Gesellschaft) that had been founded by his father. Stapel notes this background in denouncing his materialist approach:

THE GERMAN REVOLUTION AND THE RADICAL RIGHT 

63

Walter Rathenau can decree an outward (äußerlichen) socialism—that is what he is after. He cannot ‘realize’ (durchführen) the new attitude, a moral socialism, with his expansion of the war economy. In order to achieve that, one must be even more powerful than a president of the A.E.G., one must be the almighty God himself. (Stapel 1919, p. 5)

What Stapel is referencing here is Rathenau’s subsequent role early in the First World War when he was in charge of reorganising the German economy on a war footing, the results widely interpreted as a “war socialism” (Kriegssozialismus) (see Leucht 2014). Rathenau was influenced by the sociologist and political economist Johann Plenge, who argued in 1916 that [u]nder the deprivation of the war the socialist idea took effect in German life, its organization developed in a new spirit, and thus the self-assertion of our nation was born for humanity out of the idea of 1914, the idea of German organization, the people’s community [Volksgenossenschaft] of a national socialism. (quoted in Fries 1994, pp. 216–217)

Rathenau’s war socialism influenced many on the right, although was ultimately condemned as a soulless if powerful technocratic materialism, a perspective rooted as well in a profound anti-Semitism. Ernst von Salomon, the Freikorps fighter and writer who served time for his part in Rathenau’s murder, and who published a lavish and popular history of the Freikorps during the Nazi period, describes reading Rathenau’s book The Future in the lead-up to the assassination: “I felt that it was spiritually reactionary—written by a man who was born to late and not by one who had come too soon” (von Salomon 1931, p. 180). The SPD produced its own versions of war socialism. Paul Lensch, who had also argued for the importance of colonies to the national economy, was one proponent in the party. Another was the Austrian philosopher and political economist Otto Neurath, who ran an economic planning office in Munich in 1918–1919, advising revolutionary governments on the basis of what he called “war economics” (Kriegswirtschaftslehre). The war, he said in 1919, very quickly produced “a new economic order, a new type of total national (Volks) and even global economy” that could serve as a model for social democratic economics (quoted in Leucht 2014, p. 53). These visions for a totalising or integrated order suggest what we might call a biopolitical strategy. Michel Foucault argues that biopolitics was fundamentally bound up with political economy, which is precisely what we find in the radical right’s integration of visions for a “central

64  R. HEYNEN

economic dictatorship” (Stadtler 1920, p. 146) with a fetishisation of the cleansing and creative power of violence. The biopolitical dimension is perhaps most evident, however, in the centrality of a violent misogyny and a racist and colonial logic to radical right mobilisation. One of the radical right pressure groups active already during the war was the Anti-Feminist League, which in 1917 posed the problem facing Germany in existential terms, prefiguring the stab in the back myth and echoing Stadtler’s fears of a collapse of the German soul with which this chapter began: “the complete ‘feminization’ and ‘democratization’ would sound the death knell for German heroism and thus the German Reich” (quoted in Planert 1998, p. 229). The struggle over the future of the nation took place in a context where, as a result of the war, we find “a fundamentally new relationship between military destruction, industrial production, and the organization of the social and biological reproduction of society” (Domansky 1996, p. 427). This is where the futility of the SPD’s collaboration with the right is clearest. From the perspective of the right, the SPD as much as those further to the left were the post-war agents of this feminisation (universal suffrage was a key gain of the republic) and democratisation. Whatever temporary alliances might be formed, the radical right remained ruthlessly opposed to both the SPD and the republic they represented. Drawing on a legacy of colonial violence, valorising the masculine and misogynist violence found at the front during the First World War, and seeking a wholly integrated social order violently purged of dissent and heterogeneity, the years of the German Revolution provided the context for the radical right to establish an organisational and ideological base that sustained it through the following decade, transcending the immediate task of containing the revolution.

References Aus dem Bericht über eine Beratung führender deutscher Industrieller in Berlin über die Finanzierung der “Antibolschewistischen Liga” am 10. Januar 1919. 1966. In Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, band 3, von 1917 bis 1923, 539–540. Berlin: Dietz. Barth, Boris. 2003. Dolchstoßlegenden und politische Desintegration: Das Trauma der deutschen Niederlage im Ersten Weltkrieg 1914–1933. Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag. Bramke, Werner. 2009. Eine ungeliebte Revolution. Die deutsche Novemberrevolution von 1918/1919 im Widerstreit von Zeitgenossen und Historikern. In Die Novemberrevolution 1918.1919 in Deutschland für bürgerliche und sozialistische Demokratie: Allgemeine, regionale und biographische Aspekte, ed. Ulla Plener, 11–40. Berlin: Dietz.

THE GERMAN REVOLUTION AND THE RADICAL RIGHT 

65

Brown, Timothy S. 2009. Weimar Radicals: Nazis and Communists Between Authenticity and Performance. New York, NY: Berghahn Books. Canning, Kathleen. 2008. Sexual Crisis and the Writing of Citizenship: Reflections on States of Exception in Germany, 1914–1920. In Staats-Gewalt: Ausnahmezustand und Sicherheitsregimes, ed. Alf Lüdtke and Michael Wildt, 167–213. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. Ciupke, Paul (ed.). 2007. “Die Erziehung zum deutschen Menschen”: Völkische und nationalkonservative Erwachsensenbildung in der Weimarer Republik. Essen: Klartext. Cossmann, Paul Nikolaus. 1925. Der Dolchstoß-Prozeßin München, OktoberNovember 1925. Eine Ehrenrettung des deutschen Volkes: Zeugen- und Sachverständigen-Aussagen, eine Sammlung von Dokumenten. Munich: G. Birk. Dehn, Paul. 1907. Von deutscher Kolonial- und Weltpolitik. Berlin: Allgemeiner Verein für Deutsche Literatur. Diehl, James. 1977. Paramilitary Politics in Weimar Germany. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Domansky, Elisabeth. 1996. Militarization and Reproduction in World War I Germany. In Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930, ed. Geoff Eley. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Ebert, Friedrich. 1981. Ansprache Eberts zur Eröffnung der Verfassungsgebenden Nationalversammlung am 6.2.1919. In Die deutsche Revolution 1918/1919, ed. Gerhard A. Ritter and Susanne Miller. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Ehrt, Adolf. 1933. Bewaffneter Aufstand! Enthüllungen über den kommunistischen Umsturzversuch am Vorabend der nationalen Revolution. Berlin: Eckart Verlag. Eley, Geoff. 2015. Fascism Then and Now. In Socialist Register 2016, ed. Leo Panitch and Greg Albo, 91–117. London: The Merlin Press. Fries, Helmut. 1994. Die große Katharsis: Der Erste Weltkrieg in der Sich deutscher Dichter und Gelehrter. Band 1: Die Kriegsbegeisterung von 1914: Ursprünge-Denkweisen-Auflösung. Konstanz: Verlag am Hockgraben. Heither, Dietrich, and Adelheid Schulze. 2015. Die Morde von Mechterstädt 1920: Zur Geschichte rechtsradikaler Gewalt in Deutschland. Berlin: Metropol Verlag. Heynen, Robert. 2012. Socialism from the Right? Aesthetics, Politics and the Counter-Revolution in Weimar Germany. New Formations 75: 82–98. Heynen, Robert. 2015. Degeneration and Revolution: Radical Cultural Politics and the Body in Weimar Germany. Leiden: Brill. Hoffrogge, Ralf. 2017. Class Against Class: The ‘Ultra-Left’ Berlin Opposition, 1921–1923. In Weimar Communism as Mass Movement, 1918–1933, ed. Ralf Hoffrogge and Norman Laporte, 87–108. London, UK: Lawrence and Wishart. Hull, Isabel V. 2005. Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Jones, Mark. 2016. Founding Weimar: Violence and the German Revolution, 1918–1919. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

66  R. HEYNEN Kuß, Susanne. 2010. Deutsches Militär auf kolonialen Kriegsschauplätzen: Eskalation von Gewalt zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag. Lensch, Paul. 1918. Der Arbeiter und die deutschen Kolonien. In Unsere Kolonien: Sonderdruck aus der Deutschen Kriegswochenschau. Berlin: Kriegspresseamt. Leucht, Robert. 2014. Wirtschaftsgeneral und Gesellschaftstechniker. Imaginäre Anführer der Kriegswirtschaft und der Weg zu einer neuen Gesellschaftsordnung. In Der Held im Schützengraben: Führer, Massen und Medientechnik im Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Karl Wagner, Stephan Baumgartner, and Michael Gamper, 51–67. Zurich: Chronos Verlag. Levi, Paul. 1919. Die Kehrseite. Die Internationale 1 (9/10): 9–13. Liebknecht, Wilhelm. 1973. Militarism and Anti-Militarism: With Special Regard to the International Young Socialist Movement, trans. Grahame Lock. Cambridge, UK: Rivers Press. Liebknecht, Karl. 2012. That Which Is. In All Power to the Councils! A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, ed. Gabriel Kuhn, 93–95. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Madley, Benjamin. 2005. From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South West Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe. European History Quarterly 35 (3):429–464. Mühsam, Erich. 1980. Räterepublik und sexuelle Revolution. In Literaten and der Wand: Die Münchener Räterepublik und die Schriftsteller, ed. Hansjörg Viesel. Frankfurt am Main: Büchergilde Gutenberg. Mühsam, Erich. 2011. Final Court Statement, 11 July 1919. In Liberating Society from the State and Other Writings: A Political Reader, ed. and trans. Gabriel Kuhn, 131–133. Oakland: PM Press. Noske, Gustav. 1914. Kolonialpolitik und Sozialdemokratie. Stuttgart: Dietz. Planert, Ute. 1998. Antifeminismus im Kaiserreich. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Poeschel, Hans. 1920. Vorwort. In Die Kolonialfrage im Frieden von Versailles: Dokumente zu ihrer Behandlung, ed. Hans Poeschel, iii–v. Berlin: E.S. Mittler & Sohn. Protokoll der Konferenz der erweiterten Exekutive der kommunistischen Internationle, Moskau. 12–23. Juni 1923. Hamburg: Carl Hoym. Retzlaw, Karl. 1971. Spartakus: Aufstieg und Niedergang. Erinnerungen eines Parteiarbeiters. Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik. Richtlinien der OHL für die deutsche Politik vom 27. Juni 1919. 1987. In Der deutsche Faschismus in Quellen und Dokumenten, ed. Reinhard Kühnl, 76–77. Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein. Rohkrämer, Thomas. 2007. A Single Communal Faith? The German Right from Conservatism to National Socialism. New York: Berghahn Books. Sammartino, Annemarie. 2010. The Impossible Border: Germany and the East, 1914–1922. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

THE GERMAN REVOLUTION AND THE RADICAL RIGHT 

67

Schumann, Dirk. 2009. Political Violence in the Weimar Republic, 1918–1933: Fight for the Streets and Fear of Civil War, trans. Thomas Dunlap. New York, NY: Berghahn. Schumann, Dirk. 2010. Political Violence, Contested Public Space, and Reasserted Masculinity in Weimar Germany. In Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s, ed. Kathleen Canning, Kerstin Barndt, and Kristin McGuire, 236–253. New York, NY: Berghahn Books. Short, John Phillip. 2012. Magic Lantern Empire: Colonialism and Society in Germany. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Solf, Wilhelm. 1919. Kolonialpolitik: Mein politisches Vermächtnis. Berlin: Reimar Hobbing. Sprenger, Matthias. 2008. Landsknechte auf dem Weg ins Dritte Reich? Zu Genese und Wandel des Freikorpsmythos. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh. Stadtler, Eduard. 1920. Die Diktatur der Sozialen Revolution. Leipzig: Koehler. Stapel, Wilhelm. 1919. Völkisch und Sozialistisch. Jungdeutsche Stimmen 1: 4–5. Stephenson, Scott. 2009. The Final Battle: Soldiers of the Western Front and the German Revolution of 1918. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Theweleit, Klaus. 1987 and 1989. Male Fantasies, 2 vols. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. van Laak, Dirk. 2007. Afrika vor den Toren. Deutsche Raum- und Ordnungsvorstellungen in Deurschland, 1900–1933. In Ordnungen in der Krise. Zur politischen Kulturgeschichte Deutschlands, 1900–1933, ed. Wolfgang Hardtwig. Munich: R. Oldenbourg. Verhey, Jeffrey. 2000. Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth, and Mobilization in Germany. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Voigt, Carsten. 2009. Kampfbünde der Arbeiterbewegung. Das Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold und der Rote Fronkämpferbund in Sachsen 1924–1933. Cologne: Böhlau Verlag. von Salomon, Ernst. 1931. The Outlaws, trans. Ian F.D. Morrow. London, UK: J. Cape. Weisbrod, Bernd. 2000. Military Violence and Male Fundamentalism: Ernst Jünger’s Contribution to the Conservative Revolution, trans. Pamela E. Selwyn. History Workshop Journal 49: 69–94. Wertheimer, Jack. 1987. Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Wilde, Florian. 2017. Building a Mass Party: Ernst Meyer and the United Front Policy, 1921–22. In Weimar Communism as Mass Movement, 1918–1933, ed. Ralf Hoffrogge and Norman Laporte, 66–86. London, UK: Lawrence and Wishart. Wildenthal, Lora. 2010. Gender and Colonial Policy in the Early Weimar Republic. In Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s, ed. Kathleen Canning, Kerstin Barndt, and Kristin McGuire. New York, NY: Berghahn Books.

68  R. HEYNEN Zimmerman, Andrew. 2016. Communism and Colonialism in the Red and Black Atlantic: Toward a Transnational Narrative of German Modernity. In German Modernities from Wilhelm to Weimar: A Contest of Futures, ed. Geoff Eley, Jennifer L. Jenkins, and Tracie Matysik, 119–138. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic.

Revolutionary Berlin: Fulcrum of the Twentieth Century Donny Gluckstein

The title of this paper suggests a bold claim. It attributes world-historic importance to events in the capital of Germany in the winter of 1918/19. It argues that these determined developments as distant in time and place as Stalin’s hegemony in Russia, the appointment of Hitler as German Chancellor, and through this the Second World War, the Cold War and so on. If that were not ambitious enough, the chapter goes even further by suggesting that these outcomes were closely linked to a struggle for democracy rooted in Berlin’s workshops. Let us see if the case for this “butterfly effect” can be made. It relies on certain basic premises. 1. There are two left currents which have talked about revolutionary democracy—Marxism and anarchism; but since the etymological root of the term democracy derives from the Greek words—demos (the people) and kratia (power), and anarchists reject power on a point of principle, this chapter will focus on a Marxist interpretation. Its starting point is that if one narrow class of capitalists

D. Gluckstein (*)  Edinburgh College, Edinburgh, UK © The Author(s) 2019 G. Kets and J. Muldoon (eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13917-9_4

69

70  D. GLUCKSTEIN

controls the means of existence, the rest of society is subordinated to its power whatever formal democratic structures are in operation. 2.  The inherent dictatorship of capitalism is exerted through economic pressure, control of ideology (through the media, education, etc.) and ultimately the use of physical force via the state. The existence of such overarching authority, which is both dispersed and highly centralised, negates real democracy. Even where the ballot box is found it exerts relatively minimal influence in practice. The converse is also true. Democracy (in its Greek sense) will be found where the will of the working class, the majority in society, is expressed. Bound together by the common endeavour of their working relationships, this class cannot be effective individually but can only act as a class if reaching and implementing decisions collectively—i.e. democratically. Other sections, such as the oppressed, may have a significant impact on society, but they lack the collective social weight the working class derives from its location at the heart of production. 3. Though the democratic potential of the working class is a constant, the exercise of collective will tends to be evanescent because its force dissipates once the immediate issue has been resolved (successfully or unsuccessfully). A sectional strike, a mass demonstration, direct action, or even an election once every five years in which the candidate articulates working-class demands, is no substitute for real power. Only when the capitalists are expropriated at the basic economic level and collective power is secured through a workers’ state, can genuine democracy be fully rooted. This is what Marx called “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” 4. In its opposition to the control of the capitalists, the collective will of the masses can take many forms. Together these constitute class struggle, which occurs as a conflict between non-democracy and democracy, will against will. If, as the Communist Manifesto puts it, the history of the world is the history of class struggle, then the battle of wills plays a historic role. Though class struggle is not restricted to any single method, it is at the point of production that labour and bosses interact most directly and on a regular basis. In such situations there is no element of self-selection by individual workers or lack of continuity (as is the case in, for example, attendance at a demonstration or a meeting).

REVOLUTIONARY BERLIN: FULCRUM OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 

71

5. Very often it is at the point of production that the “democratic moment” is at its strongest, for a number of reasons. The further away from the root of the class struggle one goes, the more the ideology of the ruling class through its control of media, intimidation, force and fraud predominates. At the point of production the interest of the majority as a collective is revealed to participants because experience of exploitation and domination is not mediated by outside factors (propaganda, lack of direct knowledge of circumstances, and so on). Furthermore, the sense of power (kratia)—the fact that the bosses cannot do without the labour of workers (while workers can do without bosses)—can be greatest. The argument that follows employs two axes—a temporal one tracing growing radicalisation due to long-term developments before and after the German Revolution, including the situation in Berlin between November 1918 and January 1919; the other looking at process—the struggle for direct democracy stretching from the macro level of the state to the micro level of the workshop. Berlin at this time can justly be claimed as the fulcrum of twentiethcentury social and political trends because key developments turned on the outcome of events there. Firstly, the 9 November revolution ended the First World War after just two days. Secondly, the split between social democracy and communism, which had begun in Russia, was cemented in what had previously been regarded as the centre of global Marxism. The murder of the communist leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, at the hands of forces led by the social democrat, Gustav Noske, solidified a division into the Second and Third Internationals. Thirdly, the failure of the German Revolution ultimately doomed the Bolsheviks’ efforts to isolation and defeat in their predominantly peasant country. The outcome was Stalinism which had disastrous and enduring consequences for the socialist movement. Finally, the half-made German Revolution so terrified the capitalist ruling class and the establishment generally that they turned to the most reactionary forces, enabling Hitler to be appointed Chancellor in 1933. This list may seem distant from the workshops of Berlin. But if democracy is to mean anything more than a tick on a ballot paper every few years, then it must emanate from a source of real power: the collective strength of the masses over and against a tiny ruling minority. It is in class struggle, much of which takes place at work on a daily basis from one side or the other, that the potential for real direct democracy can be found.

72  D. GLUCKSTEIN

The German Sonderweg and the Labour Movement Germany’s special historical path, its Sonderweg, largely derives from a comparison with what was seen as the “normal” development of leading countries of the day—Britain, France and the USA. In these countries the vestiges of feudalism were expunged by so-called “bourgeois revolutions.” They opened the political path to parliaments and the economic path to free markets. Thus in Britain the English revolution of the 1640s removed all but the trappings of feudalism and confirmed the dominance of Parliament over the crown. Real power lay with the “middling sort” who launched the first industrial revolution and by the nineteenth century had established laissez faire and minimal state interference in the economy as the ruling principle. The US federal system, built first through the War of Independence and then via a civil war to impose free market economics, achieved the same end even more thoroughly. France’s 1789 revolution dramatically uprooted feudalism, but the continuing intensity of class upheavals (with more revolutions in 1830, 1848 and 1871) meant the French state retained considerable power in order that the free market capitalism could remain in the saddle. For reasons that cannot be considered here, Germany’s bourgeois revolution in 1848 was aborted. What followed, as Bismarck, Germany’s first Chancellor, accurately described it, was a “marriage of iron and rye” between powerful industrial capitalists and feudal Junkerdom. Germany was no less capitalist than its rivals but the configuration was different. While western parts witnessed the biggest industrial revolution in Europe, the armies of the politically retarded traditionalist Prussian state in the East carried through unification in 1871. This produced a reversal of the British situation. The parliamentary democracy of the UK may be largely a fraud, but Bismarck performed a fraud within a fraud. Although all German males were given the vote long before that happened in the UK, merely the appearance of parliamentary democracy in the Reichstag was created, all the better to cloak an intertwining of authoritarian state culture with a thoroughly modern industrial capitalist economy. This ethos filtered down to the workplace in a managerial approach defined as “Herr im Hause” (Lord in his own house). The dialectical counterpart of this process was, through rapid economic expansion, the emergence of a massive proletariat whose advancement was confronted by a seemingly impenetrable reactionary bloc uniting ruling classes not from just one but two phases of human development—feudalism

REVOLUTIONARY BERLIN: FULCRUM OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 

73

and capitalism! Out of this arose the world’s strongest workers’ movement whose expression was found in the German Social Democratic Party—the SPD. It had a political aspect but also ran a self-contained world of trade unions and manifold cultural institutions. The SPD was dominant within the Second International and its leading theoretician, Karl Kautsky, was dubbed “the Pope of Marxism.” As all roads led to the socialist Rome of Berlin, far from German socialism being seen as following its country’s distinctive path, the Sonderweg, it was judged to be the normal model against which other labour movements should be judged. This was unfortunate. The monolithic character of the class enemy (through the marriage of iron and rye) had produced an extraordinary equal and opposite unity, the marriage of reform and revolution, a divine union anointed by bureaucracy. Outside Germany the natural tension that exists between reform and revolution could manifest itself in organisational splits. For example, in Britain the Marxist Social Democratic Federation and its successors existed separately to the openly reformist Independent Labour Party and later Labour Party. The same division existed between Polish revolutionaries and the Polish Socialist Party. In 1903 the SPD’s equivalent in Russia, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the same year as the Serbians. The SPD was not entirely immune to these tensions. Indeed, as the theoretical centre of global social democracy the debate that erupted in 1900 was of the highest calibre. The publication of Eduard Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism and Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution electrified the movement. Yet there were no organisational repercussions before the First World War. It took the hammer blows of that conflict to make the SPD monolith crack. So despite a promising start and the best efforts of revolutionaries such as Luxemburg, the development of ideas about workers’ democracy got no further than the realm of theory. The consequences were not only felt in Germany. Abroad, those within the Second International tradition who rejected parliament as a genuine democratic body or means to achieve socialism, interpreted their own splits as the consequence of peculiar circumstances. A famous example of this was Lenin. In 1914 his faith in the German SPD was so strong that when he read in the papers that all but one of its deputies voted to support Germany’s war effort he was initially convinced this was “fake news.” For all these reasons the ideas of the Pope of Marxism, who best expressed the marriage of reform and revolution, remained theoretically

74  D. GLUCKSTEIN

dominant. His formulation of the issue successfully fudged the meaning of both concepts: The Socialist party is a revolutionary party, but not a revolution-making party. We know that our goal can only be attained through a revolution. We also know that it is just as little in our power to create this revolution as it is in the power of our opponents to prevent it. It is not part of our work to instigate a revolution or to prepare a way for it. (Kautsky 1909)

If the goal of socialism could only be attained through a revolution, then it followed that Germany’s parliamentary democracy was inadequate and in need of replacement. If, on the other hand the SPD was not “to instigate a revolution or to prepare a way for it” then the development of any democratic alternative was ruled out. Though the road to full theoretical development of democratic alternatives to parliamentarism was barred by Kautsky’s influential and paralysing formulation, the real world carried on regardless. In the reformist camp Ignaz Auer found a way around the problem by telling Bernstein to drop theory and get on with more practical matters since “the movement is everything.” This approach enabled unrestricted work at the parliamentary and trade union level and pulled the summit of the SPD to the right. After the row in 1900 reformism may have denied itself theoretical expression but organisationally, as Robert Michels was famously to declare, the SPD succumbed to “the iron law of oligarchy.” As noted above, however, Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish revolutionary active in the SPD, had a sophisticated critique of reformism. Later on her Mass Strike pamphlet went further by developing elements of an alternative approach that emphasised the dynamic connection between industrial action and both economic and political issues. The link was accomplished through spontaneous agitation which could therefore escape both the limitations of passive voting in parliamentary elections and the bureaucratic straitjacket of the SPD. Mass withdrawal of labour was indeed an expression of workers’ democracy insofar as the class (demos) was exerting pressure (kratia) collectively. But stopping production was not the same as taking over the economic heartland of capitalist power, just as economic strikes over respective shares of the fruits of production were not as ambitious as political strikes whose target was the state. Another foreign revolutionary active

REVOLUTIONARY BERLIN: FULCRUM OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 

75

in Germany, Anton Pannekoek, therefore located the permanent basis for a workers’ democracy outside of the existing capitalist parliamentary state: “In large organised factories, where individual action is subordinated to the collective, the habits are created in the modern proletariat which are the raw materials [for workers’ democracy]” (Pannekoek 1912). Pannekoek’s focus on the workplace put production at the heart of the process of creating a workers’ alternative to parliamentarism, but lacked the dynamism of Luxemburg’s approach because it reduced the active element to the creation of “habits.”

Berlin’s Engineering Factories in Peace and War In Germany it would take a practical critique from the base, where working-class experience of the system was sharpest, to sweep away the cobwebs of Kautsky’s centrist theory and pose the question of real democracy. One place which had great potential for undertaking this task was the capital of the Kaiserreich, its political heart and a significant industrial centre with a discontented workforce. Reasons for this included the fivefold increase in Berlin’s population during the second half of the nineteenth century with resultant overcrowding. Two-thirds of children lived two or more to a bed. In Berlin as elsewhere the German industrial revolution was broad and deep and so there was of course diversity across the working class, with many women among its ranks. However, for historical and cultural reasons, in Berlin the most significant group for our discussion was comprised largely of male engineers. This was due to the city’s concentration of large-scale metalworking factories. These were ruled by the Herr im Hause principle in combination with cutting-edge organisational methods and technology. That included an import from the United States of Taylorism—time and motion study. It created situations like this: One day [a new] machine was set up in the workshop. The worker, who for years had been at a different type of machine, began to work at his accustomed pace. The manager, who was standing behind him, leant over and speeded up the belt drive, increasing the cutting rate. Dismayed, the worker said he could not run the machine at this frantic tempo. But the manager brandished a piece of paper which indicated the rate at which such a tool was guaranteed to operate. The worker has now had to adjust to the new rate permanently. (Woldt 1913, p. 805)

76  D. GLUCKSTEIN

The engineering union, the DMV, was one of the constellation of institutions that made up the SPD’s “state within the state” and was the most powerful unit in Germany’s ADGB federation of trade unions. In Berlin, for example, 85% of turners were in its ranks. But in a context where “the movement is everything” and yet “nothing was to be done to instigate or prepare” for change, the organisational strength of the workers became a vehicle for the growth of bureaucracy. Between 1900 and 1914 the number of DMV officials multiplied 19 times over. These individuals negotiated terms but did little to hold back the employers’ offensive in the workplace. Indeed, local DMV officials such as Berlin’s Adolf Cohen usually opposed direct action such as strikes, or snuffed them out as soon as possible. If workers’ democracy began through collective action emanating from the workplace, then the block to its development was not only the capitalists. They were supplemented by a layer of bureaucrats. To counter this situation a movement of shop stewards (Obleute) began to grow before the war. Their organising semi-independently of the official union structures might barely seem to qualify as a radical step towards workers’ democracy, but that would be a false conclusion to draw. As we have seen, the ability to collectively influence working life (as opposed to putting a cross on a piece of paper once every five years) was the starting point for real democracy and the shop steward was the nexus of that collective influence. Furthermore, they were subject to instant recall and so were directly accountable to their electors. Unlike MPs or union officials they did not enjoy separate lives or salaries from those they represented. They personally experienced the consequences of their decisions. Finally, their workshop constituency, unlike a parliamentary constituency, was the locus of a confrontation of wills that was not shaped by a sporadic voting procedure in an arbitrary geographical setting comprised of atomised individuals. The shop steward relied on the ability of those represented to constitute a collective body every working day, and those represented relied on the ability of the steward to express this to management. The First World War would turn workers’ potential democratic power into reality because the truth about bourgeois “democracy” was so starkly revealed. After 4 August 1914 across Europe and among all the belligerents, pretence at even a modicum of impartiality rapidly gave way to emergency provisions which stifled free speech, shut down any meaningful debate inside parliament, and nullified workers’ rights. War contractors made fortunes and millions died fighting for the hegemony of their ruling classes over competitors.

REVOLUTIONARY BERLIN: FULCRUM OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 

77

Meanwhile, SPD leaders willingly threw themselves into supporting the Kaiser’s efforts to kill foreign workers in uniform. They had abandoned a centrist position and clearly backed the state while ditching all thoughts of revolution. The State of Siege law was introduced to virtually chain engineering workers to their machines at the same time as working hours were extended to the limits of physical endurance. Appalling though this situation was, because of the desperate need for munitions, at least Berlin’s engineers avoided a fate that was death very often—being drafted into the army and enduring four years of carnage. This created the paradoxical situation whereby the state was attempting to enslave an engineering workforce that now possessed unique bargaining power. It helped many of Berlin’s engineering shop stewards to detach themselves from the wholesale class collaboration of the SPD-led trade union movement, in order to become the organisational heart of wartime resistance within the workplace. That development received a tremendous boost when news of the February 1917 revolution in Russia came through. Across the battle lines a new organisation was glimpsed—the Soviet (council) of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. Its Order No. 1 claimed an equal right in determining state policy to a newly formed Provisional Government which essentially continued the Tsar’s wartime policies. But a new question was also posed. In Russia Kautsky’s theoretical marriage of reform and revolution had already taken a blow when Bolsheviks and Mensheviks split in 1903. During 1917 it completely dissolved as two rival bodies vied for dominance. Reformist Mensheviks and SRs (the title Social Revolutionary being no guide to actual political position) backed a Provisional Government dedicated to fighting on in the interests of the Russian ruling class, while revolutionaries led by Lenin argued that the Soviet was a new type of democracy that should replace the capitalist state and usher in “peace, bread (for the workers) and land (for the peasants).” The dispute was resolved in October 1917 when a majority in Petrograd fell behind Lenin’s second slogan—“All Power to the Soviets”—and an insurrection abolished the Provisional Government. However, Soviet democracy had a peculiar twist to it, which made it particularly and urgently dependent on events elsewhere. The backwardness of Russia’s economy meant a non-collective class, the peasantry, were numerically the largest group. Their dispersed character put democratic control of society of the sort possible through the working class beyond

78  D. GLUCKSTEIN

reach. So the new “democracy” was inherently unstable as it depended on a minority. That alone could operate the Soviet’s principles of instant recall and direct accountability and exert a strong collective will. The self-evident contradiction had to be resolved one way or another. One option might be to accept the Constituent Assembly—a parliamentary-style body elected by both peasants and workers after the October revolution. The problem is that this would have killed off “All Power to the Soviets” and replaced it with a sham, a body that opened the door to the return of the ruling class. The alternative was to spread the revolution beyond the Russian Empire so as to sustain the workers’ state and develop its economy until proletarians were the majority. The speech dispersing the Constituent Assembly after just thirteen hours was made by Nikolai Bukharin, the editor of Pravda. He told the Assembly that “the final victory of the Russian revolution is unthinkable without the victory of the international proletariat” and “a lasting victory of the Russian proletariat is impossible without proletarian revolution in Europe” (Bukharin 1919, p. 7). Germany would present the most promising prospect for proletarian revolution in Europe. Although Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (the only Reichstag deputy to vote against war) were in prison, the SPD suffered a major split when the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) broke away in protest at the Party’s abject surrender to the Kaiser. The USPD was a centrist organisation that tried to uphold Kautsky’s stance. In Berlin this was supplemented by two additional currents pointing in a still more radical direction—the revolutionary Obleute and the Spartacist League. The former had moved to the left and, as shop stewards reflecting an increasingly angry and militant engineering workforce, they could mobilise significant forces. But, inevitably, they felt themselves to be representatives of a large mass of people who held a range of political views. This had advantages as well as disadvantages. While as individuals the Obleute stood for a workers’ democracy in contradistinction to bourgeois parliaments, they were not a political party as such, and most were on the left of the USPD. The Spartacists, led by Luxemburg and Liebknecht lacked the class roots of the Obleute, but as an overtly political group who shared a common viewpoint—the overthrow of capitalism and the creating of a democratic workers’ state—they were less constrained from articulating the revolutionary socialist standpoint. The potential interrelationship of the two currents was shown in the first political mass strike of May 1916.

REVOLUTIONARY BERLIN: FULCRUM OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 

79

When Liebknecht made an anti-war speech on May Day he was arrested. Though numbering only around 100 individuals, the Obleute were able to bring 55,000 out on strike. In comparison, when the Spartacists called demonstrations in 1915 only 150 and 1500 respectively had taken part. It should be noted that all protests or stoppages were bitterly resented by the SPD leadership as unpatriotic and a weakening of the war effort. Berlin was the most strike-prone area of Germany during the war. Events took a dramatic turn in April 1917 after Leipzig witnessed a strike and the election of the first workers’ council. Though news of the fall of the Tsar may have been a factor, the actual spark came from a government cut in rations. Berlin followed closely behind with 200,000 out and councils elected by workers from individual factories. The role of strike organisation as an exertion of class will, and its development from scattered economic units towards city-wide councils was being sketched out here. Although arrests of leading Obleute broke the 1917 Berlin strike it was not long before the movement resurfaced. January 1918 raised political issues even more starkly when 400,000 Berlin workers stopped production. A workers’ council consisting of 414 delegates elected on the basis of one per 1000 was established. It put forward economic demands as inflation since the outbreak of war had reached 400% and working conditions were intolerable. But it was highly significant that political demands were also added, such as support for Soviet peace proposals at Brest-Litovsk. Notwithstanding the fact that a large number of participants, very possibly the majority, were not conscious revolutionaries, this link of economics to politics, of direct class interest to power, was established because the immediate situation made the connection self-evident. However, an inherent problem the workers’ council movement would encounter also became visible at this point. With police and army unable to break the workers’ resolve it was the SPD which succeeded. Friedrich Ebert, SPD leader admitted he “joined the strike leadership with the clear intention of bringing the strike to a speedy end with the clear intention to prevent damage to the country” (Harman 1982, p. 33). He was successful. The dynamic, whereby shop floor militants could lead an enormous movement driven by immediate discontent which effectively challenged the fundamentals of the capitalist state, had come up against the general loyalty of many to a party whose reformist ideas ran in precisely the opposite direction.

80  D. GLUCKSTEIN

The November Revolution Ten months after the defeat of the January mass strike the argument between reform and revolution, parliament or councils, capitalism or socialism, would resurface once more and with redoubled fury. The arena was once again the workers’ council though the context had changed. In November a revolution occurred which, in formal terms at least, meant that Executive Committee of the Berlin Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council held “all political power.” But it was at this very moment that the same Committee began to try to drag the movement backwards. Paradoxically, because it was such an open democratic form, the more successful and popular the workers’ council had become the greater the risk of being destroyed from within by those opposed to it. The revolution commenced outside Berlin and outside the working class. It was the mutiny of Kiel sailors on 2 November 1918 that launched an uprising that rapidly spread, establishing workers’ and soldier’s councils wherever it appeared. The wave only reached the capital at the very end of the process, but it was here that the toppling of the Kaiser was finally accomplished. The fact that the capital was so late in joining the uprising was significant. Spontaneity had accomplished much across Germany and in many places the state retreated before popular protests. However, the traditional influence and organisational power of the SPD meant that in those numerous cities and towns lacking an independent workers’ movement (such as pioneered by the Obleute and Spartacists in Berlin), bodies were established calling themselves workers’ and soldiers’ councils, after the Soviet example; but they were nothing of the sort. Composed of unelected officials or hand-picked supporters they were used to reassert the authority of the SPD over the spontaneous protest movement, dampen down the unrest, and prepare the way for parliamentary elections. Although this manoeuvre was attempted in Berlin it failed as the fake was recognised. Berlin’s strong organisational tradition, built on workplace democracy, was well established and here the masses waited for an insurrection to be initiated through their rank and file representatives. Liebknecht had recently been released and he, in conjunction with the Obleute, was working towards this with 11 November selected as the launch date. But the arrest of one of the plotters carrying a full set of plans brought the rising forward to 9 November. That day workers struck and soldiers

REVOLUTIONARY BERLIN: FULCRUM OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 

81

mutinied in their hundreds of thousands. This revealed workers’ democracy in action. The first world-historic consequence soon followed. Huge numbers across the planet thirsted for peace but until now the determination of the ruling classes to pursue their military competition at whatever cost to human life had stood in the way. The democratic wish of the people to end the suffering of World War One began to impose itself in Petrograd during 1917, but it took the masses of Berlin to finish the process by compelling the generals to sign an armistice. 9 November saw two seminal speeches made at either end of Unter den Linden, Berlin’s main thoroughfare. The street was packed with jubilant demonstrators and from the balcony of the palace of the (now abdicated) Kaiser, Liebknecht called for “a new proletarian state… the free German socialist republic.” At the opposite end was the Reichstag building. Here, Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann, the SPD leaders, were closeted with the German High Command which now had no-one to command. Countering Liebknecht’s move Scheidemann left the meeting and went out to declare the establishment of “the German republic” (on bourgeois democratic lines). If the battle lines were now drawn, at this stage the genuine workers’ councils only constituted a form of class democracy “in itself.” The issue was whether they would become a form of democracy “for itself.” On 10 November 3000 delegates elected on the basis of one per 1000 workers, and one per battalion, assembled at Berlin’s Busch Circus. The central platform was surrounded by SPD supporters who vociferously protested at an Executive Committee slate put forward by the Obleute that included its supporters plus Luxemburg and Liebknecht. Eventually an Executive of twelve soldiers (SPD or supporters) and twelve workers (split equally between SPD and Independents) was adopted. Such gerrymandering was not decisive as tricks would not ultimately determine the outcome. It is notable that in Petrograd in February 1917 the reformists had had no need to indulge in manoeuvres to gain control of the Soviet. Of the 2800 delegates to the Soviet elected after the revolution only 65 were revolutionaries (belonging to the Bolshevik Party); the rest were reformists who backed the Provisional Government led by Prince L’vov. Whether falsified or not, in the short term the result of the Busch Circus meeting was to prepare the way for the swift recovery of the capitalist state, the employers and the trade union bureaucrats. A motion

82  D. GLUCKSTEIN

passed on 12 November to establish a council armed force independent of the old army was abandoned two days later. On 16 November a motion in favour of councils rather than a restored bourgeois parliament (the National Assembly) was defeated. On 23 November councils were forbidden to interfere in areas covered by the traditional state, while factory councils were told not to step on the toes of trade unions in terms of workplace relations. Re-establishment of the influence of full-time union officials was the aim. A National Council Congress which met on 16 December 1918 ratified the Berlin Executive Committee’s approach: The National Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils of Germany, which holds all political power, turns all legislative and executive power over to the Council of People’s Representatives [comprised of 3 SPD and 3 USPD officials] until the national assembly shall rule…. (Riddell 1986, p. 143)

Again it might be argued that this decision was the result of a cynical manoeuvre. It is true that of the 489 Congress delegates, political party and union functionaries (mostly allied to the SPD) outnumbered genuine workers by 195 to 187, and so on. But how had it come about that left “functionaries” such as Liebknecht or Luxemburg had also been excluded as delegates? While the exact proportions might not have been onehundred-per cent accurate (the SPD had three times as many delegates as the USPD and thirty times as many as the Spartacists) the relative ideological balance of support within the working class was largely reflected here. The situation within the councils might have led its supporters to despair. However, the council was more than a machine for passively counting votes in respective party proportions. It was itself a laboratory for change. If the potential limitations of the workers’ council arising from its open democratic structure were now clear, it was equally important to understand that the very existence of workers’ council democracy involved a process of debate and discussion which meant it would evolve along with the class it embodied.

The Dynamics of the Revolution in Berlin The strength of the Berlin working class depended on general and particular factors. The general, or ideological question in Germany during 1918/19 concerned whether workers’ democracy (as represented by

REVOLUTIONARY BERLIN: FULCRUM OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 

83

the council) would be established. This in turn depended on the masses coming to consciously adopt the idea that real democracy lay with the council, rather than with bourgeois democracy as represented by parliament. Proof that this outcome was possible was demonstrated in Russia where the Bolshevik position gained a majority. This example suggests that the hegemony of the council form depended on leadership and arguments driven from “above” (i.e. through a party). But there was another side to the matter. For revolutionaries to be able to persuade the masses of the superiority of the council there had to be a willing audience. In Russia that audience could draw on a memory of revolutions in 1905 and February 1917. Germany had not undergone a similar experience before November 1918 and a majority in favour of the council as distinct from parliament would need time to mature. The adoption of a new attitude to the question of power could be influenced by the arguments of people like Luxemburg or Liebknecht, but it also had to come “from below” through the direct experience of the masses as they struggled in small and large groups to shape circumstances. Those circumstances included the cataclysmic situation of chaos, disorder, dislocation and hunger generated by four years of war. In other words democracy was not to be granted, it had to be knitted together through activity on a collective and increasingly conscious level. Most ordinary people in Germany carried contradictory ideas in their minds. On one side stood the prevailing ideas engendered through a feeling of helplessness before capitalist power, control of the press, and so on. On the other stood their own experience of ruinous imperialist war, exploitation and the impact this had on themselves, their workmates and their families, all of which pushed in the direction of fighting back as a class. The act of creating democracy depended on overcoming this contradictory consciousness in the direction of rejecting capitalism and seizing control instead. Although the timescale for this could not be determined, the situation after the 9 November revolution was certainly propitious for this transition. To see why requires a shift in focus from “high politics” to the particular, to the molecular processes of immediate class struggle which could be classed as “economic” but whose implications went far beyond this. On returning to work after the revolution employees at the Spandau state workshops replaced their managers with an elected committee of manual and white-collar workers. Undeterred by Council Executive Committee injunctions to submit to their union officials Daimler

84  D. GLUCKSTEIN

Marienfelde workers pressed forward a set of demands headed by equal pay for women, shorter hours, an end to overtime, hire and fire by the workers’ council, and abolition of piecework. Workers at Deutsche Motorwerke, Siemens, Stock and Zwietusch joined them in striking for similar demands soon after. The press noted that: “The workers believe there is no point waiting for the collectivisation of industry by government” (Rote Fahne, 27 November 1918). These workers were in advance of their own revolutionary leaders, and it took all the persuasive skills of the leader of the Obleute, Richard Müller, to prevent the immediate expropriation of managements at Piechatzek Liftgear, Schutz, AMBI and AEG Hennigsdorf factories. The fight for real democracy was afoot and the environment in which it was blossoming was encapsulated in this account from a right-wing newspaper of 25 November: The workers arrive on time, then take off their coats, read their newspapers and slowly begin work. This is interrupted by debates and meetings. The employers are as powerless as the managerial staff. All power is in the hands of the workers’ committees. On all questions ranging from the reconversion of the factory to peacetime production, the supply of labour, the employment of demobbed soldiers, the implementation of agreements, work methods, and sharing out of work, on all these the workers’ committees have the last word. (Rote Fahne, 25 November 1918)

However, in contrast to anarchist or syndicalist views, it is essential to note that a challenge from below could only continue if the question of physical power, of the state above, was addressed. Advance by demos at local level without kratia at the level of the state meant democracy was still a work in progress. The Neukölln district of Berlin provided one of the many examples of how the base could reach upwards towards state power, and how, in so doing, politics would be transformed at the same time. Its Workers’ and Soldiers’ council was made up of half SPD and half USPD (which included Spartacists at this juncture). Neukölln operated a revolutionary militia of 500 people and the local police force had melted away. In late November the revolutionary Council decreed the abolition of the municipal authority, the takeover of banks, and the conversion of all houses into communal property. The government (which in the shape of the Council of People’s Representatives was itself half SPD, half USPD) sent in troops to crush this movement. The soldiers were forced to withdraw after a mass outcry, as were all the SPD

REVOLUTIONARY BERLIN: FULCRUM OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 

85

representatives in the Neukölln Workers and Soldiers’ Council. In Petrograd it was this sort of transformative process of struggle that over six months made the masses receptive to Bolshevik arguments and produced majority support for Soviet power. The battle in Neukölln showed how the issue of armed force was a touchstone for who had power. On 24 December an SPD-led attempt to use troops to dissolve a key unit of revolutionary sailors within Berlin, the People’s Marine Division, signalled both the aims of that party’s leaders to crush the movement in Berlin, but also the resilience and potential for advance of the revolution. Although 70 people were killed, such was popular resistance that the troops came to mutiny against their orders and the Division survived. Anger against the SPD for having attempted counter-revolution forced the three USPD members of the Council of People’s Representatives to resign. Simultaneously the Berlin Central Executive reclaimed its right to be regarded as the highest power in the land, while an assembly of factory councils declared that henceforth these bodies would reign supreme over management in all enterprises. With hardening of positions on both sides a decisive confrontation was soon to come. On 4 January 1919, in an effort to impose capitalist law and order as well as prepare the way for the National Assembly and end to the councils, the government sacked Emil Eichhorn, Berlin’s Independent Socialist police chief. It backed this up with an invasion of the city by reactionary troops, the Freikorps. The left was divided over how to respond to the provocation. An example of the confusion was seen on the far left. In December the Communist Party had been founded out of the Spartacists and other groups. Setting out its programme in “What Does the Spartacus League Want?,” Luxemburg had insisted that revolutionaries would “never take governmental power unless that is the clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian masses […] until the masses are in conscious agreement” and that victory “comes not at the beginning, but at the end of the revolution” (Riddell 1986, p. 126). The revolution was indeed just at its beginning and the workers’ council provided the means to judge when the end was reached, because it could measure whether there was a “clear, unambiguous will” for overthrowing the capitalist state and abolishing capitalism. However, the SPD’s sacking of Eichhorn and open challenge to the revolution there and then also required a response. The choice was either immediately seizing power in the name of the workers’

86  D. GLUCKSTEIN

councils, or adopting a defensive stance. Liebknecht, in defiance of his Party’s line, and along with many of the Obleute, began calling for the seizure of governmental power. It seems they were carried away by massive turnouts for demonstrations they had called. During this time, which has wrongly gone down in history as “Spartacus week” when in fact it was an SPD counter-revolutionary coup, the workers’ council movement was completely ignored both by the SPD which, under Gustav Noske, was deploying the reactionary Freikorps, and by the Revolutionary Committee formed of Left Independents and Liebknecht. Having unleashed the demand for an overthrow of the government the Revolutionary Committee vacillated. Perhaps it was conscious that, outside of the minority of radical workers in places like Berlin, there was not majority support for another revolution. The consequence was that Berlin’s working-class demonstrators were left standing in the streets with neither targets to conquer nor any plan for retreat. Taking advantage of the indecision the Freikorps carried out a bloodbath during which some 200 were killed, including Luxemburg and Liebknecht. The tragic irony of the situation was that despite the errors the left made, the molecular process of revolutionary development through class struggle continued nevertheless, though in far less favourable conditions. In November 1918 the SPD had won 61% of votes in workers’ council elections, but just two months after the massacre it was in the minority at 36%. The German Revolution was certainly not over but it had received a decisive setback and ultimate responsibility for this lay with the reformist SPD and its reactionary military backers. A detailed discussion of how the revolutionaries played into their hands is beyond the subject of this paper, and would take us into issues concerning the late formation of the Communist Party, the immaturity of its membership, the gap between an advanced Berlin and more backward country overall, and much more besides. Yet it is pertinent to point out that workers’ democracy could not be achieved by an act of will (however much the intention was to strengthen the council idea). The working class as a mass class can only express its power through collective action and structures in which demos and kratia are inseparable. Democracy is not an optional extra, it is essential. This is in contrast to previous societies based on exploitation. These have operated a variety of state structures because the ruling class is a small minority which can organise its power through a myriad of different forms.

REVOLUTIONARY BERLIN: FULCRUM OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 

87

Consequences—From SPD to NSDAP, from Lenin to Stalin To most of the participants in Berlin during the winter of 1918/19 the debate was between different democracies—a state based on workers’ councils or one based on parliament as espoused by the SPD. That was a false reading of the situation. Whatever the surface appearance, structures of power depend on the balance of class forces. The revolution had shifted that balance to the point that there was, for once, a genuine choice, but it was not between councils and parliament so much as between the power of a minority capitalist class or the power of the majority working class. Proof is to be found in the long-term consequences of the January 1919 confrontation, which strengthened the former at the expense of the latter. As the account so far shows, it was possible to trace a chain of causation linking the workshops of Berlin to German state power and vice versa; but the chain did not end there in either place or time. The fate of the Russian revolution, largely accomplished by a small class of industrial workers in a sea of peasants, was also implicated. In February 1918 Soviet power was compelled to submit to German demands at Brest-Litovsk. A draconian peace Treaty gave the Kaiser 780,000 square km of land with 56 million people, a third of the rail network, 73% of iron ore and 89% of coal output. Soon afterwards counter-revolutionary forces aided by some fourteen foreign armies descended on the beleaguered Soviet Republic. If the German Revolution had succeeded the Brest-Litovsk Treaty would have been revoked and, in combination with assistance from the might of German industry, the Soviet Republic’s fight for survival would have been immeasurably easier. This was not to be. When the fighting ended in 1921 Soviet rule had survived in name, but in reality it was completely hollowed out. Imports had fallen 180-fold, exports 2000-fold, and the already small working class had more than halved. Victory for the Bolsheviks (now renamed the Communist Party) had depended on what was misleadingly entitled “War Communism.” In truth its apparent equality and abolition of private property was due to equal sharing out of poverty and hunger and the lack of anything meaningful to own as property. Victory had depended on operating a strict command economy from the top—which had nothing in common with democracy from below.

88  D. GLUCKSTEIN

Nonetheless, winning the civil war and war of intervention meant Russia still had a government whose ruling party was committed to the concept of Soviet power, although the Soviets themselves no longer functioned. The holding operation that followed—the New Economic Policy—halted the numerical decline in the working class but could not restore democracy at the base, above all because the five million officials working for the state massively outnumbered the demoralised and atomised industrial proletariat. By the mid-1920s hope in the international revolution, whose brightest star had been Germany, was waning. This was the origin of the Trotsky-Stalin debate. The former stressed that to achieve socialism and workers’ democracy there was no choice but to hope for external assistance from international revolution. The latter, concerned to build a war machine capable of protecting the Russian bureaucratic state machine, talked deceptively of “socialism in one country.” The industrialisation needed to build such military capability involved enormous repression, the death of millions through forced collectivisation, and so on. Its “cult of the individual”—Joseph Stalin—was the very opposite of the goal to which Berlin workers had striven in winter 1918/19. Stalin did not have to sweep away workers’ democracy in Russia, but he did need to smash what remained of its support within the Communist Party itself, through show trials, labour camps and executions. This was, in fact, a reversion to capitalism but under full state direction. The impact in Germany of the Berlin events was equally tragic. November 1918’s revolution had come close to shattering the physical basis of the German state. When the discredited remnants of the Kaiser’s regime (and the military High Command in particular) lost control of the mass of soldiers they turned to the SPD for salvation because that party continued to have strong influence over the mass of the German working class. A willing partner in the First World War, the SPD leadership was happy to provide the High Command et al. with political protection. For its part, belief in gradual change led the SPD to oppose the revolution going beyond the removal of the Kaiser. To ensure this was all that happened it looked to the High Command to organise physical protection when required. The upshot was the Ebert-Groener deal forged between the head of the SPD and a leading army general. The price that the SPD demanded of the High Command was a parliament. The High Command was prepared to pay. Along with what was left of the state machine and its capitalist backers it acceded to the Weimar Republic.

REVOLUTIONARY BERLIN: FULCRUM OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 

89

Elections therefore went ahead and a Reichstag assembled. Meanwhile the establishment used the political breathing space to reconstruct bourgeois society using the Freikorps plus all the paraphernalia of ideological and economic domination it could muster. So the result of the workers’ defeat in Berlin was the creation of a parliamentary system that co-existed alongside a largely intact capitalist state still embodying much of the original “marriage of iron and rye.” As long as the organised working class remained relatively strong and the forces of revolution were subdued, this could subsist. When Germany was hit with particular force by the 1929 Wall Street crash that arrangement fell apart. The counter-revolutionary clique around Hindenburg, former Field Marshall and now President, decided to dispense with parliamentary democracy and effectively rule by Diktat. From 1930 onwards Chancellors were no longer subordinated to the Reichstag and were picked by the President. It was under this system that Hitler was appointed in January 1933. Six years later world war, which had ushered in the German Revolution, had commenced once again, with all its horrific effects. But this time, with Stalin ensconced in the Kremlin, the outcome of world war was not the possibility of a new dawn but state capitalist domination in the East and free market capitalist domination in the West. Of course there was nothing inevitable about this. There was no unbreakable causal link between the events of winter 1918/19 in Berlin and the Holocaust or Hiroshima, but the chances of avoiding that fate were substantially reduced by the result of the January confrontation. Furthermore, in a tragically ironic twist of fate, leading SPD politicians would join Rosa Luxemburg in the grave, murdered by the same reactionary forces they had turned to for salvation in 1919. This underlined an important political fact that she foresaw when writing in the midst of the First World War. Ultimately the choice between genuine socialist democracy or continuing with capitalist rule, however masked, was a choice between “socialism or barbarism.”

References Bukharin, Nikolai. 1919. Vom Sturze des Zarismus bis zum Sturze der Bourgeoisie. Berlin: Verlag Rote Fahne. Harman, Chris. 1982. The Lost Revolution: Germany 1918 to 1923. London: Bookmarks. Kautsky, Karl. 1909. The Road to Power. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https://www. marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1909/power/index.htm. Accessed 15 Oct 2018.

90  D. GLUCKSTEIN Pannekoek, Anton. 1912. Massenaktion und Revolution. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/pannekoek/1912/xx/ massenaktion.htm. Accessed 15 Oct 2018. Riddell, John (ed.). 1986. The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power: Documents 1918–1919 Preparing the Founding Congress. New York, NY: Pathfinder Press. Woldt, Richard. 1913. Großindustrie und Gewerkschaftsarbeit. Die Neue Zeit 21: 749–757.

Working-Class Politics in the Bremen Council Republic Gaard Kets

Introduction1 Although the German Revolution can rightfully be labelled a forgotten revolution (Gallus 2010), the centennial has caused a new wave of interest in the events of 1918–1919. Whereas characterisations of the revolution have in the past century been largely negative, considering the revolution as either failed (Coper 1955), betrayed (Haffner 1969) or both, the latest wave of historical and journalistic publications has shifted its gaze to the achievements of the revolution and its role in the “departure towards modernity” for German society. While applying a concept like modernity surely carries the risk of exaggerating “discontinuities” at the expense of the many “continuities” that were also (and arguably the larger) part of the German Revolution, this chapter will focus on some of these elements of discontinuity. German historian Reinhardt Koselleck has famously argued that the modern transformation of society necessitates a change in political and social concepts used G. Kets (*)  Institute for Management Research, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Kets and J. Muldoon (eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13917-9_5

91

92  G. KETS

to describe these new experiences (Koselleck 1979). Even though the depiction of the German Revolution as a “departure towards modernity” might be an exaggeration, this chapter explores exactly how this radically new and different period of German social and political history led to the emergence of new political concepts and ideologies. The most innovative element of the German Revolution was the development of council institutions spontaneously established by sailors, soldiers and workers. An examination of the influence of the German Revolution in political theory over the past century also shows that is has been predominantly these councils that have served as inspiration for the development of innovations in political theory (Muldoon 2019). Council communists were one example of a group heavily influenced by the experiences of the council movements. A detailed account of this ideology can be found in James Muldoon’s chapter in this volume. For here, it should suffice to note that council communism developed in the decades after the 1918 revolution, by theorists like Ernst Däumig, Karl Korsch, Otto Rühle, Herman Gorter and Anton Pannekoek. Council communism as a political theory has been well-studied, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, by scholars that often aimed to find an alternative to the dogmatic dichotomy between social democracy and bolshevism (Brendel 1970; Bricianer 1978; Gerber 1978, 1988, 1989; Pannekoek and Gorter 1969; Schurer 1963; Smart 1978; Van der Linden 2004). Although council communist theory claims to be based on the experiences of the councils in Germany, council communism appeared after the revolution. This means that the workers, soldiers, sailors and peasants in Germany had no theory of council communism and no well-articulated concept of council democracy at their disposal in November 1918. These men and women had to theorise and conceptualise their experiences without prior theoretical guidance. If council communism is indeed based on these experiences, we should be able to trace some of the roots of this ideology back to the concepts that were developed (however crude or “embryonic”) in the actual historical councils. This chapter aims to shed some light on this conceptualisation of the experiences of participants within the council movements by analysing the debates of the workers’ and soldiers’ council in Bremen. What makes the city of Bremen an extraordinary case in the German Revolution, is the dominance of the radical left wing within the Social Democratic Party (SPD) before and during the war. Particularly among primary school teachers (Volksschullehrer) and dock workers, the support

WORKING-CLASS POLITICS IN THE BREMEN COUNCIL REPUBLIC 

93

for the radical left was large. This radicalisation of the working class in this city is often partially accredited to the role of radical party theoreticians such as Anton Pannekoek and Karl Radek (Kuckuk and Schröder 2017, p. 43). This chapter aims to investigate the relation between the ideas of these trained theorists and the working class in Bremen. Although radical theorists played an important role in the development of the ideas of council communism, this chapter shows how the theorisation of radical working-class politics must also be attributed to the workers and soldiers in the councils. After a brief historical introduction explaining the context of the revolution in Bremen, this bottom-up conceptual history will be applied to three questions that were formative for the revolutionary events in Bremen and for council communist thought. The first question is one of inclusion and exclusion: who constitutes the demos of council democracy? Second, how should the councils relate to other political institutions? The third question then shifts the focus to the envisioned post-revolutionary society and the possible institutionalisation of the councils. An answer to these question is sought by exploring the minutes of the meetings of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council in Bremen, newspapers and diaries. In the wake of (and inspired by) the 1905 revolution in Russia, the Social Democratic Association Bremen (Sozialdemokratische Verein Bremen, SDVB) was established in order to organise an educational (Bildung) centre for workers—comparable to the SPD Parteischule in Berlin. It was established and run by radical left-wing members of the party such as Alfred Henke, Wilhelm Pieck and Johannes Knief. From 1910 onwards, the Verein managed to attract radical theorists from around Europe to teach at their school, of which Pannekoek and Radek were the most well-known teachers. Eventually, this resulted in the radical left gaining a dominant position within the local Social Democratic Party, leading to fierce conflicts with the national leadership of the party. This ultimately precipitated the exclusion of the Bremen branch from the national organisation (Kuckuk and Schröder 2017). During the final years of the war, the Bremen Left (Bremer Linke) had mobilised the masses, including many women, for demonstrations, strikes and public meetings (Eildermann 1960). The authors and editors of the radical’s weekly Arbeiterpolitik (Workers’ Politics) increasingly questioned the role of party and union leadership and explicitly challenged the workers to take matters into their own hands (Bourrinet

94  G. KETS

2016, p. 56). When the revolution reached Bremen on 6 November 1918, the leadership of the radical left was not present—some of them resided in Berlin, some of them were at the front, and others were imprisoned (Jannack 1960; Gruppe Arbeiterpolitik 1979, p. 34; Kolb 1962, p. 79). Nevertheless, inspired by the radical teachings of the Bremen Left, the dock workers took matters into their own hands and established workers’ councils at the Weser docks. They joined forces with sailors, soldiers and other workers in the city centre, where they spontaneously constituted a Soldiers’ Council, which assumed rule over the city on the same day (Kuckuk and Schröder 2017, p. 61).

The Council and Other Institutions With the military takeover of power on 6 November 1918, the revolution in Bremen had begun. Thousands of soldiers, sailors and workers came together at the market place, where the chairperson of the USPD, Adam Frasunkiewicz, declared the establishment of a Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council. The workers decided to elect 180 delegates in the workplaces for their Workers’ Council. Combined with the 30 delegates of the Soldiers Council, this led to a Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council of 210 delegates. The workers’ part of the Council established an Action Committee (Aktionsausschuss) of fifteen delegates, subdivided into six Subcommittees (Unterausschüsse) that functioned as the executive power of the Council (Kolb 1972, p. 94). While the Council held de facto power over the city with their strong military support, the Bürgerschaft and Senat more or less continued their work as before, with their power based in the city bureaucracy and the financial institutions, effectively creating a period of dual power between 6 and 14 November 1918 (Kuckuk and Schröder 2017, p. 78). The revolutionary victory of the soldiers had not yet resulted in a thorough constitutional and political transformation. During the week in which the councils coexisted alongside the old institutions, the revolutionaries managed to gradually build a stronger position. The first step in this process was taken by the radical part of the Soldiers’ Council, that voted on 9 November to dismiss all officers from their institution (Gruppe Arbeiterpolitik 1979). On 14 November, Chairman Alfred Henke of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council dismissed the old institutions and claimed full sovereignty for the council (Arbeiter- und Soldatenrat 1918). This declaration was an exact copy of the one that Hamburg had

WORKING-CLASS POLITICS IN THE BREMEN COUNCIL REPUBLIC 

95

used two days before, and was accepted unanimously and without any debate in the council (Kets and Muldoon 2018). In the early morning of 15 November, the official transition of power was staged as a truly political event. Over 1000 people gathered in front of the town hall, where they were entertained by the garrison band. Delegates of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council appeared on the balcony, where Henke declared the Council “the representative of the entire people” and called on the old government not to obstruct the new powers. The climax of the event was the actual hoisting of the red flag, accompanied by loud cheers from the crowd and tunes from the band. Although this event signified a change in political government, the declaration also made clear that the rest of society would remain relatively unchanged. The declaration of 14 November 1918 assured citizens of Bremen that private property remained protected and that plunderers would be tried summarily (Bremer Bürger-Zeitung 15 November 1918). Even though left radicals had demanded workers’ control over food, nationalisation of the banks and big industries and peasants’ control over estates, none of these issues were considered during the actual takeover of power in Bremen. This also implies that at this early stage of the revolution in Bremen, the councils functioned as political organs of representation, and not as instruments for economic democracy in the way they would later be conceptualised in council communist ideology. The official dismissal of the old institutions did not entail their actual dissolution. Since the Senate had directed the administration of the city for decades, the whole government of the city was structured around this small elite. The revolutionaries understood that the takeover of sovereignty would not immediately transform these structures, and that therefore cooperation with the old elite would still be necessary. This explains the hopeful expectation of Henke that the Senate would cooperate with the new council government, now that “democracy had been victorious.” This new arrangement could of course “all in all be nothing but provisional”—implying that the Senate would be released of its tasks as soon as the Council was able to take control over the vast state bureaucracy (Gruppe Arbeiterpolitik 1979). The old elites were indeed willing to cooperate with the new powers. The mayor of the city, the chairperson of the now former Senate, met with some former senators and a delegation of the Council to form a mixed commission (twelve members, which gave it its popular name Zwölfer-Ausschuss) which would assist with the transmission of the city’s

96  G. KETS

governance towards the “new situation.” The exact power relations between the Senate and the Council were figured out in the following days. Although the Council was the sovereign political power, the Senate would still execute the daily administration in most areas. The Council would control the Senate and important decisions had to be discussed in the Council. Moreover, council delegates would obtain a presence in the administrative bodies (Deputationen) (Protokolle des gemeinsamen Ausschusses 1918). Notwithstanding this formal subordinate position of the Senate, the Deputationen were practically able to function as before without much interference of the Council. The most important reason for this was the lack of people that were able and willing to control and direct these administrative bodies. These complex bodies, particularly in the financial sphere, were to an important extent impenetrable for the layperson workers and soldiers. The Council was aware of this, and this explains why they left the daily proceedings in the hands of the old senators, under democratic control of the Council. Henke explained during a meeting of the Council on 19 November 1918 that it would take time for the new powers to establish their own administrative structures, and that until then, their function would be mainly one of control (Arbeiterund Soldatenrat 19 November 1918). In council communist theory, the functioning of the councils is often based on Karl Marx’ interpretation of the Paris Commune. In his essay, “The Civil War in France,” he depicted the council functioning as a “working body” that combined executive and legislative power (Marx 1978). In Bremen, this concept was never part of the political debates about the relation between the new institution of the Council and the old representative bodies. The Bremen revolutionaries organised their work and proceedings on the political structures with which they were more familiar. In the meeting of the Council on 19 November 1918, all delegates appeared to agree that with the dismissal of the Bürgerschaft, the Council would operate as the new legislative body. Even though sharing executive power with old administrators was recognised as a potential threat to the revolution, none of the delegates referred to the concept of the “working body” that would become important in council communist ideology. The relation between the Council and other institutions was questioned again when the Council met in Bremen on 28 November 1918 to discuss their position regarding the National Assembly (NA). On this day, they were interrupted by a delegation of workers who requested

WORKING-CLASS POLITICS IN THE BREMEN COUNCIL REPUBLIC 

97

that their claims be heard by the Council. This political act led to a debate about the desired relation between the Council and the working class. The delegation of workers was headed by the left radical, Johann Knief, who played an important role in the distribution and development of council ideas in Bremen. Soldiers’ delegate Meyer, a MSPDleaning Sanitätssoldat (medic) and chair of the executive of the Soldiers’ Council, responded to the workers that he did not have time to listen to anyone who just walks into the meetings of the council with claims. The interests of workers and soldiers were represented through the system of delegation, and these kind of wild interferences of meetings were disruptive. Workers’ delegate and furniture maker, Breitmeyer, and revolutionary soldiers’ delegate, Reiman, had a more direct conception of democracy, and responded that the Council should hear the requests of workers who come to the Council. USPD-leaning soldiers’ delegate, Lambert Willems, even called this a duty of the Council. The majority of the Council agreed and they decided to invite the workers to their meeting the next morning. The next day, the delegation marched (again headed by Johann Knief) into the building and threatened the delegates that anything but a rejection of the NA would not be accepted by the masses. The revolution in Germany had created the councils as the proper political form of the working class, and these need to be protected. Parliament was the political form of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of such an institution would be the victory of the bourgeoisie over the revolution. In this speech, Knief referred to the council system as the dictatorship of the proletariat, which for him and his supporters outside clearly held a positive connotation. Communist delegate, Alfred Stockinger, stated that the workers of Bremen recognised the Council as the institution that directly expressed the people’s will. Hence, the Council had to do what the workers demanded of it—should the Council fail to do this, it would lose its right to call itself a workers’ council. Workers’ delegate, Dannat, conceptualised democracy by distinguishing between parliamentary or bourgeois democracy and true, full democracy. Full democracy was impossible as long as the economy was still based on capitalist structures. The dictatorship of the proletariat was necessary to achieve the transformation towards a communist society. Only after that transformation, could society be ruled without dictatorship. These passages allow us to draw up a sketch of the concepts that communists used in their theorising of

98  G. KETS

the relation between NA and council system. According to the communists, the council was the proper organisational form of the revolution, but also of post-revolutionary society. It was directly accountable to the working class, and ruled solely in that class’ interest—hence, council rule was the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Constituting the Demos In a meeting of the Workers’ Council on 29 November 1918, the workers decided to organise new elections for the Workers’ Council and appointed a commission of five members that would prepare the Wahlreglement (election regulations). According to historian, Peter Kuckuk, the debate about the voting procedures shows how arguments about the elections were informed by the self-understanding of the Council, including its perceived aims and political function, but also by the power positions of the parties involved (Kuckuk and Schröder 2017, p. 143). The Wahlreglement was first presented to the Council on 4 December 1918. The inevitable democratic question of the self-demarcation of the demos, of inclusion and exclusion of potential voters, was one of the primary issues in the debate about the electoral regulations. How the question of membership was interwoven with the self-understanding of the Council becomes clear in the introduction of the proposal by commission-member Brauckmüller (USPD), who declared that the regulations are not permanent but should be considered “emergency law.” Because of this provisional character of the Council as a democratic body, and because of its role in preserving the achievements of the revolution, he considered it justified to exclude counter-revolutionary (bourgeois) elements from the Council. This position was supported by other USPD members and left-wing radicals. USPD member, Frasunkiewicz, considered the Council as more than a temporary body, and considered it as the foundation of a workers’ state. Hence, he argued the governing body of a workers’ state could only be elected by workers, and not by their parasitic bosses. He stressed that the elections were a fundamental issue: it meant the empowerment of the workers so that the workers’ state could flourish. On the other hand, the MSPD wanted to broaden the demos to include also the middle classes, such as the relatively large and heterogeneous group of civil servants that were not a member of any of the three socialist parties. A related question in this respect was on what basis voting should take place: through workplaces or geographic

WORKING-CLASS POLITICS IN THE BREMEN COUNCIL REPUBLIC 

99

territories? The left-wing radicals argued that workers should vote at their workplaces. This would secure a direct and close relation between the members of the Council and its base in the factories. The USPD largely supported this position. The MSPD wanted to include other groups as well, such as public servants. Therefore, they proposed to base suffrage on all those inhabitants of Bremen that were included in the files of the health insurance, but this proposal was rejected by the Council. Another element of the voting regulations that led to discussion was the paragraph that claimed that voters would only be eligible if organised in either of the three parties or the socialist trade unions. The MSPD argued that workers who were members of Christian and liberal trade unions or who were politically non-organised should also obtain the right to vote. They received unexpected support from communist, Opfermann, who argued that “[a]ny pressure to become a member of any party or union in order to be allowed to vote, must disappear”: all workers should be able to vote—irrespective of party or union affiliation. This argument appears to be based on the struggles of radical workers, theoretically supported by the writings of Pannekoek and Radek, against the iron discipline of party and union (see, for example: Pannekoek 1912). In the next meeting, when an improved version of the voting regulations was discussed, communist, Hans Brodmerkel, a self-employed butcher who was heavily involved in the establishment of the radical journal Arbeiterpolitik in 1916, expressed his wonder that there seemed to be fellow communists who supported the proposal to limit suffrage to those who were organised in parties. The MSPD should serve as a clear reminder of what effect the traditional parties and unions have had on the working class. As a result of the MSPD, many workers had consciously resigned from these political organisations. He referred to the lessons of Anton Pannekoek and articles of Karl Radek to argue that the unorganised masses were the liberating force of the working class. It would be most unfair if the Council would now deny exactly these unorganised workers the vote, and it would go against the ideas of Pannekoek and the experiences of the Bolsheviks in Russia. Communist, Wilhelm Seitz, admitted that the current suffrage was exclusive, but this was justifiable because Bremen was in an exceptional situation. The voting regulations must be seen as provisional, and had the sole function of preserving the provisional socialist republic of Bremen—therefore, it was justified to restrict suffrage to those who supported that republic.

100  G. KETS

This debate shows that the parties disagreed substantially on the question of who should be included in council politics, and that only the MSPD had a theoretically coherent answer to this question (universal suffrage). The radical left was struggling with preservation of the revolution on the one hand, and democratic legitimation of the Council on the other. Most speakers opted for security at the expense of democratic inclusiveness. But, more interestingly, the debate shows diverging tendencies within the communist group. One part focussed on a strong and disciplined organisation of radical workers in the communist party, whereas the other focussed on spontaneous self-organisation of the workers outside traditional party and union structures. The case in Bremen is one of the first visible manifestations of this council communist tendency that becomes observable in the broader German communist movement in the following years. Moreover, it shows how workers absorbed concepts of pre-revolutionary radical theory and adapted these to their political context. In doing so, they developed the rudimentary first concepts that would later become part of council communist theory.

Visions of Post-Revolutionary Society In December, the political situation in Bremen changed significantly. The communists in Bremen had developed significant influence over the USPD and these two groups grew closer in their outlook on the political situation in Bremen and Germany. This led USPD leader, Alfred Henke, to proclaim that the revolution was endangered from “the right, whereas we have no enemies on the left” (Arbeiter- und Soldatenrat 13 December 1918), signalling an important alliance with the Communists, which distanced the USPD from the MSPD. Crucial in this development was the radicalisation of the Soldiers’ Council, strongly influenced by its chairman Bernard Ecks—a wounded veteran from the East Front in his mid-thirties who had joined the communists after his return (see Protokolle des Soldatenrates 1918–1919). Two decisions of the Council, (co-) executed by the Soldiers’ Council, stood at the core of the radicalisation of Bremen politics: the takeover of the Bremer Bürger-Zeitung on 21 December 1918 and the armament of the proletariat. The Council had decided to organise the elections for the new Workers’ Council on the 6 January 1919. The MSPD manipulated election procedures, for example by allowing large groups of workers and civil servants to easily become members of the MSPD and hence make

WORKING-CLASS POLITICS IN THE BREMEN COUNCIL REPUBLIC 

101

them eligible to vote for the Council. Although these tactics failed to provide the MSPD with a majority in the Council (104 of the 263 mandates), it did infuriate the other parties and increased the already significant tensions between them. The USPD and Communists cooperated to find a way to remove the SPD from the new Workers’ Council. These events coincided with a series of protests and uprisings in Berlin, where Spartacist-led revolutionaries rejected the choice of the Reichsrätekonferenz to establish a NA and started a fierce protest against the SPD government. Radical communists in Bremen wanted to support the fighting communists in Berlin, and they secretly prepared the proclamation of a Council Republic in Bremen. Late in the evening of 9 January 1919, the USPD was informed that the next day, mass actions were scheduled to establish a council republic. The next day, while a band was playing music at the market place and workers were demonstrating in large masses, the KPD and USPD proclaimed the Council Republic. All of this happened without any violent clashes (Kuckuk and Schröder 2017, pp. 70–71). The proclamation of the republic necessitated a new institutional design for Bremen. The first meeting of the newly elected Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council was used to discuss the new governmental structures. The Senat and Bürgerschaft had already been formally dismissed, but now the possibility of any cooperation with the former Senat ended. The first task was therefore to divide up the governmental offices and departments and to transfer them into nine so-called Volkskommissariate (People’s Commissars). Furthermore, the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council elected a Rat der Volksbeauftragten (Council of People’s Delegates) that had similar competences to the former Senate and remained at all times answerable to the Council. The Council also established a body to control the Council of People’s Delegates, the Vollzugsrat, that consisted of the fifteen delegates that had been assigned a Volkskommissariat. Contradictions in the institutional design were ignored, such as the fact that two of the bodies were each assigned the role of “controlling” the other. Another challenge was to find a sufficient number of people to occupy the government’s new positions. With the SPD excluded, there was not much governmental experience on which to rely. In practice, this entailed the revolutionaries taking over the top positions in the departments, leaving the rest of the organisation, including its procedures, hierarchies and managers, intact. In the new political bodies that should have controlled the state of Bremen, the USPD had a numerical majority,

102  G. KETS

although their left-wing leaders generally voted with the KPD so that the influence of both groups was more or less equal (Kuckuk and Schröder 2017, p. 193). In the short period of the Council Republic of Bremen (it was crushed on 4 February 1919), virtually all political questions discussed concerned the protection of the young and fragile republic against enemy forces, both within Bremen (banks, MSPD, the old elites, army officers) and outside Bremen (military force of the central government in Berlin, financial lock-out by the Entente). The growing tension of this context resulted in even stronger distrust and enmity between the two governing parties. Considering all this, it is not surprising that the concrete results and revolutionary policies of the Council Republic were very limited. In this section, I will highlight two debates that characterised various visions for a post-revolutionary society and were therefore of importance for the development of council communism. One concerned the acceptance of, and participation in, the elections for the NA that were scheduled for 19 January 1919. The second regarded support for the unemployed, which also touched on the relation between equality, gender and work. The Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council discussed the elections for the NA on 13 January 1919. Adam Frasunkiewicz, leader of the left-wing section of the USPD, described a fundamental opposition between the NA and the council system that the Bremen Council Republic adhered to and therefore, Bremen should not help organise these elections. Bremen should not make propaganda for an institution that would dig the grave of the council movement. The communist Jörn adds that the acceptance of parliamentarism instead of terrorism and dictatorship of the proletariat was the main mistake made in Berlin. Centrist USPD member Alwin Kerrl defended the elections as functional for the socialist cause. He explained how socialists in the past fifty years tried to make optimal use of their limited democratic rights to distribute their ideas to the masses and these upcoming elections would be a great medium for this ideological struggle (Arbeiter- und Soldatenrat 13 January 1919). The communist moulder Franz Manthey responded that the distribution of proletarian ideas should not occur in parliaments, but in the streets. By boycotting the elections, Bremen would serve as a radical example for the proletariat in other cities. Frasunkiewicz endorsed that and referred to the current faltering of the revolution in Germany. The renewal of the revolution had to start somewhere, and boycott of elections for the NA in Bremen would be a most suitable moment for that

WORKING-CLASS POLITICS IN THE BREMEN COUNCIL REPUBLIC 

103

(Arbeiter- und Soldatenrat 13 January 1919). This short debate shows an important debate that would come to demarcate in later years a differentiation between on the one hand those socialists and communists that considered parliamentary work an important (yet in itself insufficient) weapon in the struggle towards a more emancipated society, and on the other hand a small group of council communists that rejected all parliamentary work as tempering of revolutionary potential and as a danger to the development of a working class that would be able to think and act for itself. Even though still undeveloped and immature, this can be considered as part of a concept of geistliche self-development and self-empowerment. From the very start of the revolution in Bremen, the support for unemployed workers had been an important issue. In the months following November 1918, the problem increased dramatically, because of returning soldiers who found many of their former jobs occupied by others, mostly the women and children that had kept the (war) industry running in Bremen. Moreover, because of the high inflation, existing unemployment benefits no longer sufficed to support the unemployed and their families. Until the proclamation of the Council Republic, the Senate had obstructed any new policies for unemployment compensations. With the Senate out of the way, the council government saw an opportunity to finally solve this problem. The most interesting aspect of the discussion that unfolds, was the question of unemployment benefits for women and girls. The council government foresaw that women would only receive a small fraction of the compensation for men, emulating the differences in allowances for male and female members of the council, where women received only two-thirds of the male fee (Marßolek 1997). Communist Karl Ertinger defended this differentiation by claiming that women and girls could generally live with their parents. His fellow communist Käthe Ahrens, one of only three female members of the Council, vehemently opposed this proposal. She felt pained and shocked that such proposals were be made by workers, and argued that the concept of solidarity in a workers’ state demanded equal treatment of man and women (Arbeiter- und Soldatenrat 13 January 1919). Centrist USPD leader Alfred Henke defended the inequality by pulling first the realist card, and then the pragmatist one. After paternalistically stating that he was convinced of the good intentions of Ahrens, and claiming that he was also principally a supporter of equal treatment, he argued that the compensation was a compensation of wages, and that the

104  G. KETS

current wages for women were considerably lower than those of men. Moreover, if women would obtain a compensation that is higher than their wages (in Bremen and in Germany at large), there would be a massive influx of women in Bremen who would appeal to the unemployment benefits. Another female member of the council, Minna Otto, stressed that the principle of equal payment should eclipse practical objections, and sharply inquired why the compensation for female members of the Council was still less than that of men, if Henke were such a supporter of equality? Communists Karl Plättner and Hugo Wahl stated that Ahrens’ request is nothing but a demand for justice, and that an emerging socialist state should not recreate bourgeois class laws. This differentiation based on gender was a re-enactment of the failings of the previous, capitalist, society and unacceptable. This wave of critique forced Ertinger to admit that he has not thought enough about the position of working women and girls, and he promised to have another look at the proposal—which in the end did not lead to any improvements (Arbeiterund Soldatenrat 13 January 1919). Inattentiveness to gender in the council republic equality did not stand alone. Already in the second meeting of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council on 19 November 1918, Henke had stated that his opinion on universal suffrage had changed. Whereas he had previously demanded full equality in the polling booth, he now considered that a potential danger to the revolution (Arbeiter- und Soldatenrat 19 November 1918). Some days later, Henke referred to the concept of Unmündigkeit (immaturity) of women and youth and the need to politically enlighten these groups (Marßolek 1997). Henke did not explain whether this Unmündigkeit was selbstverschuldet (self-incurred [see Kant 2009]) or not, but these arguments surely illustrate the deeply rooted sexism that was part and parcel of the democratic discourse—even among the most devoted defenders of council democracy. Historian Jörn Brinkhus has rightly stated that the radical left’s complaints about majority social democrats who departed from their radical political programmes as soon as they got power, can be easily turned on themselves in the case of gender equality: as soon as the radicals ruled the city, they forgot their calls for universal equality when this would lead to a potential risk for their position (Brinkhus 2018). The debate shows the difficulties that even the most radical emancipatory revolutionaries had with internalising and executing the concept of gender equality. A number of gender-related issues coincided in this debate. First of all, there was the tension that returning soldiers expected

WORKING-CLASS POLITICS IN THE BREMEN COUNCIL REPUBLIC 

105

the women that had been working in the factories for the past four or five years to vacate their positions in the workplace and return to their domestic work. This pre-revolutionary social division of tasks was barely challenged or questioned (Stuckmann 2018). Secondly, strongly related, there was the issue that the elections for the workers’ council is based on the male-dominated workplace. This left women largely under-, not to say un-, represented. Thirdly, the debate showed that the male-dominated government (only Minna Otto held a place in the Vollzugsrat, and no other women were involved in executive organs [Stuckmann 2018]) did not at all feel the urgency to challenge or problematise the existing, pre-revolutionary gender inequality in any serious way. It was only after the critique of Ahrens and Otto that they started to think about the issue. This surely ties into recent studies on the almost exclusive masculinity of the revolutionary subject in Germany (Canning 2015; Föllmer 2018; Kienitz and Le-Huu 2018; Grebing 1994). The relation between the revolutionary men and women in Bremen is aptly caught in the visionary words of Immanuel Kant: The guardians who have kindly taken upon themselves the work of supervision will soon see to it that by far the largest part of mankind (including the entire fair sex) should consider the step forward to maturity not only as difficult but also as highly dangerous. (Kant 2009, pp. 2–3)

The Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council of Bremen met for the last time on 3 February 1919. In the days before that, most of the sparse meeting time was used to discuss whether anything could be done to avoid the seemingly inevitable clash between the armed workers in the Bremen factories and docks that were ready to protect their Council Republic, and the marching divisions that were sent by the central government to “liberate Bremen from the terrorist dictatorship of the Bolsheviks.” Attempts by the Council government to negotiate with Berlin failed, since minister Gustav Noske had already ordered the attack on Bremen. On 4 February, the Gerstenberg Division and the Freikorps led by major Caspari and other conservative army officers started their attack on Bremen. After a long day of bloody gunfights between the government troops and the armed but untrained workers, the Bremen Council Republic fell. 28 (mostly young) workers died during the defence of the city, and 24 (para-)militaries died on the side of the government and Freikorps. The governance of the city was taken over by MSPD

106  G. KETS

members, who formed a “provisional government” and declared invalid almost all of the policies that had been instituted by the Council Republic in its 25 days of existence (Sommer 2005).

Conclusions The women, workers and soldiers in Bremen contributed to a revolutionary wave of radical democratic politics that swept through the German Empire in November 1918. The experiences and ideas that resulted from a couple of months of experimental self-rule were generally diffuse, incoherent and heterogeneous. This chapter aimed to analyse and weigh the contribution of these working-class ideas and experiences to the emerging conceptualisations of the council. The two main conceptual questions that the workers and soldiers had to answer, were (1) how their council should function, in particular vis à vis other (existing and emerging) political institutions, and (2) how a legitimate demos could be justly formed for this new form of kratos. The first section showed that the revolutionaries did not fundamentally set the concept of the council against other political forms. The emerging councils were generally considered as the supreme, but not as the only, form of political representation in the city. Cooperation with the old governmental institutions was considered temporarily necessary and the structures and hierarchies that shaped day-to-day governance were very similar of the old structures: separation between executive and legislative power, and the use of Committees and Subcommittees (Ausschüsse and Unterausschüsse) to rule the various departments of the city’s vast bureaucracy. The communists used the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat to signify a society democratically ruled by the working class via a council system. This also meant a principal rejection of the establishment of a NA. The USPD was internally divided over the relation between council rule and the role of a parliament, but in general saw the councils at least as transitional institutions that would be able to organise the socialisation of the economy. The MSPD generally considered the council undemocratic because of their exclusive membership and suffrage, and wished to substitute them for a parliamentary democracy based on universal, free and equal elections. For them, the councils had been revolutionary instruments, but were unfit for post-revolutionary organisation of society.

WORKING-CLASS POLITICS IN THE BREMEN COUNCIL REPUBLIC 

107

The conceptualisation of the relation between the council and the people differed among the various groups. Whereas the soldiers and many communist felt that the council should merely execute the will of the people in a very direct sense (which would later be incorporated in council theory with the concept of imperative mandate), USPD and MSPD delegates conceptualised representation via the councils in a more indirect sense, where delegates had room to make their own independent decisions. When discussing the constitution of a proper demos, the left-wing radicals restricted suffrage to the working class, the MSPD and some USPD members considered a broader democratic legitimation of the Council necessary by an extension of suffrage. Most of the revolutionaries were convinced that the workplace was the proper basis for this new political form, and that elections should take place at the workplace. An important principal discussion was the one about whether the electorate should be politically (in parties) and economically (in unions) organised or not. This question demarcated for the first time a difference between two groups in the communist movement: one that defended the concept of the party as leading organisational form, and another that considered the party and union problematic hierarchical structures and therefore thought that unorganised workers should also (or: particularly) be allowed to vote. This emerging theoretical divergence between these two tendencies would later develop into a dividing line between “Leninist” communists and council communists. In these debates, the Bremen revolutionaries referred to the teachings of theorists like Pannekoek and Radek to support their arguments. The analysis of the council debates in the 25 days of the Bremen Council Republic showed how the upcoming elections for the National Assembly provoked ideas about the proper place and function of proletarian politics. Where many in the communist and independent socialist parties considered the parliament as one potential place to distribute their ideas and reach the working class, a small group of communists considered the parliament a poisonous and treacherous arena, that would be incapable of empowering workers to act and think for themselves. According to this minority, the street and workplace would be the proper location for discussing communist ideas with workers. In this we find the beginning of a concept of council politics that would become an important element of council communism.

108  G. KETS

The new policy on unemployment benefits by the Council government sparked the only serious challenge to the dominant masculinity of council politics. These debates show the problematic sexism apparent in socialist and communist praxis, even though their theories and programmes had always demanded radical emancipation irrespective of gender. The direct consequence of this was that in Bremen, many bourgeois forces managed to appropriate the emancipatory groups of women struggling for recognition (Stuckmann 2018). In this progress, the women that had to a great extent created the window of opportunity for the creation of councils and the German revolution, were alienated from the revolution and its councils, and found themselves on the side of the bourgeois parties demanding parliamentary politics instead of council rule. The fact that the workers’ and soldiers’ council decided to push women out of their workplaces back into the household, hence also rejecting them a position of influence in the new council democracy, is troublesome—to say the least. The tension between council democracy based on the workplace and the role of unpaid labour (mostly by women) at home has never been seriously problematised by council communists. It seems that this is one of the main challenges for a reappraisal of council democracy and the experiences of the councils in Bremen and Germany. Such a fresh look at the roots of council democratic thought should incorporate not only the theoretical accounts of council politics that were developed after the German Revolution, but should also shift its gaze at the historical experiences of the workers and soldiers themselves, and take their political conceptualisations serious.

Note 1. My dear colleague Dr. Thomas Eimer deserves praise for his extensive and useful feedback on this chapter. Moreover, the people of the Staatsarchiv Bremen have been very generous with their assistance during my archival research at their institute.

Archival Sources Arbeiter- und Soldatenrat. 1918–1919. Protokolle und Berichten zu den Sitzungen des Arbeiter- und Soldatenrats. Staatsarchiv Bremen, Germany. Bremer Bürger-Zeitung. 1918.

WORKING-CLASS POLITICS IN THE BREMEN COUNCIL REPUBLIC 

109

Protokolle des gemeinsamen Ausschusses von Senat und Arbeiter- und Soldatenrat 1918–1919. Signature 3/3 Senatsprotokolle und Senatsvorlagen (seit 1875), file 3/3 - 151. Staatsarchiv Bremen, Germany. Sitzungen und Protokolle des Soldatenrates in Bremen 12.11.1918 - 29.1.1919. Signature 6,15 Regierungsschutztruppe Bremen, file 6,15 - 2. Staatarchiv Bremen, Germany.

References Bourrinet, Philippe. 2016. The Dutch and German Communist Left (1900– 68): ‘Neither Lenin Nor Trotsky Nor Stalin!’ - ‘All Workers Must Think For Themselves!’ Leiden: Brill Publishers. Brendel, Cajo. 1970. Anton Pannekoek, theoretikus van het socialisme. Nijmegen: SUN. Bricianer, Serge. 1978. Pannekoek and the Workers’ Councils. Saint Louis: Telos Press. Brinkhus, Jörn. 2018. Novemberrevolution - Räterepublik - » Stacheldrahtostern «. Die Revolution 1918/19 in Bremen. In Revolution! Revolution? Hamburg 1918/19, ed. H. Czech, O. Matthes, and O. Pelc, 57–69. Kiel and Hamburg: Wachholtz Murmann. Canning, Kathleen. 2015. Gender and the Imaginary of Revolution. In In Search of Revolution: Germany and Its European Context, 1916–1923, ed. K. Weinhauer, A. McElligott, and K. Heinsohn, 103–126. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Coper, Rudolf. 1955. Failure of a Revolution: Germany in 1918–1919. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eildermann, Wilhelm. 1960. Im Kampf für ein sozialistisches Vaterland. In Vorwärts und Nicht Vergessen, ed. Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Z. K. der S. E. D., 139–161. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Föllmer, Moritz. 2018. The Unscripted Revolution: Male Subjectivities in Germany, 1918–1919. Past & Present 240 (1): 161–192. https://doi. org/10.1093/pastj/gty010. Gallus, Alexander. 2010. Die vergessene Revolution von 1918/19 - Erinnerung und Deutung im Wandel. In Die vergessene Revolution von 1918/19, ed. A. Gallus, 14–38. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Gerber, John. 1978. The Formation of Pannekoek’s Marxism. In Pannekoek and the Workers’ Councils, ed. S. Bricianer, 1–30. Saint Louis: Telos Press. Gerber, John. 1988. From Left Radicalism to Council Communism: Anton Pannekoek and German Revolutionary Marxism. Journal of Contemporary History 23 (2): 169–189. Gerber, John. 1989. Anton Pannekoek and the Socialism of Workers’ SelfEmancipation 1873–1960. Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History.

110  G. KETS Grebing, Helga. 1994. Frauen in der deutschen Revolution 1918/19. Heidelberg: Stiftung Reichspräsident-Friedrich-Ebert-Gedenkstätte. Gruppe Arbeiterpolitik. 1979. Die Bremer Linksradikalen. Aus der Geschichte der Bremer Arbeiterbewegung bis 1920 (Zweite, erweiterte Auflage). Bremen: Gruppe Arbeiterpolitik. Haffner, Sebastian. 1969. Die verratene Revolution - Deutschland 1918/19. Hamburg: Stern-Buch. Jannack, Karl. 1960. Wir kämpften in Bremen für die Räterepublik. In Vorwärts und Nicht Vergessen, ed. Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Z.K. der S. E. D., 163–187. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Kant, Immanuel. 2009. An Answer to the Question ‘What Is Enlightenment’? trans. H.B. Nisbett, Great Ideas. London: Penguin. Kets, Gaard, and James Muldoon. 2018. Rediscovering the Hamburg Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils. In Council Democracy: Towards a Democratic Socialist Politics, ed. J. Muldoon, 51–70. London: Routledge. Kienitz, Sabine, and Inka Le-Huu. 2018. Frauen in der Revolutionszeit. In Revolution! Revolution? Hamburg 1918/19, ed. H. Czech, O. Matthes, and O. Pelc, 157–171. Kiel and Hamburg: Wachholtz Murmann Publishers. Kolb, Eberhard. 1962. Die Arbeiterräte in der deutschen Innenpolitik, 1918– 1919. Düsseldorf: Kommission für Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien. Kolb, Eberhard. 1972. Rätewirklichkeit und Räte-Ideologie in der deutschen Revolution von 1918/19. In Vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik, ed. E. Kolb, 165–184. Cologne: Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Koselleck, Reinhart. 1979. Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Kuckuk, Peter, and Ulrich Schröder. 2017. Bremen in der Deutschen Revolution 1918/1919. Revolution, Räterepublik, Restauration. Bremen: Edition Falkenberg. Marßolek, Inge. 1997. Novemberrevolution in Bremen. In Niedersächsische Geschichte, ed. B.U. Hucker, 511–527. Göttingen: Wallstein-Verlag. Marx, Karl. 1978. The Civil War in France. In The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. R.C. Tucker, 618–652. New York and London: W. W. Norton. Muldoon, James. 2019, Forthcoming. After Council Communism: The PostWar Rediscovery of the Council Tradition. Polity. Pannekoek, Anton. 1912. Massenaktion und Revolution. Die Neue Zeit 30 (41): 541–550. Pannekoek, Anton, and Herman Gorter. 1969. Organisation und Taktik der proletarischen Revolution. Frankfurt: Neue Kritik KG. Schurer, Heinz. 1963. Anton Pannekoek and the Origins of Leninism. The Slavonic and East European Review 41 (97): 327–344. Smart, D.A. 1978. Pannekoek and Gorter’s Marxism. London: Pluto Press.

WORKING-CLASS POLITICS IN THE BREMEN COUNCIL REPUBLIC 

111

Sommer, Karl-Ludwig. 2005. Die Bremer Räterepublik, ihre gewaltsame Liquidierung und die Wiederherstellung “geordneter Verhältnisse” in der Freien Hansestadt Bremen. In Niedersächsisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte, Band 77, ed. Historische Kommission für Niedersachsen und Bremen, 1–30. Hannover: Verlag Hahnsche Buchhandlung. Stuckmann, Dagmar. 2018. Die Neue Frau. Wandel der Geschlechterrollen im Bremen der Weimarer Republik. In Experiment Moderne: Bremen nach 1918, ed. J. Werquet, 86–99. Bremen: Focke Museum. Van der Linden, Marcel. 2004. On Council Communism. Historical Materialism 12 (4): 27–50.

Revolutionary Principles and Strategy in the November Revolution: The Case of the USPD Nicholas Vrousalis

This chapter studies the negotiation of the relationship between revolutionary principles and strategy in Germany’s main revolutionary party, the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), during the febrile early months of the November revolution—early November to late December 1918.1 Divided, ephemeral, mercurial, introverted, democratic, and vigorously militant, the USPD was a synecdoche for the German revolutionary left. The party was founded in April 1917 as the main vehicle of opposition to the war. Its rise, culmination and split in late 1920 largely coincides with the fate of the November revolution. A study of its ideological disputes is therefore tantamount to a study of the revolution’s main theoretical tendencies. One of the major strategic differences within the USPD concerned support for convocation of a national assembly, a policy deemed by some of N. Vrousalis (*)  Institute of Political Science, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark © The Author(s) 2019 G. Kets and J. Muldoon (eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13917-9_6

113

114  N. VROUSALIS

its members to be incompatible with conciliar power—“all power to the workers’ and soldiers’ councils.” However, conciliar power turned out to be not only compatible with a national assembly, but in fact to engender it. This process of delegation of power from councils to parliament was not, I will argue, bound to be a concession to the counter-revolution, or an act of political suicide, as some have suggested. Rather, delegation was the only feasible revolutionary strategy during the revolution’s early days. This strategy, which I will call council Erfurtianism, envisaged a parliamentary republic supported by the councils.2 I will then argue for two claims. First, the differences of principle between USPD Right and Left have been exaggerated: in November 1918, much of the Right favoured temporary council rule until revolutionary gains had been consolidated, while a substantial portion of the Left favoured a parliamentary system ‘borne by the councils’. In light of this, I will argue that the main area of contention between Left and Right was not universal suffrage, but the socialisation of industry. Second, the leaders of the Left shared a conception of revolutionary practice with the Right, a conception altogether distinct from that of the Bolsheviks. More precisely, the intellectual leaders of the Right (especially Karl Kautsky and Rudolf Hilferding) and Left (especially Rosa Luxemburg and Ernst Däumig) thought of revolutionary means as constitutively reflecting revolutionary ends. This conception, which attached value to the democratic liberties as such, was distinct from the purely instrumental conception of class rule affirmed by the Bolsheviks. It followed that the transition to socialism—the dictatorship of the proletariat—meant different things to the USPD Left and Right than it meant to Lenin, Trotsky, or Gramsci.

Background The 1891 Erfurt programme formed the centrepiece of the early politics of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Vigorously elaborated by Karl Kautsky, Erfurtianism advocated the conquest of power through parliamentary and trade union struggle; it agitated for proportional representation, biennial parliaments, the universal election of civil servants, secular and free general education, a national militia, and an eight-hour working day. After the Russian revolution, the two main groupings of the USPD Left—the Spartacus League and the Revolutionary Shop Stewards—dropped the parliamentary tenets of Erfurtianism and began to agitate for conciliar power.

REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES AND STRATEGY IN THE NOVEMBER … 

115

The Revolutionary Shop Stewards were the USPD’s main grassroots organisation. Led by Richard Müller and Ernst Däumig, the shop stewards were largely responsible for the mass strikes against Karl Liebknecht’s arrest in 1916, against food rationing in 1917, and against the war in January 1918. In erecting the strike committees of early 1918, they also laid the foundation for what was to become, in November 1918, the Executive Council (Vollzugsrat) of the Berlin workers’ councils. The Spartacists, on the other hand, could only observe the January strikes and the first few days of the revolution from the sidelines. By dint of state persecution, imprisonment—Liebknecht was released from prison in late October and Luxemburg in early November—and concomitant organisational paralysis, they had to limit themselves to propaganda. The German Revolution was sparked by spontaneous synergy between these revolutionary workers and radicalised soldiers. Following the Kiel sailors’ mutiny of 3 November, workers’ and soldiers’ councils began spreading all over Germany; railways carried the revolutionary fire to every corner of the country. On 7 November, Kurt Eisner, the bohemian leader of the Bavarian USPD, seized power in Munich, putting an end to the hundred-year reign of the Bavarian kings and eight centuries of the Wittelsbach dynasty. After the Kaiser’s abdication on 9 November, power fell into the hands of the Berlin Executive Council. Max von Baden, the interim Chancellor, appointed Friedrich Ebert, the conservative SPD leader, new Reich Chancellor.

The Revolution’s Erfurtian Moments On 9 November, the soldiers and workers were de facto rulers of Germany. They had put an end to world war, they controlled the guns and factories of the world’s most industrialised economy, and they carried the aspirations of social democracy. All power had passed to the councils. Against this background, the revolution’s first Erfurtian moment was the spontaneous decision to delegate executive authority to a Provisional Government of Peoples’ Representatives. The moment was Erfurtian in the sense that it aimed to preserve the democratic liberties won by the working class in Wilhelmine Germany and extend them by similar means. On 10 November, about 3000 workers and soldiers g ­athered at Circus Busch, in Berlin, to decide the future of the revolution.

116  N. VROUSALIS

They set themselves two tasks: to smash Junker militarism and to socialise the economy. The anti-militarism task meant doing away with the imperial High Command—Hindenburg, Ludendorff, Groener, and their ilk— while establishing democratic control over the army. The socialisation task meant dispossessing the great industrialists—Hugenberg, Stinnes, Siemens, Thyssen—while extending worker control to every nook and cranny of the economy. Significantly, the meeting advanced one means for the achievement of these ends: socialist unity. This was shorthand for the Erfurt programme. It followed that the transition to socialism was not an instrumental, eggs-to-omelette affair. Rather, the November revolution aimed at the extension of democratic ends—essentially, worker control of the economy—by parliamentary means. The Circus Busch delegates appointed an Executive Council, led by Richard Müller, composed of fourteen workers and fourteen soldiers. They also appointed a Provisional Government, led by Ebert, composed of three SPD and three USPD members. One of them, Barth, represented the USPD Left; Dittmann and Haase represented the USPD Right. The meeting affirmed that all political power lay with workers’ and soldiers’ councils; it also expressed a commitment to rapid socialisation of industry. At the same time, however, Germany was under siege; its straggling army was barely holding together; its enemies were demanding annexations and indemnities; its population was on the verge of starvation. Adding to the uncertainty, there was a crisis in revolutionary authority: who controlled the state administration, the police, and the army? The Berlin Executive, despite temporarily possessing supreme power, held no de jure authority beyond Greater Berlin. It followed that an all-German congress of councils would have to replace it. The date for the Congress was set to 16 December 1918. The period between November 1918 and January 1919 evinced a tug-of-war between the Provisional Government and the Berlin Executive Council. Germany’s experience of dual power conjured images of the Russian Provisional Government, the July days, and October 1917. But Ebert differed from Kerensky like prose from poetry. Although Ebert’s government was officially subordinate to the Council, he had already reappointed the officials of the German ancien régime to their posts; he was also in the process of reconciling with militarism. This led to constant conflict with the Berlin Executive. The temporary agreement of 22 November confirmed the Council’s right to appoint and remove cabinet ministers, but denied it the right to interfere with

REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES AND STRATEGY IN THE NOVEMBER … 

117

the everyday running of government. To make things worse, the Council was constantly snowed under mountains of paperwork; this allowed Ebert to squeeze out discretionary powers, all the while sapping the Council’s influence. As the social democrat Hermann Müller put it, the Council was gradually being transformed from the Committee of Public Safety into a section of the labour department (Broué 2006, p. 174). The revolution’s second Erfurtian moment was the USPD’s decision to support the election of a national assembly. On 11 December, the USPD Left—the Spartacists and the shop stewards—declared that power had slipped out of the hands of the Executive Council; Rosa Luxemburg called it the “sarcophagus of the revolution” (Broué 2006, p. 183). Her metaphor resonated with the nickname given to Richard Müller by the bourgeois press; they called him Leichen-Müller (literally: Corpse-Müller), following his pledge that a national assembly would pass over his dead body. On the eve of the council Congress, the USPD held a meeting in Berlin. Luxemburg spoke for the Spartacists. Wanting to forestall support for a national assembly and to challenge the leadership of Dittmann and Haase, she argued for a party congress. Her motion was defeated 485 votes to 185. The USPD began preparing for national elections. The revolution’s decisive Erfurtian moment transpired a day later. On December 16, the Congress of workers’ and soldiers’ councils met in Berlin. It assembled 489 delegates, elected by workers’ and soldiers’ in the pre-war electoral districts. 405 of the delegates were workers, 84 were soldiers. According to Broué, there were 179 factory and office workers, 71 intellectuals and 164 professionals, including union members. The SPD had about 288 delegates and the USPD 90, including 10 Spartacists, but excluding Luxemburg and Liebknecht (Broué 2006). The Congress made two major decisions: first, to elect a national assembly and, second, to democratise the army. It also reaffirmed a commitment to swift socialisation of the economy under worker control. The SPD motion for a national assembly was passed by 400 votes to 50; Däumig’s motion against it was defeated by 344 votes to 98. The decision to democratise the army, however, received unanimous support. It was elaborated in the Hamburg points, introduced by Lamp’l, the chairman of the Hamburg soldiers’ council. Lamp’l demanded complete subordination of the Army High Command to government and councils; abolition of all badges of rank; delegation of matters of military discipline to the soldiers’ councils; officer elections; and replacement of the standing army by a popular militia.

118  N. VROUSALIS

Before closing, the Congress decided to replace the Berlin Executive Council by a Central Council, now representing councils all over Germany. On this issue, the government carried an amendment—the Lüdemann amendment—which denied the Central Council veto power over government policy. In response, Müller and Däumig decided to boycott the Central Council election. This gave Ebert free rein: the boycott meant that all conciliar power passed over to the SPD leadership. Instead of buttressing the Central Council, the USPD boycotted it, but stayed in the Provisional Government until 24 December. By that time, a farcical coup attempt—perpetrated on 6 December—had set in train events leading to the slaughter of thirty sailors by the army. Dittman, Haase and Barth resigned in protest. In the first instance, the dual power arrangement was undermined by the SPD leadership, with some help from the USPD Left. Its spirit survived in the consciousness of the German worker and her calls for socialist unity. This spirit was not lost to Luxemburg and Liebknecht: “The congress of councils itself was in favour of the constituent assembly. You could hardly skip over that stage. Rosa and Liebknecht recognised that and Tyszka [Leo Jogiches] insisted on it” (Radek cited in Riddell 1986, p. 231, emphasis added). Radek, the Russian revolutionary, appreciated that the German Revolution differed from the Russian in that the former had its Erfurtian moment. But he mistook that moment for a mere “stage.” The mistake consists in thinking that the relationship between parliamentarism and socialism is purely instrumental: you board the parliamentary train and disembark when you get to socialism. In that belief he differed from the majority of the German workers. In the last part of this chapter, I show that this difference largely distinguished the USPD leadership (Left and Right) from the Bolsheviks.

Kautsky’s Programme The earliest theoretical defence of a pro-parliament, pro-socialisation strategy was provided by Karl Kautsky in December 1918. I shall call this strategy council Erfurtianism. Kautsky (1986) argued for the institutionalisation of dual power between National Assembly and workers’ councils, each performing different roles: roughly, parliament would control the state, councils would control the factories. Kautsky’s defence of council Erfurtianism, including his rebuttals to its critics, was

REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES AND STRATEGY IN THE NOVEMBER … 

119

cogent and important. His tactical proposal for carrying it out, however, was unsound. Let me explain. According to Kautsky, the critics of the National Assembly on the USPD Left made two claims: that allowing the Assembly election would tilt the preponderance of votes in favour of capitalists, and that political parliaments are “talking shops.” Kautsky points out that the exclusion of capitalists from the suffrage reduces the electorate by 1% or less, which is numerically negligible. He then alludes sardonically to a Spartacist who spoke long and hard—very long and very hard!—against tolerating a talking shop, in the form of the National Assembly. Kautsky concludes that the objection against parliamentary democracy can be neither that capitalists themselves are electorally pivotal nor that parliaments are talking shops. Rather, the problem is the capitalists’ power and influence, which derives from their control over the factories. So the solution is effective and comprehensive socialisation of the means of production. But this is precisely where the problems start. In December 1918, following strong pressure from below, Ebert appointed Kautsky and Rudolf Hilferding to a Socialisation Commission. The Commission was a diversionary tactic; Ebert’s real aim was to appease popular demands for economic democracy, without exacting meaningful concessions from the German capitalists. Kautsky’s Commission envisaged a gradual socialisation of industry, beginning with coal, iron and steel, eventually expanding to the whole industrial sector. But it also, and simultaneously, assigned a subordinate political role to the councils, their sole task being “to ensure that [parliament] constantly heard the voice of the workers in their class organisation.” This subordination of the councils rendered the socialisation programme impossible. For socialisation required a solid, vibrant, and self-confident extra-parliamentary workers’ movement. Kautsky knew that this kind of movement would issue from neither party nor union; its sole source was the councils. It followed that even a gradualist socialisation programme required an institutionalised council system to exert pressure from below. Yet Kautsky assumed that the councils should acquiesce in their subordinate political role and eventual self-abolition. This, it turned out, was hardly the road to power. At the end of 1918, Kautsky’s Commission issued a preliminary statement, recommending the socialisation of highly monopolised industries, such as coal and iron. At the same time, the December Congress agitated for socialisation of “appropriate” industries, with emphasis on mining.

120  N. VROUSALIS

In the grip of this revolutionary fervour, workers’ councils all over Germany set up boards purported to take control of local mines. The election of January 1919 upset these initiatives. The two socialist parties garnered 45% of the vote; the SPD joined a coalition with middle-class parties. After a wave of strikes—and the repression of the Spartacist uprising—the German workers managed to force a watered-down system of co-determination for a limited number of industries. No part of Kautsky’s socialisation plan was implemented, with the exception of the coal industry. Coal was nationalised under the aegis of a National Coal Council, composed of state officials, workers, consumers, and bosses. The reticence of the SPD leadership in respect of socialisation, coupled with its neglect of the councils, had gradually reinstated the pre-war capitalist oligarchy.

The National Assembly Means the Councils’ Death? Kautsky was a master theoretician, but a poor strategist.3 Even in the extraordinary circumstances of late November 1918, Kautsky continued to insist on election of a national assembly “to hold the nation together, to attend to legislation, and to supervise the central executive” (Kautsky in Riddell 1986, p. 154). The January election undermined this commitment, by denying the socialists a parliamentary majority. Indeed, it would seem to vindicate the anti-Kautsky position held by the USPD Left, which opposed the election from early November through to the council Congress of 16 December. In his Congress address, Däumig summed up the position as follows: if a national assembly will gather now, it will neither have the will nor the energy to realise socialism. Yes, it will create institutions that can provide the necessary financial means for such a task; state monopolies and other state-capitalist measures and institutions are conceivable. But an economic system determined by the people and giving equal rights to producers and consumers will not be considered. To establish such a system, one needs to radically change the structure of property and the relevant laws. This requires the rule of the councils. (Däumig in Kuhn 2012, p. 46)4

Later in his speech, Däumig distinguished between a national assembly along the lines proposed by the SPD leadership, and a national assembly “borne by this system,” that is, the council system. Such a

REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES AND STRATEGY IN THE NOVEMBER … 

121

national assembly, he argued, “will truly unite the country—something a national assembly based on a bourgeois class system never will” (Däumig in Kuhn 2012, p. 47). Two things follow. First, Däumig was not opposed to a national assembly on principle. Like Kautsky, he took class division to give rise to a divided people. A truly representative national assembly would remove such division by means of extensive socialisation under worker control. The second corollary is that Däumig’s position was closer to the position of the USPD Right—especially Dittmann and Haase—than originally appears. The next two paragraphs elaborate. In his comprehensive biography of the butterfly-like, six-year existence of the USPD, Morgan (1975) distinguishes between three mutually exclusive and exhaustive groupings in 1918–19: “centrists” (the old Erfurtians, including the intellectuals Kautsky and Hilferding as well as Haase and Dittmann), “radicals” (the Shop Stewards) and Spartacists. When it came to the question of the National Assembly, however, a more useful chronology must distinguish between four groups: those on the USPD Right who favoured the immediate convocation of the national assembly, those on Left and Right who favoured its postponement until “the new order… being established by the revolution, has been consolidated” (Broué 2006, p. 152; Winkler 2006, p. 335), and those on the Left who wanted to immediately replace it with a council assembly. Table 1 summarises these four positions for November and December 1918. Haase and Dittmann, representing the centrists, were originally opposed to early convocation of an assembly and favoured a temporary period of council rule in the interest of revolutionary consolidation (Morgan 1975, pp. 136–137; 189–190; Ryder 1967, p. 158).5 Insofar as Däumig’s position was representative of the radicals,6 their position in November 1918 was quite close to the centrists’: the former advocated full conciliar power, but were open to an assembly ‘borne of the councils’. It would seem, then, that neither group thought of the assembly Table 1  USPD positions on the national assembly Position on national assembly November 1918 December 1918

USPD Rightists Convoke Convoke

Centrists Postpone Convoke

Radicals Replace/postpone Replace/postpone

Spartacists Replace Replace/convoke

122  N. VROUSALIS

question as a question of principle: the issue, for them, was not universal suffrage but revolutionary ‘consolidation’, that is, progress in socialisation. However, by mid-December, the USPD centrists had acceded to the call for convocation of the Assembly as an expedient for legitimating the process of socialisation, for democratising the army, and for concluding peace with the Entente. In doing so, their strategic orientation parted from that of the radicals. The Spartacists, for their part, were more reticent. Rosa Luxemburg vacillated between thinking the assembly question irrelevant or misleading—a “cowardly detour” (Riddell 1986, p. 142)—although she did tactically support electoralism in late December (see Riddell 1986, pp. 248–259). I will return to Luxemburg’s position when I discuss revolutionary principles. But for now, Däumig’s challenge remains: was the National Assembly bound up with the councils’ death? If it was, then Däumig was right that the Assembly, and the council Erfurtian strategy that embraced it, represented political suicide. Another way to ask this question is to ask whether the revolution could have begun implementation of its two immediate tasks—anti-militarism and socialisation—by getting rid of the SPD leadership, without postponing the Assembly election. An influential affirmative answer to this question has been provided by the German historian Arthur Rosenberg, one of the active participants in the November revolution.

Rosenberg’s Gambit According to Rosenberg, the leaders of the USPD Centre, Haase and Dittman, “represented the decisively important central and moderate opinion among the Socialist working class that embraced millions of the proletariat. The fate of the German Revolution might depend on whether this tendency was put into action or not” (Rosenberg 1936, p. 59). Putting the tendency into action, for Rosenberg, meant splitting the USPD, rejoining the SPD, and carrying “a considerable part of the USPD” with them. This move could have “counterbalanced” the policy of Ebert and Scheidemann, indeed might have forced them to resign. The best time to do this was 18 December, when the USPD Left decided to boycott the Central Council elections at the Council congress. It tells in favour of Rosenberg’s strategy, moreover, that it would have confronted the radicals with a decision: side with the council Erfurtians, or side with the Spartacus League, which had been overrun by putschist fanatics. Let me explain.

REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES AND STRATEGY IN THE NOVEMBER … 

123

On 30 December, Spartacus split from the USPD, to form the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Participation in the National Assembly election was discussed on the same day. After a heated debate, in which Luxemburg and Liebknecht mustered all their political and rhetorical skills to avert disaster, the KPD voted to boycott the election by 62 votes to 33. Rosenberg comments: “Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were faced with the same decision as Dittman and Haase… whether they would appear as supporters of the policy which they believed to be the only right one, or whether they would be loyal to an out-of-date Party organisation” (Rosenberg 1936, p. 71). Like Dittman and Haase, Luxemburg and Liebknecht opted for an out-of-date party organisation. In this context, the radicals and the Spartacists were not natural bedfellows. During their early January 1919 discussions about joining the KPD, the radicals demanded that the latter rescind the decision to boycott the election; that tactics and strategy be decided jointly between Spartacus and shop stewards; and that the term “Spartacus” be removed from the new party name. The negotiations came to nothing. Rosenberg therefore rightly laments that the USPD Right did not force that disagreement earlier: a USPD split in early December would have meant earlier negotiations between shop stewards and Spartacus, earlier stalemate, and earlier homecoming to a more left-leaning, more council-oriented SPD. It is significant, in this connection, that none of the shop stewards’ leaders could much suffer the KPD, even after it was purged of putschists. Müller and Ledebour never joined; Däumig joined in 1920 and left in 1921. It bears adding that the Comintern adopted the sectarian policy of the twenty-one points in 1920; that policy choked any semblance of democracy out of the KPD and gradually turned it into a mere instrument of Russian foreign policy. So could council Erfurtianism have succeeded? Rosenberg’s speculations are plausible; they sketch a trajectory of political possibility from late 1918 to mid-1920 that was open and easily accessible to both USPD Left and Right; it involved a reconstituted parliamentary system supported by the councils.7 If this is right, then the National Assembly need not have meant the councils’ death. Historical reality, however, was much more grim. Ebert’s dismissal, in early January 1919, of Emil Eichhorn—the Berlin Chief of Police—led to mass demonstrations. On 5 January, Spartacists occupied the Berlin headquarters of Vorwärts, the SPD paper. Over the next few days, Gustav Noske, Ebert’s

124  N. VROUSALIS

bloodhound-turned-minister, unleashed the Berlin Free Corps on the Spartacists. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were murdered on 15 January.

The Problem of the Revolutionary Majority I have argued that, although the USPD Left and Right differed on the strategic question of the National Assembly, these differences have been exaggerated: the radicals recognised the possibility and value of electing a National Assembly, subject to socialisation under worker control. What made such socialisation possible, in turn, was a government prepared to fight both capitalists and militarists. And if Rosenberg is right,8 then the only strategy for getting such a government into power in early 1919 was council Erfurtianism. Unlike the radicals, the Spartacists never flirted with that strategy. This section takes up the Spartacists’ arguments for not doing so. It argues that there is a tension between Spartacist principles and Spartacist opposition to parliamentarism. The 1918 draft programme of the Spartacus League (“What does the Spartacus League want?”), largely drafted by Rosa Luxemburg, evinces a distinction between principles and strategy. According to Luxemburg, the essence of socialism is: That the vast, labouring masses cease to be ruled over and instead begin to experience every aspect of political and economic life for themselves — to run it and to acquire free and conscious control over their own destiny. (Luxemburg in Riddell 1986, p. 176)

We have here a statement of principle, an avowed commitment to the free and rational self-government of the individual. Free self-government, says Luxemburg, sounds “the death knell for all forms of servitude and oppression” (Luxemburg in Riddell 1986, p. 178). It follows, she thinks, that class enemies—“capitalists, junkers, petty proprietors, officers, and all the beneficiaries and parasites of exploitation”—will fight tooth and nail to repress this anti-oppression struggle. Luxemburg infers that “it is an insane illusion to imagine that the capitalists will submit good-naturedly to a decision by a socialist parliament or national assembly and calmly agree to give up their property, profit, privileges, and their right to exploit” (Luxemburg in Riddell 1986, p. 179). By implication, only a “united front” of German workers, peasants and soldiers, which

REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES AND STRATEGY IN THE NOVEMBER … 

125

holds “all state power,” can realise the socialist principle elaborated above (Luxemburg in Riddell 1986, p. 179). What does it mean for the workers to hold “all state power”? According to the Spartacus programme, the workers’ and soldiers’ councils replace “the inherited institutions of class rule—federal councils, parliaments, town councils—with their own class institutions” (Luxemburg in Riddell 1986, p. 177). This leaves a crucial question unanswered: who controls the state during this replacement process? The programme concludes: The Spartacus League will never take governmental power until that is the clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian masses of Germany. It will never take power until the masses are in conscious agreement with its aims, goals, and methods of struggle. (Luxemburg in Riddell 1986, pp. 184–185)

There are three important sources of vagueness here. First, who counts as a member of the “proletarian masses”? Second, what counts as “conscious agreement”? Third, how is it to be institutionally ascertained? In respect of the first indeterminacy, it is relevant that the Berlin workers’ councils of 1918 included “the members of the liberal professions,” but not full-time caregivers. In addition, of the 489 delegates at the council Congress of 16 December, only two were women. In other words, the councils of the November revolution were constitutively exclusionary of non-workers, including care-givers (most of whom were women), the permanently disabled, the long-term unemployed, and the retired. This was hardly consistent with the Spartacus programme’s principled opposition to “servitude and oppression.” Call this the exclusion objection. The objection was raised by Kautsky (1986), who inferred that “the more you proceed [towards inclusion], the closer you come to universal suffrage” (Kautsky in Riddell 1986, p. 151). It bears noting that the proposed revolutionary alternative, Däumig and Müller’s “pure council system” (see Ralf Hoffrogge’s chapter in this volume and Hoffrogge 2015, pp. 109–117), envisaged territorial councils side-by-side with vocational councils. But territorial councils, once again, seemed to presuppose something like universal suffrage. There are further indeterminacies in Luxemburg’s argument, as to what counts as conscious agreement and how it is to be ascertained. Ernest Mandel elaborates:

126  N. VROUSALIS We do not rule out the possibility, improbable but not impossible, that a very high level of political consciousness among the masses… could result… in a coincidence between a parliamentary majority and a majority the organs of direct democracy. All the better. But what seems to us inadmissible… is to subordinate the realisation of the revolutionary programme to a prior and durable attainment of a stable parliamentary majority, even when that programme is supported by a clearly expressed majority of citizens. (Mandel 1978, p. 165)

What counts as a programme supported by a “clearly expressed majority of citizens,” other than one receiving a majority in free and open elections? Sure, a majority need not be “stable” and “durable.” But no revolutionary supporter of universal suffrage subordinates the realisation of the maximum programme to stability; all she does is require a majority in a free and open election. Call this the legitimation objection. The Spartacus programme never addresses the exclusion and legitimation objections. Yet these objections suggest that the programme is not just indeterminate on crucial details; they also threaten its coherence, that is, the consistency of its principles—opposition to oppression through democratic self-government9—with its anti-parliamentary strategy. That is, even assuming that the exclusion objection could be definitively addressed, we would still be left with the question of how to ascertain the democratic legitimacy of a socialist programme in a transparent way. Universal suffrage offers an obvious solution to this problem. And if this is granted, then it would seem that the only strategic position consistent with the principles enshrined in the Spartacus programme was some form of institutionalised cohabitation between worker control over the factories and parliamentary control over the state—that is, some version of council Erfurtianism.

Two Models of Revolutionary Practice So far the argument has focused on strategy and its relationship with revolutionary principles in the USPD during the early of the revolution. I now want to argue that, although much of the USPD Left never acceded to council Erfurtianism, it did share with the Right a conception of revolutionary principles, a conception altogether distinct from that of the Bolsheviks. More precisely, the intellectual leaders of the USPD Right (especially Kautsky and Hilferding) and Left (especially Luxemburg and

REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES AND STRATEGY IN THE NOVEMBER … 

127

Däumig) shared a conception of revolutionary means as constitutively reflecting revolutionary ends. It followed that the transition to socialism, for both Left and Right, meant different things than it meant to Lenin, Trotsky, or Gramsci. According to a long tradition in socialist political theory and historiography, choiceworthy means are constituted independently of choiceworthy ends. This is how Lenin, Trotsky, and Gramsci thought of the relationship between revolution, on the one hand, and state and civil society on the other. Gramsci, for example, famously juxtaposed the Russian and German situations, describing the former as fully enveloped in the state, its civil society “primordial and gelatinous”; in the West, by contrast, “when the state trembled, a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The state was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks […]” (Gramsci 1971, p. 238). It followed that you can take the communist citadel if, but only if, you overcome these obstacles. Whether it’s Russian ditches or German fortresses, Orthodox priests or Prussian intellectuals, the question of revolution is the question of getting from here to there. Call this the fortress model of the transition to socialism. Now suppose I want you to be my friend. I threaten you that, if you don’t become my friend, I’ll shoot you. In return for your friendship, I offer to give you money, drive your car, buy you presents, make you famous. None of this will make you my friend. Sure, you might feign friendship. But I’m not your friend; quite the contrary. So we won’t arrive at friendship by any means whatsoever; to get there, we can employ certain means only. More succinctly: the end of friendship constitutively constrains the means. Call this the friendship model. I think that the friendship model captures the logical structure of the transition to socialism better than the fortress model. To get to socialism, we can employ certain means only. Sure, we might feign socialism. But as long as democracy is not reflected in our parties, unions, and strike committees—not to speak of workplaces and markets—we’ll never get there. It therefore won’t matter how many fortresses we take, or how many intellectuals we persuade and hegemonise, unless we do it the right way. This does not exclude revolutionary violence as a means, but it does mean that violence is justified only if it reflects democratic ends, as such. But what about militarists, reactionaries, fascists, and other anti-democrats—those who would not bulk at using any and all of the aforementioned means to thwart the advent of socialism? Once again,

128  N. VROUSALIS

the friendship model provides better guidance than the fortress model. Suppose a third party is attempting to thwart our friendship through threats, bribes, force, or a combination thereof. According to the fortress model, we can fend her off using any means likely to be causally effective in making her fail. Not so on the friendship model. On that model, we can only enlist means that meet these causal efficacy conditions and (1) do not undermine (the value of) our friendship, (2) do not foreclose possibilities for future friendship with current nonfriends. Let me explain. In respect of (1), suppose we can thwart the thwarter by temporarily organising ourselves in a way that undermines our equality as friends; we can, for example, set up a system of military hierarchy with blind obedience to authority. On the fortress model, this is permissible as a means. On the friendship model, it is not. For we can’t suspend friendship, or summon it up like room service. Or, more precisely, if we can summon up a relationship like we can room service, then that relationship will resemble room service more than it resembles friendship. Note that these are claims about the nature of friendship, not about its psychology or causal determinants: for any relationship to count as friendship, it has to develop through reciprocal attachment to its value as such. The same is true of socialism. That is, if Luxemburg is right that socialism is the death knell to all forms of oppression and servitude, then socialists must make the knell the leitmotif of all socialist activity, from the struggle against class to the struggle against the occupational division of labour. Those who aren’t dancing to the knell’s tune aren’t really dancing at all. In respect of (2), suppose we can thwart the thwarter by closing ourselves from the world, withdrawing from possibilities for future friendships, especially with non-thwarters who could become our friends. The fortress model does not exclude this possibility, whereas the friendship model does: anti-friendship friendship is an unsustainable notion, because foreclosure of friendship with others undermines the joint openness to me and you that made our friendship possible. It does not follow, and it is false, that socialists should turn the other cheek on counter-revolutionaries, or aim to befriend them. Quite the contrary: it is in virtue of self-consciousness of the democratic nature of their activity—including the means that constitute it—that socialists can fight just wars against counter-revolutionaries, and fight them justly. According to the friendship model, socialist ends evince both the revolutionary jus ad bellum and the revolutionary jus in bello. This, however, is a problem for another time; I do not want to defend the superiority

REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES AND STRATEGY IN THE NOVEMBER … 

129

of the friendship model here. Instead, I will argue that Luxemburg, the most sophisticated theoretician of the USPD Left, affirmed a version of the friendship model and disavowed the fortress model. In that conception of revolutionary practice, she differed little from the rest of the USPD, including the USPD Right (Kautsky, Haase, Hilferding, etc.). In affirming the friendship model, German revolutionary social democrats differed from those numerous Bolsheviks who affirmed variants of the fortress model.10

Revolutionary Means and Ends The Spartacus programme echoes Marx and Engels’ idea that “the liberation of the working class must be undertaken by the working class itself” (Luxemburg in Riddell 1986, p. 178). But why not let others undertake liberation for you? On the fortress model, for example, you can be driven straight into liberation; all you need is a sufficiently strong battering ram—or, at least, a bulletproof limo—and an astute driver, preferably recruited from the party school of Vanguard Chauffeurs. Luxemburg, of course, would have none of that (1961, Chapter 2; 1970, Chapter 4). For her, the Marxian idea of attaining the end of democratic self-government11 through democratic self-government seems to be an entailment of a prior socialist principle, mandating “free and conscious control” over one’s own destiny. In the Spartacus programme, this is expressed in the following famous passage: The working masses must learn to transform themselves from lifeless automatons that capitalists insert into the production process into free, thinking, self-activating administrators of that process. They have to acquire the sense of responsibility of functioning members of a community who as a whole are the sole proprietors of all social wealth. They must develop industriousness without the employers’ whip, maximum productivity without a capitalist slave driver, discipline without the yoke, and order without bosses. (Luxemburg in Riddell 1986, p. 177)

These exercises in self-government, underpinned by the “moral foundations of socialist society,” recall the friendship model. They evince the kind of mutual understanding involved in cultivating a friendship, a mutual education that helps constitute it as such. By the same token, our cooperation in joint struggle against capitalists in the factory, against

130  N. VROUSALIS

private property in the mass strike, against racism in the antifascist demo, are means reflecting the end of democratic self-government. The organised form of this cooperation—the transition to socialism—preserves the democratic liberties, while extending them beyond those afforded by bourgeois institutions. Socialists succeed if and only if these liberties penetrate the hidden abode of production, attenuating capitalist rule over workplace and market. So Luxemburg affirmed a version of the friendship model (for a similar interpretation, see Geras 1976, part IV). She was not the only leading member of the USPD Left to do so. In his speech at the December Congress, Däumig reasoned along similar lines. He said next to nothing about state power and its justification under socialism; rather, most of his speech elaborated on the revolution as a vehicle for a spiritual awakening of Germany, a collective attempt of and by the people to escape intellectual and spiritual subservience: The German Revolution has very little trust in itself and the spirit of submissiveness and obedience is a deeply rooted legacy reaching back many decades. This cannot be changed by simple election campaigns with leaflets thrown at the masses every two or three years. It can only be changed by a dedicated attempt to make and keep the German people politically active. This can only happen in the council system. We have to abandon the entire old administrative machinery, on the federal, regional, and municipal level. The German people have to get used to self-management instead of governance. But how do you educate a people, how do you let them fully grasp the concept of self-management, if you allow them to simply trot along and send delegates to parliament? (Däumig in Kuhn 2012, p. 48)

Däumig and Luxemburg agree that the revolution’s main role is pedagogical: its aim is democratic self-government through democratic self-government. That is, the only way you achieve the end is by helping yourself and others self-consciously practice the standard the end prescribes; then and only then does the end constitutively constrain the means and the means reflect the end.12 This is, again, an entailment of the friendship model. What about the USPD Right? Kautsky’s writings abound with affirmations of the friendship model. Here is a famous passage from The Road to Power:

REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES AND STRATEGY IN THE NOVEMBER … 

131

But the rate of progress increases with a leap when the revolutionary spirit is abroad. It is almost inconceivable with what rapidity the mass of the people reach a clear consciousness of their class interests at such a time. Not alone their courage and their belligerency but their political interest as well, is spurred on in the highest degree through the consciousness that the hour has at last come for them to burst out of the darkness of night into the glory of the full glare of the sun. Even the laziest becomes industrious, even the most cowardly becomes brave, and even the most narrow gains a wider view. In such times a single year will accomplish an education of the masses that would otherwise have required a generation. (Kautsky 1909, p. 72)

Moreover, Kautsky’s writings on socialisation refer extensively to the collective self-education furnished by revolution, this time in connection with material production (see, for example, Kautsky 2012, p. 183 and passim). The same motif of immanent growth and democratic self-education recurs in Hilferding’s (1905) discussion of the general strike. The main theoreticians of the USPD Right therefore affirmed a conception of revolutionary practice based on the friendship model: democratic self-rule can only be achieved through democratic self-rule. This conception was shared by both USPD Right and Left. In her essay on the Russian revolution, Luxemburg writes: The socialist system of society should only be, and can only be, a historical product, born out of the school of its own experiences, born in the course of its realisation, as a result of the developments of living history… However, if such is the case, then it is clear that socialism by its very nature cannot be decreed or introduced by ukase. (Luxemburg 1970, p. 390)

This passage contains both explicit affirmation of the friendship model—the socialist system as a “school” of its “own experiences” with self-government—and implicit disavowal of the fortress model— socialism by party decree or battering-ram (see also Luxemburg 1970, p. 393 and passim). Luxemburg is here admonishing Lenin and Trotsky and their “rule by terror.” I will not defend this admonition, although it is obviously eminently defensible. It suffices for my purposes that the most important theoretician of the German revolutionary left avows an account of revolutionary principles that situates her squarely on the same camp as the council Erfurtians. If there were any renegades, they weren’t Luxemburg or Kautsky.

132  N. VROUSALIS

Notes













1.  Research for this project was supported by the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS), Aarhus University, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark. Thanks to Gaard Kets and James Muldoon for helpful written comments on an earlier draft and to A.J. Julius for helpful discussion. 2. Council Erfurtianism received sapient early defence in the work of Arthur Rosenberg; it was further elaborated, decades later, in the work of Peter von Oertzen (Oertzen 1963) and the council historians (Eberhard Kolb, Reinhard Rürup, among many others). 3. This cannot be said of the other major theoretician of the USPD, Rudolf Hilferding. Although he remained confident that a National Assembly election would beget a socialist majority, he opposed its immediate election “to facilitate voter registration, the securing of national borders, and the education of the masses concerning their tasks in the revolution” (Smaldone 1988, p. 287). Hilferding did, however, agree with Kautsky that the dictatorship of the proletariat was the democratic republic. Here, Kautsky took himself to be following Marx and Engels (see Salvadori 1979, pp. 222–224, 230–232). 4. See Riddell (1986, pp. 140–145, 186–196, 207–208) for cognate pronouncements by Luxemburg and Liebknecht in mid-December 1918 and Kuhn (2012, pp. 59–75) for a similar argument by Müller at the council Congress. 5. This was not identical with what USPD centrists or radicals took proletarian dictatorship to be. Haase and Dittmann followed Marx and Engels in thinking of class dictatorship in terms of a democratic republic. As I will argue below, the Spartacus programme, largely authored by Luxemburg, also disavowed that account of dictatorship. 6. Müller mentions council Erfurtianism—referring to Kautsky’s programme— in his history of the November revolution, but does not address the argument on its merits. Georg Ledebour, one of the founders of the USPD, seems to have sided with council Erfurtianism, supporting the convocation of the Assembly in late December (Kuhn 2012, pp. 119–120). 7. I discuss the post-1918 career of council Erfurtianism in an essay entitled “The enduring relevance of the German revolution,” which is available from me upon request. 8. There is considerable evidence to support the Rosenberg thesis. In the 1919 elections, the USPD received 2.3 million votes (7.6%) and the SPD 11.5 million (37.7%). In the first election it did contest (in June 1920), the KPD received 0.589 million votes (2.1%) and the USPD about 5 million (17.9%). Assuming the USPD Left’s following in 1919 was half a million or lower (that is, lower than what the KPD got in 1920), a split

REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES AND STRATEGY IN THE NOVEMBER … 

133

of the USPD and subsequent reunification with the SPD could have given the latter about 42% of the vote in January 1919. This means that it could have governed without the support of the Centre party. 9. What Luxemburg (1976, p. 110) calls the “basic position of socialism,” that is, “the general opposition to the class regime and to every form of social inequality and social domination.” 10. For a historian’s account of these differences, see Bassler (1973). In what follows, I try to sketch only one strand of disagreement between the Bolsheviks and the USPD Left. 11. Whatever the best conception of democracy is. In the previous section, I argued that that conception will delegate some role to democratic parliaments. 12. These two expressions are not logically equivalent: the former is weaker than the latter. The friendship model is compatible with both the weak and strong interpretation.

References Bassler, Gerhard P. 1973. The Communist Movement in the German Revolution, 1918–1919: A Problem of Historical Typology? Central European History 6 (3): 233–277. Broué, Pierre. 2006. The German Revolution, 1917–1923. London: Haymarket Books. Geras, Norman. 1976. The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg. London: New Left Books. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith. Moscow: International Publishers. Hilferding, Rudolf. 1905. Parliamentarism and the General Strike. The Social Democrat 9 (11): 675–687. Hoffrogge, Ralf. 2015. Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution. Leiden: Brill. Kautsky, Karl. 1986. National Assembly and Council Assembly. In The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power, ed. J. Riddell, 94–105. London: Pathfinder Press. Kautsky, Karl. 1909. The Road to Power. Chicago: Samuel Bloch. Kautsky, Karl. 2012. The Labour Revolution. London: Routledge. Kuhn, Gabriel. 2012. All Power to the Councils! A Documentary History of the German Revolution 1918–1919. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Luxemburg, Rosa. 1961. The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism, ed. B. Wolfe. London: Integer Press. Luxemburg, Rosa. 1970. Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, ed. M.A. Waters. New York: Pathfinder Books.

134  N. VROUSALIS Luxemburg, Rosa. 1976. The National Question: Selected Writings, ed. H.B. Davis. London: Monthly Review Press. Mandel, Ernest. 1978. From Stalinism to Eurocommunism. London: Verso. Morgan, D.W. 1975. The Socialist Left and the German Revolution: A History of the German Independent Social Democratic Party, 1917–1922. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. von Oertzen, Peter. 1963. Betriebsräte in der Novemberrevolution. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Riddell, John (ed.). 1986. The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power. London: Pathfinder Press. Rosenberg, Arthur. 1936. A History of the German Republic. London: Methuen. Ryder, A.J. 1967. The German Revolution of 1918. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Salvadori, Massimo. 1979. Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution. London: NLB. Smaldone, William. 1988. Rudolf Hilferding and the Theoretical Foundations of German Social Democracy, 1902–33. Central European History 21 (3): 267–299. Winkler, Heinrich August. 2006. Germany: The Long Road West. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PART II

Political Theorists of the German Revolution

Eduard Bernstein and the Lessons of the German Revolution Marius S. Ostrowski

Unlike other revolutions that have achieved greater resonance in the European social imaginary, the legacy of the 1918–1919 German Revolution in political thought has been deeply one-sided and unusually monolithic. Traditionally, only radical tendencies within the political left have historically staked a claim to “ownership” over the Revolution. The events of 1918–1919 in Germany are often bracketed with the better-known events of 1917 in Russia as part of the “origin story” or “founding myth” of the twentieth century revolutionary left. As a source of theoretical insight, they tend to be deployed overwhelmingly by adherents of “left communism,” especially in its “council communist” instantiation. At the same time, the memory of the German Revolution is marked with countless signifiers of tragedy, frustration, and resentment adopted directly from the radical-left imaginary, with the deaths of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht at the hands of Freikorps troops acting as a particularly visceral symbol for the “betrayal” of socialism, and of the wider lost opportunity for more drastic social transformation.

M. S. Ostrowski (*)  All Souls College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Kets and J. Muldoon (eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13917-9_7

137

138  M. S. OSTROWSKI

However, the hegemonisation of the German Revolution by narratives from the radical left does not fully describe—indeed, it even obscures—a range of possible alternative interpretations of the Revolution. In particular, the conflation of the entire Revolution—whose first tremors were felt as early as 1916, and whose effects continued until as late as 1923—with the narrow moment of the January 1919 Spartacist revolt, and to a lesser extent the short-lived council republics in various German states (like the 1919 Bavarian Soviet Republic), is largely a product of radical-left decontestation (Broué 2006; McElligott 2013). Above all, what is often missing from the view of the Revolution in left politics broadly construed are narratives from non-revolutionary socialist perspectives. These neglected narratives often emphasise a very different set of moments as significant milestones, including the collapse of cooperation between the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and Independent Social-Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) on 29 December 1918, which paved the way for the Spartacist uprising; the elections to the Nationalversammlung (National Assembly) on 19 January 1919, whose outcome forced the SPD into a “Weimar Coalition” with non-socialist parties; and the inaugural Reichstag elections on 6 June 1920, where the left’s irreconcilable fragmentation effectively turned Weimar Germany’s fledgling government over to an uneasy liberal-conservative coalition, marking a definitive end to the revolutionary period. This chapter seeks to offer an alternative view of the theoretical legacy of the German Revolution from a social-democratic or “reformist” socialist perspective, focusing on its reception in the writings of Eduard Bernstein. As the founder and chief advocate of the “revisionist” tendency that ended the hegemony of “orthodox” Marxism within socialist thought, Bernstein entered the period of revolutionary transition in Germany as one of the best-known and most controversial figures on the European left. And as one of the few prominent “revisionist” figures who had broken with the SPD and joined the more “orthodox” USPD over the SPD’s support for the war whose end the Revolution helped bring about, Bernstein approached the Revolution’s theoretical implications from the unique perspective of a thinker whose political aims and commitments were in equal parts sympathetic to and significantly at odds with those of both the radical left and the moderate right of German Social Democracy. This chapter traces the lessons Bernstein draws from the events of the German Revolution, exploring the dangerous role

EDUARD BERNSTEIN AND THE LESSONS OF THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

139

of myths in scientific-socialist thought, the need for left politics to be positive and constructive (not just critical and demonstrative), and the relationship between political theory and political practice in projects for progressive societal transformation.

Reform or Revolution, Revisited During the early months of the Revolution, Bernstein played a central part in the German left’s attempts to effect an orderly transition from the chaotic decline of the Kaiserreich to the nascent structures of the German Republic. On 10 November 1918, one day after Kaiser Wilhelm II’s abdication and the declaration of the Republic, the SPD and USPD leaderships negotiated the formation of an interim coalition government, the Rat der Volksbeauftragten (Council of People’s Deputies), to manage the end of hostilities on the Western Front and establish new provisional political institutions. Many of the major figures on the German left secured positions within the Rat, and Bernstein himself was rewarded for his long career of tireless activism and parliamentary service by being appointed Assistant Secretary to the Reichsschatzamt (Reich Treasury), a position he held until January 1919 (Steger 1997, p. 224). At the same time, he doggedly pursued his longstanding objective of bringing about the reunification of the SPD and USPD, prefiguring this “left unity” project in person by rejoining the SPD on 24 December 1918 while remaining a member of the USPD, which he only left on 21 March 1919 when the party explicitly banned its members from holding dual party affiliations (Bernstein 1919b; Vorwärts 1918b). Throughout this time, and especially once he was free of his governmental duties, Bernstein also maintained an active presence as a journalist for the main party organs of German Social Democracy. No longer persona non grata in the SPDloyal press after his “return to the fold,” he produced a succession of columns in Vorwärts—supplemented by occasional appearances in other periodicals such as the USPD organ Freiheit or the main socialist newspaper in his Breslau constituency, the Breslauer Volkswacht—that provide both a “live” chronicle and a retrospective assessment of the events of the revolution. After the Revolution ended with the widespread defeat of the “revolutionist” elements, Bernstein devoted his intellectual energies during 1920 and 1921 to revisiting the questions it had raised in greater detail, in light of his experiences during the transition from Kaiserreich

140  M. S. OSTROWSKI

to Republic. This led to two works in particular, both of which are ostensibly historical but which, on closer inspection, embed many significant theoretical assumptions and insights that are key to understanding Bernstein’s political worldview. In the first, Die Deutsche Revolution: Geschichte der Entstehung und Ersten Arbeitsperiode der Deutschen Republik (The German Revolution: A History of the Emergence and First Working Period of the German Republic), Bernstein (1921a) gives a highly detailed account of the events of the Revolution and their intellectual, economic, and political context, covering the period from the collapse of the Kaiser’s government in October 1918 to the Nationalversammlung elections in January 1919. In this work, originally written as part of a planned (but seemingly never completed) larger work, he revisits themes that he first considered earlier in his career, including reformist and revolutionary tendencies within socialism, the strategic importance of ideological and organisational party unity, the dangers of militarism and political violence, relations with non-socialist and bourgeois movements, and the defence of parliamentary democracy. Meanwhile, in the second work, Wie Eine Revolution Zugrunde Ging (How A Revolution Died), Bernstein (1921b) offers a historical analogy to the German Revolution in his account of the 1848 French Revolution, memorably analysed by Karl Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, as well as an explication of the significant new theoretical and practical lessons that the events of the 1848 Revolution hold for the German experience. Across both works, a relatively new facet of Bernstein’s intellectual persona emerges—that of the memoirist and historiographer, to complement his established presence as a social activist and political theorist. Given the context in which they were written, perhaps the most burning question these works raise is whether they reveal any transformation in Bernstein’s position within the “reform or revolution” debate that arose in the final years of the nineteenth century, prompted by the publication of his “Problems of Socialism” articles (1896–1898) and Preconditions of Socialism (1899). The short answer is a resounding no. While, of course, Bernstein was much too nuanced and refined a thinker to see the Revolution merely as confirmation of his Preconditions-era reformism, and hence offer no further statements on the “reform or revolution” question, it is certainly fair to say that he saw nothing in his experience of the Revolution to alter or weaken his reformist convictions. Instead, he seized the opportunity afforded by the Revolution’s

EDUARD BERNSTEIN AND THE LESSONS OF THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

141

events—and the subsequent public need and desire for authoritative accounts of these events—to elaborate his position in greater detail, updated to reflect more recent problems and examples. Perhaps the clearest point of change in Bernstein’s “mature” reformism is that by 1920–1921 he was able to direct his criticism at a more concrete target than in 1896–1899. As he observes in a newly-written afterword to the third edition of Preconditions, an extract of which was published in Vorwärts in May 1920, Bernstein (1920a, b) saw in the emergent phenomenon of Bolshevism a clear realisation of the semiabstract Blanquist tendencies that had been his bête noire in his earlier writings. For Bernstein (1919c; 1920b, c; 1921a, pp. 21–24, 40, 43, 68, 101–102, 128ff.; 1921b, pp. 65–66), Bolshevism—whether in its original Russian incarnation or in the imitant forms embraced by the Spartacists and the left-USPD—embodied everything Social Democracy ought to oppose: an undemocratic reliance on coups d’état by conspiratorial cadres to usurp political power, a dictatorial conception of rule based on selective class representation, and the mechanical application of a bastardised reading of early Marxist thought to vastly unsuitable social conditions. He amplified his scepticism towards the use of “uncivilised” political violence, maintaining that it was only likely to delegitimise the revolutionary cause, and that overreliance on coups de main would fail to secure revolutionary achievements in a lasting way (1921a, pp. 40–41). Further, he insisted that revolutions need both good leadership by experienced politicians with sound judgment and deep democratic accountability, arguing that the tried-and-tested structures of parliamentary representative democracy offered a better balance between these than the novel system of workers’ and soldiers’ councils. And he reiterated that socialists had to take into account social complexity and the underlying differences between countries, with a view to establishing a kind of epistemic hierarchy between socialist movements, whereby activists in less-developed countries learn revolutionary strategy from those in more-developed countries, and not vice versa (1919c; 1921a, p. 172). In other words, ultimately, Bernstein’s elaborations of his anti-revolutionary socialist position were very much in the same spirit as his original statements from the 1890s. In this light, it is an especially great tragedy that the prospects for a serious continuation of the late-nineteenth century “reform or revolution” debate were dealt a crippling blow by the murder of Rosa Luxemburg, Bernstein’s most powerful interlocutor on the “revolutionist” side.

142  M. S. OSTROWSKI

Despite their intense strategic disagreements, Bernstein himself deeply respected Luxemburg, admiring her as much for her “selfless” activism and wholesale dedication to the socialist cause as for her “thoroughly poetical nature” and her romanticist view of the prospects for proletarian emancipation. It is clear that Bernstein would have relished a “second round” in their debate, and he mourns her death unconditionally as a great loss to Social Democracy, and to the new Republic: In her, socialism has lost a highly-talented comrade-in-arms, who could have rendered the Republic inestimable services, if her wrong assessment of the available options had not led her into the camp of the illusionists of Gewaltpolitik [the politics of violence]. But even he who for that reason was her opponent in the party struggle will still cherish the memory of this restless fighter. (1921a, p. 171)

It is certainly true that, with Luxemburg’s murder, the “reform or revolution” debate suffered a serious theoretical setback, becoming agonisingly one-sided, and in effect defunct not long after. Whereas the early debate was largely encapsulated in Preconditions for Bernstein and Social Reform or Revolution? and The Mass Strike for Luxemburg, the later debate is missing an equivalent Luxemburgist text to match German Revolution, How A Revolution Died, and Bernstein’s other “mature” writings. Their places as the “leading” respective advocates of reform and revolution within the socialist movement have also remained vacant. Few other thinkers engaged with the question as directly or eloquently as Bernstein and Luxemburg, and those that did typically presented their cases without the urgency that comes from facing a direct opposing interlocutor—such as the Fabians and Austromarxists for the reformist side, and the Leninists and their successors for revolution. Moreover, they often struggled to propel their localised debates beyond matters of parochial party disagreements, and thus—unlike Bernstein and Luxemburg—failed to attain the prominence required to influence socialist strategy on a truly global scale.

Socialist Science Versus Anti-socialist Myth Yet the absence of any major shift in Bernstein’s reformist outlook should not be taken as a sign that he saw the Revolution as devoid of any theoretical lessons. In fact, beyond the sometimes inhibiting parameters

EDUARD BERNSTEIN AND THE LESSONS OF THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

143

of the “reform or revolution” question, his writings on the Revolution contain several fertile elaborations on other themes that offer a fascinating deeper insight into his overarching theoretical perspective. The first of these is his profoundly negative view of the political role of mythmaking and fantasy. In Bernstein’s (1921a, pp. 76–77, 165–171) view, the immediate aftermath of the Revolution was—as with any sudden or drastic political event—characterised by the proliferation of exaggerated “legends” (positive and negative) around the parties and persons involved in it, often fuelled by the sensationalism of newly-formed radical media outlets who were jostling to gain a toehold among the proletarian readership of the new Germany. These legends, in turn, had percolated strongly into the “received” narratives of the Revolution, and he laments the absence of thorough and comprehensive historical accounts of its duration. Indeed, he finds that the only accounts available so far were summary descriptions of the Revolution’s emergence and first developments, writings on specific events or the actions of specific people, political critiques, accounts of legal proceedings, or official and unofficial reports—many of which were partisan, and which often falsified facts outright. Bernstein (1921a, pp. 5–6) argues that cleaving to such accounts, and integrating a substantively flawed account of “what happened” into their theoretical analyses, was a sure way for socialists to draw entirely the wrong lessons from their experience of the Revolution. Instead, socialists who claimed to be “scientific” in their outlook urgently needed to formulate truly objective accounts of the German Revolution, and he puts forward The German Revolution as his attempt to fill this gap—an attempt in which he claims to have tried to be “just but not impartial” towards the people and events involved, acknowledging his own position as a co-participant. In this context, Bernstein’s writings on the Revolution play a didactic role: dispelling socialists’ partisan myths and fantasies about the Revolution’s events, and reminding them of the need for a sober scientific-socialist approach to political historiography that serves to reveal the deeper contradictions that underlie political events (Bernstein 1921a, p. 6). Bernstein’s approach to this is twofold. First, he offers an anecdotal “worked example” of the potential theoretical and strategic significance of basing one’s worldview on different historical accounts of seminal events. In the foreword to How A Revolution Died, appropriately entitled “History and Legend,” Bernstein (1921b, p. 6) recalls that it was his own deeper study of the events of the 1848 February

144  M. S. OSTROWSKI

Revolution in France—prompted by an invitation to read the Swiss historian Louis Héritier’s (1897) then-newly-published account during the 1890s—that first caused him to question the received view of that revolution among orthodox Marxists. This further engagement with the history of 1848, he relates, convinced him that it was above all the irresponsible provocations of the Babouvists and the agitations of revolutionary socialists in April–May 1848, coupled with the reprisals that followed the failed workers’ uprising in June, that intensified class oppositions between the bourgeoisie and socialist workers to the point where monarchist reaction gained ground, and ultimately enabled the coup d’etat in December 1851 (Bernstein 1921b, pp. 7–8). Bernstein (1921b, pp. 9–10) suggests that Marx may have had valid tactical reasons for brushing over this core truth about 1848 in the Eighteenth Brumaire, but argues that Marx’s decision left contemporary socialists with a distorted view of the “legend of 1848,” as well as a host of “slogans and arguments derived from it,” that were actively detrimental to their cause. Though published in 1921, the bulk of How A Revolution Died consists of an essay dating from the start of Bernstein’s revisionist “turn” that he had previously hesitated to publish. In his commentary on it, Bernstein candidly describes his moment of disillusionment and disenchantment with orthodox Marxism. His experience of ideological rupture, when (in the idiom of modern ideology studies) the spectres of a stubborn reality that did not fit his familiar ideological map surged into his consciousness, forced a piercing moment of ideological reappraisal—a need to “make a complete break” with his prior commitments—that manifested in his “turn” towards reformism (Bernstein 1921b, pp. 9–10). In other words, Bernstein’s criticism of myth is also a self-critique. Bernstein treats the German Revolution as a confessional moment—an opportunity to revisit the instant where the “scales” of mythical illusion fell from his eyes— and he wants to encourage Weimar-era socialists to go through the same thought-processes, not just about the 1848 revolution but also analogously the events of 1918–1919 as well. At the same time, Bernstein is clearly keen to raise awareness among his fellow socialists of the dangers to which an indulgence of myths and fantasies can lead, and the consequent need to dispel them far more widely. He illustrates this by choosing a specific focal point of the post-Revolution “legends” in circulation and “unmasking” it repeatedly throughout his account: namely, the mythologies that grew up around Karl Liebknecht in the wake of his murder, including the brutal and dramatic circumstances of his death, and the lenient sentences meted out to his killers, which turned

EDUARD BERNSTEIN AND THE LESSONS OF THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

145

him into a martyr for the radical left. Against this view, and in stark contrast to his deep respect for Luxemburg, Bernstein (1921a, pp. 68–70, 165–171) has little patience with Liebknecht, whom he sees as a volatile, egotistical “desperado” suffering from a chronic lack of political responsibility and a limitless capacity to overestimate his own skills and importance. Above all, Bernstein criticises Liebknecht for repeatedly jeopardising the transformative project of the Revolution at several crucial junctures, fomenting unrest precisely at times when he should have been seeking to safeguard the foundations of the new Republic. The most egregious example of this, in Bernstein’s view, came during the fraught negotiations between the SPD and USPD on 9 November 1918 over the formation of a provisional government. Given the sizeable extent of the SPD’s popular support in rural and urban areas, its offer to the USPD to participate in a coalition “socialist unity” government was surprisingly generous, which contrasted sharply with the USPD’s rigid reticence to cooperate with people they denounced as “traitors to socialism.” But this tense situation was only exacerbated by Liebknecht, whose campaign of inciting oratory against the SPD “Scheidemänner” and “counterrevolutionary” demands for all executive, legislative, and judicial power to be transferred to the workers’ and soldiers’ councils nearly derailed the negotiations entirely (Bernstein 1921a, p. 34). Bernstein also pours scorn on the image of Liebknecht, a lawyer with a long family lineage of professional political involvement, as a hero of the German proletariat. Recalling his own personal encounters with Spartacists who were themselves disconcerted by Liebknecht’s increasingly inflexible radicalism, he observes that Liebknecht was far from the “voice of the people,” but rather a dogmatic outlier within a party that at the time enjoyed muted popular support (winning only 7.6% of the vote in the Nationalversammlung election, compared to the SPD’s 37.9%) (Bernstein 1921a, pp. 75–76). Bernstein accuses Liebknecht’s followers of inflicting collateral damage on the Republic in trying to unjustly exalt their dissatisfaction with the course of the Revolution. Fuelled by the radical press, the remaining Spartacists presented the SPD as accessories to Liebknecht and Luxemburg’s deaths—a portrayal that Bernstein (1921a, pp. 79–81, 165–171) utterly rejects, emphasising that the military sidelined the SPD and swiftly took over control of the interrogation and pursuit of the Spartacists. This misrepresentation risked causing irreparable damage to German workers’ view of the government, and had the capacity to produce a “Liebknecht myth” that might make the man more dangerous to the Republic dead than he would have been had he still been alive (Bernstein 1921a, pp. 170–171).

146  M. S. OSTROWSKI

For Bernstein, the particular risk associated with reliance on fantasies, such as those fostered by the “legend of 1848” and the “Liebknecht myth,” is that socialist strategy becomes hopelessly divorced from its real material context. In his view, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) founded by Liebknecht and Luxemburg was especially guilty of this, as to a lesser extent was the USPD. The issue at stake was both parties’ overt desire to replace the democratic Republic with what Bernstein (1920c) termed a “dictatorship of councils [Rätediktatur]”—i.e., to bring about in Germany what the Bolshevists had achieved in Russia with the 1917 October Revolution. This, for Bernstein, was dogmatism trumping scientific assessment par excellence, and he saw his role in the post-Revolution period as delivering some hard truths to the more idealistic elements in German socialism (Vorwärts 1918a). German communists seemed quite comfortable with the demonstrable economic damage the 1917 revolutions and “war communism” policy had wreaked on the parts of Russia under Bolshevist control, so long as rule by a centralised hierarchy of workers’ soviets remained assured. Moreover, they were also prepared to hazard similarly dire consequences in Germany, despite the vast differences between the two countries’ economic conditions: The fact that such a dictatorship in industrialised Germany would have far more destructive economic consequences than in overwhelmingly agrarian Russia bothers them just as little as the fact that such a dictatorship in Germany, with a citizenry that is superior to the Russian one in number and in other respects, and with a peasantry so differently disposed to the Russian one, would meet much stronger and tenacious resistance than there. (Bernstein 1920c)

So strong was the pull of the mythologies surrounding Bolshevism that its German supporters were prepared to abandon core Marxist tenets about the determinant role of social-economic context in deciding the right use and applicability of anti-capitalist strategy, pushing them “back into the speculative method of pre-Marxian socialism”: While, according to Marx, a backward country should learn from a more advanced country, now the advanced countries of Western Europe are supposed to adopt the methods of social-political action from the substantially backward countries of Eastern Europe. (Bernstein 1919c)

EDUARD BERNSTEIN AND THE LESSONS OF THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

147

Ultimately, German communists were so “blinded by the Bolshevist slogans, which sound Marxist but which stem from conceptions that Marx himself has rebutted,” that they even sacrificed what should have been their central raison d’être—their commitment to truly improve the lot of working people—instead “hoping for world revolution and hoping to build a beautiful new society on the rubble it will bring” (Vorwärts 1918a). It is above all for this reason, Bernstein (1920c) argues, that Social Democracy must “engage the enemy on the left” and defend the development of the Republic, the legacy of the Revolution, and the welfare of the German people against the “general impoverishment and servitude” that would ensue from the communist Gewaltpolitik. The incentive for socialists to appeal to myths, and their susceptibility to myths’ enticing appeal, can only be overcome via an uncompromising reassertion of the methodological principles of scientific socialism, updated to take into consideration the innovations of the burgeoning field of social science. For Bernstein (1921b, pp. 63–65), would-be social revolutionaries need to be “at home” in social science to ensure that their strategies and policies are appropriate for the conditions in which they find themselves—i.e., they must be intellectuals (by disposition, not in terms of their social status) who, not unlike in Karl Mannheim’s (2014, pp. 91–170) conception, can “cut through” myths to “lay bare” the realities they disguise. Of course, political myths do not all come from the communist left, and even in his most vitriolic moments of hostility to Bolshevism and its acolytes, Bernstein never loses sight of the fact that some of the most dangerous myths were manufactured by the reactionary right. The myths around the end of WW1, for instance, were a prime case of illusion and disillusionment. Bernstein recounts the key moments of the end of the war, including the abject collapse of the German army in July–August 1918 due to the influx of new manpower, tanks, and flier squadrons on the Allied side. He argues that the consequent total loss of morale among German soldiers when they realised the war was lost severely undermined their capacity to believe the censored news and tightly-controlled militarist propaganda they were fed by the Oberste Heeresleitung (Supreme Army Command), which had taken on de facto dictatorial authority by the end of WW1, and instead made them sympathetic to agitations for socialist-revolutionary change (Bernstein 1921a, pp. 9–13). In this context, the attempts by militant nationalist

148  M. S. OSTROWSKI

rabble-rousers to blame the German military collapse on the new civilian government and the effects of the Revolution—now better known as the “stab-in-the-back myth”—should be seen as a new, desperate way of trying to re-superimpose a militarist ideological “mask,” premised on a blatant falsehood, on a stubborn reality that refused to fit their ideological “map” (Bernstein 1921a, pp. 11–13; 1922). Such myths from the right were, in Bernstein’s (1922) view, designed to disguise the dangerous threat that resurgent militarism and reaction posed to the Republic—whether in the form of attempted coups d’état like the failed Kapp-Lüttwitz putsch, rising electoral support for fascism in Bavaria, Silesia, and elsewhere, or cynical tax avoidance and price manipulation strategies by major agrarians and industrialists that hollowed out the young Republic’s weak economic power. On this basis, Bernstein (1919a) insists that his fellow socialists had to stop deceiving themselves about the future safety and stability of the Republic. One symptom of the fact that the Republic was a “civic republic” [bürgerliche Republik] that acted as a kind of hybrid of a “bourgeois republic” [Bourgeois-Republik] and a “workers’ republic” [Republik der Arbeiter] was that its political system contained a range of parties whose commitment to maintaining German democracy was highly uneven, and often tenuous. The national-conservative German National People’s Party (DNVP), for instance, was explicitly hostile to the Weimar regime; the support of the national-liberal German People’s Party (DVP) was unreliable at best; and even the other “Weimar Coalition” parties, the Christian-democratic Centre Party (Zentrum) and the social-liberal German Democratic Party (DDP) were at best “rationally but not emotionally committed to the Republic, and cannot be relied upon to defend it with all their force in times of serious danger.” The uncomfortable reality Bernstein (1921c) wants to impress on other socialists is that “only the socialist parties are republican in the character of their policy and goals.” Even if they are republican in different ways in practice, he recognises that in extremis—as happened in the general strikes that ended the Kapp-Lüttwitz putsch—the non-SPD socialists could just about be relied on to support the Republic and resist its enemies energetically. But he takes small comfort from this, arguing that socialists must do everything necessary to avoid matters coming to such extremes, and avoid leaving the fate of Republic to the uncertain outcomes of such confrontations.

EDUARD BERNSTEIN AND THE LESSONS OF THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

149

Constructive Politics Versus Protest Politics Although the ancien régime and its trappings of imperialism and militarism were still an ever-present threat to the new Republic, either in their original guise or mutated into new forms, Bernstein (1919a) is also at pains to stress the important role the Kaiserreich played in bringing about the conditions in which the Republic and its attendant societal transformations could emerge. He reminds his fellow socialists that, in accordance with the precepts of scientific socialism, every societal form lays the preconditions for its successors. Every advancing human society, he argues, is a complex organism that is subjected to certain laws of development, which cannot—contra the “interventions” of the Bolshevists and other Blanquists—be reformed at will into a desired form, but can only be further developed into a certain new form after fulfilling certain changes in the foundations of its living process (Bernstein 1919c). For Bernstein (1921a, pp. 7–8), what brought about the collapse of the Kaiserreich were the unintended consequences of its own “blood and iron” policy. More immediately, the revolutionary situation in Germany was brought about by a combination of the delayed electoral reform for Prussia, the one-sided terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and the Entente’s refusal to conclude peace terms with an increasingly compromised Wilhelm II (Bernstein 1921a, pp. 19–20, 24–25). The particular socialist (as opposed to liberal) tenor of the Revolution, moreover, was due to the fact that the German army leadership unwittingly enabled socialist-revolutionary agitation among the soldiery by sending arrested socialist activists to serve in penal battalions at the front (Bernstein 1921a, pp. 9–10). Bernstein (1921a, pp. 7–8) also insists that the Revolution would have been impossible, and the Republic a far-off aspiration, if the Kaiserreich had not laid down certain longerterm useful foundations as well: fostering political unity within Germany, tearing down its internal political-economic borders, and pursuing trade according to a “most-favoured-nation” principle that led to industrial development and turned Germany into a rich country by 1914. At the same time, however, Bernstein (1922) warns socialists not to misrecognise and overestimate the historical opportunities afforded them by the conditions in which the Republic had emerged: Four years after the German Revolution, we feel more clearly than ever before how differently the transition to the republican state form took place in Germany than we social democrats hoped for and aspired to.

150  M. S. OSTROWSKI

Socialists had been dealt the task of constructing the Republic in a profoundly “unsuitable moment”—“not as a result of our victory over a form of society that had developed up to its last implications, […] but as the result of the collapse of the backward part of this society in itself” (Bernstein 1922). It was the states that had retained the most pronounced elements of feudalism that had been defeated in a struggle with more developed capitalist powers, and it was only in the former, not the latter, that opportunities for socialist transformation had so far arisen at all. Despite this caveat, Bernstein (1921a, pp. 14ff.) insists that socialists need to make the most of any such moments, however “unsuitable,” to effect a radical break with the destructive logic of the ancien régime. In his view, the experience of the Revolution showed that the only movement capable of doing so was Social Democracy, and he considers it a key expression of the movement’s intrinsic identification with (and representation of) the interests of the working class that the SPD “took upon itself [the] hard and rough work … [of] constructing and expanding the Republic” during and after the Revolution (Vorwärts 1920). In that context, the refusal of the socialists in other parties— especially USPD and KPD—to “collaborate in the expansion of the Republic and the socialist reform work” over what he saw as comparatively petty complaints over leadership personnel utterly infuriated Bernstein (1920c), and he dedicated significant efforts to resisting the detrimental effects of such “splittist” tendencies (Vorwärts 1918a). For Bernstein, the task of building a new society like the Republic required socialists to abandon their familiar oppositional disposition and “demonstration politics,” cultivated through long years of suppression, and embrace “constructive politics, the politics of positive creation” (Freiheit 1920). The SPD had recognised this, and risen to the occasion, whereas the USPD and KPD had “chosen the comfortable role of the external critic, … keep[ing] themselves free of blame easily”— content to carp from the sidelines and, worse, “explode” the new regime wherever possible from within (Vorwärts 1920). In Bernstein’s (1920c) view, left-socialists like the USPD and KPD missed the fundamental point that the advent of the Republic called them from merely protesting against government to participating in it—a lack of realisation brought out particularly acutely during the first post-Revolution elections in 1919 and 1920:

EDUARD BERNSTEIN AND THE LESSONS OF THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

151

What is the election about in the first instance, demonstrating or opposing? Opposing only makes sense against an existing government, but it makes no sense against a government that is still to be formed. One should demonstrate, of course, but in a positive rather than a negative sense. One ought to demonstrate for what should be; all other forms of demonstration are worse than worthless. (Bernstein 1920d)

Bernstein blames the persistence of this demeanour of “negating demonstration” on the radical press in the urban centres where USPD and KPD support was at its strongest: A press that lives off critique, so that about all criticism it loses any measure in its judgment. […] The consequence is a strong blasé attitude, an urge to deny for denial’s sake, and a low estimation of all creative work that does not immediately bring about perfection. (Bernstein 1920d)

While such a blasé attitude might occasionally be right when it realises imperfections, Bernstein (1920d) finds it ultimately unfruitful, arguing that “everything great in the world is only brought about by work which creative enthusiasm lends motivation and endurance.” In this light, if the USPD and KPD were unwilling to form a pro-Republic Einheitsfront, they had to be challenged at every opportunity, and in a letter to the Volkswacht that received some traction on both sides of German Social Democracy, Bernstein committed himself to just such a struggle in the USPD-leaning territory of Potsdam (Teltow-Beeskow constituency)— expressly to ensure maximal SPD influence over the Republic’s “legislation and administration, [its] general interest, its political integrity, and its economic and social development” (Vorwärts 1920). For Bernstein (1919c), the drive for productive creativity in the construction of the new Republic is inseparably tied to the central role of parliamentarism and the democratic franchise. He reiterates his support for parliamentarism, drawing support—as he did in Preconditions— from the later thought of “the founders,” and arguing that Friedrich Engels especially had turned shortly before his death from seeing electoral democracy as a “means of swindling [Prellerei]” into one of emancipation for the proletariat. Won round to the potential “social force” of democracy by the unexpected efficacy of “the parliamentary action of Social Democracy” in wringing concessions from the Wilhelmine regime on issues of unemployment insurance and other

152  M. S. OSTROWSKI

similar legislation—“despite all the hurdles that the military state sought to put in its way”—Marx and Engels could not have envisaged that a time would come again where socialists would declare the democratic franchise unsuited to socially emancipating the proletariat, and wish to throw it on the scrapheap in favour of a dictatorship of the proletariat exercised exclusively by workers’ councils. (Bernstein 1919c)

Bernstein even goes so far as to suggest that the first generation of Marxists “never imagined that dictatorship in any other way than that it would be exercised through democracy,” and dismisses the Bolshevist conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a centralised soviet republic—echoed in the KPD and USPD’s endorsement of the “council republic” model—as inevitably at risk of degenerating into a system where “the proletariat does not rule, but rather a minority exercises its rule with the help of hired guards” (Vorwärts 1918a). Democracy under a general franchise, he insists, is the surest way to ensure that the working class can exercise decisive influence over all areas of public life—and this will become only ever more the case as capitalist production achieves ever greater maturity, and as the size and social significance of the proletariat (and Social Democracy) grows as a result. All in all, Bernstein (1919c) defends parliamentary democracy as a “guarantee of organic proceeding” in society—yet he also recognises that democracy under the new Republic requires a transformation in the electorate’s approach to voting, compared to its impoverished instantiation under the Kaiserreich. In the Republic, voting is much more meaningful than simply choosing who opposes the Kaiser’s government and his Reichskanzler: it is voters on whom the character and composition of the government depends, in that the government is the “commissary agent [Beauftragte]” of the popular assembly, which is in turn the “commissary agent” of the electorate. It is above all this systemic change in the constitutional function of parliamentarism that necessitates a change in left strategy away from critique and opposition, and towards positive construction. As Bernstein (1920d) phrases it in a front-page Vorwärts article on the day of the 1920 Reichstag election: To put it drastically for democratic and socialist voters who have not yet freed themselves from the way of taking a position they were used to under the Kaiserreich: you do not have to elect naysayers anymore, but yeasayers!

EDUARD BERNSTEIN AND THE LESSONS OF THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

153

A citizen of a democratic republic must, in Bernstein’s uncompromising view, “vote for the party that comes closest to his convictions, and is thereby willing and able to give the Republic a government,” while any “socialist and democrat who leaves this outside consideration commits a crime against the Republic.” Of course, not just any government will do. The Republic “needs a government that is determined to practise a forceful politics in the sense of modern democracy, encompassing the tendencies of the working class”—and that, for Bernstein (1920d), is “unthinkable” without Social Democracy.

Political Theory and Political Practice The close imbrication of positive, creative politics with electoral democracy in the Republic is, for Bernstein, a particular reflection of the weighty historical significance that attaches to all watershed revolutionary moments. Politics, he suggests, is not just characterised by patient gradualism—the “strong and slow boring of hard boards” of Max Weber’s conception—though this often works to provide the preconditions for political transformation, but can also happen in short, sharp bursts. In the trajectory of the Revolution, such “burst” moments are not hard to identify, and Bernstein (1921a, pp. 21, 82ff.) himself highlights the Spartacists’ embrace of the Bolshevist political-economic model in early October 1918 and the first Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils on 16–21 December 1918 as (in his view) slightly underappreciated milestones. Moments such as these were truly social and democratic, in that they gave ordinary citizens the opportunity to take part in shaping history—even though, ironically, they might not themselves be at all aware they were performing the role of historical protagonists. Outside such moments, however, the decisive points in even the most grassroots-driven social transformations tended to fall within the purview of a very reduced subset of the population: trade-union and party leaders, military commanders, high-level judges and bureaucrats—but rarely if ever the actual working population that would bear the brunt of these social changes. In this context, Bernstein sees elections as, in effect, systematised versions of such “short, sharp burst” moments, and more-or-less regularised opportunities for ordinary citizens to participate in the shaping of their collective history. Voting under a general franchise in a democratic republic is, he argues, the best and most reliable way of preserving the revolutionary moment—both in the sense of its

154  M. S. OSTROWSKI

momentousness and its momentum. This historical weight, of course, not only gives voting potent political force, but also imposes on voters a high level of political responsibility. Bernstein (1920d) is very doubtful that many German voters—habituated as they were to the comparative façade of elections under the Kaiserreich—were aware of this force and this responsibility, and he warns of the risk that voters with an insufficiently-developed democratic self-conception would “let the command over [their] vote be determined by side issues”: For some the election day was only an opportunity to vent their displeasure about some event or some lack of drastic satisfaction; others allowed themselves to be influenced by provocations about certain personalities when they cast their vote; yet others believed that the act of voting was their opportunity to give an individual confession of faith in some abstract or fantastical doctrine, and more along similar lines.

Bernstein sees in this tendency a serious danger to both the health of democracy and the prospects for socialist reform, and argues that “to keep Germany on the path of decisive republican politics,” its newlyempowered voters must be educated to see the act of voting as “not a matter of questions of personality, not individual questions of policy, not about the proclamation of ideologies, but about decisions over quite specific comprehensive types of policy.” For voters to treat democratic elections with the seriousness they deserve, they must consider every party and every policy “as a whole from its leading points and with a view to all its consequences,” and act “in accordance with the fact that they hold the fate of their people in their hands” (Bernstein 1920d). Of course, the historical weight of democratic elections imposes responsibilities not just on voters but also on political parties and movements—especially Social Democracy—to collectively rise to the occasion. Bernstein saw the birth of the new Republic as a clear “moment of truth” for German socialists, who could no longer continue to simply try and “ride out” the decades-long tension between the demands of “orthodox” Marxist doctrine and the behaviour of trade-union and parliamentary Praktiker. The divide had already been damaging to Social Democracy when Bernstein first sought to bridge it in the 1890s in Preconditions—but now that the movement had taken over the reins of government and needed to prove its superiority to the discredited conservative establishment, it had become unsustainable. Socialists,

EDUARD BERNSTEIN AND THE LESSONS OF THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

155

in Bernstein’s view, needed to introduce some long-absent consistency between their theory and their practice, and the responsibility for this lay evenly on both sides of the divide. On the one hand, the SPD had opened itself up to legitimate criticisms of amorality and hypocrisy— not least from Bernstein himself—by simultaneously trying to criticise the war conduct of the Heeresleitung during WW1 while continuing to approve war credits in successive Reichstag votes. On the other hand, the leftist elements in the USPD had abandoned Social Democracy entirely and turned towards anti-parliamentarism (e.g., Gruppe Internationale) or outright Blanquism (e.g., the Spartacists and later KPD) (Bernstein 1921a, pp. 19–28; Freiheit 1920). Neither of the extremes within Social Democracy had covered themselves in glory in the late stages of the Kaiserreich, and—importantly—neither had the right to claim to be “in all points the sole correct interpreter of the social-democratic idea and the infallible representative of the policy conforming to it” (Bernstein 1919b). In this respect, the Revolution was something of a dénouement in the contest between the rival conceptions of socialism and social development represented by the Praktiker—who were more-or-less committed to some form of revisionism and parliamentary reformism—and the various leftist tendencies—who adhered to Marxist orthodoxy and endorsed various forms of “councilist” revolutionism (Bernstein 1921a, pp. 65–82). While Bernstein was clearly convinced that the two extremes clearly held barely-reconcilable positions on the “methods of socialist struggle,” he nonetheless held out hope that some kind of alignment on at least some fundamental principles might be reached as a kind of initial gateway to achieving a semblance of consistency within the German socialist movement (Vorwärts 1918a, 1920). He felt that there was a clear basis for unity, at least for a majority of the SPD and USPD leadership and party members, around principles of securing and expanding democracy, the gradual socialisation of industry, and interim measures to ensure the health and stability of the German economy (Vorwärts 1918a). Of course, he does not dispute that there are heavy differences of opinion between the various sections of the socialist movement, and he is hardly optimistic that they will disappear overnight, but he does not think that these differences should prevent common struggle in moments where it is important to act practically, and where agreeing policy guidelines and necessary programmes of action takes precedence over theoretical background disputes—especially when far more than elections are at stake (Bernstein 1919a).

156  M. S. OSTROWSKI

But socialist alignment on principles and the consistency it would bring also depended on the willingness of the relevant party leaderships and members to exercise the strategic flexibility necessary to cooperate with one another—and above all, to cooperate within the democratic institutions of the new Republic. In this respect, from Bernstein’s perspective, it was a matter of basic political acumen—not some heroic concession, nor an act of treachery—that the USPD accepted the SPD’s offer to enter a governing coalition in the Rat der Volksbeauftragten. A refusal would, he argues, have been nothing short of a “crime against Social Democracy,” as it would have split the socialist movement between government and opposition, and forced the SPD to take power alone or (worse) alongside members of bourgeois parties, which would have made the situation in Germany even more uncertain than it already was in the early months of the Revolution (Vorwärts 1918a). Yet, for Bernstein (1919b), the preparedness of the SPD and USPD to work together in the coalition, however reluctantly and temporarily, gave two strong signals about the immediate future of the socialist movement in the Republic. First, the coalition was the first step on the way to burying the “party strife [Parteihader]” between SPD and USPD, as it indicated the possibility for both sides to move towards a rapprochement. Of course, the political differences between the parties were still too great to effect an immediate fusion, but Bernstein argues that, at least as a contingent measure, they urgently needed to consider forming electoral pacts or running common candidate lists in order to avoid the worst aspects of mutual internecine campaigning, and to stave off the threat of counterrevolution. Second, the fact that the majority of USPD members had supported the decision to enter the coalition was a vital sign that a commitment to democracy was deeply rooted in the German proletariat. This, in Bernstein’s eyes, legitimated and vindicated the decision to hold elections for the Nationalversammlung as the best way to achieve “firm, ordered conditions” in Germany—and proved beyond doubt the fundamental unpopularity of transitioning to exclusive rule by the workers’ and soldiers’ councils after the Bolshevist model (Vorwärts 1918a). Ultimately, Bernstein saw the cooperation, alignment, and eventual reunification of the various left-oriented tendencies as the only way for socialists to secure the “unreserved trust of workers in the honesty, capability, and unity of Social Democracy” as the movement that best represented their interests. The prevailing party strife only served to call forth distressing emotional ructions among the great mass of the workers, who

EDUARD BERNSTEIN AND THE LESSONS OF THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

157

had “no understanding for the dispute” between SPD and USPD, to waste a vast amount of labour power that would be better directed elsewhere, and to risk the loss of vital constituencies to bourgeois-reactionary parties. Meanwhile, he argues, a united socialist movement would be well-placed to “engage with much greater conviction those workers who have ended up in wrong ways of thought through the destructive influence of the war,” and to “deprive powers hostile to the Revolution of much more recognition among waverers and the undecided” (Bernstein 1919a; Vorwärts 1918a).

Conclusion Bernstein’s writings on the German Revolution offer an insight into a neglected family of socialist narratives about the end of the Kaiserreich and the rise of the Weimar Republic. His experiences in 1918–1919 confirmed the reformist views he had first articulated in Preconditions of Socialism, albeit now contrasted with the specific target of Bolshevism, both in its Russian instantiation and in its echoes in USPD and KPD ideals and commitments. Bernstein opposes the proliferation of myths on left and right in the post-Revolution period, and reiterates that socialism must remain sensitive to material conditions, taking its cue from innovations in social science. He exhorts socialists to move beyond the critical opposition of their Wilhelmine days, and engage in constructive projects of creative societal transformation, especially to build and sustain a healthy socialist democracy in the new Republic. Finally, he argues that the dawn of the Republic places new demands on voters to recognise the social import of their electoral decisions, and on socialist parties to put aside their theoretical and strategic disputes in order to achieve tangible results for the working class they purport to represent. Bernstein’s overarching concern is to “pick up the pieces” after the ruptures of WW1 and the Revolution, and to restore Social Democracy as a viable political movement that can rise to the challenges of this period of profound societal crisis. His admonitory comments regarding the threats facing the Republic were somewhat prophetic, and the spectre of the eventual collapse of Weimar Germany hangs broodingly over them. Nevertheless, his writings are a rich source of insights for socialist theory and strategy that hold enduring value well beyond their original context, and remain acutely relevant to the problems facing Social Democracy in contemporary society.

158  M. S. OSTROWSKI

References Bernstein, Eduard. 1919a. Zur Frage der Einigkeit. Vorwärts 36 (81), 13 February. Bernstein, Eduard. 1919b. Auf Wiedersehen! Ein Abschiedswort an die Unabhängige Sozialdemokratie. Vorwärts 35 (148–9), 21–22 March. Bernstein, Eduard. 1919c. Lassalle und der Bolschewismus. Vorwärts 36 (444), 31 August. Bernstein, Eduard. 1920a [1899]. Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie. Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz. Bernstein, Eduard. 1920b. Bankerott des Bolschewismus. Vorwärts 37 (238–9), 10 May. Bernstein, Eduard. 1920c. Die Kommunisten. Vorwärts 37 (255), 19 May. Bernstein, Eduard. 1920d. Die Entscheidung. Vorwärts 37 (286), 6 June. Bernstein, Eduard. 1921a. Die Deutsche Revolution: Geschichte der Entstehung und Ersten Arbeitsperiode der Deutschen Republik. Berlin: Verlag Gesellschaft und Erziehung. Bernstein, Eduard. 1921b. Wie eine Revolution Zugrunde Ging. Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz. Bernstein, Eduard. 1921c. Der 20. Februar und die Republik. Vorwärts 38 (81), 18 February. Bernstein, Eduard. 1922. Nach vier Jahren. Volkswacht 33 (263), 9 November. Broué, Pierre. 2006 [1971]. The German Revolution, 1917–1923. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2006. Freiheit. 1920. Bernsteins Kampf gegen die Unabhängigen. 3 (161), 6 May. Héritier, Louis. 1897. Geschichte der französischen Revolution von 1848 und der zweiten Republik in volksthümlicher Darstellung. Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz. Mannheim, Karl. 2014. Essays on the Sociology of Culture. London: Routledge. McElligott, Anthony. 2013. Rethinking the Weimar Republic: Authority and Authoritarianism 1916–1936. London: Bloomsbury. Steger, Manfred B. 1997. The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism: Eduard Bernstein and Social Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vorwärts. 1918a. Eduard Bernstein für Einigkeit. 35 (352), 23 December. Vorwärts. 1918b. Eduard Bernstein wieder der Partei beigetreten. 35 (353), 24 December. Vorwärts. 1920. Eduard Bernstein gegen USP. 37 (234), 7 May.

Karl Kautsky and the Theory of Socialist Republicanism Michael J. Thompson

Introduction The German Revolution presented the radical labour movements in Germany with a stark choice. With the end of World War I and the establishment of Soviet Russia, workers’ parties in Germany now faced the option of which new political form would be up to the task of the aspirations of socialism. The divide between those who strived for a poststate form of politics, consisting of workers’ and soldiers’ councils and those who wanted a republic constituted the major political and theoretical fault line of this period. Today, we see the concept of social democracy as a coopted political and institutional form. In its alliance with bourgeois interests, it created the administrative welfare state not only to stave off radical socialist impulses, but also to alleviate the excesses of laissez faire market society. At the same time, it was complicit with the move towards neoliberalism and has essentially exhausted itself both as an ideology as well as a policy paradigm. But if we look back to the defence of socialist republicanism that thinkers such as Karl Kautsky M. J. Thompson (*)  William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Kets and J. Muldoon (eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13917-9_8

159

160  M. J. THOMPSON

placed at the centre of their political vision, we see that there is much more to this story of a democratic socialism that maintains constitutional and republican principles and institutions. It is perhaps an irony of history—or perhaps better, a persistent tragedy—that radical politics has yet to move beyond the anti-statist and anti-constitutionalist impulses that characterised German communist (KPD) ideology at the time. The opposition of council democracy and republicanism was the central axis around which the debate about socialism’s future path in Germany would take. In this chapter, I will argue that Karl Kautsky’s thought in this period and after, specifically his defence of a socialist republic and his emphasis on the centrality of democratic working-class struggle, should be taken as central for contemporary radical political theory and movements. It will not be my intention in what follows to provide any kind of deep exploration of Kautsky’s ideas, but rather to use them as a touchstone for a thesis about the kind of politics and vision that any kind of rational socialist politics should have at its core. What we can take from Kautsky’s defence of the idea of a socialist republic remains salient in an age when the socialist political imaginary remains regressed and mired in a deeply underdeveloped state. I will defend his radical bona fides and suggest that his ideas can help us think through some of the problematic ideas that have been elaborated in recent decades by postmodern radical democratic theory. My thesis will be that the realisation of a socialist republic should in fact lie at the centre of any realistic and mature vision of socialist politics. I will build on the basic arguments put forth by Kautsky and show that his vision is consistent with a radical socialist politics and with a solid theory of democracy, the rule of law, and a socialist theory of the state. I will advocate for what I call radical constitutionalism which maintains that the goals of socialist society can and indeed must be promoted through constitutional means. But more centrally, I see Kautsky’s unique understanding of class and its sociological basis as crucial for understanding a broader radical politics that can unify struggles against domination without succumbing to the fragmented theory of antagonistic politics that has become a trope of contemporary theory. Kautsky’s “democratic-proletarian method,” as he calls it, can serve to show how the working-class prefigures a new, more egalitarian and democratic form of sociality that can serve as the basis for social transformation. All the while, republican institutions serve to enact and secure the new forms of social relations that displace those of dominance, exploitation and subordination.

KARL KAUTSKY AND THE THEORY OF SOCIALIST REPUBLICANISM 

161

Throughout this essay, I remain steadfast in my rejection of the basic counter-thesis to socialist republicanism that maintains, just as it did in Kautsky’s time, that both the working class and republican institutions must be done away with in any vision of radical political theory. I think this is not only irresponsible but also deeply delusional. I want to extend Kautsky’s defence of socialist republicanism into contemporary debates about the nature of socialist politics and the relevance of republican institutions and principles for the construction of a socialist politics that achieve enduring power and have deep transformative effects upon society. As Kautsky correctly saw the matter, the issue of maintaining political power had to be resolved via democratic mechanisms not only as a matter of principle, but equally as a matter of politics. To subvert the modern institutions and norms of democracy was to invite the powers of reaction to crush democracy as a whole as well as socialism. Today’s socialist thinkers seem to be under the spell of an ethical conviction that lacks any sense of seriousness with respect to this matter. Republicanism is a principle as well as a set of institutions. It is fundamentally a principle of self-rule by members of a political community for the good and interests of that community in common. It is also committed, as an adjunct to this first principle, to the idea that each member of the community should be free from the dominance of others. Relations of subordination and exploitation are, in this sense, expressions of the corruption of that community. But republicanism is also a set of institutions that seek to defend and express these twin principles. Its relation to socialist theory is complex but one that I think needs to be made explicit and defended. Indeed, one thing that the historical period of 1918–1919 shows us is that the debate over whether to transform or annihilate the state, i.e., the struggle between social democrats on the one hand and communists on other, remains with us. For well over three decades now, left political theory has been transformed by a series of ideas that have made the commitment to a democratic republic seem anathema to contemporary forms of power and social struggles. But this has only made radical politics reside in academic abstraction rather than have any efficacy in the real world. What is needed is a defence of a mature, politically relevant formulation of socialist democracy, one that takes the Enlightenment achievements of republicanism and constitutionalism to a new level of democratic richness and hopefully re-animates the political possibilities of democratic socialism.

162  M. J. THOMPSON

Kautsky’s Defence of Socialist Republicanism At the heart of Kautsky’s theory of socialist republicanism is a theory about the nature of what a just social order would look like under socialism and a theory about the political and institutional means that must be used to obtain and maintain this new configuration of society. In many ways, this is resonant with ideas that were internal to the tradition of radical republicanism in western political thought. The basic idea that lay at the heart of a republican form of government, going back to the classical age and then re-animated during the Renaissance and the early-modern period, was the premise that human beings were a cooperative and associative species and their lives together constituted a common good, a common property for all. Social relations were therefore put to correct or just ends when they were oriented towards the benefit of the totality of the community and not the private ends of any one individual or some sub-set of the community. Social power and domination therefore became a concern for republicans because it constituted a capacity of private interests to organise social relations and institutions according to their designs and not the according to the needs of the res publica (Thompson 2019a). For Kautsky, this is a central interpretive frame for what he sees as the proper ends of a socialist society. He refers to this as a “cooperative commonwealth” and holds to the principle of “cooperative production for use” as opposed to a “system of production for sale” (Kautsky 1910, pp. 95ff.). Republican institutions were crucial for Kautsky because the transformation of society according to any socialist programme entails two basic projects: (1) the establishment of a democratic legitimacy of socialism based on a trans-class basis so as to neuter the capacity of counter-revolt and establish a democratic consensus for the second project, (2) the socialisation of economic-productive capacities of society. Here we see that Kautsky’s socialist programme is decidedly in line with a radical expression of republican principles: that of (1a) democratic control as opposed to elite or private forms of control over the state and society, and (2a) that of reconciling the goods and wealth that is cooperatively produced according to the ends and needs of the society in common. Kautsky recognises that state power is crucial for these dual projects. He is not naïve about the nature of the modern state. He sees that it is essentially an institution that protects the interests of capital as a system and capitalist interests as a class. “So long as the property-holding

KARL KAUTSKY AND THE THEORY OF SOCIALIST REPUBLICANISM 

163

classes are the ruling ones, the nationalisation of industries and ­capitalist functions will never be carried so far as to injure the capitalists and landlords or to restrict their opportunities for exploiting the proletariat” (Kautsky 1910, p. 110). But the state cannot be reduced to these features. Here Kautsky’s economism plays a useful role: the state is essentially defined by the dominant economic ends that those in power have in view. Hence, the transformation from a state that protects capital, exploitation and inequality can be transformed via democracy into one that protects and guides a cooperative commonwealth. A socialist republic is not the same as a democratic republic. The difference lies in the fact that under a merely democratic republic each may have the rights of free association, free press, enjoy the expansion of the franchise, etc. But a socialist republic is organised and oriented by the organised working class or what we can today simply call the “wage-dependent,” as opposed to the “profit-dependent,” segment of society (Streeck 2017), and organised according to common ends of use and need and without exploitation. As Kautsky argued in 1919: “The German republic must be a democratic republic. But it must become more: a socialist republic, a collectivity within which the exploitation of man by man will no longer have any rights of citizenship” (Kautsky 1919, pp. 3–4). Now we can see that the thesis of a socialist republic, for Kautsky, takes one more and more the basic principles of radical republicanism: primarily in its emphasis on the dual principles of maximising the common good of the association that is society and second, the elimination of domination (whether of exploitation, exclusion, unequal status, etc.) among its members. Democratisation and socialisation are now the basic ends towards which any socialist society must seek to maximise and realise. Advanced industrial societies with parliamentary institutions were therefore ripe for electoral mechanisms for social transformation. This was no domestication of Marxian ideas. Indeed, Kautsky was following what Marx’s mature political thought had also maintained. As Marx wrote in 1866: The working man is no free agent. In too many cases, he is even too ignorant to understand the true interest of his child, or the normal conditions of human development. However, the more enlightened part of the working class fully understands that the future of its class, and, therefore, of mankind, altogether depends upon the formation of the rising working generation. […] This can only be effected by converting social reason

164  M. J. THOMPSON into social force, and, under given circumstances, there exists no other method of doing so, than through general laws, enforced by the power of the state. In enforcing such laws, the working class do not fortify the government power. On the contrary, they transform that power, now used against them, into their own agency. They effect by a general act what they would vainly attempt by a multitude of isolated individual efforts. (Marx 1977, pp. 80–81)

For Kautsky, the seizure of state power was crucial and the means by which it accomplished this was as well. The democratisation of the state via the unification of the working class, its political maturity achieved by organised working-class consciousness, will be a revolutionary act (see Kautsky 1946, pp. 29ff.). For Kautsky, there can be no “evolutionary socialism,” we cannot hope for a gradual reformism in coalition with bourgeois parties and expect socialism to emerge over time. A socialist republic will have to be achieved through democratic means and expressed through liberal-republican institutions. It had to be achieved via “the democratic-proletarian method […] of class struggle which confined itself to the non-military means of parliamentarism, strikes, demonstrations, the press, and similar means of exerting pressure” (Kautsky 1996, p. 36) all, of course, where these political institutions were already established. In many ways, emphasis on Kautsky’s orthodoxy is misplaced and overly simplistic. He did believe that that working-class agency could not be formed by ethics alone, and he did see that the interests of working people would be shaped by the historical and economic conditions that were present at the time. But this is not as reductionist as it might first appear. Indeed, he loosely held to the Kantian conception of epistemology where subject and object related as separate. But he also held to the Marxian thesis that both subject and object were historical in nature. Hence, the knowledge possible to the subject was restricted by the nature of the object itself. But as the object, in this case social reality, changed historically so did the subject’s cognition of it. New ethical ideas and value premises therefore emerged from the new ways that social reality was shifting away from individual forms of craft production in the early-nineteenth century to modern cooperative forms of industrial production. Now, the ethical values of a commonwealth could be held in view in the consciousness of working people and the democratic, common ends of the community as a whole could be put at the forefront of a

KARL KAUTSKY AND THE THEORY OF SOCIALIST REPUBLICANISM 

165

new conception of society and state. Indeed, in his discussion of Thomas More, Kautsky made this principle central: “So it comes about that certain ideas are only operative under certain conditions, that ideas which at one time encounter indifference and even scorn are taken up with enthusiasm, and often without strict verification, a few decades later” (Kautsky 1959, p. 160 and passim). The democratic moment here was therefore given more ballast in the sense that it was both cognitive as well as ethical. The cognition of the working class would reflect the objective conditions of debasement and exploitation that mass-industrial capitalism manifested. Democracy was therefore not simply a mechanism for the exercise of choice, it was the very means by which a complex, technological division of labour could be managed for common ends and needs. Democracy also concerned other forms of domination as well. Thinkers from Eduard Bernstein, August Bebel (for instance in his Woman and Socialism), and Magnus Hirschfield had seen that social democracy would be able to absorb new kinds of concerns with gender, sexuality and race (see Mancini 2011). Kautsky was therefore adamant to include these liberal principles within the framework of socialist democracy: “The Socialist parties fight not only for shorter working hours and higher wages, unemployment insurance and shop councils, but also for the liberty, equality, fraternity of all human beings, regardless of race, colour or creed” (Kautsky 1946, p. 27). And similarly, this formed the basis for a wider political ethic against all forms of exploitation and oppression: “There today every genuine opponent of exploitation and oppression must take part in the class struggle from whatever class he may come” (Kautsky 1964, pp. 4–5). This did not mean that there was no space for workers councils in this socialist-republican scheme. Councils were still a crucial layer of democratic self-administration at the local and firm level. But to elevate them into anything beyond this would be anti-democratic, Kautsky argued, since these councils were unable to cognise the whole and the interests of those outside of their own concern. As Massimo Salvadori has argued: “To opt exclusively for the council form would be to introduce a system based on work place and occupation, that would exalt particularlist and corporatist tendencies, creating and consolidating divisively localist interests and loyalties” (Salvadori 1990, p. 237). By contrast, democracy was a means of organisation as well as a means to construct the needed legitimacy that socialism would require in order to effect the kind of social change requisite to existing social and property relations.

166  M. J. THOMPSON

There could be no programme for socialisation without democratic legitimation. Once the working class was split, ideologically as well as in terms of party organisation, then, and only then, Kautsky believed, could the counter-majoritarian powers of reaction defeat a workers’ party that in fact represented the majority of the population. The state was therefore not to be reduced as essentially oppressive or leading to anti-democratic tendencies. The critique of Bolshevism, for Kautsky, centred at least in part on this very question. For Kautsky, the democratic essence of socialism had to guide the organisation of the party and the institutions of the state. But Lenin, in his rebuttal to Kautsky, saw the matter differently. As Lucio Magri has argued, Lenin’s “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky presents the proletarian dictatorship as ‘unrestricted,’ and the democratic dimension as absorbed into the party that represents and organises it” (Magri 2011, p. 28; cf. Bronner 1990, pp. 76ff.). The political crisis of 1919 therefore made it imperative for a socialist party in Germany to have deep democratic roots and not to give in to the Jacobin tactics of Bolshevism. By 1931, it was clear to Kautsky that what Bolshevism led to was anti-democratic and was of a piece with fascism: “Fascism, however, is only the counterpart of Bolshevism, Mussolini merely apeing Lenin. […] Fascism shows that the Bolshevik methods of dictatorship can be used equally well for muzzling the proletariat or its enemies” (Kautsky 1931, p. 139). Only an adherence to democratic, socialist republicanism, one rooted in the “democratic-proletarian method,” would be able to resist the forces of reaction as well as be able to proceed with the project of socialisation (see Kautsky 1925, pp. 180ff.). The correct interpretation of the concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was therefore, for Kautsky, to be understood as an organised, unified working class that was able to steer the powers of the state based on its victory in parliamentary institutions. Again the democratic principle was central: a socialist republic was the only rational means for societies with developed economic and political institutions to commence the policies of socialisation. But also, his political acumen was well aware of the powers of reaction and the ways that reactionary forces would be emboldened and essentially empowered by the destruction and de-legitimisation of republican institutions. Kautsky emphasises over and over again the importance of any rational, enduring socialist programme’s need to rest on the kind of broad legitimacy that democratic-republican institutions can provide:

KARL KAUTSKY AND THE THEORY OF SOCIALIST REPUBLICANISM 

167

But if the proletariat in a democratic state grows until it is numerous and strong enough to conquer political power by making use of the liberties which exist, then it would be a task of great difficulty for the capitalist dictatorship to manipulate the force necessary for the suppression of democracy. (Kautsky 1964, p. 9)

A socialist republic would therefore be distinct from a bourgeois republic not in the basis of its essential institutions—of a free press, open and fair elections, constitutionalism and the rule of law, and so on—but instead on the interests and ends for which those institutions were used. The fear that a dictatorship of the proletariat would lead to a “bonapartist régime” was not to be feared. [T]his is not at all the necessary outcome of a proletarian revolution, provided the working class constitutes the majority of the population and is organized democratically, thereby assuring the preconditions for socialist production. By dictatorship of the proletariat we can mean nothing other than the rule of the proletariat on the basis of democracy. (Kautsky 1918, p. 47)

And for all of this, Kautsky knew that at the core of it all was the need for the will, for a subjective factor that would compel members of the oppressed class to seek social transformation through organised, democratic means.

Theorising Plebian Power: Two Models of Political Radicalism In many ways, Kautsky’s model of socialist republicanism rests on a concept of social class and radical political agency that many have seen as fragmented and neutered in modern society. The “proletariat” as a political agent has crumbled and new forms of social struggle, many maintain, have come to take its place. We are dealing with a plural, not a unitary, political agent, these theories argue, and we need to rethink socialist theory and practice as a result. In place of exploitation as the central category of domination, we are now asked to think in terms of “relations of subordination” which is understood as an open set of difference between different kinds of agents. Class no longer has a privileged position since gender, sexual difference, independence movements,

168  M. J. THOMPSON

race, and so on, can all qualify as different forms of subordination and therefore as sites for political struggle and become “relations of oppression” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, pp. 152ff.). As one recent writer has restated this claim: Against Marx, I argue that the accelerating dislocatory power of capitalism does not lead to the emergence of a unique political subject, but rather to the multiplication of social actors, defined in terms of locality, language, ethnicity, sexuality or whatever. As such, the task after Marx is the reactivation of politics through the articulation of new political subjectivities. (Critchley 2007, p. 91)

If a rational, democratic, and politically plausible form of s­ocialism is ever to emerge, views such as this must be thoroughly rejected. In what follows, I will seek to show that Kautsky’s theory of the democratic-proletarian method can help us see the political salience of a radical democratic politics that puts class at its centre while nevertheless presenting us with a means by which we construct a normative framework for other struggles against domination and oppression. Kautsky’s defence of socialist republicanism is in deep contrast with what now runs current in radical theoretical discourse. What is at stake, I will argue here, is the choice between two essentially incompatible models of political strategy. On the one hand, Kautsky’s socialist republicanism achieved through his “democratic-proletarian method” which emphasises the need for a democratically organised opposition based on class to reorient state power. I will present a reconstruction of this thesis that can take on present theoretical debates. On the other hand, there is the view, taken from postmodern writers, that holds that the state is the site for struggle; that it is a form of power in and of itself. Radical democracy, on this view, is the expression of any group that has discursively formed itself as an oppressed group seeking its autonomy from the state and state power. This alternative sees radical democratic practice as inherently in tension with the state; it views radical democratic politics as an expression of a mélange of interests, sometimes forming a radical “demos,” sometimes not. I will suggest here that this view is inherently misguided politically and should be rejected as a legitimate conception of socialist politics. Instead, I will suggest a theory of radical constitutionalism that draws off of Kautsky’s socialist republicanism. But before I do this, let me show why this alternative model of plebian power is misguided and why it fails as an adequate and coherent political theory.

KARL KAUTSKY AND THE THEORY OF SOCIALIST REPUBLICANISM 

169

Essential to the critique of the class-based model of plebian power is the thesis that the very concept of class, as understood in the Marxian tradition, is now anathema to contemporary struggles. Antagonism against oppression has its roots in multiple, indeed, irreducibly plural, contexts. As a result, seminal thinkers such as Nicos Poulantzas argued that the conflict between labour and capital must be displaced in favour of allied groups of the populace and the powers of the state (Poulantzas 1978a). Politics is now not only seen as autonomous from economics, the state is now seen as marked by its own distinctive form of power that is itself non-reducible to the capitalist class (Poulantzas 1978b). For Poulantzas, it is illusory to see the state as politically neutral, a mere instrument for whatever class happens to control it. Instead, it always congeals a “power bloc” that grants those that control it an organisational power over society. The political struggle is now understood to be one between not workers and capitalists who control the state, but between “power alliances” of different social groups who struggle against the “power bloc” of the state. This view has become deeply influential in contemporary left theory. The state is now seen as a source of dominance sui generis and is not to be seen as a neutral tool for whatever class happens to seize its control. Even more, is the displacement of class as a central agent for socialist politics. On this view, political agency is now to be understood as discursively produced by new narratives against relations of oppression and subordination. Now, new social movements struggle against the forms of power that new narratives about social power articulate. “The common denominator of all of them,” write Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, “would be their differentiation from workers’ struggles, considered as ‘class’ struggles” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, p. 159). They go further. The class basis of social struggle must be further displaced because they obscure the other, non-class struggles that have been emerging since the 1960s. As they put it: Once the conception of the working class as a ‘universal class’ is rejected, it becomes possible to recognize the plurality of the antagonisms which take place in the field of what is arbitrarily grouped under the label of ‘workers’ struggles,’ and the inestimable importance of the great majority of them for the deepening of the democratic process. (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, p. 167)

Finally, there is no single struggle that can take precedence over any other. All struggles are necessarily particular, having their own partial

170  M. J. THOMPSON

interests in view and created from their own situated forms of oppression: “all struggles, whether those of workers or other political subjects, left to themselves, have a partial character, and can be articulated to very different discourses” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, p. 169). Political radicalism, radical democracy itself, now comes to be seen as the association of divergent social struggles, their oppression discursively created, railing against the state as the central site of power and domination. It is for this reason that many theorists now look to the “demos” as a kind of radical potentiality of the people against all forms of power. The discourse now becomes even more abstract and incoherent, however. Unmoored from any concrete basis in social power relations, we are now to see political struggles as raging against the state rather than incorporating it for the purposes of social transformation. Returning to Marx’s youthful critique of the state, Miguel Abensour seeks to posit a theory of radical democracy that is in tension with the state itself. “Democracy is anti-statist or it is not,” Abensour (2011, p. xxxiii) maintains. As he seeks to argue, “[d]emocracy will be construed instead as going beyond the boundaries marked out by the State, as pointing beyond the State, as though its calling were to overtake the State’s designated limits, to overflow like a fertile, generous river, and extend to the whole body of the social realms” (Abensour 2011, p. 2). The crux of this argument is that any movement against the state affirms in actu the possibility of annihilating the division between governors and governed, or of reducing it to almost nothing, inventing public space and a political space under the banner of isonomy. In short, this way for politics to be is a transformation of the power in potential to act in concert: it signifies the passage from power over human beings to power with and between human beings, the between being the place where the possibility of a common world is won. (Abensour 2011, pp. 96–97)

I think that a reconstruction of Kautsky’s theory is apposite here. For what Kautsky proposes in his democratic-proletarian method resonates with some of what Abensour argues above. The core argument is that we should see in the way that the proletariat is constituted sociologically— that is, in terms of its practices and interdependent relations—the prefiguration for what a socialist society should seek to make concrete. The thesis is that modern forms of cooperation and interdependence, made material through the development of industrial capitalism, holds out for

KARL KAUTSKY AND THE THEORY OF SOCIALIST REPUBLICANISM 

171

us a model for sociality beyond merely economic modes of activity and being. Indeed, it is the model for what a free, democratic and solidaristic society would look like. Class is therefore not an a priori category for social struggle, nor is working-class agency formed by its mere existence. Rather, Kautsky’s deeply political claim is that working-class agency is itself the product of democratic organisation and is itself a construction based on material-social factors. These material-social factors centre around the practices of cooperation and interdependence; they bring to bear a new form of sociality that can be the font for other forms of social change and transformation. Diagnosing social oppression is linked to class dominance only because we can see in modern forms of working life a egalitarian solidarity that can be brought to consciousness and serve as a model for other forms of social life. This would entail the democratic transformation of society. The democratic-proletarian method is therefore not a reduction of social domination to class relations, it is rather a political thesis that maintains that the democratisation of working people is a prelude to a broader democratisation of society as a whole. Kautsky’s thesis is therefore more sophisticated than typical orthodox interpreters of Marx have let on. As a form of plebian power it seeks to make working-class forms of solidarism and interdependence a model for even non-class struggles. It is not a simple reflection theory of knowledge that undergirds his argument. In that case, working people would simply react mechanistically to the change in material-institutional organisation of society. But what he really is asking us to consider is that the change in social practices and sociality itself brought about under industrial capitalism makes new forms of social reality embryonic in the present and potentially transformative for the future. These new forms of sociality are brought to the fore via the forms of interdependent activity that essentially constitute the urbanised industrial proletariat. A new material form of social organisation therefore brings into view a new web of values and norms, new forms of interaction and social solidarity that can serve as a model for how a new form of free associational life can be made concrete. As Stephen Eric Bronner correctly argues: According to Kautsky, the critical ethical question therefore asks whether the dominant group is willing to recognize those norms of cooperation it espouses in terms of its actual practice. If it does not, then new norms must be developed by the oppressed group to help overturn the ‘decadent’ system. (Bronner 1990, p. 35)

172  M. J. THOMPSON

What this means is that a democratically organised working-class offers society a new model as well as a new set of values for social relations, equality, solidarity and interdependence. Developing this thesis, we can see that what lies at the heart of the democratic-proletarian method is a very different understanding of what class actually is. Kautsky’s thesis, as it was with all the more sophisticated Marxist thinkers of the early twentieth century, was that the industrial proletariat, far from being a reified political agent, was historically unique in terms of the sociological way that it was constituted as a class and how it engendered a new form of sociality that would serve as the model for a more emancipated form of sociality and social practice. To grasp this view and to use it against the postmodern and post-structuralist theory that has become hegemonic in contemporary left theory, we need to see that it is the cooperative, interdependent ontology of social relations that essentially defines the industrial working class and marks it off as politically as well as sociologically unique (see Bottomore 1984, pp. 179ff.). Kautsky’s tireless discussion of the “cooperative commonwealth” (Kautsky 1910, pp. 88ff.) indicates the centrality of this thesis. The key idea here is that the democratic-proletarian method is not one that puts a specific class over and above all others, nor is it that the working class has a priori status as a political agent, or their interests are to be given priority over the remainder of society. The argument is rather that modern, industrial forms of production have made materially real forms of cooperation and interdependence that previous phases of social development had not brought completely to the fore. In this sense, the plebs are able to reconstitute the populus as a non-hierarchical, democratically constituted association of equals. The problem of agency that the postmodern theorists critique is therefore largely mistaken. The key is not a unique political subject, it is a new form of sociality that capitalism has brought into reality via organised forms of interdependent labour and association that is crucial. Indeed, Kautsky is bounded by the interests of his own time. He sees economic issues of production and distribution as central ideas. But he also saw that it was bringing into historical reality a new form of sociation and a new form of individuality. As Henry Pachter correctly puts the matter: “socialism begins with the insight that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. The association can envisage goals that unassociated individuals might not even be able to conceptualise” (Pachter 1984, p. 38). The emergence of this new form of sociality affects and shapes

KARL KAUTSKY AND THE THEORY OF SOCIALIST REPUBLICANISM 

173

working people, but it leads us to a more profound claim and realisation about human sociality itself: that we create and live in a world, a social reality, of our own creation; that this reality is cooperatively created and maintained. If this is true for our working, productive life, than why not for how we manage our cities, the environment, our civic and our intimate relations? Why not see the dominance and exploitation of one over an other as obviating the basic essence of our social-cooperative capacities? Class, understood as a concept of power relations, can therefore be expanded to include those groups that are constituted by dominationrelations more generally (cf. Aronowitz 2003). Struggling against the state, making the state the object of annihilation and overcoming is not, however, the solution. The thesis that can be drawn out from Kautsky’s argument is that the state must itself be transformed by the democratic interests that emerge once these new forms of social praxis are captured by ethical and political consciousness. Working-class politics is therefore something more than working-class interests. Industrial (and, one can still argue, post-industrial) capitalism rests on a historically unique form of interdependence that, if politically organised democratically, allows us to bring to consciousness other forms of domination and domination-relations within the community as a whole. The structure of dominus and servus, classical republican categories that are translatable into modern power relations, becomes the underlying political grammar for comprehending social power and the way it abuses the social bonds between us. Kautsky is clear that the changing nature of capitalism is responsible for bringing about this shift in consciousness. In early capitalist development, craft production made liberal independence a central political value since private property and self-determination went hand in hand with the craft-based economy (Kautsky 1910, pp. 35ff.). But as this system faded and industrial capitalism developed and became dominant, it was not liberal individualism that emerged as the framework for freedom, but a social conception of freedom that fit with the developed social economy of the modern period. Hence, it is the structure of our social relations with others— namely their anti-hierarchical, non-dominating character—that becomes the aim for a social conception of freedom where a richer individuality can be articulated. The proletariat is therefore not simply the “working class” being dominated by capitalists; it is this, to be sure, but it is also, just as importantly, a class that can see itself sociologically as different

174  M. J. THOMPSON

from other forms of social life. Economic class is related to other, non-economic struggles in that it holds out for us the idea that an alternative to dominating structures of relations that of democratic, non-hierarchical, non-dominating, non-exploiting, and relations between persons. Indeed, what becomes cognitive, captured in consciousness, is what has been made manifest in the material-objective world thanks to capitalist development and democratic class consciousness: the fact that domination-relations are the basis for the entirety of society itself. Even if non-economic forms of power are eroded—inequalities of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, or whatever—this does not eliminate or constrain the most basic power resource available over other human beings: that of capital. The retreat from class in contemporary theory would be seen by Kautsky therefore not only as lacking a cohesive politics for democratic social transformation, it would also lack the sociological and normative basis for what an alternative radical democratic society would be based upon: namely, an association of interdependent equals enriching the common good to enhance each other’s individuality and development. It is therefore the inherent sociality of human life, as a species, that is central here. It grounds political consciousness once we begin to see that an interdependent, cooperative form of social life is possible. The basis of this approach was well-grounded in the kind of Kantian Marxism to which Kautsky adhered. The key idea here was that the concept of sociality was seen to be the a priori category needed for the proper, rational understanding of human life. In 1925, Max Adler made this point clear in his brilliant Kant und der Marxismus: In fact, just as critical philosophy starts, and must start, from individual consciousness but demonstrates in this consciousness a supra-individual, transcendental-social, a priori socialized character; so Marxism starts from man. […] However, it does not start from man as he conceives himself, as individual man, but from socialized man. […] As soon as man appears, society is there, because man is empirically possible only among men. (Adler 1925, p. 138)

The implication of this thesis—one that Kautsky would have held as central to his own epistemology—is that this inherent sociality of man is shaped by different historical and economic forces. The key again is that only a democratically organised working class has the potentiality to make this inherent sociality into one that is truly free—emancipated

KARL KAUTSKY AND THE THEORY OF SOCIALIST REPUBLICANISM 

175

from hierarchy, domination, exploitation and so on. This then becomes the basic grammar for other forms of sociality and institutions as well. Since the Kantian-Marxist position excluded the concept of teleology as the proper formulation of knowledge (see Adler 1904), the democraticproletarian method is needed to shape the political move to socialism. There can be no historical, moral, economic or political certainty that it will be realised, it is always inherently political. All of this, however, is dependent not on working people simply becoming the majority share of the population. What is needed is that working people be constituted as a class, and be constituted as a class democratically with the political aim of reconstituting social relations democratically. Hence, the democratic-proletarian method can be re-animated as a political concept that retains its political salience only if we are able to extend its logic into those other social struggles that have as their goal the transformation of social relations into those that are interdependent and egalitarian. Against the still-persistent view that has expunged class from an understanding of plebian power, we must see that the thesis implicit in Kautsky’s understanding of politics, history and sociology is that non-class forms of domination and oppression are addressed by the kind of model of interdependent sociality that the working class actually manifests in its sociological and economic position in cooperative praxis. Why can we not see struggles against racial, ethnic, gender, environmental and urban struggles as resolvable through the kind of interdependent egalitarianism that Kautsky saw at the heart of what the proletariat was becoming under industrial capitalism? To reject class in favour of some other form of oppression simply misses the deeper, indeed, more compelling thesis here: that all forms of oppression and domination can be displaced when the concrete nexus of our social relations are transformed into a truly democratic, self-determining association of equals.

Towards a Theory of Radical Constitutionalism The real error that thinkers such as Abensour and others have made with respect to a theory of socialist republicanism is in their interpretation of the state as a kind of container of democratic politics. Once we adopt the view—one they rightly critique—that democracy is merely a matter of what state institutions instantiate, then we have truly lost view of the radicalism of what Marx and Kautsky were trying to put forwards.

176  M. J. THOMPSON

The idea that democracy moves beyond the boundaries of the state is indeed part of the process of socialisation, not only of economic-productive assets, but also of other forms of social life as well. The normative primacy of republicanism is therefore not only in the thesis of privileging the common good, but of a set of institutions that will be able to adjudicate distributive and corrective claims about justice. It is also about erecting new institutions based on new practices and norms. A mature form of socialist democracy would therefore be one that insists on the basic political principle that a common power is needed to articulate rights, adjudicate disputes and conflicting claims about justice, and to serve as the basis for legitimate coercion against those that seek to achieve dominance over others. To call into question the state’s power to protect and orient political institutions in this process is simply ludicrous and politically irresponsible. In order to firm up and make more concrete the ­socialist-republican thesis, I want to suggest that it rests on a further core commitment to constitutionalism as a basis for social transformation. The political romanticism of contemporary theorists of radical democracy, as I have described them above, suffers from the delusion that social transformation will have no use of law and state. But this is a utopian and immature brand of politics—so much so that it in fact becomes an anti-politics: it has nothing concrete to offer the real world and no means by which we can “control the controllers.” Democracy not tempered by republicanism cannot secure the common interest of its members; it cannot ensure accountability, secure democratic practices, and so on. But Kautsky’s persistent claim in his writings is that the state and its institutions will be transformed as a democratically organised working class participates in it: “Whenever the proletariat engages in parliamentary activity as a self-conscious class, parliamentarism begins to change its character.” The state is therefore not a form of domination sui generis, as Poulantzas and others maintain, rather “it is the most powerful lever that can be utilised to raise the proletariat out of its economic, social and moral degradation” (Kautsky 1910, p. 188). Such arguments may initially strike us as utterly passé. But contained therein is a core thesis about the rational political aims of socialist movements: the transformation of republican institutions to conform to the democratic, cooperative and egalitarian-interdependent sociality that a democratically organised proletariat embodies. Indeed, even Machiavelli—who has been wrongly cast in much contemporary

KARL KAUTSKY AND THE THEORY OF SOCIALIST REPUBLICANISM 

177

scholarship as some kind of proto-anarchist—is also allied to republican institutions and their allegiance to the common interest of its members. It is needed against the powerful, but also against the excesses of people as well. We should see in this not a conservative argument, but an admission that the institutions of a republic must be used to foster common interests and social change. The state will change because the basis of social organisation will also be changing. The view of a post-statist society was not one Marx had in view. As Terry Eagleton has soberly argued: What Marx hoped would wither away in communist society was not the state in the sense of a central administration. Any complex modern culture would require this. […] The state as an administrative body would live on. It is the state as an instrument of violence that Marx hopes to see the back of. As he puts it in the Communist Manifesto, public power under communism would lose its political character. Against the anarchists of his day, Marx insists that only in this sense would the state vanish from view. What had to go was a particular kind of power, one that underpinned the rule of a dominant social class over the rest of society. National parks and driving test centers would remain. (Eagleton 2011, p. 197)

I think we can see in this a basic commitment to radical constitutionalism: as the formation of institutional rules and design that can serve as the formal basis of democratic power and the means by which self-determination and anti-domination are secured. It is simply a paucity of political creativity and imagination that rejects republican institutions and constitutionalism based on its contemporary defects. In truth, a mature form of socialist-democratic politics would seek precisely what Kautsky urges: the democratic transformation of republican institutions to serve as a guarantor and agent for broader forms of socialisation and social transformation. This does not, in any way, vitiate the persistent need for social movements against the state, but it does mean that a properly democratic, socialist republic would be dedicated to evolutionary change and would seek to build institutions that would aid in the process of achieving economic democracy (Thompson 2018) as well as democratising non-economic forms of life. As Henry Pachter, one of the great advocates of socialist republicanism, correctly saw the matter: “In contrast to the liberal-republican state, the democratic state is not a limited state; it absorbs influences from the community, and it is allied with socialism by unbreakable ties” (Pachter 1984, p. 45 and passim; also see Schulman 2011).

178  M. J. THOMPSON

Socialism and Democracy Kautsky, not unlike his fellow Kantian Marxists, was always insistent that the working class and democracy were not teleologically linked in any way. Working people did not simply manifest democratic forms of thought and values. Rather, political awareness of their empirical condition—the forms of exploitation, domination, and modes of work and praxis in which their lives unfolded—was needed to form them into a democratic-political force. Only then could the democratic-republican institutions that constituted mature polities become socialist-­republican institutions via political and social struggles. Whatever the historical shortcomings of thinkers such as Kautsky may be, there can be no question that an adherence to a mature and modern form of democracy based on Enlightenment principles and values was at its core. Democracy, in this sense, is deepened by the inclusion of working-class concerns since it has the capacity sociologically to shape a new form of sociation that has common interests, solidarity and equality at its center. Politically, the struggle remains to sustain this consciousness and to make it the wellspring for the values and institutions of a new society. The thesis I have put forth in this essay has been that Kautsky’s ideas about working-class politics, democratic organisation and republican institutions form an important grammar for understanding radical democracy in a way that speaks to new social movements and concerns. By taking his thesis about the “democratic-proletarian method” as a point of departure, we can see that the essential link between socialism and democracy as well as socialism and equality and justice movements can be made explicit: the formulation of new forms of social-relational life that eliminates domination and oppression and instead seeks the fulfilment of individuality via the cultivation of cooperative, interdependent forms of associational life. Democratic life is deepened beyond its limits in liberalism and the institutions of republicanism become the vehicle for these transformations even as they maintain their democratic-civic character. Class is the means not to place one group over any other, but shows us the most universal axis of power in modern society. A return to class against the discursive self-formation of political subjectivity should therefore retain its primacy in any attempt to deepen democracy and enact social transformation (see Anderson 1983; Wood 1986). In classical times, the development of democracy in many Greek poleis was punctuated by military campaigns and wars against Persian

KARL KAUTSKY AND THE THEORY OF SOCIALIST REPUBLICANISM 

179

dominance. In the battles that Athenians fought together where social status was obliterated by cooperative efforts in battle, a new consciousness was raised. When soldiers returned to the city, they found that those who fought beside them were now resurrecting distinctions based on rank and wealth. But in time, these divisions were eroded. The new consciousness of an essential equality and cooperativeness between all citizens became the basis for a new political culture and new democratic institutions. Industrialised labour, urbanised social life and other forms of interdependence made material by modern capitalism can also become manifest in consciousness and lead to a similar kind of social transformation. Once we see that at the heart of Marx’s social theory lies a central thesis about the social-relational essence of the human species and that history is understood as the different shapes and forms that these relations take on, will we be able to perceive that Marx’s thought contains within it a broader emancipatory philosophy that can change the register of radical politics. Republicanism—radical republicanism—is the structure of thought to which Marx himself subscribed, along with Machiavelli, Rousseau and others (Thompson 2019b) who sought to forge a new, more radical conception of democratic politics and practice. Perhaps when this basic idea once again animates the political interests and imagination of working people, we will see the emergence of a more mature and effective political radicalism. For now, however, given the unfortunate state of academic theory and depoliticised neoliberal culture, we will have to wait in earnest.

References Abensour, Miguel. 2011. Democracy Against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Moment. Cambridge: Polity. Adler, Max. 1904. Kausalität und Teleologie im Streite um die Wissenschaft. Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung Ignaz Brand. Adler, Max. 1925. Kant und der Marxismus. Berlin: E. Laub’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung. Anderson, Perry. 1983. In the Tracks of Historical Materialism. London: Verso. Aronowitz, Stanley. 2003. How Class Works: Power and Social Movement. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bottomore, Tom. 1984. Sociology and Socialism. New York: St. Martin’s. Bronner, Stephen Eric. 1990. Socialism Unbound. New York: Routledge. Critchley, Simon. 2007. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. London: Verso.

180  M. J. THOMPSON Eagleton, Terry. 2011. Why Marx Was Right. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kautsky, Karl. 1910. The Class Struggle. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr. Kautsky, Karl. 1918. Demokratie oder Diktatur. Berlin: Verlag der weißen Blätter. Kautsky, Karl. 1919. Richtlinien für eine sozialistisches Aktionsprogramm. Berlin: Sittenfeld. Kautsky, Karl. 1925. The Labour Revolution. New York: The Dial Press. Kautsky, Karl. 1931. Bolshevism at a Deadlock. New York: The Rand School Press. Kautsky, Karl. 1946. Social Democracy Versus Communism. New York: The Rand School Press. Kautsky, Karl. 1959. Thomas More and His Utopia. New York: Russell and Russell. Kautsky, Karl. 1964. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. Kautsky, Karl. 1996. The Road to Power: Political Reflections on Growing into the Revolution. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Magri, Lucio. 2011. The Tailor of Ulm: Communism in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso. Mancini, Elena. 2011. Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom. New York: Palgrave. Marx, Karl. 1977 [1866]. Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council. In Selected Works, vol. 2, 77–85. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Pachter, Henry. 1984. Socialism in History. New York: Columbia University Press. Poulantzas, Nicos. 1978a. Political Power and Social Classes. London: New Left Books. Poulantzas, Nicos. 1978b. Classes in Contemporary Capitalism. London: New Left Books. Salvadori, Massimo. 1990. Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, 1880–1938. London: Verso. Schulman, Jason. 2011. Socialism: Liberal or Democratic-Republican. In Rational Radicalism and Political Theory, ed. Michael Thompson, 191–208. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Streeck, Wolfgang. 2017. Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. London: Verso. Thompson, Michael J. 2018. A Theory of Council Republicanism. In Council Democracy: Towards a Democratic Socialist Politics, ed. James Muldoon, 108–127. New York: Routledge.

KARL KAUTSKY AND THE THEORY OF SOCIALIST REPUBLICANISM 

181

Thompson, Michael J. 2019a. The Demise of the Radical Critique of Economic Inequality in Western Political Thought. In Histories of Global Inequality: New Perspectives, ed. Christian O. Christiansen and Steven Jensen. New York: Palgrave. Thompson, Michael J. 2019b. The Radical Republican Structure of Marx’s Critique of Capitalist Society. History of Political Thought (in press). Wood, Ellen Meiksins. 1986. The Retreat from Class. London: Verso.

Democracy and Dictatorship: Rosa Luxemburg’s Path to Revolution Mayra Cotta

Introduction In her essay, The Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg (2010) argued for a distinctive understanding of revolutionary transformation through which workers would struggle for a socialist democracy. Her argument, which cut across debates at the time concerning “democracy or dictatorship,” affirmed both the necessity of the rule of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and a commitment to basic political freedoms and democratic institutions. It therefore entailed fidelity to notions of democracy and dictatorship, but only understood in a particular way. Luxemburg rejected bourgeois democracy just as she rejected what she conceived of as “dictatorship on the bourgeois model” (Luxemburg 2010, p. 228). Against the German Social Democratic Party, Luxemburg argued that the formal presence of democratic elections, even with a nominally socialist government in power, did little to alleviate the domination and exploitation experienced by workers in the workplace under capitalist relations of production. Yet, against the Bolsheviks, Luxemburg did not M. Cotta (*)  New School for Social Research, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Kets and J. Muldoon (eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13917-9_9

183

184  M. COTTA

consider that a dictatorial path of suppressing democratic institutions would be an effective or desirable way to achieve a socialist democracy. Luxemburg set out what was in effect a method of revolutionary transformation: the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and immediate socialisation of the economy by means of the active participation of the mass of workers in the creation of new political and economic institutions. She insisted upon an underlying agreement between revolutionary means and ends insofar as a free and equal socialist democratic regime could only be achieved “on the basis of the most active, unlimited participation of the mass of the people, of unlimited democracy” (Luxemburg 2010, p. 231). Luxemburg’s theory of socialist transformation was at once a lesson on the deconstruction of the class rule of the bourgeoisie and the construction of a democratic socialist society. Her awareness of the limits of bourgeois democracy and her wariness regarding the enthusiastic embrace of a precariously qualified dictatorship by a party elite were part of a sophisticated framework of a revolutionary theory of socialist transformation. She attempted to develop a revolutionary theory that did not concede to authoritarian temptations but that adopted robust measures to socialise the economy. With Lenin, Luxemburg was keenly aware of the threat that a bourgeois counter-revolution posed to a revolutionary movement and the tenacity with which the bourgeoisie would defend their private property. Yet she also feared the consequences of a misshaped revolution and the civil war that could result from attempts to form a minority dictatorship. In the turbulent days of the German Revolution, Luxemburg promised that the Spartacus Group would not take power without the support of the majority of workers. While she was aware of the necessity of workers using force to overturn the class domination of the bourgeoisie, she expressed ambivalence about the use of violence and overly-centralised organisational methods, which restricted the creativity and autonomy of the working class. My claim in this chapter is that Luxemburg envisaged a socialist revolution not just as a struggle for institutional power or a new mode of production. The revolutionary process, on the contrary, was conceived of as a construction of a new way of life, and of new forms of social interaction and cultural relations, capable of guaranteeing the liberation of a people’s spirit. Instead of the single event of a political coup, Luxemburg conceived of the revolution as a long and permanent process of transformation, which involved social and economic changes in

DEMOCRACY AND DICTATORSHIP: ROSA LUXEMBURG’S … 

185

an overall reconfiguration of social relations. Luxemburg’s ­distinctiveness during the German Revolution was in this commitment to robust socialist measures of transformation through a popular, democratic movement supported by the majority of the population: neither democracy nor dictatorship traditionally understood, but rather “dictatorship… [as a] manner of applying democracy.” It was through “resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society”—while simultaneously creating the social and economic foundations of a new order—that Luxemburg hoped to bring about a socialist democracy and avoid the twin dangers of counter-revolution and civil war (Luxemburg 2010, p. 231).

Democracy and Dictatorship Luxemburg’s elaboration of the appropriate relationship between democracy and dictatorship intervened in a long-standing debate in political theory. First, her theory of socialist transformation can be better understood in relation to Karl Kautsky’s critique of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In his famous work of 1918, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Kautsky advanced the idea that an unyielding adherence to democratic practices was the only secure path to guarantee that a revolutionary process would not degenerate into a violent dictatorship controlled by the bourgeoisie or a party vanguard. Drawing from the Jacobin experience during the French Revolution, Kautsky developed the thesis that dictatorship once employed could easily be turned against workers. Yet for Luxemburg, Kautsky went too far in supporting the SPD-led government and for not calling for the immediate socialisation of the economy. While Kautsky did support the programme of a socialist republic, he clashed with Luxemburg in his support for a more gradual approach to socialisation, and one that would be based on what Luxemburg considered elections to a bourgeois parliament (Kautsky 1918). Luxemburg’s support for democratic methods of transformation forms part of a long tradition which emphasises and valorises the unruliness of democracy. In contrast, as far back as Plato, democracy has been negatively depicted as a form mob rule and lacking a justifiable order. This ancient anti-democratic sentiment was passed down to the American Founding Fathers who were suspicious of unmediated democratic practices that would bypass representatives and manifest

186  M. COTTA

themselves through the direct action of the people. Modern representative democracy as it was practiced by many liberals after the American Revolution reduced modern iterations of democracy to notions of the rule of law and competitive elections. The liberal democratic critique of dictatorship is based on its interruption of these competitive elections and the suspension of the rule of law. When Luxemburg discussed democracy in relation to dictatorship, on the other hand, what she argued for was not the presence of bourgeois political institutions but the participation of the masses in political processes. A revolution would be democratic in Luxemburg’s sense if it was devised and carried out by the majority of citizens who themselves were responsible for the great task of political and economic transformation. Luxemburg criticised the limitations of bourgeois democracy and its institutions, while at the same time rejecting the vanguardist practices that sought to tame the proletariat. With this contribution, Luxemburg wished to put forth a view of a socialist democracy as involving the direct and unmediated participation of the people in political life. This core characteristic of democracy, present in its earliest practices, was not only rescued by Luxemburg, but inserted as the leitmotif of the revolutionary process. Plato conceptualised democracy as a political product of the contradictions inherent in oligarchy, whose internal class conflict would eventually lead to the poor uprising against the rich (Plato 1997, pp. 1162–1163). One undesirable consequence of a democratic form of government for Plato is not only heterogeneity, but also the dissolution of authority. The lack of appropriate criteria for determining who rules based on knowledge, class or rank leads to a rupture of the social bond and the creation of a regime that lacks qualified rulers (Plato 1997, p. 1168). It is precisely this fear of the people’s freedom that Luxemburg feels compelled to address in her writings. For her, the revolutionary process would overcome power asymmetries and political domination through the enlargement of the public and the politicisation of day-to-day life. It would do this through empowering people to penetrate, transform and, when necessary, obliterate existing political and economic institutions. This revolutionary demand conflicts with the Platonic criticisms of democracy. Plato, in addition to the Greek and Roman writers influenced by him, saw democracy as the rule of the poor. Another important element of most Ancient political thought was the idea of dissension as

DEMOCRACY AND DICTATORSHIP: ROSA LUXEMBURG’S … 

187

an enemy that needed to be destroyed. In this sense, dictatorship was viewed by Roman political theorists as an effective temporary solution to existential threats to the republic. After the classical period, Machiavelli was the most prominent early modern theorist to revive the concept of dictatorship as a legal means to both deal with periods of exception and to accommodate an imperialist element in a republic (Machiavelli 2013, p. 33). This inaugurates the renewal of republicanism in addition to support for the idea of dictatorship in moments of emergency. From Machiavelli to Harrington and Rousseau, early modern thinkers of republicanism all endorsed dictatorship and the necessity of constitutionalising states of exception as a condition for the survival of a republic. This theoretical arc formed by the conceptualisation of dictatorship from the ancients to modern republicans places this notion at the heart of modern political thought. This is part of the reason why the revolutionary process vaguely described by Marx as “dictatorship of the proletariat” is embraced by Lenin and put into practice by the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution. Lenin shared with earlier anti-democratic writers a fear of internal dissent, suspicion of the freedom of the people, anxiety about unmediated democratic practices and the acceptance of the regulation of moments of emergency by a centralised political force. In this sense, Luxemburg made a fundamental break from this ethos that has tainted the theoretical elaborations of even radical revolutionaries. It was this anxiety about unmediated popular political action that influenced Lenin’s interpretation of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a call for a necessary centralisation of political struggles and vanguardism. The most relevant consequence of Luxemburg’s critique of Leninism addressed this foundational entwinement between the fear of the people’s rule and the technique of dictatorship as a means to control internal dissent, historically linked to class conflict.

Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat Within the liberal tradition, dictatorship is vehemently rejected and presented as the opposite of democracy. The two cornerstones of the liberal democratic critique of dictatorship are the affront to the rule of law and the suspension of elections. Liberal democracies have actively worked to confine the staging of political conflict exclusively within representative

188  M. COTTA

institutions. One quick look at the contemporary configuration of the field of democratic studies, with its almost exclusive focus on electoral campaigns, election-related processes and techniques of representation, is enough to realise how successful liberalism was in transforming the meaning of democracy. With the liberal shift in the meaning of democracy, dictatorship is understood merely as the suspension of elections and the rule of law. Luxemburg, on the other hand, offers a more thorough-going defence of democratic practices. Luxemburg confronts the complicated relation between democracy and dictatorship articulated in revolutionary Marxism with a vigorous commitment to the constant participation of the masses in the revolutionary process. She guards against the liberal iterations of democracy supported by the bourgeoisie and repudiates the false dichotomy between “dictatorship or democracy.” For her, the crux of the revolutionary tension that “history has placed on the agenda is: bourgeois democracy or socialist democracy” (Luxemburg 2010, p. 232). She is one of the political thinkers who has best reconciled deeply revolutionary ambitions with truly democratic practices. Her approach enables a theoretical construction of an approach that engages all people in politics. She emphasised the importance of people creating for themselves the paths for a transformative process of inventing a new society and non-exploitative modes of production. To be clear, Luxemburg does advocate for the use of “top-down” measures to dismantle and destroy the most robust capitalist institutions. Dividing the revolution into moments of destruction and creation, she supported, for example, the forceful dismantling of a system of private property and its transformation into a system of public ownership. To secure the revolutionary process, therefore, the use of force from a centralised power can and should be used in favour of the masses. However, while the “negative, the tearing down, can be decreed, the building up, the positive, cannot” (Luxemburg 2010, pp. 226–227, 231). The creative dimension of the revolutionary process depends on the moments of spontaneity and improvisation that cannot be anticipated or forged by a vanguard. In this sense, it is evident that Luxemburg’s repudiation of Lenin’s and Trotsky’s authoritarian practices in the Russian Revolution was not based on a bourgeois morality that satisfies itself with formal guarantees of liberty. On the contrary, it relied on the conviction that a revolution can only flourish if people have enough space to create their own revolutionary strategy.

DEMOCRACY AND DICTATORSHIP: ROSA LUXEMBURG’S … 

189

This point is certainly one of the most relevant interventions in Luxemburg’s work. After all, within the Left and among revolutionary authors, democracy and dictatorship have often been approached from ambivalent perspectives, or even woven together in a possible coherent dialectical relation. In contrast, in Luxemburg’s work, the resistance to dictatorship is the starting point to thinking revolutionary democracy, thus, deepening the meaning of radically democratic practices, without resorting to the limited guarantees elaborated by liberal theorists. To properly grasp Luxemburg’s theory of democracy and dictatorship it is important to clarify her understanding of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and how this relates to Marx and Lenin’s interpretation. Evidently, Marx did not inaugurate the use of the idea of dictatorship among revolutionary thinkers. On the contrary, he developed the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat through his reading of Jacobin writers. Reimagining the tradition of people’s sovereignty, revolutionary insurgents during the French Revolution embraced dictatorship not as the antithesis of democracy, but precisely as a necessary step to realise it. However, even though the Jacobins were inspired by Athenian democracy, they still contemplated the possibility of the people being too weak to effectively wage a revolution (Robespierre 2007, pp. 62–63). Although Robespierre’s ideas influenced Marx, Marx’s concept of a dictatorship of the proletariat represented for him not rule of a vanguard party, but rather the rule of the entire working class. In this way, Marx attempted to infuse the idea of class rule with democratic practices; his conception of class rule was intended to be a transitional form of democratic regime in which bourgeois forms of domination would be dismantled. In the Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx refers to the dictatorship of the proletariat as the period of revolutionary transformation between capitalist and communist society, a period in which the “state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” (Marx 1978, p. 537). Even though Marx fails to elaborate this issue further, he does affirm that the “pretty little gewgaws” defended by bourgeois democrats, like universal suffrage, direct legislation and popular rights, depend on the “recognition of the so-called sovereignty of the people and hence are appropriate only in a democratic republic” (Marx 1978, p. 538). Lenin’s approach to the role of the party in a revolution and his own take on the dictatorship of the proletariat, informed by the Jacobin legacy of the French Revolution, produced a powerful contamination of

190  M. COTTA

Marx’s revolutionary theory (Lenin 1975, pp. 135–138). With Lenin, dictatorship is instrumentalised as a means to defeat the bourgeoisie as enemies of the workers. As paradoxically as it may seem, even though the revolution is an act of freedom against tyranny and oppression, for Lenin, this freedom could not be achieved through its own practice. He envisaged dictatorship as a way of assisting the structural transformation of society while the bourgeois apparatuses were still functioning. Dictatorial rule was a technology to defeat class enemies. Luxemburg was aware of the paradoxes of employing dictatorial measures during an emancipatory revolution. She also understood the appeal of dictatorship based on the simple reason that it was very efficient. After all, concentration of power makes it easier to direct a revolution through the establishment of a vanguard. But she saw that a dictatorial approach to directing a revolutionary impulse entailed the distortion of the democratic nature of the revolution. At precisely this point, Rosa Luxemburg is capable of giving one of her most relevant contributions to the debates around revolutionary processes, which is superior to both liberal and Leninist approaches. On the liberal side, democracy is deflated and reduced to competitive elections and the rule of law, while on the Leninist side, democracy becomes a future that never arrives and dictatorship is embraced and accommodated in the revolutionary process as a means to achieve the freedom of the people.

Democratic Revolution and Socialist Democracy With her acute sense of historical responsibility towards the events unfolding and her ability to thoroughly adjust Marxist theory to the concrete reality of the working class and economic relations of her time, Rosa Luxemburg argued that a truly democratic revolution does not require a vanguard leading the masses, nor an authoritarian centralism controlling it. Her argument against Leninism and her defence of workers’ and soldiers’ councils established a powerful political agenda, still relevant for resistance against capitalism. Luxemburg’s political theory was based on the central idea that the socialist revolution was not merely a struggle for institutional power or a dispute between distinct modes of production; it entailed the construction of a new way of life encompassing a change in economic relations, but also a transformation of bourgeois culture centred on egoism and selfishness towards a socialist culture of solidarity and public spiritedness.

DEMOCRACY AND DICTATORSHIP: ROSA LUXEMBURG’S … 

191

Luxemburg disparaged ideas of revolution as a violent coup d’état that needed to be secured through a dictatorship. For her, the revolution was a process of a new set of morals emerging which would guarantee a process of liberation in the mental as well as the physical sphere. Luxemburg’s theory of a democratic revolutionary process foreshadows new conceptions of democracy that go beyond the idea of competitive elections and democracy’s other institutional elements. Jacques Rancière’s idea of democracy as an act, of democracy enacted through moments of disruption (Rancière 2010, pp. 64–69), for instance, finds a solid theoretical base in Luxemburg’s ideas that the people participating in a democratic revolution are capable of finding themselves a “constitution in the street disorders” (Luxemburg 2010, p. 210). The unstable relation between order and true democratic practices, in this way, seems to closely correspond to Rancière’s elaboration of dissent being inherent to democracy (Rancière 2014, p. 61). Another case in which Luxemburg’s influence can be spotted in contemporary theories of democracy that break away from liberal iterations of an institutionalised regime is found in Claude Lefort’s development of the politics of human rights. According to him, there is a necessity of guaranteeing a protected space for conflicts to occur in order to assure that democracy will not overpower social divisions in the name of an organic social unity. For Lefort, the politics of human rights are democratic and constitutive of the political precisely because they stage political conflicts that cannot be unified through a corporal mode of representation (Lefort 1986, pp. 254–259). A similar perspective is found in Luxemburg’s critique of trade unions in the organisation of mass strikes, since she relates the success of these struggles to their ability to transform themselves into a real people’s movement. In this sense, the crux of the proletarian struggle is not located in representative bodies, like trade unions, but on the “periphery of the revolutionary-minded proletariat,” since this is the locus of tensions and conflicts that must be addressed in order to advance democracy (Luxemburg 2010, pp. 112–114). Despite Lefort’s effort to move away from Marxism, he ends up coalescing with Luxemburg in the primacy of society over the state as the space of democratic practices (Lefort 1986, p. 21). Lefort’s work resonates with Luxemburg’s critique of the vanguard when he recognises the democratic dimension of political struggles of a people to embrace their autonomy and to self-manage themselves (Lefort 1986, pp. 267–268).

192  M. COTTA

One of the most serious problems with Lenin’s notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat for Luxemburg was precisely the establishment of a vanguard detached from the proletariat. According to her, the “ultra-centralism asked by Lenin” reproduced a form of sterile practice of standing in for popular activity, which inhibited the possibility of the development of a “positive and creative spirit” (Luxemburg 2006, p. 87). This, nonetheless, should not be mistaken for a plea for naive horizontality. On the contrary, at this point, Luxemburg argued for a strong role for a revolutionary party as an active subject in the construction of a counter-hegemony. The party must be capable of social penetration and the construction of a new common sense. Indeed, according to her, it was only through the party that the spontaneous economic-corporative or trade-unionist phase could be transcended to a consciousness of the working class, capable of accounting for more complex and multifocal social and political configurations. Her critique of Lenin on this issue concentrated on the argument that the preoccupation with controlling the party, rather than developing its activity, organised a configuration that surrounded the revolutionary process, in its period of intensified creativity, “with a network of barbed wire” that “render[s] it incapable of accomplishing the tremendous task of the hour” (Luxemburg 2006, p. 88). The rule by terror proposed by the Bolsheviks, in Luxemburg’s argument, threatens the only way through which public life could flourish, i.e. through “the most unlimited, the broadest democracy and public opinion” (Luxemburg 2010, p. 234). She also criticised the suppression of the freedom of the press and the rights of association and assembly during the Russian Revolution, which suffocated the material conditions for the masses to organise themselves (Luxemburg 2010, p. 231). Luxemburg, however, was definitely not a conservative social democrat in the sense the term has acquired today. Her repudiation of the terror and defence of socialist democracy was rooted in a commitment to the revolution: The proletarian revolution requires no terror for its aims; it hates and despises killing. It does not need these weapons because it does not combat individuals but institutions, because it does not enter the arena with naïve illusions whose disappointment it would seek to revenge. It is not the desperate attempt of a minority to mold the world forcibly according to its ideal, but the action of the great massive millions of the people, destined to fulfill a historic mission and to transform historical necessity into reality. (Luxemburg 1918)

DEMOCRACY AND DICTATORSHIP: ROSA LUXEMBURG’S … 

193

In this sense, Luxemburg resisted the urge inaugurated by the Jacobins during the French Revolution of using dictatorship as a means to defeat their enemies. She firmly believed that the overthrow of absolutism would be a long and continuous process, encompassing a whole period of class struggle. She even argued that class-consciousness was stronger amongst the Russian proletariat because “in the revolution when the masses themselves appear upon the political battlefield this class-consciousness becomes practical and active” (Luxemburg 2010, p. 115). Her commitment to spontaneity lead her to understand that in a revolutionary process “any political class action can arouse in a few hours whole sections of the working class from their passive condition” (Luxemburg 2006, p. 91). This of course should not be mistaken with a kind of naïveté and purposeless spontaneity. On the contrary, Luxemburg presented a consolidated agenda and understood the importance of organising resistance and building the revolutionary party. In Reform or Revolution, her description of Lenin’s centralism has much in common with the practices amongst Roman dictators. Lenin proposed a powerful head of the Central Committee who would be able to name local committees leaders, impose ready-made rules and even dissolve and reconstitute local organisations. Even though Luxemburg was not against the idea of centralism itself, she insisted on a “self-centralism of the advanced sectors of the proletariat,” through the “organisation and the direct, independent action of the masses” (Luxemburg 2006, p. 78). This self-centralism depended on the existence of a substantial number of workers educated in the political struggle and on the possibility for the workers to elaborate their own political activity “through direct influence on public life, in a party press, and public congresses” (Luxemburg 2006, p. 79). In this sense, as much as the party plays a relevant role in the organisation of the revolutionary class, it is only through day-to-day democratic practices that workers attain the necessary education to engage in the socialist revolution. Luxemburg considered that democracy could never be suspended in the revolutionary process, nor could it be negotiated in favour of authoritarian centralised leadership. She thus offered a firm response to Lenin’s defence of its suppression during revolutionary periods, insisting that “the more democratic the institutions, the livelier and stronger the pulsebeat of the political life of the masses, the more direct and complete is their influence” (Luxemburg 2010, p. 230). Evidently, Luxemburg recognised that every democratic institution presents limits and deficiencies,

194  M. COTTA

but she firmly objected to the solution developed by Trotsky and Lenin, who prescribe the elimination of democracy as such. In this sense, this remedy is “worse than the disease it’s supposed to cure”, since only the “active, untrammelled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people” can provide an effective solution to the limitations of any political institution (Luxemburg 2010, p. 231). Luxemburg believed in a workers’ democracy capable of combining centralised leadership and respect for the autonomy of workers. In this view, it is through the every-day political activities of the masses that their chaotic energies and expectations could be developed into a democratic experience. However, the process of developing this political consciousness would take place in workers’ councils. On this point, a vanguard would never be able to stand in for or substitute this process of self-education. She stood firmly against Bolsheviks outlawing freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, arguing that liberty is always and exclusively liberty for those who also think differently. According to her conceptualisation of democracy as action, which requires “intensive political training of the masses” (Luxemburg 2010, p. 232), the only way to succeed in a revolutionary process was to promote a rich public life capable of fostering new political initiatives and opening new processes of self-governing. She saw a direct relationship in a poor, rigid and constrained public life in a country and the exclusion of democracy (Luxemburg 2010, p. 233). Finally, her defence of socialist democracy relied on an interpretation of the practices and concrete agenda of workers during revolutionary activity. In “What does the Spartacus League Want?” she defended the confiscation of all private wealth above a certain level and its use to fund the overhaul of food, housing, health and education systems. She repudiated national debt and war loans and proposed nationalising all banks, mines and heavy industry, taking over the public transport system; she also contended that large landed estates should be occupied and farmed collectively and everybody should have a six-hour working day. As seen before, Luxemburg attacked the liberal appropriation of democracy, denouncing the political hollowness of this version of government. Understanding that this model was deeply rooted in an economic system based on individual competition for material and symbolic goods, Luxemburg was suspicious of democratic elections as revolutionary means, arguing for the creation of institutions that could really respond to people’s authentic aspirations for freedom (Luxemburg 2006, p. 56).

DEMOCRACY AND DICTATORSHIP: ROSA LUXEMBURG’S … 

195

She correspondingly developed a sound critique of the conservative members of Social Democracy and their reformist political agendas, which prevented workers from achieving their freedom from the capitalist system (Luxemburg 2010, p. 229). In this sense, the Luxemburgist legacy provides the tools to think in holistic terms about the socialist revolution, in a framework that structurally combines theory and practice.

Conclusion Today, the Left is more aware of the existence of multiple struggles not only against a capitalist class and the state, but also a racist, sexist, ableist and colonialist state and other social institutions. The comprehension, however, that distinct forms of oppression are part of the same social, economic and political system, based on the unequal distribution of material and symbolic goods allows us to organise a unified and focused struggle, without ignoring internal differences within the oppressed classes. After all, it is impossible to think about a new political common life without attacking the naturalisation of capitalism and its institutions. This contradictory and unjust mode of social-economic organisation supports a series of political problems such as the concentration of power, state corruption, violence, oppression, labour exploitation and environmental devastation. Luxemburg called for us to discard the idea that this economic mode of production is the only one available and develop a socialist system of co-operative production. For her, the development of autonomous workers’ councils was a first step in the direction of a more just and humane society. For this, Luxemburg’s work does not provide a blueprint for the revolution, but it does invite reflection on processes that would guarantee the defence of democratic practices. Luxemburg’s view of the revolution as a long and permanent democratic process led her to consider that revolutions were not made out of party slogans or top-down directives. She believed that power was not permanently crystallised in institutions nor was it an instrument that could be seized once and for all by revolutionary actors. Instead, she considered power as something that could be developed through the mass actions of workers and built up in their autonomous organisations. If the beginning of the twentieth century showed the importance of the communist organisation on the factory floor to free the working class, the twenty-first century opens up other paths for the revolutionary struggle to free the oppressed. Nonetheless, these new paths will be

196  M. COTTA

illuminated by Luxemburg’s principles of collaboration, solidarity, fraternity and permanent democracy. Rosa Luxemburg conceived of the revolution as a process of inventing a new society and reconfiguring social practices. For Luxemburg, revolution was not considered as a single act, but a radical transformation of the way we think and live; an accumulation of individual transformations intervening constantly and directly in the political realm. Since this process inevitably gives rise to tensions between conservation and change, it requires discipline and a sense of responsibility regarding the development of adequate strategy. In this sense, I believe Rosa Luxemburg has important lessons to teach us. She was one of the first voices to stand up against the crude historical materialism that had developed in the Second International. For Luxemburg, history was not determined by strict laws, but could be forged through collective democratic practices. Luxemburg was a firm advocate of the necessity of creating new institutions capable of ensuring a people’s direct participation in politics. Liberal criticisms of dictatorship are incapable of addressing the profoundness of contemporary social crises. The ultimate ambition of Luxemburg was to promote democratic practices which involved the majority of a political community in political activity so that they could participate in a self-determining society.

References Kautsky, Karl. 1918. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Marxists Internet Archive. Available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1918/dictprole/index.htm. Lefort, Claude. 1986. The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: MIT Press Edition. Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich. 1975. Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution. In The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton. Luxemburg, Rosa. 1918. What Does the Spartacus League Want? Marxists Internet Archive. Available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/14.htm. Luxemburg, Rosa. 2006. Reform or Revolution and Other Writings. New York: Dover Publications. Luxemburg, Rosa. 2010. Socialism or Barbarism: The Selected Writings of Rosa Luxemburg. London: Pluto Press.

DEMOCRACY AND DICTATORSHIP: ROSA LUXEMBURG’S … 

197

Machiavelli, Niccolò. 2013. The Discourses. New York: Penguin Classics. Marx, Karl. 1978. Critique of the Gotha Program. In The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton. Plato. 1997. The Republic and The Statesman. In Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, 294–358, 971–1223. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Rancière, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Rancière, Jacques. 2014. Hatred of Democracy. New York and London: Verso. Robespierre, Maximilien. 2007. Virtue and Terror. New York: Verso.

Richard Müller, Ernst Däumig and the “Pure” Council System Ralf Hoffrogge

The Revolutionary Shop Stewards (Revolutionäre Obleute) were an organised group of unionists in Berlin’s metal industry who mobilised workers against Germany’s war efforts during the First World War and played a key role in the German Revolution. One of their leaders, Richard Müller, was appointed chairperson of the Executive Council of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ councils, which was theoretically the highest political authority during the weeks of November and December 1918. Through their direct contact with workers, they exercised a greater influence over political events than the Spartacus League, although their contribution to revolutionary events has frequently been unacknowledged (Hoffrogge 2015).

Parts of this chapter have been previously published in Ralf Hoffrogge, WorkingClass Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Müller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015). Here reproduced with kind permission. R. Hoffrogge (*)  Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Kets and J. Muldoon (eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13917-9_10

199

200  R. HOFFROGGE

The Revolutionary Shop Stewards were formally members of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) even though they organised autonomously from this party. During the revolution, Richard Müller and Ernst Däumig advocated for a council system as the new institutional framework of a German socialist republic. On this question, they were opposed to the leadership of the SPD and even the right wing of the USPD who both supported the creation of parliamentary institutions as the basis of a new German republic. In the First National Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils Däumig’s proposal for the continuation of the council system was defeated by an overwhelming majority of delegates who voted for the calling of a national assembly and elections to a liberal parliament. These elections were held on 19 January 1919 and delivered a majority of non-socialists parties resulting in a coalition government between liberal parties and the SPD. This chapter will examine the Revolutionary Shop Steward’s involvement in the German Revolution and the political theory of council socialism developed by Richard Müller and Ernst Däumig.

The Council Movement During the War and Revolution What was the council movement about? Strike committees calling themselves “workers’ councils” had formed by spring of 1917. Berlin’s January 1918 strike leadership likewise used that title, giving the council principle national exposure (Schneider and Kuda 1968, p. 25). Richard Müller had already reported in 1917 that the Shop Stewards in Berlin were preparing “to stop the democratic state claptrap and establish a council republic based on the Russian model” (Müller 1924a, p. 175). It was unclear, however, just what a council system would look like. Ultimately, the councils did not develop along Russian lines but rather as spontaneous resistance organisations. Originally emerging because the traditional organs of the labour movement had failed during the decisive crisis of August 1914, councils became a new way for workers to represent their interests and neither the Social Democratic Party nor the unions represented workers’ opposition to the war and the Burgfrieden anymore. These councils were simply a new form of the labour movement’s democratic assembly traditions (Müller 1985, p. 327). But once peace had been won, the future of the councils was uncertain. An intense debate about Germany’s future arose in advance of the first national Council Congress in December 1918 focusing on a central

RICHARD MÜLLER, ERNST DÄUMIG AND THE “PURE” COUNCIL SYSTEM 

201

issue: national assembly or council system? The USPD, including the Spartacus League and the Shop Stewards which had been part of this large umbrella organisation of anti-war socialists since 1917, advocated a council system which the SPD regarded as an abhorrent “state of lawlessness,”1 insisting on the early establishment of a national assembly which alone could ratify the future constitution (SPD pamphlet 1918). The most decisive and best-known advocates of the council system were Ernst Däumig and Richard Müller. Müller’s bold remarks made him a symbol of the council republicans. He categorically rejected the demand for a national assembly at a Berlin council assembly on 19 November 1918, declaring, “I have put my life on the line for the revolution and I will do it again. A national assembly is a path to bourgeois rule, a path to struggle; the path to a national assembly will go over my dead body!” (Engel et al. 1993, pp. 154, 184).2 For the usually softspoken Müller, this was a rare grand gesture. While it made him a symbol of the council republicans, it also earned him the moniker “Leichenmüller” (Müller the Corpse) which, thanks to the efforts of the bourgeois and SPD press, would stick to him forever.3 The irony could not be heavier. Unlike Liebknecht, Müller was down to earth, a stranger to ardour. Herrmann Müller-Franken, who was often opposed to Müller, mused that “Müller was anything but vicious … Indeed, if he ever directed strong words against an opponent, his soft Saxon accent and idiom moderated the attack” (Müller-Franken 1928, p. 92).4 Müller’s remarkably strong posture at the 19 November assembly indicated his commitment to the council system as the revolution’s achievement. Müller’s solitary gesture of vehemence was undoubtedly prompted by desperation: he was increasingly aware that his passion for a council republic was not shared by the councils themselves. After the revolution, there was a widespread desire to reunify the workers’ parties that had been split by the war. A unified workers’ party could then reclaim their traditional task of political organising from the councils. After all, the wartime divisions between the two types of working-class organisation no longer mattered after the armistice. However, this desire for unity remained largely incognisant of the reality of the collaborationist stance of the bulk of the SPD and union leadership. It assumed that the SPDdominated Council of People’s Deputies would respect the workers’ and soldiers’ councils and act according to their wishes. So, though the councils were practically omnipotent in November 1918, they did not think it necessary to constitute themselves into a lasting state power.

202  R. HOFFROGGE

And neither Richard Müller and the Shop Stewards nor the USPD succeeded in convincing the councils that they should do so. Indeed, they evinced a distinct political timidity in making this case. Fearing a collapse of the German economy, they claimed only oversight authority for the councils in both economic and political matters and did not act to assume power immediately as the Spartacus League urged. The schism in the labour movement over the question of peace, moreover, obscured older fault lines between its revolutionary and reformist currents that did not become apparent either before or during the revolution. They only began to emerge painfully after 9 November and ultimately resulted in the failure of the revolution.

The First Council Congress and the Triumph of Parliamentarianism As we have seen, the first Council Congress of December 16 brought together delegates from all the country’s workers’ and soldiers’ councils for the first time in the Prussian state parliament building. Its agenda: the revolution’s future. Richard Müller gave the opening speech and reported on the Executive Council’s work while Ernst Däumig presented a declaration of principles for maintaining the council system as the structure of the state (Kuhn 2012, pp. 31–40).5 Müller’s opening speech presciently warned that, “The battle of wits that will rage in these rooms today and in the coming days will be harsh and severe” and the mood was certainly heated (Zentralrat der deutschen sozialistischen Republik 1919, p. 1). If that was not enough, the conference was repeatedly interrupted by demonstrations outside and frequent delegations demanding hearings for their various demands. The chief debate was whether the nascent council system or a future national assembly would be the form of the future German state. The front ran primarily between the Executive Council and the Council of People’s Deputies even though both bodies included USPD and SPD members. But the Executive Council was paralysed and, in the Council of People’s Deputies, only the independent Deputy Barth broke through that front and criticised the government for its inability, or unwillingness, to address the main questions of the revolution such as socialisation of industry. But Barth was the only radical there—his two independent colleagues, Dittmann and Haase, took the view that only a future national assembly could make legitimate decisions on the foundations

RICHARD MÜLLER, ERNST DÄUMIG AND THE “PURE” COUNCIL SYSTEM 

203

of a new German state. This meant that high-ranking members of the revolutionary government were not interested in actually exercising revolutionary powers. Such passive institutionalism, which was certainly prevalent at the top of the USPD, could also be found among ordinary members of both SPD and USPD. This was evident in the proceedings of the first Council Congress, for example. Worker’s delegates declared their support for socialisation of industry but were unwilling to make this task their own in their factories and workplaces, delegating it instead to the Government of People’s Deputies or the National Assembly. This expectation that the revolution would be executed from above by a benevolent government was the most fundamental obstacles the German Revolution faced. In his opening speech, Müller spent considerable time on answering the array of charges made in the bourgeois press—of usurpation of office, incompetence and embezzlement—against the Executive Council and of accepting over 10,000 Marks against himself personally (Zentralrat der deutschen sozialistischen Republik 1919, p. 18). Such politically motivated accusations cut Müller close to the bone. Having spent the entire morning on lengthy explanations and repudiations, he only got to the real issues and to criticising the policies of the Council of People’s Deputies, particularly their role in the attempted coup of December 6, after lunch. Müller’s charges against the Deputies were undoubtedly justified, but his speech, which was uncharacteristically strident, failed to pull wavering Social Democratic delegates over to his side and the battle lines only hardened further. The task of defending the council system thus fell to Ernst Däumig, but even his oratorical skill could not overcome the conflict between the USPD and the SPD. Eventually, an overwhelming majority of delegates supported the election of a national assembly. Having lost the major battle, partisans of the council system won on the “Hamburger Punkte,” points of agreement proposed by delegates from Hamburg which confirmed the soldiers’ councils’ position in the army and disempowered the officers. Richard Müller made no secret of his disappointment at the next general assembly of the Berlin workers’ councils: “This central congress was Germany’s first revolutionary tribunal, but there was no revolutionary atmosphere at all. My expectations were none too high going in, but I had no idea that this congress was going to turn into a political suicide club” (Engel et al. 1997, p. 16). The council movement had reached a political dead end and for Richard Müller personally it was a hard,

204  R. HOFFROGGE

perhaps the hardest, defeat of his political career. The left should have paused to reflect and reorient at that point, but the course of events left no time for that. The Council Congress had been tumultuous and the USPD’s boycott of elections to the Central Council created there to take over the national responsibilities of the Executive Council only handed the SPD a majority on that all-important body on a platter and hardened battle lines for the conflicts that followed.

Theorising Council Socialism Despite this near total defeat for the left, Müller and Däumig did not give up. They had predicted the bourgeois majority and the defeat of the combined SPD and USPD in the national assembly elections of 19 January 1919. The National Assembly now met in Weimar because after the uprising Berlin appeared unsafe for such a government. There, the social democratic parties remained dependent upon the agreement of bourgeois forces such as the Catholic Centre Party in the process of drawing up a new constitution. Müller and Däumig now set about trying to reorganise the council movement. A resolution in the general assembly of the Berlin councils warned against the anti-council majority in the national assembly and demanded a second national council congress. Richard Müller sent that demand for information and comment to every workers’ and soldiers’ council in Germany (Institut für Marxismus Leninismus 1958b, p. 128).6 It resonated widely and the social democrat dominated Central Council which, for all its inactivity remained the highest organ of the council movement, was forced to call for a second congress in April 1919. Above all, however, Müller and Däumig were concerned with elaborating a systematic theory of worker’s councils. Until then, the right to control the workplace and socialisation of key industries had served as the minimum programme of the movement, but all else remained unclear (von Oertzen 1976, p. 85). The forum that discussed the councils’ future ultimately became the newspaper, Der Arbeiter-Rat, literally “the workers’ council,” which Däumig established in February 1919 and in which the first outlines for a lasting institutionalisation of the council system would be presented (von Oertzen 1976, p. 79).7 For neither the discussion around mass strikes in 1905 nor the inspiration of Marx’s writings about the Paris Commune had yet led to the formation of an

RICHARD MÜLLER, ERNST DÄUMIG AND THE “PURE” COUNCIL SYSTEM 

205

effective council theory. Even anarcho-syndicalism, which was oriented to rank and file democracy, was vague about the concrete organisation of a non-capitalist mode of production. Over the course of the following year, Däumig and Müller developed the theory of a “pure council system” directly out of the practice of the workers’ council.8 The “Guidelines on the Tasks and Scope of the Workers’ Councils,” for example, which the general assembly of the Greater Berlin workers’ councils adopted on 17 January 1919, were ground-breaking.9 They were the result of the clarification process that Müller and the Revolutionary Shop Stewards underwent in trying to unify and systematise their council structures and propose a socialist transition programme, of sorts (von Oertzen 1976, p. 83). More drafts followed with Müller and Däumig publishing them not only in the Arbeiter-Rat but in pamphlets and other publications as well (Müller and Däumig 1919). They wanted to popularise the concept of the council system and to refute the blanket complaint that council rule would mean “Bolshevist chaos.” The “pure council system” was intended not to complete parliamentary democracy but to replace it.10 Moreover, employers had no place in it: it was a pure workers’ council structure. Over the course of the conflict-ridden year, 1919, the pure council system became the most influential council model, in part because most SPD politicians either rejected council structures altogether or at least insisted on employer participation. The KPD, on the other hand, emphasised the necessity of seizing state power and dismissed detailed council designs as “schematism.” Müller and Däumig envisaged the council system as workers’ struggle in three successive forms: one within capitalism, another as a transitional form moving towards socialisation, and the third, creating an ideal socialist planned economy. It did not separate the socialist utopia from the fighting organisation; rather, the revolutionary organisations were to prefigure the emancipatory objectives. The council structures’ struggle from the bottom up would take from the capitalists the knowledge that had enabled them to dominate workers and employ it for the autonomous self-organisation through which they would advance step by step to managing the entire economy according to plan in the future. In the spirit of Marx and Engels, Müller and Däumig saw their model as both a radical form of democracy and a dictatorship of the proletariat understood as the class dominance of the working class. It was distinct from Leninist and social democratic conceptions of nationalisation

206  R. HOFFROGGE

in that workers’ self-management was central. The definition of the proletariat was an economic one: only those who did socially useful work without exploiting alienated labour could be elected to the councils and this expressly included the intelligentsia, office workers, engineers, public officials, etc. as “brain-workers.” Whatever the merits of this definition, we may note that while white-collar workers and professionals did work within the council structures as a caucus of “democrats,” the majority of them could not be won over to socialist objectives (Fig. 1).11 The model consisted of parallel economic and political workers’ council structures, the first elected in workplaces and the second in geographical constituencies. The political workers’ councils were envisaged as a pyramid of municipal councils, regional councils, a national council congress, and a central council. They were to replace traditional political organisations such as the city councils and state governments all the way up to the national government and to make all decisions not directly related to production. The economic councils arose from workplace councils, industry-specific regional councils, general economic councils for each region, a national economic council for each industry and a general national economic council at the top. Larger council bodies consisting of more than 100 people such as the national economic council and the national group councils were to form management committees in order to retain their capacity to act. The highest authority in the entire system was to be a central council joining the two systems to which the apex councils of both economic and political councils would be subordinate. In its pure form, therefore, the model required councils to assume political as well as economic power. It also required the German state to be federally restructured into territorial districts that represented economic regions such as greater Berlin or the Ruhr—and not the states such as Prussia or Hessen-Nassau formed for long-forgotten dynastic reasons of the feudal past. In addition, parliamentary structures were to be abolished. Executive and legislative powers would no longer be separated; there would only be political and economic self-management. Only the lower levels of the political and economic council structures—such as the workplace, municipal, industry and district councils— were to be directly elected. The upper levels would be elected indirectly by the lower councils. Individual workplaces would be managed jointly by their workplace and district group councils to avoid situations where the interests of specific factories or enterprises conflicted with general

RICHARD MÜLLER, ERNST DÄUMIG AND THE “PURE” COUNCIL SYSTEM 

207

Outline of a pure council system (Graphische Darstellung einer Räteorganisation zur Betätigung auf wirtschaftlichem Gebiet, source: Richard Müller, “Das Rätesystem in Deutschland,” in: Die Befreiung der Menschheit, Leipzig 1921) The diagram is reproduced as in the original source, only numbers assigned to levels were added for this edition. The diagram starts on level 1 with Works Councils (Betriebsräte) representing larger factories and Professional Councils (Berufsräte), representing freelance workers and small enterprises where several workplaces unite in order to elect their council delegate. The Professional Councils represent a profession of a group of small workplaces, rather than a single workplace. The industry-specific Regional Councils (Bezirks-Gruppen Räte) on level two comprise the elected representatives of all Works Councils of a given industry in a specific region. Müller proposed that the dynastic states of the German Reich should be abolished in favour of economic regions. On level 2.5 we find the General Economic Councils (Bezirkswirtschaftsräte) and the General Political Councils (Bezirksarbeiterrat). In the diagram, only one General Economic Council is depicted: it would be the highest economic council for its region. The empty box on level 2.5 represents the General Political Council for that region. It would sit atop the other half of the council-structure not visible in the diagram, the territorial workers’ councils based, not on industries, but on municipalities and regions. While the different types of economic councils are responsible for economic planning, the political councils would rule all matters beyond production. On level 3, the National Industrial Councils are depicted (Reichsgruppenräte). They are responsible for an entire industry on a national level such as Mining (Bergbau) or Agriculture (Landwirtschaft). Like all upper councils in this scheme, these councils are elected by the lower level of councils. On level 4, the National Economic Council (Reichswirtschaftsrat) as economic government for the whole country is located. The empty box stands for a political council as national government to be elected by the lower territorial councils in the regions.

Fig. 1  Outline of a pure council system

208  R. HOFFROGGE

interests of the population. The indirect electoral elements should be understood as Müller and Däumig’s concession to efficiency criteria: the upper council levels were to gather expertise, coordinate and represent the interests of the economy as a whole while the particular interests of specific workplaces fell under the aegis of the lower councils. All councils at all levels, however, were to be elected and subject to recall at any time in order to prevent bureaucratisation and the formation of a hierarchy. With its dual territorial and production-unit based structure, the model dispensed with party politics and would ideally even make labour unions superfluous. But until it was implemented, Müller and Däumig quite resolutely pushed for all council socialists to become members of the social democratic unions in order to win them over to their cause. They also took care to anchor their council system in the USPD’s agenda. This distinguished them from the syndicalists, who supported immediate withdrawal from the major unions, organised their own grassroots unions, as well as rejecting parties in general.12 Müller and Däumig’s pure council system provided a framework that simultaneously avoided over-centralisation due to its grassroots democratic construction while also attempting to rule out economic fragmentation that might develop out of s particular regional interests and “industrial egoism” of single enterprises by means of extensive coordination and mediation. They pursued a middle course between the absolute federalism of the anarcho-syndicalist models and the centralised state conceived by Social Democrats and Bolsheviks.13 The weakness of Müller and Däumig’s proposed model lay in the unclear relationship between territorial councils, such as the municipal workers’ councils of Berlin, and the economic councils that operated on a company basis.14 Especially in the middle and upper levels, there was no demarcation of where economic decisions ended and political decisions began. The structures and processes of economic planning, or the mediation of needs and production, were also left unclear. We can only suspect that Müller and Däumig had in mind a democratised variant of the planning processes that had been common in the wartime economy or within the large trusts.15 The prevailing monopoly structures and, above all, the reality of nearly comprehensive planning for necessities, resources, and production within the framework of the wartime economy left little room for doubt about the feasibility of a planned economy.16 The council system’s detractors, therefore, never claimed any purported superiority of the market in mediating production

RICHARD MÜLLER, ERNST DÄUMIG AND THE “PURE” COUNCIL SYSTEM 

209

and consumption. Instead, they referred to the council models’ radical demands for democracy as a recipe for “chaos and confusion.” Although Däumig and Müller tried to disarm every possible objection to the council system with their detailed organisational outline— making for the schematism of their model, like the dissociation of the political and economic councils, concrete consumption planning, also remained a fundamental weak spot. Such weaknesses could not be entirely eliminated and only illustrate the great difficulty of reorganising an industrial capitalist society, with its profound separation and complex interrelationship between economic and political structures on a socialist basis to fulfil material needs as well as ensure democratic functioning. In addition to the problems already mentioned, their models also suffered from critical democratic limitations: the problem was not so much that employers were deliberately denied voting rights, which was the entire political point of workers’ councils, but that housewives and the unemployed were also unrepresented in the council system. It therefore not only excluded participation by the former ruling class, but also by essential parts of the working population. Another democratic limitation was the possibility that a hierarchical council bureaucracy could emerge from the indirect voting system for the upper councils. Such limitations, which also mark other council theories, often lead to the conclusion that the council system is in itself an unworkable utopia. Such judgments fail to consider that today’s liberal democratic capitalism also needed centuries to evolve from its simple precursors and is still riddled with problems. Negative judgments on council theories often cite the alleged inefficiency of radical democratic structures. However, council self-management offers enormous potential not only for the emancipation of workers but also for more efficient workflow and decision-making structures, which often become bureaucratic and fragmented in hierarchical systems such as capitalism. That is why even modern neoliberal capitalism has had to try to combat these problems and to channel workers’ creativity directly into the work process through “flat hierarchies,” group work, etc. In neoliberal capitalist context, however, such attempts quickly come up against the requirements of capital accumulation (which is entirely different from efficient satisfaction of human needs) and no real self-management results. Müller and Däumig’s council ideas are therefore interesting to later generations despite their weaknesses.

210  R. HOFFROGGE

Perhaps the greatest advantage of their model is that it does not conceive of the planned economy and self-management as being in opposition to each other. On the contrary, real worker ­self-determination is the basic criterion of both. Planning in its social democratic and party communist versions has failed to focus so centrally on conceptions of emancipation. Only the anarcho-syndicalists, as the third major tendency in the labour movement, have supported producers’ self-liberation energetically. Although anarchism in Germany had always been a marginal fringe movement, it did attain considerable influence in the form of revolutionary syndicalism, primarily in the Ruhr region in 1918/1919. Müller and Däumig’s model, however, is distinct from the syndicalist proposals in its high degree of mediation: district councils and the national economic council were to work towards reconciling various interests and enabling interregional planning. By contrast, most contemporary syndicalist-federalist discussions simply fail to consider the overall organisation of production in society or what Marx, in his critique of Proudhon, called “the general organisation of labour in society.” Less a critique of anarchism than a counter-model to party and state socialism, the pure council system has remained the starting point for critical and unorthodox currents in Marxist thinking. For example Karl Korsch, one of the founders of “Western Marxism” and a source of inspiration for the student movement of the 1960s, was a writer for the Arbeiter-Rat in 1919 and adopted Müller’s council model in his writing.17 Korsch’s later and widely disseminated criticism of authoritarian Marxism would be inconceivable without his experiences in the council movement. Müller’s council ideas were also consciously analysed by some later historians and political scientists with an eye to reforming and expanding co-determination models in the German Federal Republic of the 1960s, for example by Dieter Schneider, Rudolf Kuda, and Peter von Oertzen.18 Although these attempts at updating the council system remain a topic of academic and political discussion to this day, they have lacked the political force necessary to gain a wider audience. Müller and Däumig’s ideas reached the height of both their dissemination and their impact during their own time given that the pure council system was one of the most influential models in the council movement of that period. Even then, however, they were often mixed with anarcho-syndicalist ideas in practice.

RICHARD MÜLLER, ERNST DÄUMIG AND THE “PURE” COUNCIL SYSTEM 

211

Notes





1. SPD pamphlet, Nur über meine Leiche, without author credit, Vorwärts Verlag, Berlin, 1918. 2.  On the question of a National Assembly, see also Richard Müller, “Democracy or Dictatorship,” in All Power to the Councils! ed. Gabriel Kuhn 2012, pp. 59–76; and Ernst Däumig, “The National Assembly Means the Councils Death,” in All Power to the Councils! ed. Gabriel Kuhn, pp. 40–51. 3.  Vorwärts applied this derogatory nickname to Müller regularly over a long period. For example, a 24 September 1918 article dripped malice from its title as well as its content: “The Living Corpse,” stated, inter alia, that “Richard Leichenmüller has not justified his existence at all since entering the National Assembly. He must have committed hara-kiri long ago.” See also the above mentioned pamphlet Nur über meine Leiche, Vorwärts Publishing House, Berlin, 1918. 4. The accent was more likely Thuringian given that that was the region where Müller grew up, but the two accents are very similar. 5. The minutes of the first Council Congress are published in: Zentralrat der deutschen sozialistischen Republik 1919. Müller’s speech has been translated into English. 6. Institut für Marxismus Leninismus beim ZK der SED (ed.), Dokumente und Materialien zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, series II, vol. 3, Berlin (DDR), 1958b, p. 122. 7. Richard Müller wrote for the Arbeiter-Rat and as of issue 45/46 in the fall of 1920 he replaced Max Sievers as its editor-in-chief. Ernst Däumig was the contributing editor for the duration. 8.  Some of Richard Müller and Ernst Däumig’s writings on the council system have been translated into English: Ernst Däumig, “The Council Idea and Its Realization”; Richard Müller, “Report by the Executive Council of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils of Great Berlin,” both in Kuhn (2012). The best synthesis of Müllers ideas on the council system, including its historical basis, is his essay “Das Rätesystem in Deutschland,” see Müller (1921). Other German sources on Müller and Däumig’s include their essay, “Hie Gewerkschaft – Hie BetriebsOrganisation – zwei Reden zum heutigen Streit um die Gewerkschaften,” Müller and Däumig (1919); Richard Müller, “Das Rätesystem im künftigen Wirtschaftsleben,” in Der Arbeiter-Rat, no. 6, 1919, reproduced in Bermbach (1973, p. 88); Richard Müller, “Die staatsrechtliche Stellung der Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte,” in Der Arbeiter-Rat, no. 6, 1919; Ernst Däumig, “Der Rätegedanke und seine Verwirklichung,” in Revolution – Unabhängiges sozialdemokratisches Jahrbuch, Berlin, 1920,

212  R. HOFFROGGE











pp. 84ff., reproduced in Schneider and Kuda (1968, pp. 69ff.); Ernst Däumig, “Irrungen und Wirrungen,” in Der Arbeiter-Rat, no. 2, 1919, excerpts reproduced in Schneider and Kuda (1968, p. 78). 9.  Arbeiter-Rat, no. 20, January 1919. Reproduced in Schneider and Kuda (1968, p. 80). 10. The following description of the pure council system is based on Arnold (1985, pp. 148–211), von Oertzen (1976, pp. 69–109), Schneider and Kuda (1968, pp. 34–64 and 65, 109), and Hottmann (1980). 11.  For more on the Democratic caucus in the Executive Council, see the editors’ notes in Engel et al. (2002, p. XXVI) and Gerhard Engel, “Die ‘Freie demokratische Fraktion’ in der Großberliner Rätebewegung - Linksliberalismus in der Revolution 1918/1919,” in Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (IWK), no. 2, 2004, pp. 150–202. The Democrats had in fact introduced the first female delegates into the council movement. Those delegates were often teachers or came from other white-collar professions. 12.  One substantial exception was the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (KAPD), which was a product of a left breakaway from the KPD and strongly syndicalist. See Hans Manfred Bock, Syndikalismus und Linkskommunismus von 1918–1923. Zur Geschichte und Soziologie der Freien Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands (Syndikalisten), der Allgemeinen Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands und der Kommunistischen Arbeiter-Partei Deutschlands, Meisenheim/Glan, 1969. 13.  For a comparison with syndicalism, see Günter Hottmann, Die Rätekonzeptionen der Revolutionären Obleute und der Links-(bzw. Räte-) Kommunisten in der Novemberrevolution: Ein Vergleich (unter Einschluß der Genese der Rätekonzeptionen), thesis, Göttingen, 1980; and Volker Arnold, Rätebewegung und Rätetheorien in der Novemberrevolution, 2nd ed., Hamburg, 1985, p. 184. 14. For the unmediated juxtaposition of councils in Berlin and a critique of the pure council system in general, see Engel et al. (2002, p. XIII). 15.  Lenin had made a similar proposal in his 1917 book, The State and Revolution. It did not, however, provide council structures. See V.I. Lenin, Essential Works of Lenin: “What Is to Be Done?” and Other Writings, Dover Publications, 1987, pp. 347–348. 16.  Even bourgeois employers and politicians like Thyssen head, Alphons Horten, and AEG head, Walther Rathenau, had proposed plans for socialisation and a state-run economy in light of the obvious economic crisis at the end of World War I. See Walter Euchner, “Ideengeschichte des Sozialismus in Deutschland,” p. 286, in Geschichte der sozialen Ideen in Deutschland: Sozialismus – Katholische Soziallehre – protestantische Sozialethik, ed. Helga Grebing, Essen, 2000, pp. 15–867.

RICHARD MÜLLER, ERNST DÄUMIG AND THE “PURE” COUNCIL SYSTEM 

213

17. For Müller’s influence on Karl Korsch, see Volker Arnold, Rätebewegung und Rätetheorien, pp. 214–217. Korsch’s writings in the Arbeiter-Rat are reproduced in Michael Buckmiller (ed.), Karl Korsch Gesamtausgabe Band 2 – Rätebewegung und Klassenkampf, Frankfurt a.M., 1980. For verification of the initial publication, see pp. 622, 637, 638, and 641. 18. See Schneider and Kuda (1968, pp. 42–62) and the expert report that Peter von Oertzen wrote for IG Metall called Die Probleme der wirtschaftlichen Neuordnung und der Mitbestimmung in der Revolution von 1918, reproduced in von Oertzen (1976).

References Arnold, Volker. 1985. Rätebewegung und Rätetheorien in der Novemberrevolution, 2nd ed. Hamburg: Junius Verlag. Bermbach, Udo (ed.). 1973. Theorie und Praxis der direkten Demokratie. Texte und Materialien zur Räte-Diskussion. Opladen: Westdt. Verl. Bock, Hans Manfred. 1969. Syndikalismus und Linkskommunismus von 1918– 1923. Zur Geschichte und Soziologie der Freien Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands (Syndikalisten), der Allgemeinen Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands und der Kommunistischen Arbeiter-Partei Deutschlands. Meisenheim/Glan. Buckmiller, Michael (ed.). 1980. Karl Korsch Gesamtausgabe Band 2— Rätebewegung und Klassenkampf. Frankfurt a.M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt. Engel, Gerhard. 2004. Die ‘Freie demokratische Fraktion’ in der Großberliner Rätebewegung - Linksliberalismus in der Revolution 1918/1919. In Internationale wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (IWK), no. 2, 150–220. Engel, Gerhard, Bärbel Holtz, and Ingo Materna (eds.). 1993. Groß-Berliner Arbeiter und Soldatenräte in der Revolution 1918/1919, Dokumente der Vollversammlungen und des Vollzugsrates. Vom Ausbruch der Revolution bis zum 1. Reichsrätekongreß, vol. 1. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Engel, Gerhard, Bärbel Holtz, and Ingo Materna (eds.). 1997. Groß-Berliner Arbeiter und Soldatenräte in der Revolution 1918/1919, Dokumente der Vollversammlungen und des Vollzugsrates. Vom 1. Reichsrätekongreß bis zum Generalstreiksbeschluß am 3. März 1919, vol. 2. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Engel, Gerhard, Bärbel Holtz, and Ingo Materna (eds.). 2002. Groß-Berliner Arbeiter und Soldatenräte in der Revolution 1918/1919, Dokumente der Vollversammlungen und des Vollzugsrates. Vom Generalstreikbeschluß am 3. März bis zur Spaltung der Räteorgane im Juli 1919, vol. 3. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Euchner, Walter. 2000. Ideengeschichte des Sozialismus in Deutschland. In Geschichte der sozialen Ideen in Deutschland: Sozialismus—Katholische Soziallehre—protestantische Sozialethik, ed. Helga Grebing. Essen: Klartext.

214  R. HOFFROGGE Hoffrogge, Ralf. 2015. Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Müller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Hottmann, Günten. 1980. Die Rätekonzeptionen der Revolutionären Obleute und der Links-(bzw. Räte-) Kommunisten in der Novemberrevolution: Ein Vergleich (unter Einschluß der Genese der Rätekonzeptionen), Staatsexamensarbeit. Unpublished thesis, Göttingen. Institut für Marxismus Leninismus beim ZK der SED (ed.). 1958a. Vorwärts und nicht vergessen. Erlebnisberichte aktiver Teilnehmer der Novemberrevolution 1918/19. Berlin (GDR): Dietz. Institut für Marxismus Leninismus beim ZK der SED (ed.). 1958b. Dokumente und Materialien zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, series II, vol. 3, Berlin (DDR) Zentralrat der deutschen sozialistischen Republik 1919. Kuhn, Gabriel (ed.). 2012. All Power to the Councils! A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918–1919. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Lenin, V. I. 1987. Essential Works of Lenin: “What Is to Be Done?” and Other Writings. New York: Dover Publications. Müller, Dirk H. 1985. Gewerkschaftliche Versammlungsdemokratie und Arbeiterdelegierte vor 1918. Berlin: Colloquium Verlag. Müller, Richard. 1919. Das Rätesystem im künftigen Wirtschaftsleben. In Der Arbeiter-Rat, no. 6. Müller, Richard, and Ernst Däumig. 1919. Hie Gewerkschaft—Hie BetriebsOrganisation—zwei Reden zum heutigen Streit um die Gewerkschaften. Berlin: Weckruf-Verlag. Müller, Richard. 1921. Die Entstehung des Rätegedankens. In Die Befreiung der Menschheit. Leipzig: Bong. Müller, Richard. 1924a. Vom Kaiserreich zur Republik. Vienna: Malik-Verlag. Müller, Richard. 1924b. Vom Kaiserreich zur Republik—Die Novemberrevolution. Vienna: Malik-Verlag. Müller-Franken, Hermann. 1928. Die Novemberrevolution—Erinnerungen. Berlin: Der Bücherkreis. von Oertzen, Peter. 1976 [1963]. Betriebsräte in der Novemberrevolution. Berlin: J.H.W. Dietz. Schneider, Dieter, and Rudolf Kuda (eds.). 1968. Arbeiterräte in der Novemberrevolution. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt a.M. SPD pamphlet. 1918. Nur über meine Leiche. Berlin: Vorwärts Verlag. Zentralrat der deutschen sozialistischen Republik (ed.). 1919. Allgemeiner Kongreß der Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte Deutschlands—Stenographische Berichte, Berlin.

Gustav Landauer and the Revolutionary Principle of Non-violent Non-cooperation Christian Bartolf and Dominique Miething

Introduction A distinct strand in the history of ideas and activism for social change challenges a problem known as “voluntary servitude,” a notion put forth by Étienne de La Boétie: any tyrant can be toppled, any unjust system can be overcome, if only people deliberately withdraw their support, that is, if they apply the non-violent non-cooperation principle. This concept extends well into the twentieth century, beginning with Leo Tolstoy’s public statements in favour of the Russian Revolution in 1905, followed by Gustav Landauer’s Die Revolution (1907). Landauer also refers to La Boétie to highlight religious thinkers and groups—e.g. Petr Chelčický and the Doukhobors—whose practical spirituality had already influenced Tolstoy. Non-violent non-cooperation ultimately found practical C. Bartolf  Gandhi Information Center (Research and Education for Nonviolence), Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] D. Miething (*)  Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Kets and J. Muldoon (eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13917-9_11

215

216  C. BARTOLF AND D. MIETHING

expression in Kurt Eisner’s organising efforts for the Bavarian Revolution of 1918 and in Landauer’s leading role in the Munich Council Republic of April 1919. The concept also had a strong impact on the journalist and political pacifist Carl von Ossietzky (Nobel Peace Prize laureate of 1935, awarded in 1936).

Historical Context of the Council Revolution: Kurt Eisner and Gustav Landauer If we, after 100 years, turn back to the Munich Council Republic and the November Revolution, the council-democratic ideas of the revolutionaries, Kurt Eisner and Gustav Landauer, may be summarised as follows: an end to all wars; an end to all causes of war; a guarantee of life and happiness—sociologically speaking—for each individual worker, peasant and citizen; federalism instead of centralism; the formation of active communities of creative human beings, cooperatively organising their own consumption and production; abolition of the distinction between intellectual and manual labour; maintenance of public order through the collective restructuring of the executive, judicative and legislative bodies, to be controlled by the councils; the disbandment of illegal army units, Freikorps (Free Corps), and intelligence agencies, in favour of a strengthened police force; reform of the judiciary on the basis of a human rights-oriented constitution; free and fair elections to the state parliament through universal suffrage. In this programme, the new democratic authority, implemented and guaranteed by the councils, was designed to ring in the gradual yet swift disappearance of a malign spirit that had been haunting the political atmosphere. This malign spirit, constantly striving towards dictatorship, fed off authoritarian, imperialist, militarist and nationalist attitudes and policies. To make it disappear required a consensual process through the formation of a qualitatively new “common sense.” Perpetuated by the Kaiser, the Reich’s chancellor and its generals—and reinforced by a complacent nobility and a chauvinistic-patriarchal and nationalistic bourgeoisie—this malign spirit also guided the minds of the predominantly submissive and uncritical journalists, bellicose and state-fixated teachers and university professors. Finally, Germany’s military caste, encouraged by a rapidly expanding arms industry, harboured the same sentiments, as did the Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German League): this League constituted the core of the later antisemitic and ethnocentric (völkisch)

GUSTAV LANDAUER AND THE REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLE … 

217

nationalism, which in 1933 meant the end of the democratic republic and the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship. In retrospect, after 100  years, the history of the November Revolution and the Munich Council Republic is inextricably linked with the genesis of German fascism and right-wing terrorism. Such groups and forces included the Freikorps Epp, the Marinebrigade Ehrhardt and the Organisation Consul, the Pan-German League, the German Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation (Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund; Dietrich Eckart, Julius Friedrich Lehmann), the right-wing paramilitary militias (various Freikorps units) and the DSP (Deutschsozialistische Partei), the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; DAP), the later National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; NSDAP), the ariosophic Thule-Society (Thule-Gesellschaft; Walter Nauhaus, Rudolf von Sebottendorf), from its “Münchener Beobachter” to the “Völkischer Beobachter”, the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch in 1920 and the HitlerLudendorff Putsch in 1923. It was not only the antisemitic propagandist Julius Streicher in Nuremberg, but also Rudolf Heß, Adolf Hitler, Ernst Röhm, Hans Frank, Alfred Rosenberg and Karl Haushofer and other future Nazi criminals who started their career in these organisations for the militaristic and propagandistic defence against the authoritarian council type (soviet) of the Bolsheviks under Lenin and the Red Army under Trotsky. This was advocated in Germany by the Spartacus League and the KPD and inspired by the Russian (1917) and the Hungarian Revolution (1919). The cult of the völkisch-antisemitic swastika emblem and the orchestration of assassinations and Feme murders against liberal and socialist politicians from November 1918 onwards linked these racist societies with financial sources that should be of immense interest to historians and political science. A central interest of the pacifist and council-democrat, Kurt Eisner, was not to repudiate the German share in and the German responsibility for the beginning of the war in 1914, something to which the nationalist historical revisionists aspired. Before and after the commencement of the Paris peace negotiations, especially at Versailles, these “stab-in-the-back legend” (Dolchstoßlegende) revisionists tried to shift guilt and responsibility: to deserters, conscientious objectors and pacifists; to insurrectionary and rebellious soldiers, particularly at the Kiel mutiny, in which also Bavarian sailors participated (e.g. Rudolf Egelhofer), who later continued their revolutionary activities in Bavaria; to independent socialists and

218  C. BARTOLF AND D. MIETHING

Russian revolutionaries; to the liberal and critical press; to socialists such as Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg as well as Gustav Landauer and Kurt Eisner. Both, Eisner as well as Landauer were convinced of the German war guilt. On 23 November 1918, Eisner, acting as the Bavarian representative in Berlin, published diplomatic memoranda from the Bavarian Foreign Ministry: “a document, through which now the last veil is torn from the secrets of this world war” (Eisner cited in Schmolze 1978, p. 165). The Denkschrift by Matthias Erzberger from 2 September 1914, based on a memorandum by German industrialist August Thyssen, adopted the annexationist German war aims, which aimed at breaking the dominance of the British colonial empire. The September Program of Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg from 9 September 1914 incorporated these war aims of Erzberger’s Denkschrift (Fischer 1967, p. 104). Heinrich Claß, chair of the Alldeutscher Verband, which dates back to the stern opposition against the Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty in 1890, reworked his own war aims memorandum from September 1914 into a pamphlet, which he then disseminated with a circulation of 35,000 copies, following Ludendorff’s agreement and involvement (Kruck 1954, p. 85). Channelling his policies through the Deutsche Wehrverein, Claß forced the German Empire’s massive military armament at the latest since the Agadir Crisis in April 1911. All three documents not only give evidence of the war aims that were influenced by the expansionist, pan-German, militaristic, nationalist and racist Alldeutscher Verband, but they irrefutably prove German responsibility for the First World War. Kurt Eisner and Gustav Landauer went to great lengths to spread the fact that Matthias Erzberger, through his Denkschrift of 2 September 1914, had a decisive part in the German war guilt, even though in 1917 he revised his earlier policies from 1914, supporting a separate peace as well as a corresponding peace offer from 19 July 1917. Gustav Landauer’s commitment to international understanding dates back to at least June 1914, the month of the founding of the Forte-Kreis (Forte Circle) at the city of Potsdam. It was here, on the eve of the First World War, that Landauer presented seven theses for a transnational Bund der Aufbruchsbereiten (literally: Covenant of Those Ready to Depart), an organisation devoted to benevolence, justice and human dignity (Wolf 2011, p. 221). Members of this circle included, among others, Martin Buber, Henri Borel, Frederik van Eeden and Florens Christian Rang. The

GUSTAV LANDAUER AND THE REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLE … 

219

French pacifist Romain Rolland was also sympathetic to it. Addressing Rolland directly in an article from 24 September 1914, published in Siegfried Jacobsohn’s Die Schaubühne, Landauer remarks: We, who do not want any war, under no circumstances at all, are isolated ones in all peoples; and among those isolated only fewest know, what reorganisation of humanity is required, in order to render possible a warless culture. (Landauer 2011b, p. 184)

A continuation of this commitment was the Bund Neues Vaterland (BNV; New Fatherland League, from 1922 onwards: German League for Human Rights). In November 1914, the BNV distanced itself from the Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft, Germany’s main pacifist organisation; the BNV was founded by the visionary of the “United States of Europe,” Otto Lehman-Rußbüldt, Ernst Reuter and Lilli Jannasch (Leder 2014, pp. 718f.). Ultimately, after the army had drafted Max Müller, the printer of Landauer’s journal Der Sozialist (1909–1915), Landauer committed himself more strongly to the BNV. Following the authorities’ prohibition of the BNV on 7 February 1916, many of its former members joined the newly founded Zentralstelle Völkerrecht (Central Office for International Law). The Zentralstelle advocated a mutually agreeable peace without any impairment to a peoples’ right to self-determination: “for peaceful settlement of future international disputes by means of organised mediation or legal decision” in order to “put an end to the old peace-harming arms race politics,” as stipulated in the foundational text from 25 August 1916 (Landauer 2011d, p. 207). This foundational text was penned, in accordance with a guideline from 30 July 1916, by Gustav Landauer together with the would-be Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ludwig Quidde (1979, p. 113). Signatories included, among others, Eduard Bernstein, Helene Stöcker, Hellmut von Gerlach, Walter Schücking, Julius Hart, Friedrich Wilhelm Förster, Minna Cauer, Hedwig Dohm and Hans Paasche (Leder 2014, pp. 719f.). The Zentralstelle was meant to be spread to all parts of Germany in order to organise rallies and gatherings to enable free and public debate about war and peace. Landauer led the local Groß-Berlin section. Its office was located in a building on Kantstraße 159 in Berlin-Charlottenburg, the future office of the journal Die Weltbühne. Wochenschrift für Politik, Kunst, Wirtschaft, which would eventually be edited by the Nobel Peace laureate Carl von Ossietzky.

220  C. BARTOLF AND D. MIETHING

The journalist Kurt Eisner already called on the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands; SPD) in February 1915 to distance themselves from the German war politics and their aims. After seceding from the SPD, Eisner joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands; USPD). Since December 1916, that is, the phase during the First World War, when both sides had rejected peace and mediation offers, Eisner gathered a discussion circle at the inn, Goldener Anker, at 116 Schillerstraße in Munich. The circle grew larger every week until finally 150 young people listened to Eisner analysing and interpreting newspaper articles and government documents. A first public demonstration in Munich failed in August 1917, the War Ministry issued a banning order, the police barred entry to the hall, Eisner was prevented from speaking. In the middle of December 1917, Eisner negotiated with USPD representatives about a strike in the war industry (Schmolze 1978, p. 39). Taking part in Eisner’s circle was his later secretary, Felix Fechenbach, as well as the communist-anarchist, Erich Mühsam, with whom the socialist council-democrat Eisner had considerable disagreements. Present at the gatherings in Munich was also the poet Ernst Toller, who held a fiery speech against the war and publicly recited his impressive anti-war poems, as Oskar Maria Graf recounts in his memoir Prisoners All (Wir sind Gefangene. Ein Bekenntnis aus diesem Jahrzehnt, first published in 1927 in Munich). They all later belonged to the leading figures of the revolution in Munich in November 1918 and the following months resulting in the first Munich Council Republic in early April 1919. After the declaration of the German peace negotiators at BrestLitowsk in December 1917, Eisner noticed that the workers yearned for a “peace agreement without annexations and reparations, with the right to self-determination for all peoples” (Eisner cited in Schmolze 1978, p. 45). For this purpose, a general mass strike was called. The representatives of the workers and the parliamentary representatives of the USPD agreed on a compromise: a three-day demonstration strike in January 1918. In order to prevent offensive poison-gas attacks—after the October Revolution in Russia and the peace negotiations at BrestLitowsk as well as the Fourteen Points statement by US-President Wilson—Eisner planned, according to the pacifist educator Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster (Schmolze 1978, pp. 43ff.), to organise a strike of the munitions workers:

GUSTAV LANDAUER AND THE REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLE … 

221

We must throw ourselves against this raging insanity in the last hour. We finally need freedom and truth. […] The means though, to conquer the power for a German democracy is the mass strike, which – successful in Germany – then (after the victory over our inner enemy, over this odium generis humani [hatred for the human race]) will automatically take the weapons of war from the hands of the workers of all countries. (Eisner 1996a, pp. 231f.)

The Munich strike of January from 28 January until 3 February 1918, during which workers’ councils were formed for the first time, was a continuation of two earlier strikes: the Liebknecht-strike (June 1916) and the April-strike 1917. On 31 January 1918, Kurt Eisner was arrested after giving a speech to the workers of the Bavarian Aircraft Works. In the early hours of 1 February 1918, the agitator Sarah Sonja Lerch, wife of a private lecturer at Munich University was also arrested. Lerch, née Rabinowitz, had already taken part in the first Russian Revolution of 1905 and died on 29 March 1918 at the age of only 31 years at Stadelheim Prison (Schmolze 1978, p. 64). The young writer Ernst Toller also joined Kurt Eisner’s strike campaign: “The World War had turned me into an opponent of war. I had already realised that it had been a catastrophe for Europe, a plague on humanity, the crime of our century” (Toller 1934, p. 107). In a pamphlet circulating during the munitions workers’ strike, dated 31 January 1918, Eisner related his message to the world: Manifesto [Kundgebung] The striking workers of Munich, first of all those of the Krupp Works, convey their brotherly compliments to the Belgian, French, English, Russian, Italian, American, Serbian workers. We feel at one with you in the solemn resolve, to put an end to the war of insanity and the insane immediately. We do not want to murder each other. Unite with us to enforce the peace between the peoples, which will secure freedom and happiness for all human beings while creating a new world. We German workers will hold our rulers, those responsible for the World War, accountable. The struggle for peace has begun. (Eisner 1975, pp. 64f.)

On Friday, 1 February 1918, 8000 workers went on strike. On 2 February 1918, 6000 strikers gathered on the Theresienwiese in Munich. Here, the student Ernst Toller spoke, who, in his first successful drama, Die Wandlung (1919), depicted his transformation of a

222  C. BARTOLF AND D. MIETHING

war veteran into a recognized artist and revolutionary. On 3 February 1919, 3000 workers again gathered on the Theresienwiese, forming a protest march through the city, which drew an additional 2000 people. Eisner’s friends handed out pamphlets, which repeated the core demand: “Immediate peace offer from the German government to all warring nations on the basis of: no open or veiled annexations, no reparations, observation of the peoples’ right to self-determination” as well as “full right of association and freedom of the press and freedom of assembly,” a “purely democratic constitution,” the “repeal of the state of siege,” “demilitarization of all factories and repeal of the Law on the Patriotic Auxiliary Service” (Schmolze 1978, pp. 60f.). Toller was arrested, transferred to a military prison, then released to a regiment in Neu-Ulm, where he established contact with the anarchist Gustav Landauer, who then lived in nearby Krumbach (Schmolze 1978, p. 63), in order to encourage him to become active for the cause of the Socialist revolution. Gustav Landauer’s seminal Call to Socialism (Aufruf zum Sozialismus, 1911) became the vision of Ernst Toller, who was under the influence of the thought of the sociologist Max Weber from Heidelberg. The time after the first Russian Revolution of 1905 in particular was a time full of upheaval and hope for social reform, for an end to the monarchy and fundamental changes in society, which in Germany as well as in Russia were extinguished through prohibition and censorship. It thus came as no surprise that Landauer issued a special number of his journal Der Sozialist (1909–1915) on the occasion of Tolstoy’s death in the year 1910. It is at the end of this very same year that Landauer went on to publish a series of his very own, first ever complete translations of Étienne de La Boétie’s Discourse de la servitude volontaire ou le Contr’un, written during the mid-sixteenth century. How profoundly Landauer was impressed by the ideas contained in this essay may be recognised from his characterisation of La Boétie as “the youthful preceptor of all revolutionaries” (Landauer 2011a, p. 259). He published this public appreciation on 25 November 1918 in his article “The united German republics and their constitution” (Die vereinigten Republiken Deutschlands und ihre Verfassung), at a time when he was still hopeful for a true revolution. Under the tacit influence of Tolstoy’s Für alle Tage (Tolstoi 1906, pp. 439–442, 524–534), Landauer had already highlighted the revolutionary ideas of Étienne de La Boétie, friend of the French philosopher Michel de la Montaigne, in his seminal tract Die Revolution (1907). Boétie’s treatise on voluntary servitude is usually regarded as the first essay in

GUSTAV LANDAUER AND THE REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLE … 

223

the history of literature—even though it was Erasmus of Rotterdam, who had written the first essay: Dulce bellum inexpertis (1515), an essay against any war, which already at that time documented the relationship between humanism and pacifism. In Die Revolution, Landauer also mentions the Czech reformer and craftsman Petr Chelčický and his fundamental book The Net of Faith (written around 1443), which criticised ecclesiastical representatives and institutionalised religion from a socialist perspective, because they have not improved the lot of the poor. Eisner and Landauer were guided by the cosmopolitan vision of a confederation of states as a world republic without armies, as Immanuel Kant stipulated in his Perpetual Peace of 1795, “in the same year, in which Kant, at the height of the Coalition Wars, countered the Prussian peace of humiliation at Basel with his philosophical sketch for a perpetual peace” (Landauer 1921a, pp. 152f.). The principle of non-violent non-cooperation, as put forth by La Boétie and Tolstoy, which ultimately can be traced back to Laozi and his Tao Te Ching principle of “non-forcing” (wu wei), lies at the very core of Gustav Landauer’s political philosophy. Tolstoy had already written his essay “Non-Acting” (Tolstoy 1904, esp. p. 103) on the wu wei principle in Russian in 1893 (first English translation 1895). In 1917, Landauer’s friend Martin Buber had already published The Teachings of the Tao (Die Lehre von Tao) and elaborated the non-violent principle of wu wei explicitly with respect to the political ruler and his relation to the people (Buber 1917, pp. 87–90; esp. 90–94). Shortly before the end of the First World War, on 14 October 1918, Landauer echoed this tradition when criticising his friend Fritz Mauthner’s Realpolitik: “For true politics, the kind of politics, which goes back to Laozi and Buddha and Jesus, is not the art of the possible, but of the ‘impossible’” (Landauer 1994, p. 347). Landauer and Eisner advocated an independent socialism in a council democracy: the only political method to topple a tyrant through actions such as strikes in the armament factories to end colonialist and imperialist war crimes. Owing to his commitment during and after the January strike in 1918 as well as due to the integrity bestowed upon him through his arrest in October 1918, Kurt Eisner became the representative of the Bavarian November Revolution and the first Prime Minister (Ministerpräsident) of Bavaria. His programme was to achieve Bavarian sovereignty from Berlin, in order to follow his federalist vision and to effect a connection between his council-socialist ideas with the parliamentary system. Eisner reached

224  C. BARTOLF AND D. MIETHING

the height of his authority on 17 November 1918, thanks to his speech delivered at the official celebration of the revolution at the National Theater of Munich. Here, Eisner’s Gesang der Völker (Chant of the Peoples) became the anthem of the revolution (after the tune of a prayer of thanksgiving after the Dutch War of Independence) about which Landauer’s impressively reported in a letter to his daughter Gudula from 24 November 1918 (Landauer 1929, p. 312). The height of Landauer’s authority was the proclamation of the Bavarian national holiday on his birthday, 7 April 1919. Motivated by anti-nationalist and internationalist sentiments, Communists immediately criticised this proclamation (Mühsam 1929, p. 55)—just as the federalist Eisner was later vilified by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf as “Partikularist” (Hitler 2016, p. 1411), because Eisner opposed Berlin’s counter-revolutionary and bellicist centralism. After the murder of Kurt Eisner, Landauer, acting as a new representative of the Munich Council Republic, was equally aware of the fact that he could become a prime target of the counter-revolution by the “White Guards,” the Freikorps assassins and the Feme murderers. Therefore, he committed himself to the daily tasks as commissioner for people’s education (responsible for the domains of education, culture and sciences) since the beginning of the Munich November Revolution, in full awareness of the mortal risk. The fatal decision of the staunch council-democrat, Kurt Eisner, in December 1918 was his political agreement to the state parliament elections in January 1919 in order to document the democratic character of the November Revolution. This was because he stood for a council-democratic idea that was contrary to the one geared towards the authoritarian Soviet “dictatorship of the proletariat”-model. This motto was first propagated by the Spartacus League and later, in January 1919, continued by its successor, the KPD. Their Bavarian representatives pursued the same goal under the leadership of both Russian-born Max Levien and Eugen Leviné. Gustav Landauer, in contrast, wanted the “abolition of the proletariat” (Landauer 2011a, p. 258), for he despised the “dictatorship” of the same, as the motto from the Communist Manifesto of 1848, Karl Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program of 1875 and the October Revolution of 1917 would have it. The struggle against the bourgeois press had a similarly fatal effect on the continued existence of the Munich Council Republic as did its utilisation of the Spartacist militia as well as the temporary arrest of certain communists. In addition, Ludwig Gandorfer, a friend of Eisner and peasant leader, died

GUSTAV LANDAUER AND THE REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLE … 

225

prematurely, which resulted in a lack of representation of the revolutionary fervour among the peasantry, whose reactionary representatives earned the most votes at the state election in January 1919. The Majority Social Democrat, Johannes Hoffmann, was already minister of culture under the Eisner government and became prime minister, minister of foreign affairs and minister of culture on 17 March 1919, after the Bavarian parliament had been constituted. Against this government, the Central Council of the Bavarian Republic and the Revolutionary Council of Workers proclaimed the Bavarian Council Republic on 7 April 1919, which was welcomed by several other Bavarian cities. In mid-April, Hoffmann organised, together with the so-called White Guards, Prussian and Württemberg Freikorps-units, the counter-revolution against the Second Council Republic under Levien and Leviné, whose authority was shattered by the “Munich murder of hostages” of Thule-Society members on 30 April 1919. These dead became the first “blood witnesses,” i.e. martyrs, for the NSDAP. It was only due to the revolutionary Ernst Toller’s humanitarian intervention that the executions discontinued. Recalling this episode in his autobiography, Toller penned a most notable thought: “When would man cease from this endless harrying, torturing, murdering, and martyrizing of his fellows?” (Toller 1934, p. 199). From 4 December 1918 until 25 January 1919, Adolf Hitler, together with 15 other soldiers, kept around 1000 French and Russian prisoners of war under guard in a camp lead by a soldiers’ council at the city of Traunstein. On 12 February, Hitler was transferred to the Second Demobilisation Company in Munich and on 15 February, he got himself elected as his regiment’s ombudsman. As such, he worked with the propaganda department of the new Bavarian state government under Kurt Eisner (USPD), required to school his comrades in matters of democracy. Thus, Hitler, together with his regiment took part in a demonstration of the Revolutionary Workers’ Council in Munich. On 26 February, Hitler accompanied Eisner’s funeral procession, who had been murdered five days earlier by right-wing extremist Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley. On 15 April, Hitler was elected a member of the council of the Auxiliary Battalion of the soldiers’ councils of the Munich Council Republic. After its brutal suppression in early May 1919, Hitler denounced other ombudsmen from the battalion’s council as “the worst and most radical agitators […] for the Councils’ Republic” (Hitler cited in: Herz and Halfbrodt 1988, pp. 41f.), thus contributing

226  C. BARTOLF AND D. MIETHING

to their accusation and buying himself the trust of the new authorities. He later withheld his initial cooperation from the socialist soldiers’ councils. In May 1919, Hitler for the first time met Captain Karl Mayr, head of the propaganda department of the General Command of the Reichswehr 4. On recommendation of his superior, Hitler, in the summer 1919 twice enrolled in “anti-Bolshevik propaganda courses” at Munich University for the purpose of “propaganda among the troops.” It was here that the German-nationalist, pan-German and antisemitic academics schooled him for the first time, whose influence reached from the DAP all the way to the Nazi-party. Hitler continued his right-wing extremist path, taking on a job as a spy for the Reichswehr in July 1919, tasked with influencing fellow soldiers and gathering intelligence on the DAP. In these circles, Hitler’s antisemitism took definitive shape from September 1919 onward. Impressed by the party’s chair Anton Drexler, Hitler eventually joined the party himself and got acquainted with his future mentor Dietrich Eckhart, an active member of the Thule-Society and also founding member of the DAP, which, from February 1920 onward called itself NSDAP, adopting the swastika as its emblem.

Kurt Eisner and Gustav Landauer on the Councils’ Revolution On the night to 8 November 1918, Kurt Eisner, serving as chair of the Workers, Soldiers and Peasants’ Council, gave a speech “To the Population of Munich!” Here, at the height of his political authority, Eisner cited the non-violent aspect of his political programme: “Everyone help so that the inevitable transformation will go about swiftly, easily and peacefully. In these times of senseless fierce murder, we abhor all bloodshed. Every human life shall be sacred” (Eisner 1996b, pp. 237f.). On 6 April 1919, Gustav Landauer, friend and successor of Kurt Eisner, drafted the proclamation of the first Bavarian Councils’ Republic. Published in Münchner Neueste Nachrichten on the following day, Landauer identified the general strike as a symbol of non-violent non-cooperation against capitalism, which generated war as the scourge of humanity: As a sign of joyous hope for a happy future of all humankind, we hereby declare 7 April a national holiday. As a sign of the commencing parting of the execrable age of capitalism, work is suspended on Monday, 7

GUSTAV LANDAUER AND THE REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLE … 

227

April 1919, throughout Bavaria, insofar as it is not necessary for the life of working people, about which further regulations will be issued at once. (Landauer 2011c, pp. 317f.)

Already in 1893, Landauer addressed the causes of war, among them, greed for annexations and expansion of capital in the colonies of imperialist states, but also the lack of resistance in society against nationalist governments and states: But doesn’t Mr. [August] Bebel know that only governments wage wars and not peoples? Indeed, as long as the states of today exist, there will be wars, because the peoples put up with it; but does any people have an interest in mangling the other? Only if this people is fanaticized from above and brought up with false, preposterous notions. Only the obsession to dominate human beings and the boastful desire to call a potentially very large territory one’s property, to see it lying at one’s feet, generates wars. Without domination, no war, this is clear, and only anarchy can put an end to warfare once and for all. (Landauer 1986a, pp. 111f.)

War meant mass murder and collective insanity according to Landauer, as he made clear again in 1895, stressing adherence to “truth” and reason: murdering other human beings can never ever further their own “well-being” (Landauer 1986b, p. 141). More than twenty years later, in the year 1916, during the First World War, Landauer penned a letter to US-President Wilson after several failed peace offers. He described the relationship between militarism and armament as systematic preparation for war: The European War has prepared itself and has broken out in 1914, because Europe has imposed on itself from 1870/71 onwards the heinous system of armed peace; of rising armament for war; of years-long detention of almost the entire male population in a rigid body, practicing destruction as vocation and technique; the system of these standing as well as fluent armies in a never-seen-before kind of way. Hermsdorf near Berlin, Christmas 1916. (Landauer 1968, pp. 257f.)

Writing for Die Weltbühne in May 1918, Landauer recalled the practical commitment of the Russian count, Leo Tolstoy, for the sake of peasant families and craftsmen threatened by starvation and death, for conscientious objectors in Russia and internationally, and for the

228  C. BARTOLF AND D. MIETHING

exemplary Doukhobors (spirit wrestlers), who publicly burnt all their weapons in 1895 as a demonstration and global symbol, visible to all humanity, for a new era of non-violence and peace: He levelled relentless criticism against any politics, which, regardless whether conducted by the hierarchy, by Czarism, by pseudo-democratic oligarchs, by power of the crowds or revolutionary governments of violence; to him, the principles of public life were no different to those in private life. (Landauer 2013, p. 224)

Landauer, thus, followed Tolstoy, whom he called a spirit wrestler for logic, truth, benevolence, gentleness and solidarity. Non-violent non-cooperation also entailed determining the correct relation of means and ends in the revolution, a lesson which Landauer learned not only from Tolstoy but also from “his great predecessor Etienne de la Boëtie” (Landauer 1921b, pp. 202f). In his 1907 programmatic Die Revolution, Landauer had already referred to the essay of La Boétie as a “microcosm of the revolution,” after which he went on to extensively paraphrase entire passages such as: But Etienne de La Boëtie has the floor: nothing else is necessary, he says, but the desire and will to be free. It is a voluntary servitude. It almost seems, he says, as if the people despised the precious good of freedom, because it is too easy. “Resolve to serve no more, and you are free. I do not want that you chase away the tyrant or topple him from his throne over; simply do not support him; and you shall see how he like a great colossus, whose pedestal has been pulled away, falls of his own weight and breaks into pieces.” Fire can be extinguished by water; but one should stay clear of the conspiracies to chase away or kill a tyrant, and of those striving for fame and glory, yet only conserve and reproduce tyranny; they abuse the sacred name of freedom. (Landauer 1907, pp. 89f.)

This principle of non-violent non-cooperation was later recommended by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi—whom the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore called Mahatma (“great soul”)—as a means for the national emancipation of his country, India. From 1917 to 1919, he put it into practice in three regional campaigns of non-violent resistance against British colonial rule. The writer Arnold Zweig aptly summarised how the principle found global application:

GUSTAV LANDAUER AND THE REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLE … 

229

Then rose the star of Gandhi. He showed that a doctrine of non-violence was possible. It seemed given [to] him to shape human society according to his teachings, in fact upon the basis that Tolstoy and Prince Kropotkin had already laid in Czarist Russia from the old doctrines of Christianity. In Germany [there] were [also] representatives of such convictions. Men like Kurt Eisner and Gustav Landauer, Carl von Ossietzky, Erich Mühsam and Theodor Lessing sought nothing else. Could they fail in Germany when Gandhi succeeded in India? (Zweig 1949, p. 331)

In December 1911, during Gandhi’s first successful campaigns in South Africa, Landauer endorsed the principle of non-violent non-cooperation in a Socratic dialogue for adult education. Intended for print under the title The Abolition of War by the Self-Determination of the People: Questions to the German Workers (Die Abschaffung des Krieges durch die Selbstbestimmung des Volkes. Fragen an die deutschen Arbeiter) as a pamphlet of 100,000 copies (Leder 2014, p. 611), the fictional partners within the pamphlet’s text reflect upon the strike as a method: If, as a result of the war, an international economic crisis and increased unemployment are there, if, added to this, dejection, hunger, sickness, misery, and despair arrive, then there will be no more strength to act and no possibility for intervention […] This strike is not like any other […] If in a State transportation of people and goods is stagnating, if no electricity is being delivered and no coal is being produced, if the cities are without light and the houses without water, then the whole thing does not have to take too long. The governments no longer know what it means when peoples arise and stand up for their self-determination. Then they will learn, and this strike will achieve its end. This end is: to make an impression at home and abroad; and to inspire imitation in all countries. […] Let us prepare ourselves so that, if it ever should come to this, we are the first who will honour the truth. Truth has but one honour: that she will become reality. In such very primal things all humanity, all peoples of culture know but a single truth: thou shalt not kill in order to live; thou shalt work to live. Let us take the first steps and after them, the second and so forth, in order, if need be, to have an effect through the last means of labour: You know: one has referred to cannons as the last means [ultima ratio] of kings. Now you know the last means [ultima ratio] of labour: non-working [“Nichtarbeit”]. […] Let us follow our consciences and our insight […]. (Landauer 2010, pp. 266ff.)

230  C. BARTOLF AND D. MIETHING

The editor of Die Weltbühne (The World Stage) in 1929, Carl von Ossietzky, consequently applied this principle of “non-working” to make workers realise their massive power over the control of industrial arms production: No, the refusal to perform military services is not enough. Already in peacetime, we have to take out the nests of hell, where the instruments of war are manufactured. Do you believe, calling for a general strike still makes sense if the danger of war is imminent; the blood-propaganda of the press has set in, rumours are swirling around and the same lie is blasted from all broadcasting stations into millions of ears – ? What should be put into practice is the control of industry by the workers. (Ossietzky 1929, pp. 281f.)

Epilogue Kurt Eisner, Gustav Landauer, Erich Mühsam, Ernst Toller—four revolutionaries, whose erroneously tried to collaborate both with Majority Social Democrats (MSPD) and authoritarian Spartacus League (since 1919 Communist Party) members receiving their orders from Budapest and Moscow—after the first Congress of the Communist International (“Comintern”) in early March 1919. Why? Because the MSPD used the Freikorps as mercenary armies, which were financed by the arms industry’s anti-Bolshevik fund (Antibolschewistische Liga, later Liga zum Schutze der deutschen Kultur), to crush the Socialist revolution by military force and assassinate their protagonists, e.g. Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Eisner and Leo Jogiches. Because the heads of the Communists, Max Levien and Eugen Leviné, persistently refused to support the first council democracy of Landauer and Mühsam, calling it a pseudo-Soviet Republic (Scheinräterepublik). It was only on 13 April 1919, Palm Sunday Coup (Palmsonntagsputsch), when the Republican Protection Troop (Republikanische Schutztruppe) led by Alfred Seyffertitz (again, financed by the arms industry’s anti-Bolshevik fund) started their assault on the first council democracy, that the Communist Rudolf Egelhofer (later head of Leviné’s Red Army) stopped the counter-revolution. Gustav Landauer continued to implement his reform programme even during the second (Communist) council democracy, albeit only for the first two days. If he knew what he was putting on the line when he, following the call of his friend Kurt Eisner, let himself be appointed as Commissioner of

GUSTAV LANDAUER AND THE REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLE … 

231

Enlightenment and Public Instruction in the former Bavarian People’s Republic and then went on to become a member of the council government, the same that Ernst Toller served on, Erich Mühsam, the Socialists Levien and Leviné? Just as countless other like-minded comrades, Gustav Landauer rejected violence in the very sense, even where she, weapon ready in-hand, put herself into the service of protecting those accomplishments that the revolutionary people had saved from the collapse of German Imperialism. (Zweig 1980, pp. 8f.)

Martin Buber, friend of Gustav Landauer, acutely described what a discussion about the problem of violence as means of revolutionary politics can bring to the fore between different revolutionaries. In recalling a telling episode from his time spent in Munich in the days of February 1919 leading up to the murder of Kurt Eisner, Buber dismissed Max Weber’s distinction between Gesinnungsethik (ethics of conviction) and Verantwortungsethik (ethics of responsibility). Buber accompanied Landauer to a political meeting, in the process of which he observed that Weber’s distinction was absurd in the face of revolutionary violence: About two weeks after Landauer’s memorial address on Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg I was with him, and several other revolutionary leaders in a hall of the Diet building in Munich. Landauer had proposed the subject of discussion – it was the terror. But he himself hardly joined in; he appeared dispirited and nearly exhausted – a year before his wife had succumbed to a fatal illness, and now he relived her death in his heart. The discussion was conducted for the most part between me and a Spartacus leader, who later became well known in the second communist revolutionary government in Munich that replaced the first, socialist government of Landauer and his comrades. The man walked with clanking spurs through the room; he had been a German officer in the war. I declined to do what many apparently had expected of me—to talk of the moral problem; but I set forth what I thought about the relation between end and means. I documented my view from historical and contemporary experience. The Spartacus leader did not go into that matter. He, too, sought to document his apology for the terror by examples. “Dzertshinsky” he said, “the head of the Cheka, could sign a hundred death sentences a day, but with an entirely clean soul.” “That is, in fact, just the worst of all,” I answered. “This ‘clean’ soul you do not allow any splashes of blood to fall on! It is not a question of ‘souls’ but of responsibility.” My opponent regarded me with unperturbed superiority. Landauer, who sat next to me, laid his hand on mine. His whole arm trembled. (Buber 1957, p. 119)

232  C. BARTOLF AND D. MIETHING

Therefore, the core message of La Boétie, Tolstoy, Eisner and Landauer remains this: “An end can only be reached if the means are already coloured by the colour of the end. Never can non-violence be attained through violence” (Landauer 2009: 276). Assassinations, hostage murders, executions and machine gun fire are the prison of any social revolution, as Oskar Maria Graf, writer and friend of Eisner and Landauer, and himself an eyewitness to the Munich Council Republic, confirmed: I wanted to go to the Parliament House, but the sentry would not let me in. By chance, I met a radical worker, whose acquaintance I had made only recently. I walked with him for a bit and debated. “This revolution is worse than the monarchy,” I said. He agreed. “But just give us time, we shall soon be in power … We need weapons first,” he said. “What, but you’re a pacifist?!” I asked. “Yes, yes, that’s true … But we only want a proletarian struggle of self-defence against the counter-revolution … a man cannot be a pacifist there,” he retorted. “Really … well, well, I always thought pacifism meant the repudiation of all war and all use of force … So the militarists were actually in the right,” I replied. He stared at me and did not know what to say next. “Yes, once the power is in our hands there won’t be any more war,” he said after a while again and asked: “Or what do you think?” “The general strike! Simply a very radical general strike. The rich and the bourgeoisie have not even begun to feel anything of the revolution yet … When there is no water, no light, no bread, nothing at all, then that’ll be the end of the counter-revolution … We need not shoot, just don’t lift a finger,” I answered morosely. “Yes, yes, that’s quite right, quite right, but nobody will join in,” he said, “that sort of thing depends on everybody joining, otherwise it has no value. The Majority Social Democrats will only sabotage it all again … So it’s better for us to look around for arms.” “And with the shooting, will everybody join?” I asked, at once mischievous and sad. “Oh yes, certainly.” “Then we all are lost … the revolution and us … everything”, I replied and left. (Graf 1948, pp. 363f.)

Erich Mühsam retrospectively characterised the council revolution as “precipitous” (Mühsam 1929, pp. 5 and 61). Ernst Toller in his autobiography

GUSTAV LANDAUER AND THE REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLE … 

233

Eine Jugend in Deutschland referred to it as a “mistake,” because of the revolution’s imperfect leadership, the break-away of the moderate Socialists, a disorganised administration, increased food scarcity and confusion among the soldiers (Toller 1934, Chapter 11). Gustav Landauer resigned from his post on 16 April 1919 with a letter to the Action Committee (quoted in ibid.), in which he explained that his concept of independent Council Socialism awakens all creative energies of the people (i.e. industrial workers, craftsmen, engineers, peasants, scientists, teachers, artists, lawyers) and that this new cosmopolitan vision, solemnly declared on Landauer’s birthday, 7 April 1919, “as a sign of joyous hope for a happy future of all humankind,” has never been shared by the Communists. To summarise, Gustav Landauer agreed to become politically active in the Socialist revolution because Ernst Toller, the war veteran, antiwar poet and representative of the anti-militarist youth, urged him to do so and because Kurt Eisner asked him to join the Munich November Revolution “to assist in transforming souls” (Landauer 1929, p. 296) through political enlightenment. Both Kurt Eisner and Gustav Landauer have not realised the principle of non-violent non-cooperation (according to Etienne de La Boétie and Leo Tolstoy) with complete success, Ernst Toller’s major endeavour was to minimise bloodshed during the downfall of the revolution, and Erich Mühsam was arrested and unable to prevent the worst which happened in May 1919—one hundred years ago today.

References Buber, Martin. 1917. Die Lehre von Tao. In Die Rede, die Lehre und das Lied. Drei Beispiele, 35–94. Leipzig: Insel-Verlag. Buber, Martin. 1957. Recollections of a Death. In Pointing the Way, 115–120. New York: Harper & Brothers. Eisner, Kurt. 1975. Kundgebung. In Kurt Eisner: Sozialismus als Aktion. Ausgewählte Aufsätze und Reden, 64f. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Eisner, Kurt. 1996a. Aufruf zum Streik (January 1918). In Kurt Eisner: Zwischen Kapitalismus und Kommunismus, ed. Freya Eisner, 231f. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Eisner, Kurt. 1996b. An die Bevölkerung Münchens! In Kurt Eisner: Zwischen Kapitalismus und Kommunismus, ed. Freya Eisner, 237–238. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Fischer, Fritz. 1967. Germany’s Aims in the First World War. New York: W. W. Norton.

234  C. BARTOLF AND D. MIETHING Graf, Oskar Maria. 1948. Wir sind Gefangene. Ein Bekenntnis aus diesem Jahrzehnt. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag. Herz, Rudolf, and Dirk Halfbrodt (eds.). 1988. Fotografie und Revolution, München 1918/19. Berlin: Nishen. Hitler, Adolf. 2016. Mein Kampf: eine kritische Edition, ed. Christian Hartmann et al. München, Berlin: Institut für Zeitgeschichte. Kruck, Alfred. 1954. Geschichte des Alldeutschen Verbandes 1890–1939. Wiesbaden: Steiner. Landauer, Gustav. 1907. Die Revolution. Frankfurt am Main: Rütten und Loening. Landauer, Gustav. 1921a. Goethes Politik. Eine Ankündigung (1918). In Der werdende Mensch. Aufsätze über Leben und Schrifttum, ed. Martin Buber, 138–154. Potsdam: G. Kiepenheuer. Landauer, Gustav. 1921b. Lew Nikolajewitsch Tolstoi (1910). In Der werdende Mensch. Aufsätze über Leben und Schrifttum, ed. Martin Buber, 199–205. Potsdam: G. Kiepenheuer. Landauer, Gustav 1929. Sein Lebensgang in Briefen. Bd. II, ed. Martin Buber and Ina Britschgi-Schimmer. Frankfurt am Main: Ruetten & Loening. Landauer, Gustav. 1968. Friedensvertrag und Friedenseinrichtung (1916 Brief an Wilson). In Gustav Landauer: Zwang und Befreiung. Eine Auswahl aus seinem Werk, ed. Heinz-Joachim Heydorn, 256–262. Köln: Jakob Hegner. Landauer, Gustav. 1986a. Die sozialdemokratische Wahlagitation. In Signatur: g.l. Gustav Landauer im » Sozialist « (1892–1899), ed. Ruth Link-Salinger, 108–114. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Landauer, Gustav. 1986b. Die Kriegsfeier. In Signatur: g.l. Gustav Landauer im » Sozialist « (1892–1899), ed. Ruth Link-Salinger, 141. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Landauer, Gustav. 1994. Brief an Mauthner, 14.10.1918. In Gustav Landauer – Fritz Mauthner. Briefwechsel 1890–1919, ed. Hanna Delf, 347. München: C.H. Beck. Landauer, Gustav. 2009. Anarchische Gedanken über Anarchismus. In Gustav Landauer: Anarchismus. Ausgewählte Schriften, Bd. 2, ed. Siegbert Wolf, 274– 281. Lich, Hessen: Edition AV. Landauer, Gustav. 2010. Die Abschaffung des Krieges durch die Selbstbestimmung des Volkes. In Gustav Landauer: Gustav Landauer: Antipolitik. Ausgewählte Schriften, Bd. 3.1, ed. Siegbert Wolf, 265–279. Lich, Hessen: Edition AV. Landauer, Gustav. 2011a. Die vereinigten Republiken Deutschlands und ihre Verfassung (1918). In Gustav Landauer: Nation, Krieg und Revolution. Ausgewählte Schriften, Bd. 4, ed. Siegbert Wolf, 254–260. Lich, Hessen: Verlag Edition AV. Landauer, Gustav. 2011b. An Romain Rolland. In Gustav Landauer: Nation, Krieg und Revolution. Ausgewählte Schriften, Bd. 4, ed. Siegbert Wolf, 182–185. Lich, Hessen: Edition AV.

GUSTAV LANDAUER AND THE REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLE … 

235

Landauer, Gustav. 2011c. An das Volk in Baiern! In Gustav Landauer: Nation, Krieg und Revolution. Ausgewählte Schriften, Bd. 4, ed. Siegbert Wolf, 317f. Lich, Hessen: Edition AV. Landauer, Gustav. 2011d. Gründungsaufruf “Zentralstelle Völkerrecht”. In Gustav Landauer: Nation, Krieg und Revolution. Ausgewählte Schriften, Bd. 4, ed. Siegbert Wolf, 207–208. Lich, Hessen: Edition AV. Landauer, Gustav. 2013. Zu Tolstois Tagebuch. In Gustav Landauer: Literatur. Ausgewählte Schriften Band 6.2, ed. Siegbert Wolf, 222–226. Lich, Hessen: Edition AV. Leder, Tilman. 2014. Die Politik eines „Antipolitikers“. Eine politische Biographie Gustav Landauers. Lich, Hessen: Verlag Edition AV. Mühsam, Erich. 1929. Von Eisner bis Leviné. Die Entstehung der bayerischen Räterepublik. Berlin: Fanal-Verlag. Ossietzky, Carl von. 1929. Unselig sind die Friedfertigen. Die Weltbühne, 25. Jg., Nr. 8 (19. February): 281f. Quidde, Ludwig. 1979. Der deutsche Pazifismus während des Weltkrieges 1914– 1918. Aus dem Nachlass Ludwig Quiddes, ed. Karl Holl and Helmut Donat. Boldt: Boppard am Rhein. Schmolze, Gerhard. 1978. Revolution und Räterepublik in München 1918/19 in Augenzeugenberichten. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Toller, Ernst. 1934. I Was a German: The Autobiography of Ernst Toller. New York: William Morrow and Company. Tolstoy, Leo. 1904. Non-Acting. In Essays and Letters, trans. Aylmer Maude, 94–122. New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company. Tolstoi, Leo. 1906. Für alle Tage. Ein Lebensbuch, ed. E.H. Schmitt and A. Skarvan. Dresden: Verlag Carl Reißner. Wolf, Siegbert. 2011. Notes. In Gustav Landauer: Nation, Krieg und Revolution. Ausgewählte Schriften, Bd. 4, ed. Siegbert Wolf, 221. Lich, Hessen: Edition AV. Zweig, Arnold. 1949. Thanks to Gandhi. In Mahatma Gandhi: Essays and Reflections on His Life and Work, ed. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, 331ff. London: George Allen & Unwin. Zweig, Arnold. 1980. Gustav Landauer zum Gedächtnis (1949). In Gustav Landauer: Der werdende Mensch. Aufsätze zur Literatur, 5–9. Leipzig, Weimar: G. Kiepenheuer.

Persistent Memories: Jewish Activists and the German Revolution Stephen Eric Bronner

1919 is an extraordinary date in German history. It brought the democratic revolution of 1918 abruptly to a close and opened the door for what in 1933 would become the Nazi seizure of power. Paranoia gripped Germany in that year. Inspired both by the bitter reality of defeat on the battlefield, and the radical spectre of bolshevism, it produced a subtle shift in the common understanding of anti-Semitism and the fears motivating the anti-Semite. 1919 saw the preoccupation of the right-wing press with the “Jewification” (Verjudung) of German society make way for the vision of a “Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy” (Traverso 1992, p. 48). The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, forged in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair, had already been made popular in Russia during the Revolution of 1905 (Bronner 2019). Anti-Semites in Germany learned This chapter has previously been published as Stephen Eric Bronner, “Persistent Memories of the German Revolution: The Jewish Activists of 1919” New Politics (1995) 5(2). Here reproduced with kind permission. S. E. Bronner (*)  Department of Political Science, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Kets and J. Muldoon (eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13917-9_12

237

238  S. E. BRONNER

from it. They continued to bemoan the dominance Jews supposedly held over certain professions including banking and they still referred to Adolf Bartels, the noted nineteenth-century philologist, and his list of eight-hundred Jewish writers who were supposedly displacing German writers from their culture (Pachter 1982, p. 262). But the war and subsequent revolutions transformed older concerns. Jews were now considered not merely religious heretics or profiteers, the worst sorts of capitalists, but also traitors undermining the German nation in the name of democracy while conspiring with the international communist revolution against Christian civilisation. This change in the anti-Semitic worldview made it possible to speak of Weimar democracy as a “Jew republic.” Was this new order not the product of defeat on the battlefield, dominated by moneylenders, led by socialists and “criminals” willing to accept the provisions of the humiliating Treaty of Versailles? The November Revolution of 1918 had begun with the abdication of the Kaiser and the returning troops, disgruntled and without hope for the future, whose plight was so well described by Erich Maria Remarque in novels like The Road Back and Three Comrades. A power vacuum arose with the fall of the monarchy and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) that was filled under the leadership of the pro-war “majority” faction led by Friedrich Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann and Gustav Noske. Accompanying the rise to power of the SPD came strikes and mass disturbances of which the uprising initiated by a group of sailors in Kiel was the first. The aristocracy and bourgeoisie feared for their status and their property. The military and bureaucracy felt betrayed by the defeat while peasants and the petit-bourgeoisie embraced the legend of the “stab in the back” perpetrated by Jews, pacifists, socialists and communists on the home front. The situation was perilous and the possibility of civil war real enough. Social democracy had always held forth the promise of a republic. But it was now in a terrible position (Rosenberg 1961, p. 5). The SPD could either compromise with the anti-democratic and reactionary classes of the Wilhelmine Monarchy and introduce a “republic without republicans” or risk civil war and possible invasion at the hands of the victorious allies by taking a more radical course. This would involve purging the military and state bureaucracy, liquidating the estates of the reactionary aristocracy in the East, and dealing with an insistent minority of the proletariat seeking a genuinely “socialist” republic based on the spontaneously erupting “workers’ councils” (Räte) or “soviets” if not the more authoritarian tenets of Bolshevik theory. The social democrats chose the less dangerous

PERSISTENT MEMORIES: JEWISH ACTIVISTS AND THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

239

option and turned on the Left whose most important proponents wished to chart the more radical, if somewhat inchoate, course. None of this meant much to the far right. Its ideological attachment to xenophobia, militarism, authoritarianism and anti-Semitism created the philosophical context in which Jews could appear as the root of the problem. Their inbred lack of principle and national roots supposedly made it possible for these “aliens” to dominate the liberal bourgeoisie, social democracy and international communism as well. The “Jews” were thus capitalists and “reds” at the same time, chameleons capable of assuming any guise. Inextricably connected with the forces supposedly dominating the Weimar Republic, or what the Nazis termed the “system,” this seemingly explained why the “Jew republic” should have crushed the uprisings in which any number of Jewish revolutionaries played a highly visible role.

Luxemburg as Theorist and Activist Rosa Luxemburg was clearly the predominant figure among them. Born in 1871, in the city of Zamosc, Poland, to a middle-class Jewish family, Luxemburg became a revolutionary while still in high school. Hunted by the police, she fled to Zurich before making a marriage of convenience in order to enter Germany and work with the jewel in the crown of international social democracy: the SPD. Various writers have emphasised the effect of being a Jew or a woman on the identity of Rosa Luxemburg (Arendt 1973, p. 36; Dunayevskaya 1981, p. 79; Ettinger 1986). She was always an opponent of bigotry and insisted on equality. Her thinking grudgingly allowed for “national cultural autonomy,” and she saw social democracy as the natural home for the oppressed (Luxemburg 1976). But the argument originally made in her dissertation, The Industrial Development of Poland (1894), with its critique of the nationalism embraced by leaders of Polish social democracy like the future dictator Josef Pilsudski, extends by implication to all forms of particularism. Luxemburg would consistently oppose any ideology capable of compromising proletarian unity, the struggle against imperialism, and what she considered the internationalist tenets of Marxism. Her principles were well known, but her early writings were not. Luxemburg’s ascent in the world of international social democracy began with a contribution to what became known as “the revisionist debate” of 1898. Initiated by Eduard Bernstein with a set of articles, which were reworked into a book entitled The Preconditions of Socialism, orthodox

240  S. E. BRONNER

Marxism was charged with ignoring the manner in which capitalism had stabilised and the fact that the “inevitable” proletarian revolution anticipated by Marx was no longer on the agenda. Insisting that “the movement is everything and the goal is nothing,” Bernstein called upon social democracy to surrender its “revolutionary phraseology” and foster a policy of compromise with non-proletarian classes to insure economic reforms so that socialism might gradually “evolve.” Social Reform or Revolution (1899) was the finest contribution to the debate made by any critic of “revisionism,” which included the most famous theoreticians of orthodox Marxism like Karl Kautsky and Georgii Plekhanov. In this pamphlet, Luxemburg noted how crisis was endemic to capitalism and expressed her fears about how an unrestricted politics of class compromise might justify any choice by the party leadership, and shift power to the trade unions. She also argued that there were limits to reform and that it could never transform the production process or eliminate the prospect of imperialism and political crisis. Without a political revolution, she argued, reforms granted under one set of conditions could also be retracted under another. A simple emphasis on economic reforms would thus result only in a “labor of Sisyphus.” Indeed, without an articulated socialist “goal,” she believed that the SPD would increasingly succumb to capitalist values and surrender its sense of political purpose. Just as Luxemburg rejected the idea of a democratic mass party run by experts and basically concerned with incremental reforms, however, her Organizational Questions of Social Democracy opposed the idea of a “vanguard” party based on blind obedience and dominated by revolutionary intellectuals. Lenin and Bernstein were, for her, flip sides of the same coin. In her view, both sought to erect an “absolute dividing wall” between the leadership and the base. If socialism is to transform workers from “dead machines” into the “free and independent directors” of society as a whole, Luxemburg argued, then they must have the chance to learn and exercise their knowledge. Consequently, it only makes sense that the radically democratic aspects of the Russian Revolution of 1905 should have inspired her finest theoretical work, Mass Strike, Party, and Trade Unions (1906). This pamphlet placed a new emphasis on the innovative talents of the masses in organising society. It spoke about connecting economic with political concerns. It also articulated her organisational dialectic between party and base, which would gradually build the “self-administrative” capacities of workers by helping them develop new representative

PERSISTENT MEMORIES: JEWISH ACTIVISTS AND THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

241

institutions and then, at a different stage of the struggle, still newer ones. This radical democratic vision stayed with Rosa Luxemburg during World War I, which she spent in a tiny prison cell. There she wrote various responses to her critics, translated The History of My Contemporary of her favourite poet, Vladimir Korolenko, and—under the pseudonym Junius—produced the great anti-war pamphlet, The Crisis in the German Social Democracy (1916), which mercilessly criticised the SPD for its support of the Kaiser’s war, its obsession with votes, its cowardice in the face of public opinion, and its betrayal of working-class interests. Also written in jail were her beautiful letters to friends and lovers. They portrayed her diverse interests, her courage and her deep sense of humanity. Sonja Liebknecht—the wife of Luxemburg’s fellow socialist martyr Karl Liebknecht—published a small volume of her more intimate letters in 1922 and another followed a year later edited by Luise Kautsky. Interestingly enough, they served a political purpose. The publication of Luxemburg’s letters was meant to build sympathy for the woman who was being castigated both by social democracy and a communist movement undergoing “bolshevization” and attempting to rid itself of what its former leader Ruth Fischer called “the syphilitic Luxemburg bacillus.”

Paul Levi Between Moscow and the Left There was good reason why this increasingly authoritarian movement should have turned on the first president of the German Communist Party. In jail, while in ill health and with little information other than newspapers, Rosa Luxemburg wrote what was surely her most prophetic and intellectually daring work. The Russian Revolution (1918) condemned the tactics that would ultimately undermine the Soviet experiment. Opposed to Lenin’s agrarian policy, continuing to reject the use of slogans implying the “right of national self-determination,” her analysis is best known for insisting that the revolution extend both formal and substantive democracy as well as the justly famous words: “Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. … Its effectiveness vanishes when “freedom” becomes a special privilege.” Paul Levi, her lawyer with whom she was intimate towards the end of her life, convinced Luxemburg not to publish the piece for fear of aiding the reaction. She reluctantly agreed. She may not have had the strength

242  S. E. BRONNER

to refuse. Alfred Doeblin described her in his lengthy novel, Karl und Rosa (1950), as suffering a nervous breakdown in prison. Following her release in 1918, her hair had turned white and she appeared even more frail and thin. But Luxemburg extended her support to the Spartacus group that would serve as the nucleus for the German Communist Party (KPD) and advocate the creation of “soviets” (or “workers’ councils”). In spite of its legendary stature, Spartacus never received the support of a proletarian majority—and Rosa Luxemburg knew it. She warned against setting loose the revolution in Germany and, after initially opposing the idea of a National Assembly, ultimately called for participating in the elections of the nascent Weimar Republic. But she was outvoted. The Spartacus Revolt broke out in 1919 and Rosa Luxemburg decided to remain in contact with the masses. Article after article in the bourgeois press implicitly or explicitly called for her death and that of other Jewish leaders of the uprising like Karl Liebknect and Karl Rade, and even the socialist Vorwärts printed the ditty: Hundreds of proletarian corpses all in a row—proletarians! Karl, Rosa, Radek and company! All in a row—proletarians!

Luxemburg alone might have been able to counteract—if every so briefly—the power of Lenin and the Bolsheviks on the international Left (Borkenau 1962, p. 148). She also warned that a “military dictatorship” would soon supplant the Weimar Republic. But the forces of order got their wish. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were brutally murdered at the hands of proto-Nazi thugs employed by the socialist government of Ebert and Gustav Noske and the phony investigation into their deaths caused a sensation. What’s more, the murderers of Liebknecht and “bloody Rosa, the Jewish pig” got off easy. They served little jailtime and all became heroes in the Third Reich. Grimly, for a short time, Leo Jogiches took over the reins of Spartacus. Luxemburg had fallen in love with him during her time in Zurich and, though their affair was now over, he never lost his affection and admiration for her. Jogiches, who was born in 1867, was always her political ally and, while their relationship was difficult, Luxemburg relied upon his advice to the very end. Leo Jogiches was a great and honourable revolutionary, who spent years underground and in jail. He was not a theorist or a writer, but a man of action who thrived during times of upheaval and used the considerable fortune of his family to help finance the labour movement

PERSISTENT MEMORIES: JEWISH ACTIVISTS AND THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

243

in Poland, Russia and Germany. He participated in virtually every revolutionary uprising during the early years of the century, opposed World War I, and was instrumental in founding Spartacus. He begged Luxemburg and Liebknecht to leave the country when it was clear that defeat was certain. They rejected his advice and moved from one flat to another, without a plan or an idea about what should come next, before they were caught. Ironically, however, Jogiches himself stayed in Berlin. With what must have been a rare smile, he apparently said: “Somebody has to stay, at least to write all our epitaphs.” The death of Rosa Luxemburg left Jogiches a broken man. Obsessed with bringing the murderers to justice, and preserving her papers, his own life lost all meaning in 1919. By all accounts, Leo Jogiches almost purposely left himself open to capture and, while under arrest, he was shot in cold blood. Paul Levi assumed the leadership of the KPD after the death of Luxemburg and Jogiches (Levi 1969; Beradt 1969). Born on 11 March 1883, he had studied jurisprudence at the University of Berlin and the University of Grenoble and, after receiving his degree, quickly became one of the leading lawyers in the SPD; indeed, it was Levi who defended Rosa Luxemburg in her famous trial for engaging in anti-militarist activity in the months preceding World War I. Opposed to the conflict from the very first, by 1916, Levi had entered the executive committee of Spartacus and represented Lenin’s call to transform the conflict between states into a “class war” at the Zimmerwald Conference in 1917. Levi pressed the investigation into the death of Luxemburg following the defeat of the Spartacus Revolt. He also insisted on drawing lessons from the defeat. This led him into conflict with the Bolshevik leadership in Moscow who supported Béla Kun, the famous Hungarian communist, in maintaining an “offensive” strategy of armed uprising. Levi now argued instead for a “defensive” strategy. He believed that the communist cadres had been devastated, the proletariat exhausted, by the defeats of 1919 and that it was now necessary to rebuild, enter unions, attract new members, concentrate on ideological work, and reject romantic ultra-leftism. The debate came to a head over the March Action of 1921. An uprising had been called by Moscow, against the pleadings of Levi, which was quickly crushed. In a complicated back and forth, essentially, Levi demanded that the Moscow leadership take responsibility for the debacle. Lenin was himself initially sceptical about the revolutionary attempt. But, when Levi levelled his criticisms publicly, the Russian leader showed no hesitancy in purging him from the Comintern for breach of discipline

244  S. E. BRONNER

even while integrating his policy proposals into Left-wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. It was in the aftermath of this controversy during 1922 that Levi released Luxemburg’s pamphlet, The Russian Revolution, for publication. Levi tried to remain active before his death in 1930 in what might have been an attempt at suicide. He ultimately rejoined the SPD. But he remained an outcast without power or influence. The social democrats had little use for him or memories of Luxemburg either for that matter. An organised anti-communist witch-hunt had accompanied the birth of the Weimar Republic. It struck hard in Bavaria. This province had remained relatively free from the influence of the Ebert and Noske government in Berlin. It also witnessed uprisings like so many other cities in Germany. The most famous involved the reformist politician Kurt Eisner—a Kantian pacifist and longtime socialist parliamentarian, a newspaper editor as well as a writer of socialist lyrics and fairy tales—who wound up leading a demonstration of 200,000 people and then, in the aftermath of the Kaiser’s abdication, heading a minority government that introduced numerous progressive reforms (Eisner 1979). Eisner was the first of the “five literati” who would dominate the Munich events of 1918–1919. His assassination while on the way to hand in his resignation, coupled with the emergence of a short-lived Hungarian Soviet, generated the desire for a Bavarian Soviet. It was believed by many on the international left that a soviet in Bavaria would induce the Austrians to form one of their own (Carsten 1972, p. 263). Thus, the summary declaration of a Bavarian Soviet on 7 April 1919 made a certain degree of political sense even if the material conditions for its success were lacking.

Jewish Activists and Poets in Bavaria The Bavarian “soviet” was initially ruled by independent socialists like Ernst Toller along with a sprinkling of anarchists like Gustav Landauer and Erich Mühsam in coalition with representatives of the SPD. But the independents were organisationally weak and the majority socialists were increasingly disgraced by the actions of their comrades in Berlin. As a consequence, this regime found itself supplanted by a communist government whose most visible leader was Eugen Leviné. Communist rule, however, lasted only two weeks. It was displaced by a new “dictatorship of the natives” led by Toller and his friends, which lasted only a few days before capitulating to the forces of right-wing reaction.

PERSISTENT MEMORIES: JEWISH ACTIVISTS AND THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

245

The Bavarian Soviet never had a chance. It may have had strong support from the working class, but it immediately became the object of intense hatred by the capitalist, the petty bourgeois, and the peasant. The new soviet was also a perfect target for the “philistines.” Munich was, after all, a centre of the expressionist avant-garde before World War I. Perhaps for this reason, especially at the beginning, the Bavarian “soviet” was strongly influenced by representatives of the literati including, among others, Otto Neurath, Lion Feuchtwanger and Oskar Maria Graf. And these intellectuals did not make the best politicians. The Bavarian Soviet never produced leaders on par with Luxemburg, Liebknecht, or Levi. The foreign minister of this staunchly Catholic province, in fact, was a certifiable lunatic by the name of Franz Lipp—who in all seriousness—decided to declare war on the Pope. Nevertheless, for better or worse, the Bavarian Soviet was unique in attempting to fuse cultural with political liberation. Its guiding spirit was undoubtedly Gustav Landauer who withdrew from active participation when the communists took power. He was a pacifist and an anarchist whose nobility of spirit and commitment was noted by everyone who knew him. Born in 1870 in Karlsruhe, Landauer entered politics very young. “I was an anarchist,” he liked to say, “before I became a socialist.” And that was true enough. Landauer may have joined the social democratic movement and he may have edited a j­ournal called The Socialist around 1900. But, from the start, he had little use for the reformism of the SPD and quickly became a leading figure of an ultra-left faction, known as “the young ones,” which was summarily expelled in 1894. Proudhon and Kropotkin would always play a far greater role in the thinking of Landauer than Marx. His anarchist vision was directed less towards the institutions of the economy and the state than the human condition. He became interested in the “life reform” movement and, by 1902, his work had already influenced those involved with the journal, New Community, to which any number of major Jewish intellectuals like Martin Buber contributed. Indeed, this also was around the time Landauer formed what would become a lasting friendship with Erich Mühsam. Landauer was more than a political figure or a bohemian. He was also a noted historian of literature, who wrote a fine study of Shakespeare, and a novelist whose works brought him a wide measure of acclaim. His world was unbounded and that was also true of his wife—Hedwig Lachmann—who translated Oscar Wilde and Rabindranath Tagore.

246  S. E. BRONNER

Landauer spoke of himself as a German and a Jew in essays like The Developing Person (1913). But he deemed the whole of his personality more than the sum of its parts just as humanity was, for him, more than the various nationalities and ethnic communities comprising it. A presumption of human goodness and striving for a utopian condition of harmony, a respect for the individual and love of community, informed his ethics. These beliefs also played a role in his somewhat less notable political writings like A Call to Socialism, which envisioned economic equality along with a new direct form of democracy whose control by a newly educated working class would make violence dispensable. Marta Feuchtwanger—the wife of the great realist writer Lion Feuchtwanger and himself a participant in the events—told an interesting story about Landauer. Apparently, after being arrested following the collapse of the Bavarian Soviet, he started talking to the soldiers escorting him to prison about the goodness of humanity when suddenly, tired of walking and weary of his monologue, they summarily beat him to death (Feuchtwanger 1984, p. 133). He looked to the future without seeing the present. Baron von Gagern, the officer responsible for his murder, was never punished or even brought to trial. This story, which speaks volumes about the judiciary in the Weimar Republic, also provides a deep insight into the moral politics of Landauer. He always considered himself an educator and spoke to the best in people. His concern was less with institutions than the ways people treated one another. He called for a new humanitarian consciousness and a new democratic worldview. And, as Minister of Education in the Bavarian Soviet, Landauer attempted to introduce a set of radical reforms ranging from allowing any eighteen year old to become a full-time student at the University of Munich to setting up a “students’ soviet” and abolishing examinations. His democratic and bohemian perspective, in fact, becomes abundantly clear from his striking claim: “Every Bavarian child at the age of ten is going to know Walt Whitman by heart. That is the cornerstone of my educational program.” Rimbaud had called upon his generation to “change life.” Erich Mühsam heartily agreed. And why not? Mühsam was for Germany, according to another famous anarchist, what Rimbaud was for France (Souchy 1984, p. 10). Born in 1878, the son of a Jewish pharmacist in Berlin, he was expelled from high school for socialist agitation. Mühsam felt himself an “outsider” from the beginning and naturally gravitated to the anarchist circles of Berlin and Munich. Max Nomad described him as an inveterate sponger during these early years (Nomad 1964, pp. 16ff.).

PERSISTENT MEMORIES: JEWISH ACTIVISTS AND THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

247

But in 1904, The Desert, his first collection of poems was published and, soon enough, Mühsam began making his name as the author of cabaret songs, anecdotes and sketches. He riddled social democracy with sarcasm in poems like the untranslatable “Die Revoluzzer” and important journals like Die Weltbühne and Simplicissimus began publishing his work. “Let us make room for freedom” was a line in one of his poems. And that was what he sought to do when, in 1911, Mühsam became the editor of Kain, which he described as a “magazine for humanity.” It was, of course, nothing of the sort. This journal based in Munich was sophisticated and avant-garde. Mühsam wrote every line like his Viennese friend and counterpart, Karl Kraus, the editor of The Torch. Mühsam advocated pacifism, sexual liberation and an apocalyptic notion of revolution. He defended his radical friends and castigated the status quo. When World War I broke out, he published a collection entitled Deserts, Craters, and Clouds in which he made the plea: “drink, soldiers, drink ….” Mühsam refused to serve in the army or register as a conscientious objector. And, for this, he was jailed. He came out against the National Assembly following his release and sought to found an Association of International Revolutionaries in Munich, which came to nothing. Their programme was somewhat unclear and organisational questions bored Mühsam. Never particularly concerned with the class struggle, in keeping with Landauer, he spoke to the “exploited” and even attempted to proselytise among the lumpenproletariat. Mühsam’s vision of socialism, like that of Landauer and Toller, was essentially aesthetic and visionary. Mühsam was taken alive after the fall of the Bavarian Soviet and condemned to fifteen years at hard labour. The sentence was commuted to five years. He continued his anarchist activities after his release, but grew more sober. His new journal, Fanal, no longer criticised social democracy as the main enemy, but the Nazis. Mühsam spoke out against the abuses of the Weimar judicial system and supported organisations like Red Aid, which raised money for political prisoners and sought their liberation. He wrote a play, Reason of State, about Sacco and Vanzetti, and an account of the Bavarian Soviet entitled From Eisner to Leviné: A Reckoning. His own humanistic values and hopes for the Bavarian Soviet are therein made clear along with the stubbornness of the communists. Even in this work, however, Mühsam could not adequately deal with the shortcomings of his own political voluntarism or the institutional and social reasons for the failure of the Bavarian experiment.

248  S. E. BRONNER

Few were hated with the same degree of passion by the nationalist right and its advocates continued to vilify Mühsam during the years of the Weimar Republic. This anarchist Jew somehow stuck in the craw of the far right. Henry Pachter even suggested that Hitler probably remembered the young bohemian, playing chess in the famous Cafe Megalomania in Munich after the war, and making fun of the future chancellor’s drawings (Pachter 1982, p. 252). In any event, the philistines had their revenge. Following the Nazi seizure of power, Mühsam was immediately captured and transported to the Oranienburg concentration camp, where he died in 1934 after being slowly and almost systematically beaten to death. Mühsam was one of the best-loved figures of the Bavarian Soviet and there are enough reports about workers and soldiers shouting his name and even carrying him on their shoulders. He was a satirist, an ironist and something of a clown. He never showed favouritism towards any party and acted responsibly as a leading politician of the Bavarian Soviet. Mühsam sought unity, proved willing to compromise with the communists and even appeared as their spokesperson on one or two occasions. All of this without surrendering his principles or his various utopian ideas for reform. He knew who he was and his “identity” was never a problem for him. Thus, Mühsam could write: I am a Jew and will remain a Jew so long as I live. I never denied my Judaism and never even walked out of the religious community (because I would still remain a Jew and I am completely indifferent under which rubric I am entered in the state’s register). I consider it neither an advantage nor a disadvantage to be a Jew; it simply belongs to my being like my red beard, my weight, or my inclinations. (Mühsam 1984, pp. 422–423)

It wasn’t much different for Ernst Toller. The most famous and perhaps prototypical leader of the Bavarian Soviet was born in Posen in 1893 and his autobiography—I Was a German—speaks elegantly of anti-Semitism in Germany. But still he joined the military in a mood of “emotional delirium” to fight in World War I. Given his release in 1916, in the wake of a nervous breakdown, he soon became a staunch pacifist and ultimately a socialist. After studying at the University of Munich and Heidelberg, where he came to know Max Weber and various other distinguished academics, Toller wrote his deeply autobiographical play: Transformation (1917). Dream sequences, abstract figures and various

PERSISTENT MEMORIES: JEWISH ACTIVISTS AND THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

249

other expressionist techniques are employed in this drama whose main character experiences any number of “transformations,” each of which liberates him from a prior ideological prejudice, until finally he finds “redemption” (Erlösung) in a utopian vision of “revolution.” Based on a fundamental “faith in humanity,” concerned less with workers than an image of the oppressed, this “revolution” would prove non-violent and bring about a change in the very “essence” of “man” beyond all externalities. Toller was—like Eisner—a member of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), which had split from the SPD in 1916 over the latter’s pro-war policy. The USPD, small and poorly organised in Munich, had aligned itself with the councilist movement and Toller quickly became a leading figure in the Bavarian Soviet. His supposedly remarkable oratorical abilities surely didn’t hurt; indeed, it was said that “he carried the people by the force of his own convictions … They wanted a mission in life; Toller supplied them with one” (cited in Flood 1989, p. 4). The creation of the Bavarian Soviet was accompanied by the planting of freedom trees, the singing of Jacobin songs, and a great deal of libertarian rhetoric. The more contemporary German writer Tankred Dorst, in fact, argued that Toller interpreted the events of 1919 in terms of the expressionist apocalypse his works depicted. Whether that is true or not remains an open question. But it is surely true that Toller knew nothing about economics and not much more about institutions. His grasp of political priorities was also somewhat suspect. While Bavaria was experiencing a food shortage, in the aftermath of the allied blockade, Toller’s first speech to the soviet concerned the new forms of architecture, painting and drama by which humanity might express itself more fully. Administrative services collapsed and the organisation of revolutionary soldiers was a shambles; indeed, with a mixture of affection and sarcasm, Max Weber once remarked: “God in his fury has turned Toller into a politician.” But, in fact, Toller remains a great symbol for socialist libertarians. He was brave and humane. He fought courageously with the defenders of the Bavarian Soviet against the reactionary forces and saved many hostages from the revenge sought by various communist leaders like Rudolf Engelhofer. Toller was captured with the downfall of the Bavarian Soviet and spent five years in prison, part of the time—ironically—in a cell not far from the one occupied by Adolf Hitler. There he wrote his beautiful collection of poems, entitled The Swallow’s Book, which brought him

250  S. E. BRONNER

great popularity, and attempted to unify respect for the individual with solidarity in works like Man and the Masses (1924) and Broken-Brow, which concerns an impotent war invalid abandoned by society. The pathos in the work of Toller increased along with his despondency. And yet, following his release, he joined The German League for Human Rights and participated in various pacifist organisations. Even while writing for prestigious journals like Die Weltbühne, which published his prison writings, and using an innovative expressionist style, he always considered himself a “people’s poet” (Volksdichter). He was another, like Mühsam, who castigated the criminal justice system for its right-wing bias and Hooray! We’re Alive! remains among the most trenchant criticisms of the materialistic and chauvinistic underside of the Weimar Republic. Toller was also, along with Mühsam, one of the very few intellectuals who immediately realised the danger posed by the Nazis and what differentiated them from other “bourgeois” and even “reactionary” parties. Toller fled Germany when they came to power. He went from Switzerland to France, England and finally to the United States. But he hated exile. He never made it in Hollywood and, while feeling his powers diminishing, he despaired as Hitler won victory after victory. Toller, the pacifist and humanitarian, committed suicide in New York in 1939. He never saw the end of the regime he so despised. If Toller died too early, however, his communist competitor for power in the Bavarian Soviet—Eugen Leviné—died just in time. He would certainly have perished, perhaps even more cruelly, under Stalin. Leviné was not quite the saint his wife, Rosa Leviné-Meyer, portrayed in her biography. But he incarnated the best of the Bolshevik spirit. He was unyielding and dogmatic, but an honest intellectual and totally committed to the most radical utopian ideals of international revolution. Born on 10 May 1883 in St. Petersburg into a wealthy Jewish family, he was brought up in Germany where as a youth he actually fought a duel against someone who had made an anti-Semitic remark (Leviné-Meyer 1973, p. 6). He returned to Russia in 1904 where he gained revolutionary experience and participated in the Revolution of 1905 before being arrested and severely beaten. After bribery secured his release, he moved back to Germany. There Leviné worked as a propagandist for the SPD and naturally gravitated to the circle around Rosa Luxemburg before ultimately finding his way to Spartacus. Leviné soon enough found himself in disagreement with his mentor. Enthralled by the Russian Revolution of 1917, in contrast to Luxemburg, he took a genuinely ultra-left stance. He was critical of the

PERSISTENT MEMORIES: JEWISH ACTIVISTS AND THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

251

alliance between Spartacus and the USPD. He also vigorously opposed participating in the National Assembly and ultimately embraced Lenin’s new Communist International. Believing the masses would follow an inspired vanguard, in keeping with the Bolshevik example of 1917, he and his close comrade, Max Levien, were instrumental in causing the defeat of the more moderate proposals of Luxemburg and the leadership of Spartacus thereby paving the way for what would take place in Berlin. But, for all that, Leviné acquitted himself valiantly during the uprising. The police hunted for him and at the urging of Paul Levi, the new leader of the German Communist Party, Leviné was sent to Munich where he was to put the small and disorganised party cell in order. Leviné’s first article warned workers not to engage in any “precipitous” actions and he opposed forming a Bavarian soviet. When the soviet was proclaimed anyway, appalled by its circus-like character, Leviné was successful in calling upon the KPD to remain in opposition. He still feared working with representatives of the SPD and, perhaps more fully than any other of its prominent figures, recognised the lack of support—especially among the peasants—for the Soviet. The question is why Leviné should have called upon the communists to reverse their position. He knew the Soviet was doomed. Perhaps his new stance derived from a desire to take power and use the occasion to make propaganda and identify the communists with the soviet. His policy surely did not find its source in Moscow; indeed, no Bolshevik emissaries were active in Munich. Most likely, following Rosa Luxemburg, Leviné decided to preserve the soviet ideal and “stay with the masses” in the face of the reaction. Leviné was, interestingly enough, no less utopian than his opponents. His communists may have introduced censorship, but they too sought to revamp the schools, and proclaimed the famous Frauenkirche a “revolutionary temple.” All this was a desperate attempt to mimic what has been described as the “heroic period” of war communism in the Soviet Union. Communist workers, however, soon enough turned against the disastrous policy of Leviné and his heritage is tainted by the useless shooting of hostages and arbitrary confiscations carried out by members of his own party. For all that, however, Leviné remained true to his beliefs. He participated in the street fighting and his defiant death before a firing squad only testified to his courage. Indeed, with his cry of “Long Live the World Revolution,” the tragic-comedy of the Bavarian Soviet came to a close along with the most radical hopes of 1919.

252  S. E. BRONNER

Epilogue Judaism never figured prominently in the writings or the politics of these activists. All were cosmopolitans and, essentially, assimilationist. But, in keeping with the Old Testament, they considered themselves prophets of justice, equality and democracy. They were romantics without much sense of the institutions necessary to sustain their values. Each condemned the decadence of the status quo and genuinely identified with those whom, in biblical language, Ernst Bloch liked to call “the lowly and the insulted.” Each prized the moment of action and sought to provide the masses with a new sense of their own possibilities. Each also exhibited exceptional bravery and remained true to his or her convictions. Each after his or her fashion challenged an alienation whose source lies with the story of Adam and Eve. Each dreamed of paradise. These Jewish revolutionaries spanned the spectrum of radicalism and seemingly little united them. They were a motley crew. Mühsam and Toller were leading figures of the expressionist avant-garde. But the first was an anarchist and the second a left-wing socialist. It was the same with Landauer and Eisner though both were influenced by Kant. Leviné was a Bolshevik. As for Luxemburg, Jogiches and Levi, they had little use for moralism or bohemians and even less for authoritarians. Judaism doesn’t help much in explaining their particular form of revolutionary commitment. Viewing the matter in this light, however, is perhaps overly academic. The fascist and anti-Semites certainly didn’t feel that way. Judaism has a certain importance when considering the uprisings of 1919, but less with respect to its impact on the revolutionaries themselves than on their enemies. Activists of the counter-revolution used the visibility of these Jews to justify their idea of a “Jewish-Bolshevik” conspiracy intent on destroying Germany and the Aryan race. Anti-Semitism doesn’t disappear simply because Jews don’t define themselves as such. 1919 is a case in point. The utopian values embraced by these Jewish revolutionaries, in fact, only heightened the fervour and brutality of those most intent on introducing barbarism. And, in a way, the reactionaries succeeded. All of these remarkable humanitarians were forgotten long before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the emergence of our own right-wing cultural climate. The alternative they offered to both the impoverished cultural landscape of capitalism and what increasingly became a gray form of communism is now almost a memory. But this is precisely what makes it important to preserve a

PERSISTENT MEMORIES: JEWISH ACTIVISTS AND THE GERMAN REVOLUTION 

253

sense of their vision, their sacrifice, and contest the dark truth behind the beautiful words of Erich Mühsam: Who will remember me when I am dead? The sad day has snatched my youth. Evening came too soon. Rain fell. Happiness passed me by; I remained a stranger. My poor heart has its fill of suffering. Soon comes the night which has no stars

References Arendt, Hannah. 1973. Rosa Luxemburg. In Men in Dark Times. Middlesex: Penguin. Beradt, Charlotte. 1969. Paul Levi: Ein demokratischer Sozialist in der Weimarer Republik. Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt. Borkenau, Franz. 1962. World Communism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bronner, Stephen Eric. 2019. A Rumour About the Jews: Reflections on AntiSemitism and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. New York: Palgrave. Carsten, Francis. 1972. Revolution in Central Europe 1918–1919. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dunayevskaya, Raya. 1981. Rosa Luxemburg: Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Eisner, Kurt. 1979. Sozialismus als Aktion: Ausgewaehlte Aufsaetze und Reden, ed. Freya Eisner. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Ettinger, Elzbieta. 1986. Rosa Luxemburg: A Life. Boston: Beacon. Feuchtwanger, Marta. 1984. Nur eine Frau. Munich: Knaur. Flood, Charles Bracelen. 1989. Hitler: The Path to Power. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Levi, Paul. 1969. Zwischen Spartakus und Sozialdemokratie: Schriften, Autsaetze, Reden und Briefe, ed. Charlotte Beradt. Vienna: Europäische Verlagsanstalt. Leviné-Meyer, Rosa. 1973. Leviné the Spartacist. London: Gordon and Cremonesi. Luxemburg, Rosa. 1976. The National Question and Autonomy and Imperialism and National Oppression. In The National Question: Selected Writings by Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Horace B. Davis. New York: Monthly Review. Mühsam, Erich. 1984. Briefe 2 Bde. Darmstadt: Topos. Nomad, Max. 1964. Dreamers, Dynamiters, and Demagogues: Reminiscences. New York: Waldon. Pachter, Henry. 1982. Weimar Etudes. New York: Columbia University Press.

254  S. E. BRONNER Rosenberg, Arthur. 1961. Geschichte der Weimarer Republik. Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt. Souchy, Augustin. 1984. Erich Mühsam: Sein Leben, Sein Werk, Sein Martyrium. Reutlingen: Trotzdem Verlag. Traverso, Enzo. 1992. Les juifs et l’allemagne: de la “symbiose judeo-allemande” a la memoire d’auschwitz. Paris: Decouverte.

PART III

The German Revolution in Contemporary Political Theory

A Theory of Council Democracy Yohan Dubigeon

(Translated by Olivier Ruchet).

While historical and political studies of the councils and other political experiments of self-government are relatively easily accessible, analysis that approach the councils as a consequent political and theoretical set of ideas are, on the other hand, quite rare. However, the hypothesis pursued here consists in grasping democracy and the councils as a whole. That set of ideas might well not be monolithic or homogeneous, but it is at least coherent enough to be contrasted with other theoretical wholes, first and foremost with representative democracy in its modern, liberal form. This latter political and theoretical model embodies a historical reality, particularly well expressed in Bernard Manin’s classic book, The Principles of Representative Government (1997 [1995]). It is thus possible, and intellectually fruitful, to contrast that archetype of a modern regime, which Manin purposefully avoids calling representative democracy—avoiding the use of that hodgepodge concept is actually one of the strengths of his argument—with the model of council democracy. Council democracy represents a political object that has both a

Y. Dubigeon (*)  IEP (Sciences Po) Paris, Paris, France © The Author(s) 2019 G. Kets and J. Muldoon (eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13917-9_13

257

258  Y. DUBIGEON

historical reality—the communes, councils, committees and other forms of self-government and democratic self-instituting—and a genuine theoretical depth. The interpretation of the experience of the German councils proposed here follows this insight. The development of the workers’ movement in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century generated a rich variety of episodes of democratic self-organisation: councils, communes, committees, revolutionary assemblies and self-administration. Among these, the period of the councils that unfolded in more or less direct relation to World War I, occupies a central role. Although rightly described as revolutionary moments of preeminent importance, these political experiments are nevertheless largely ignored by modern democratic theory. Spontaneously emerging in moments of intense social, political and even armed conflict, political apparatuses such as the Paris Commune, Russian soviets or German councils are only partially understood unless the substantial positive political dimension they advocated is taken into account (Castoriadis 2007). The councils extend the potential of political conflict beyond the limits of the state and of the professional spheres of government (Abensour 2004). At the same time, they support elements of a substantial definition of radical democracy (Rancière 2006), namely the principles of council democracy, understood as a bottom-up form of democracy, as self-government, or as the collective self-instituting of political subjects. A hypothesis, however, is in and of itself no conclusive evidence, and the texts that treat council democracy as a theoretical and political whole are few and far between. Work dedicated to the topic usually belongs to one of three categories: 1. historical case studies: There are plenty of important monographs on historical events from the Paris Commune of 1871 to the Hungarian Councils of 1956.1 These works are obviously essential to develop a nuanced and contextualised understanding of the events. However, they tend to approach the experiences from the point of view of a political history of events, only leaving marginal space for the understanding of political institutions and practices invented at the time.2 What is more, by their very nature, they only seldom draw links between council and communalist experiments, which were similar in multiple ways, starting with the political functioning of council-type organisations.

A THEORY OF COUNCIL DEMOCRACY 

259

2. theoretical work devoted to, with varying degrees of emphasis, a council-like form of democratic organisation, or to a radical form of democracy based on these experiences. Here, the works of authors like Abensour (2004, 2011), Castoriadis (1987, 2007, 2009), or Rancière (2004, 2006, 2007) come to mind in France. One could also cite the even more renowned work of Hannah Arendt, who was, to the author’s knowledge, the first who used the expression council democracy in her book On Revolution (2006). 3. militant work, finally, as rich as it is diverse, outlines the democratic potential of council democracy. One can mention here the figures of founding theorists-militants like Anton Pannekoek and Rosa Luxemburg, or Herman Gorter, Otto Rühle and other followers of the Dutch–German left that sketched the outlines of a theory of the councils. It is therefore within this theoretical landscape, sketched here in very broad strokes, that the council experience during the German Revolution is approached. The present chapter follows the outline of a more in-depth analysis of the modern development of council democracy published as a book, La Démocratie des conseils (2017). The book draws attention to three constitutive dimensions of the politico-theoretical model, for which the Paris Commune, the Russian soviets and the German Revolution are, in turn, central references. These dimensions are (1) the principles of political organisation put forth; (2) the strategic questions raised; and (3) the problem of the mediation between organisation and movement. Accordingly, this chapter situates the German Revolution in the context of these three dimensions, and points to the places where its interpreters seem to have produced the most fecund work.

Political Principles Inherited from the Paris Commune The first dimension of the insurrection of the councils, as they appeared in Germany in the wake of the soviet movements of 1905 and 1917 in Russia, was deeply political. Most analysis, especially in commemorative periods such as we live in today, tend to focus on factual aspects and primarily put an emphasis on the destructive dimension of revolutionary organs. However, the main originality of these organs had to do with their positive political dimension, and with the creative potential they

260  Y. DUBIGEON

brought forth. The point is of course not to denigrate the importance of the insurrectional dimension of these instruments of struggle—as the chapter shows below—and even less so to proceed without a contextualised understanding of the chain of events leading to the German Revolution: the war, the loss of credibility of the unions, the influence of the Russian Revolution, the ambivalence of social democracy and the strategic choices made by the Communist Party under the influence of its Soviet neighbour definitely played a crucial role in the advent and the destiny of the council wave that swept across Germany. However, the creation of the councils and the deployment of their organisation can primarily be seen as the products of original political principles, of which the German Revolution is only one of the historical manifestations: the principles of democratic self-institution whose roots can be found in a number of important plebeian experiences (Breaugh 2013; Thompson 1966) before they appeared in their modern guise during the Paris Commune. Without falling into a formalist approach that would read into the institutional form taken by these democratic experiments the guarantee of their political meaning (form fetishism), it can be argued that the political principles of self-institution experienced in the continuity of the Paris Commune count among the structuring dimensions of bottom-up democracy. Council-type experiences primarily reveal a form of democracy that rests on its direct or horizontal dimension. Communalist experiences and councils of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century all offered a local and physical space for democracy to unfold. This anchoring was not artificially created, as it relied on existing spaces of social life, in particular in the sphere of professional activities—the workshop, the factory, the field—or of existing living space—neighbourhood, district, village, commune. In the case of soldiers or sailors (Badia 2008, pp. 49–53), the battalion displayed the double characteristic of embodying a double time-space of “professional” activity and of daily life. In Paris, a few months prior to the communalist insurrection of 1871, National Guard Vigilance Committees were elected by the base, and democratically organised into a vast federation whose central committee would form the Commune (Talès 1998, p. 20). At the same time, political clubs appeared everywhere in Paris. Situating themselves in the revolutionary heritage of 1789, 1793, and 1848, these spaces devoted to self-training strikingly illustrate the phenomenon of political reappropriation of council democracy.3

A THEORY OF COUNCIL DEMOCRACY 

261

In Russia, factory and neighbourhood soviets formed the first echelon of the political re-appropriation of the soviets (Anweiler 1974, pp. 108–128). They were generally in charge of organising local political life (starting with ensuring supplies and defense) as well as enforcing the decisions made by the soviets (Ferro 1980, pp. 53–54). Finally, in Germany, the phenomenon of political re-appropriation coalesced around a system of “trustees” at odds with traditional social democratic unions. These workshop or factory representatives elected by their base on a logic of company organisation opened up corporations and instituted a space of transversal democratic deliberation within the realm of production before they federated into unions (Authier 1973, p. 138). In all cases, it was the closer and more accessible institutions which were more easily taken hold of and utilised by the many. Conversely, Marc Ferro’s study of the sociological make-up of the soviets shows that the higher one went up in the concentric hierarchy of the soviets, the more social elites were overrepresented (1980, pp. 72–80). Such operations of political re-appropriation, that appeared spontaneously in contexts of intense social and political conflict, signify a gesture of maximal extension of democracy’s horizontal dimension, of which at least three theoretical principles can be deduced: a principle of participation, a principle of autonomy, and a principle asserting the political capability of the many. All three principles can be found in the main foundational texts of the council movements.4 Drawing more from the Athenian roots of democratic thought than from the liberal thought of political revolutions (Finley 1985), these principles constitute the first elements of a repressed council tradition in modern democratic thought. While not opposed to political representation, the democratic self-institution of councils displayed a form of vigilance towards the verticality of political power that deserves further elaboration. In the Parisian, Russian, and German experiences, a principle of ascending solidarity appeared as soon as the necessity to overcome the echelon of local democratic organisation became entrenched. On the ground, away from the theoretical debates of the International about federalism and democratic centralism, a form of concentric delegation emerged in a way that transcended actual capacities: in addition to the self-institution of the physical echelon was added the progressive delegation of everything that could not directly be handled by the echelon, according to a double principle of trust and permanent control, forming the core of the institutional principles of council democracy.

262  Y. DUBIGEON

From factory and neighbourhood committees to the executive committee to the Greater Berlin Council, German councils directly followed the model of the soviets: village soviets gathered in volost (Eroshkin 1919), volost executive committee members formed a regional assembly, whose representatives were sent to the echelon above, all the way up to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets that designated its central executive committee. Of course, this concentric architecture did not prevent the rapid bureaucratic takeover of decision-making, as occurred in the USSR. However, the institutional contours it sketched inscribed the power of the soviets as a bottom-up democratic movement. Delegation processes of communalist and council revolutions hence participated in a more general philosophy of proximity between the representatives and those they represented. At the time of the communalist insurrection, the Parisians mainly gave their votes to individuals who had never held elected office and belonged to the popular classes and the lower bourgeoisie (workers, employees, school teachers, writers, etc.), thereby prioritising interpersonal knowledge and militant reputation over socio-economic status (Dautry and Scheler 1960, p. 10). During the German Revolution, individuals literally named “trustees” were the first delegates of the council movement, as representatives of all the workers of companies, not subjected to the social democratic unions, which had converted to the war effort. This central phenomenon in the emergence of professional organisations federated into unions can be traced back to the British shop stewards movement (Authier 1973, pp. 90–107). Such proximity may not in and of itself offer much guarantee; it is nevertheless a first step towards an understanding of political representation conceived as a relationship in which the power of the representative is still under the control of the represented. On that point perhaps more than on any other, “the idea of the councils was born in the Paris Commune,” as German militant-theorist Otto Rühle put it (Rühle 1924). The main measures for controlling political offices and of ­vertical delegation were indeed invented and experimented within the French capital during the months of the Commune. First, the election and revocability of the entire civil service asserted that the principle of consent dear to the liberal revolutions was only meaningful under the aegis of a permanent accountability of representatives (and more widely of civil servants) in order to eschew dispossessing the body politic of the instituting power. The self-limiting of mandates and therefore the rotation of public offices as well as the limitation of the salaries of office holders and

A THEORY OF COUNCIL DEMOCRACY 

263

civil servants completed that effort towards the de-professionalisation of the institutions of the Commune (Bourgin and Henriot 2002, p. 126). While the Central Committee chose to dissolve before communal elections, and while official appeals repeated the necessity to trust unknown and poor individuals with elected mandates (Official Journal of the Paris Commune), in its early days the Commune voted for a remuneration cap of its members at the rate of an average manual worker (Bourgin and Henriot 2002). These principles, which were hailed by socialist theorists (Marx, Bakunin, Lenin, Luxemburg, Pannekoek), formed the basis of council revolutions in Russia and Germany. On the question of the imperative mandate, these democratic experiments were more ambivalent. While the Commune claimed an imperative mandate in order to facilitate a strict control over the work of representatives, the measure was never strictly decreed in the organisation of Russian and German councils. The quest for a permanent accountability of representatives was present in the two cases, but it was felt that the rigidity of the imperative mandate might risk paralysis in the deliberation among representatives that could then turn against initial anti-bureaucratic gestures (Bensaïd 2011, p. 54). Be that as it may, the shared preoccupation for the control of elective mandates crystallised in a set of principles that must be approached as a whole. Beyond a more or less comprehensive list of good institutional practices, the council movement displayed a self-consciously affirmed and resolutely democratic conception of representation. The maximal extension of horizontal participation and the permanent control of the vertical delegation of power together express a refusal of the professionalisation of political tasks. The principles expressed point towards the reintegration of political activities into the fold of other social activities, towards the fading away of the state as a distinct apparatus, and more widely towards the reversible transformation of the relationship between the governed and those who govern. On these essential points, just like Otto Rühle once claimed, the Commune opened the way to the Russian and German council experiences. Taken together, these political principles and practices thus express a radically democratic conception of political power. Council democracy is seen as democracy in and through action, leading to a form of self-education, a denaturalisation of authority, and to equality through practice (Rancière 2004, 2006, 2007). Out of the council movement also emerged a substantial conception of two essential democratic principles.

264  Y. DUBIGEON

First, equality: the relationship of political command is a priori established among equals, while reversible obedience, born out of controlled delegation, reinforces that equality a posteriori. Next, freedom: building itself up from the bottom of society, council democracy is constituted as an intrinsically plural and creative experience. Against liberal democracy—or representative government, perhaps— council democracy aimed to eliminate politics as a distinct profession linked to the state apparatus, in order to achieve a maximal extension of equality and autonomy in the collective handling of public affairs. In contrast with bureaucratic regimes and their totalitarian extensions, council democracy constituted itself as a form of collective management that sought to preserve the highest possible degree of political contestation and openness (Breaugh 2013, p. 115).

A Strategic Dual Role Inherited from the Soviets These political principles fuel a conception of democracy that is so rich, and so under-valued, that it is worth examining. At the same time, the political content of council democracy remains static and incompletely spelled out as long as the strategic issues that preceded its emergence and its hypothetical triumph are not carefully analysed. Phenomena such as the advent, the reversal, the institutionalisation and the disappearance of experiences of democratic self-institution must be looked at from the dynamic perspective of the political strategies put in place on the occasion of these experiences. However, the strategic elaborations favourable to the revolutionary establishment of council power are a necessary—but not sufficient— condition for the perpetuation of bottom-up democracy. What is at stake is twofold here: the internal make-up of councils, first—do the revolutionaries form a majority? What importance do they grant to the power of the councils?—and, then, the relation to existing social and political institutions—and in particular the question of whether capitalist property should be expropriated. However essential these questions may be, it is not the object of the present chapter to dwell on them in much detail—the point here is rather to understand the strategic dynamics that are transversal to communalist and council experiences and to capture their roles in the institutionalisation, the side-tracking, and the failure of these political moments. While the Paris Commune served as the matrix of the German Revolution from the perspective of the principles and

A THEORY OF COUNCIL DEMOCRACY 

265

conception of political power, the Russian soviets constituted the foundational reference from a strategic perspective. The council appeared in Russia in 1905 as a political tool of self-organisation on the basis of both territory and profession. However, in 1905 just like in 1917 or 1918, and in Russia just like in Germany, the council movement is poorly understood if one assumes that the councils were initially imagined and constituted as organs of self-government meant to serve as substitutes for state governments. Committees and councils appeared spontaneously during episodes of intense social and political tension, and were initially assembled as organs of struggle. The strikes of Ivano-Voznesenk and Petrograd in 1905 (Anweiler 1974, p. 39), the uprisings of the sailors in Kiel and of workers in Berlin at the end of the war in 1918 (Badia 2008, pp. 49–53) were insurrectional situations during which strikers and mutineers sought first and foremost to develop political tools that would be useful to their struggle. Their goal was to establish a unified and autonomous direction to the strike in order to strengthen it, and to give voice to the demands of the strikers—with the possible additional role of the defense of its members. As the insurrectionary situation gained strength, what was first thought of as strike committees tended to expand—in time and in terms of geographic and social space—to become denser, and to unify, until a council-type organisational web progressively appeared. In that sense, as Oskar Anweiler’s work underscores (Anweiler 1974, pp. 38–39), there was no difference in nature between a committee and a workers’ council, a soldiers’ council, or a neighbourhood council; there was a progressive and non-linear evolution of the degree of delegation, of unification, and of the social base involved in self-organisation. At the same time, the tightening of the council (or communalist) fabric progressively led to an overflowing of the initial role of the protests; that overflow led to a transformation of their meaning. Committees and councils extended their actions to increasingly general economic and political domains, until they took charge of a form of political reorganisation of the territories on which they operated. In Germany, the speed and intensity of the insurrection that followed the Kiel mutiny led to a fast evolution of the committees and councils. They often formed as true committees of public safety in charge of administering a growing part of day-to-day operations by seizing, even sooner than in Russia, numerous levers of power (Authier 1973, p. 138).5

266  Y. DUBIGEON

As a preliminary approximation, that changing role could be considered as the period of transition from a situation of self-organisation to self-government. The point was no longer only to organise the strike or to defend the struggle, but to progressively take on tasks that were until then performed by preexisting political institutions. This complex evolution was at the origin of situations of dual power, which could be described as the keystones of the success or failure of democratic experiences. The Petrograd soviet probably embodied the most famous example of dual power, as in the Spring of 1917, it found itself in a such a favourable situation that the provisional government was only able to remain in power thanks to the support of the soviet, while the soviet refused to take its place. This is the famous “February paradox” analysed by Leon Trotsky (Anweiler 1974, p. 129). Towards the end of 1918 in Germany, the exact same questions had to be faced by councils in de facto power across the country. Rosa Luxemburg described the situation in the following terms: We have to seize power, and the problem of the seizure of power poses the question: what does each workers’ and soldiers’ council in all Germany do, what can it do, and what must it do? (…) We must undermine the bourgeois state by putting an end everywhere to the cleavage in public powers, to the cleavage between legislative and executive powers. These powers must be united in the hands of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils. (…) Thus, the conquest of power will not be effected with one blow. It will be a progression; we shall progressively occupy all the positions of the capitalist state and defend them tooth and nail. (Luxemburg 1918)

Pannekoek expressed the stakes facing the councils in the following way: “their aims gradually take a more concise shape. From the simple strife for better working conditions, in the beginning, they grow into the idea of a fundamental reorganization of society” (Pannekoek 2003, p. 18). To be sure, the strategic dynamic briefly presented here did not boil down to a revolutionary framework mechanically conceived in two successive moments that would be separated by a sudden shift: revolutionary uprising, seizure of power, then transformation of social and political relations. Where the observation of council experiences is probably the most fruitful is precisely in the complex and porous interlocking at play between a negative side of struggle to destabilise existing institutions—both political and economic—and a positive side of

A THEORY OF COUNCIL DEMOCRACY 

267

political reconstruction by means of the principles of bottom-up democracy mentioned above. These two sides of the councils experiment, just like the two sides of the same medal, cannot be conceived or understood separately. Among the political organisations embodying these communalist and council experiences, two main poles can be sketched. The political tendencies that arose within the councils navigated between these two poles. On the one hand, one can distinguish a fetishist pole, composed of left-libertarian and anarchist-leaning organisations; and an instrumentalist pole on the other, composed of both—for reasons that were different in the two cases—Leninist and social democratic organisations. The Paris Commune found itself torn between these two poles, represented respectively by a federalist and internationalist minority, and by a majority essentially composed of Jacobins and followers of Blanqui. The divergence between their strategic orientations took a final, conflict-ridden turn during the debate of the Commune about the election of a Committee of Public Safety (Bourgin and Henriot 2002). On the one hand, the majority defended a principle of efficacy around a resolute action that came to terms with the fact that it bypassed the democratic principles of the Commune because it sensed the reaction was imminent. On the other hand, a minority, preoccupied with the dictatorial danger, defended the democratic principle by prioritising the creation of new social and political relations over the efficacy of the struggle against the Versaillais reaction. Between centralist and antiauthoritarian democratic demands (Breaugh 2013, pp. 188–193), the two ideal-typical poles, fetishist and instrumentalist, were pitted against one another, creating a central tension that was constitutive of council and communalist experiences. In Russia, the instrumentalist pole obviously prevailed, by way of Bolshevik control. In that regard, it is interesting to note that when they appeared in 1905, the soviets received a much warmer welcome from the social democratic Mensheviks than from the Bolsheviks. The former emphasised the role of revolutionary self-administration played by the soviets (Anweiler 1974, pp. 45–46), and viewed them very favourably until their ambiguous position flipped in 1917 as a choice had to be made between revolutionary self-administration and the liberal institutions of the provisional government (Anweiler 1974, pp. 68–72). The Bolsheviks, meanwhile, were initially resolutely hostile towards the soviets that they saw as non-revolutionary organisations, before they

268  Y. DUBIGEON

used them as their rallying flag in what amounted to a true tactical reversal in April 1917 (Anweiler 1974, pp. 154–156). This promotion of the soviets was made in view of the soviets’ capacity to undermine the provisional government and therefore because of their destructive role as instruments of struggle, rather than for the purpose of revolutionary self-administration. Where should the organisations of the German Revolution be placed with regards to this strategic tension? Even more so than in the case of the Russian Mensheviks, social democracy in the German case acted towards the councils with a form of ambiguity that precipitated their demise. After the Kiel sailors’ mutiny, the situation radicalised like wildfire: councils were formed in Hanover, Hamburg and Munich, where the workers’ council decreed an independent socialist democratic republic after the takeover of the Landtag. The revolutionary movement toppled the imperial regime in Berlin, where the president of the Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany (majority-SDP), Friedrich Ebert, became chancellor, and then president of the Council of People’s Deputies, thanks to the ambiguity of a particular strategic positioning: everywhere, the SPD sided with the revolutionaries, while at the same time calling for calm and restraint (Badia 2008, pp. 49–53). Germany experienced at that point a situation of dual power similar to what happened in Russia in the Spring of 1917, with the provisional government and the executive committee of the Greater Berlin Council. Soon thereafter, the maneuvering of the SPD dispelled the ambiguity, and successfully circumscribed the power of the councils everywhere it commanded a majority, by making the councils relieve themselves of their prerogatives in favour of legal political, social, and economic institutions (Authier and Barrot 1976, p. 102). The tragic degree to which social democracy would thereafter turn against the revolutionaries is well known, with Gustav Noske ordering Freikorps to crush the movement in a bloodbath, assassinating the movement’s two emblematic spokespersons, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The self-administration of the councils was skillfully suppressed, not by their direct dismantling, but by way of their self-dissolution and their institutionalisation, which culminated in the law of 4 February 1920 actually legalising the councils, putting a muzzle on their corrosive potential and turning them into a controlled element of the liberal and capitalist regime (Riesel 1997). As in the case of the Paris Commune, the fragility and the tragic destiny of German revolutionary experience raises the question of the

A THEORY OF COUNCIL DEMOCRACY 

269

temporality of council democracy, and of its ability to last. This aspect would deserve further elaboration than space allows for here, but it appears that self-government generally represents a paradoxical breach, temporarily opened in the normal functioning of liberal representative regimes. Democratic experiments appear in the breach in the mode of the event, while they foster the institutionalisation of radically democratic procedures (Dubigeon 2017, pp. 216–222). The strategic orientations of the Commune, the Russian Revolution, and the German Revolution, however different they might have been, all exemplified this temporality of a breach destined to close off again, seemingly condemning council democracy to fade. On the one hand, the fetishising of communalist self-government was the product of a focus placed on democratic procedures rather than on the problem of the balance of power. On the other hand, the instrumentalising of the councils was expressed by their mobilisation as tools of destabilisation rather than as perennial forms of self-institution. In one case, the fetishising of procedures failed to make the event endure, and in the other the instrumentalising of the procedures led to the event’s institutionalisation and emptied it of its democratic substance.

Sustaining the Council Project After the German Revolution The dual opposition between fetishism of form and strategic instrumentalisation begs the following question: are all forms of democratic self-institution bound to be either crushed (Paris Commune), led astray (Russian soviets), or domesticated (German councils)? Political scientists are probably unable to answer that question. However, the socio-history of the councils is interesting in that it leaves in its trail elements of political and strategic reflections as rich as they are understudied. It is in that regard necessary to turn to the so-called “councilist” or communist authors on the councils. These heirs of the German Revolution left behind a dense literature around the question of the articulations and links between the movement towards self-institution and the political organisations it fostered. In other words, it is the question of mediation, of the designation and role of spokespersons, and the question of organisation, which leads to the thorny debate on the inevitability (or not) of the dispossession of the represented by their representatives (Bourdieu 1985).

270  Y. DUBIGEON

A preliminary remark first. The quarrels and political divisions between Leninist communists, council communists, left-libertarians, and other political families are numerous. The point here is not to deny that fact, but the object of this chapter on council democracy is not to rehearse these debates.6 The works whose main conclusions are sketched below have been considered as the “councilist” pole broadly construed, gathering all the actors who defended council-types of self-institution as a goal and as a method. The heirs of that tradition comprise in that sense all those who approach the activity of political mediation somewhere between political substitutionism and the temptation of spontaneism. However, council theorists approached the strategic and organisational poles in very different ways. Thought on the councils first developed after the denunciation of political substitutionism, analysed as the central cause of the abandoning of council democracy and of any kind of political self-institution. This constitutive rejection can of course be explained by the hegemonic role taken by Leninism within the revolutionary movement, and it was first expressed as a criticism of Bolshevism in action. The first axis of criticism of the pro-council communist left has to do with the destruction of political pluralism, both outside the Bolshevik party and within the party itself (Ferro 1980, pp. 231–236). The banning of parties thought to be in favour of increasing the power of the councils,7 followed by the banning of all internal oppositions to the Leninist current of Bolshevism,8 led to the exclusion or removal of militants and theorists of left communism like Alexander Shliapnikov and Alexandra Kollontai, and more importantly to a progressive devitalisation of the soviets, which were progressively transformed into nothing more than the communication channel of the omnipresent party. This “councilist” criticism is linked to another: the problem of the subordination of the councils to a bureaucratic, if not totalitarian, political and economic power. Article 41 of the constitution of the USSR authorising the People’s Commissars to govern by decree without the approval of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets (Bunyan and Fisher 1934), militarisation of the workplace and reintroduction of appointed directors in companies (Pannekoek 1947) are among the seminal measures leading to the dispossession of the power of the councils. Leveraging these operational elements, opponents of the councils denounced the bureaucratic control over the power of self-institution, and the progressive emergence of a form of state capitalism, seen as a final sign of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. This idea is present in the works of the councilist heirs of

A THEORY OF COUNCIL DEMOCRACY 

271

left communism such as Anton Pannekoek, Otto Rühle, the Group of International Communists (GIK), and Paul Mattick. Another, more theoretical, critique of Bolshevik politics denounces the Bolshevik substitutionist conception of organisation insofar as it corresponds to a deterministic and anti-democratic conception of society. That critique, that emerges in the writings of the young Trotsky (1904), followed by Rosa Luxemburg (1906) and Anton Pannekoek (1910) offers a radical analysis of the close connection between Leninism and social democracy vis-à-vis the role of organisation, and of the scientist and elitist rapport of a certain Leninism towards the spontaneity of movement of political self-institution (Dubigeon 2017, pp. 284–288). If anti-substitutionism is thus the point of departure of council theories of organisation, is there a point of destination—or, to say it differently, does a council theory of organisation exist? While the problem would deserve further elaboration, a negative answer can already be given in the first instance. Readers interested in the rich debates between heirs of council theory on that question can turn to the last two chapters of this author’s book, La Démocratie des conseils (Dubigeon 2017, pp. 289–348). By way of conclusion, it is useful to offer some avenues of reflection on the topic. Taking stock of the failure of revolutionary movements, and in particular of the German council movement, some heirs of the tradition seem to fall into the trap of spontaneism by avowing a rejection of any form of permanent organisation. In a position of total rupture vis-à-vis the Russian Revolution, some council trends reject the old structures of the workers’ movement wholesale—parties, unions—arguing for the inevitability of the bureaucratic takeover that would necessarily come out of any interaction between organisation and movement (Wagner 1934; Group of International Communists 1938). A similar mistrust and strategic abandonment can be found in the works of authors like Helmut Wagner (1934), Otto Rühle (1924), Karl Schröder (1920), or Henk Canne-Meijer (2007). These works indirectly allude to a theorisation of passivity and the abandonment of the revolutionary project. In terms of political currents, this spontaneism is incarnated in the Essen tendency of the KAPD led by Otto Rühle, and by the creation of the AAUD-E, born of the split of the General Workers’ Union of Germany (AAUD). This tendency refuses any partisan mediation, and turns its back on the council communist party KAPD because the KAPD represents the old dualism party/union between political and economic organisations

272  Y. DUBIGEON

(Authier 1973, p. 110). Only the union should subsist, and it too is destined to dissolve into the council system, even if a certain confusion is introduced here between the revolutionary self-institution of the councils and the permanent organisation of the union (Rühle 1924). By refusing any political arbitration and any effort of theoretical clarification external to the movement, this strategic positioning seems to render unlikely the perpetuation of self-institution beyond the breach. The politics of councils is a sphere of reflection around self-government rather than a monolithic political tendency, as demonstrated by the fact that other currents and authors try to keep that threat at bay by exploring a middle ground between substitutionism and spontaneism. The quest for that balance originates in Germany, with the KAPD and the theoretical work of Anton Pannekoek, around three main axes: valorising the subjective factors—i.e. of work of political consciousness raising—as a key element of the project of council democracy; defense of spaces of self-organisation as indispensible settings of political gathering; and finally limitation of the role of permanent organisations to theoretical clarification and propaganda (Authier 1973, pp. 4–7). Later, around Castoriadis, on the occasion of a double dialogue he conducted with Anton Pannekoek and then Claude Lefort (Castoriadis 1952, 1954, 1959; Lefort 1952, 1958; Pannekoek 1953, 2011 [1954]), a conception of political mediation emerged that was both rich and fragile. Castoriadis, who was a staunch anti-determinist revolutionary, was ready to accept the permanent risk of failure of the project of political self-emancipation, by stumbling either on the side of the confiscation of the democratic project (substitutionism), or on the side of theorisation and passivity (spontaneism). However, in the lineage of the other “councilist” heirs of the German Revolution, he persisted in holding together revolutionary political action and an unconditional defense of self-institution, treading a narrow path between the abandonment of the revolutionary project and its instrumentalisation. At odds with the idea of a pacified society internally reconciled, the democratic project appears as the regime of the permanent calling into question, and as the symbol and guarantee of an effective autonomy. The detour operated here by means of the German Revolution and other experiences of political self-government served a twofold objective: to diminish the fuzziness around theories arguing in favour of a deepening of democracy—participatory, radical, deliberative—by adding a historic-practical dimension, and to prolong the historical thread

A THEORY OF COUNCIL DEMOCRACY 

273

of moments of self-emancipation by shedding light on one of its essential sources. The history of the councils is thus not merely interesting in itself, but because it allows a better understanding of the current stakes of democratic self-institution. If many a strategic marker was swept away by the failure of the Soviet Union and a decline of the workers’ movement that has been inversely proportional to the rise of neo-liberalism, it would be ill-advised to wipe the slate clean. The stakes of council democracy precisely acquire their full meaning when understood in light of contemporary mobilisations placing democratic self-institution as a central demand; the history of the councils is thus still in the process of being written, right before our eyes.

Notes 1.  To name but a few that were useful for the present text: Choury, Lissagaray, Rihs, Talès on the Paris Commune; Ferro, Trotsky, Schapiro on the Russian Revolution; Authier and Dauvé, Broué, Badia on the German Revolution. 2. It is important to immediately add to this remark the extreme difficulty that hinders the understanding of these political practices, sometimes situated in the microhistory of short and conflict-laden experiences for which sources are, on that particular point, very weak. 3. See in particular the Club Nicolas-des-Champs, whose archives were analyzed by Maurice Choury (1967). 4.  To cite only these: the “Declaration to the French People” for the Commune and the “Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People” of January 1918 for the Russian soviets. 5.  A number of situations of double power were, however, marred by a strong ambiguity, as the political appropriation of the councils happened in parallel with a strong legalism and a voluntary subjection to the authority of legal institutions in most councils where social democracy remained in the majority. 6.  This demanding work has in particular been carried out by Philippe Bourrinet (1998). 7. Such as the Left-socialist revolutionaries, whose leader Maria Spiridonova said about the vanishing of political liberty: “The soviets must be like a sensitive barometer connected to the people; therefore unconditional freedom of election, the free play of the people’s spontaneous will must prevail; only then will creative energy, a new life, a living organism come into being. (…) For this reason we fought exclusion of the right-wing socialists from the soviets” (Anweiler, p. 232).

274  Y. DUBIGEON 8. From that perspective, the decisive moment takes place during the Xth Congress of the Bolshevik Party of March 1921, following which the Workers’ Opposition as well as all other form of internal currents within the party are banned (Shliapnikov, “Appeal of the 22”; Kollontai, “Speech at the Xth Congress”).

References Abensour, Miguel. 2011 [1997]. Democracy Against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Movement, trans. Max Blechman. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Abensour, Miguel. 2004. Pour une philosophie politique critique. Paris: Sens & Tonka. Anweiler, Oskar. 1974 [1958]. The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905–1921, trans. Ruth Hein. New York: Pantheon Books. Arendt, Hannah. 2006 [1963]. On Revolution. London and New York: Penguin. Authier, Denis. 1973. La gauche allemande: pour l’histoire du mouvement communiste en Allemagne de 1918 à 1921. Paris: la Vieille taupe. Authier, Denis, and Jean Barrot. 1976. La gauche communiste en Allemagne: 1918–1921. Paris: Payot. Authier, Denis, and Gilles Dauvé. 2003. Ni parlement, ni syndicats: les Conseils ouvriers! Les communistes de gauche dans la Révolution allemande (1918–1922). Paris: Les Nuits Rouges. Badia, Gilbert. 2008. Les Spartakistes: 1918 l’Allemagne en révolution. Bruxelles: Aden. Bensaïd, Daniel. 2011. La politique comme art stratégique. Paris: Syllepse. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1985 [1984]. Delegation and Political Fetishsm, trans. Kathe Robinson. Thesis Eleven 10–11 (1): 56–70. Bourgin, Georges, and Gabriel Henriot. 2002. Procès-verbaux de la Commune de 1871. Coeuvres-et-Valsery: Ressouvenances. Bourrinet, Philippe. 1998. La gauche germano-hollandaise des origines à 1968. On line Edition. http://www.left-dis.nl/f/gch/. Accessed Oct 2018. Breaugh, Martin. 2013 [2007]. The Plebeian Experience: A Discontinuous History of Political Freedom, trans. Lazer Lederhandler. New York: Columbia University Press. Broué, Pierre. 2006 [1971]. The German Revolution, 1917–1923, trans. Eric Weitz. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Bunyan, James, and H.H. Fisher. 1934. The Bolshevik Revolution 1917–1918: Documents and Materials. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Canne-Meijer, Henk. 2007 [1935]. Vers un nouveau mouvement ouvrier, trans. P. Bourrinet. Echanges et Mouvement. Castoriadis, Cornélius. 1952. Sur le programme socialiste. Socialisme ou Barbarie. n°10.

A THEORY OF COUNCIL DEMOCRACY 

275

Castoriadis, Cornélius. 1954. Réponse au camarade Pannekoek. Socialisme ou Barbarie. n°14. Castoriadis, Cornélius. 1959. Prolétariat et organisation. Socialisme ou Barbarie. n°27. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987 [1975]. The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 2007. Les carrefours du labyrinthe 4. La montée de l’insignifiance. Paris: Éd. du Seuil. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 2009. La source hongroise. Collectif Lieux Communs. Choury, Maurice. 1967. La Commune au cœur de Paris. Paris: Éditions sociales. Dautry, Jean, and Lucien Scheler. 1960. Le Comité central républicain des vingt arrondissements de Paris: septembre 1870-mai 1871. Paris: Éditions sociales. Dubigeon, Yohan. 2017. La Démocratie des conseils: Aux origines modernes de l’autogouvernement. Paris: Klincksieck Éditions. Eroshkin, M.K. 1919. The Soviets in Russia. New York: Russian Information Bureau in the U.S. Ferro, Marc. 1980. Des soviets au communisme bureaucratique. Paris: Gallimard. Finley, Moses. 1985. Democracy Ancient and Modern. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Group of International Communists (GIC). 1938. The Origins of the Movement for Worker’s Council in Germany. Trans. from Dutch. http:// www.marxists.org/subject/left-wing/gik/1938/workers-councils.htm. Accessed Nov 2018. Lefort, Claude. 1952. Le prolétariat et le problème de l’organisation. Socialisme ou Barbarie. n°10. Lefort, Claude. 1958. Organisation et parti. Socialisme ou Barbarie. n°26. Lissagaray, Prosper-Olivier. 2012 [1876]. History of the Paris Commune of 1871, trans. Eleanor Marx. London: Verso. Luxemburg, Rosa. 1906. The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions. Trans. from German by Patrick Lavin. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/mass-strike/. Accessed Nov 2018. Luxemburg, Rosa. 1918. Our Program and the Political Situation: Speech to the Founding Congress of the Communist Party of Germany (Spartacus League), Made on December 31, 1918. Trans. from German. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/31.htm. Accessed Nov 2018. Manin, Bernard. 1997 [1995]. The Principles of Representative Governement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pannekoek, Anton. 1910. Tactical Differences Within the Workers’ Movement, trans. Malachy Carroll. Bricianer, Serge. 1976 [1969]. Pannekoek and the Workers’ Councils. St Louis, MO: Telos Press.

276  Y. DUBIGEON Pannekoek, Anton. 1947. Public Ownership as Common Ownership. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1947/public-ownership.htm. Accessed Nov 2018. Pannekoek, Anton. 1953. Letter to Socialisme ou Barbarie. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1953/socialismeou-barbarisme.htm. Accessed Nov 2018. Pannekoek, Anton. 2003. Workers’ Councils. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Pannekoek, Anton. 2011 [1954]. Reply to Castoriadis, trans. Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi. Viewpoint Magazine. https://www.viewpointmag. com/2011/10/25/letter-3-pannekoek-to-castoriadis/. Accessed Nov 2018. Rancière, Jacques. 2004 [1995]. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2006 [2004]. On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heran. London: Verso. Rancière, Jacques. 2007 [2005]. Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran. London: Verso. Riesel, René. 1997. Préliminaires sur les conseils et l’organisation conseilliste. Internationale situationniste. Paris: A. Fayard. Rühle, Otto. 1924. From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution. London: Socialist Reproduction. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https://www.marxists. org/archive/ruhle/1924/revolution.htm. Accessed Oct 2018. Schapiro, Leonard. 1955. The Origins of the Communist Autocracy—Political Opposition in the Soviet State—First Phase 1917–1922. London: G. Bell & Sons. Schröder, Karl. 1920. Du devenir de la nouvelle société. (Dis)continuité 7. Talès, C. 1998. La Commune de Paris de 1871. Paris: Spartacus. Thompson, Edward P. 1966. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage. Trotsky, Leon. 1904. Our Political Tasks. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https:// www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1904/tasks/#online. Accessed Nov 2018. Wagner, Helmut. 1934. Theses on Bolshevism. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/wagner/1934/theses.htm. Accessed Nov 2018.

Insurgent Democracy and the German Councils Paul Mazzocchi

The traditional image of council movements has seen them as a spontaneous outburst of collective power, often breaking with the higher authority of a party or bureaucratic type.1 But, in these terms, democratic insurgencies become little more than a temporary outburst, seemingly destined to fail as politics regresses into a constituted or formal politics. Against this line of thinking, this chapter explores the contribution of Miguel Abensour’s theory of insurgent democracy to re-thinking the problem of constitution and institution, and utilises these contributions to read the emergence of council democracy during the German Revolution. This re-thinking begins with a re-conceptualisation of “institution” as denoting a social matrix, and with an attempt to assert a constitutional right to insurrection. In this context, the developing revolutionary movement in Germany represents the emergence of an insurrectionary or insurgent institution, with institution understood not simply as a “governing body” but as a social matrix that informs and makes possible collective action. This forces us to consider the revolution as more than an ephemeral or momentary phenomenon, but something P. Mazzocchi (*)  York University, Toronto, ON, Canada © The Author(s) 2019 G. Kets and J. Muldoon (eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13917-9_14

277

278  P. MAZZOCCHI

that is anchored in longer processes. The German Revolution further poses the problem of producing a political institution that prolongs the revolutionary caesura between two different regimes of domination, each representing an eternal return of the “state” as a form of political relation. By constructing an insurrectionary form of institution, the council movement constitutes a continued insurgence against the emergence of a new state, exhibiting the dialectic of emancipation and the means through which a right to insurrection takes on a concrete form that aims to deny a regression into systems of domination.

The Contours of Insurgent Democracy Insurgent democracy begins with the idea that the demos—understood as an indeterminate, plural being—is the subject of politics. But, as an originary subject, it must be instituted, which is to say that its existence does not preclude the act of subjectification whereby it asserts its own being. Building on this, Abensour understands the political as a realm or space in which the demos-as-subject objectifies itself. But such acts are haunted by the originary division of the social. On one hand, this means that the social is plural and caught up in temporality, and thus not capable of producing an identity or a totalising subject. On the other, this refers to the idea that all communities are divided by two desires: the desire of the grandees to govern and oppress, and the desire of the plebeians to be neither governed nor oppressed. This leads to the conflictual character of political objectification. The grandees attempt to solidify their own power, separating the political from its connection to the ambiguities of the originary subject, turning state power into an alien entity that subjects the demos to a political force outside of itself. Under these conditions, a part represents itself as the whole, imposing a passivity on the rest of society, and an ever-present uniformity upon the parts. Against this, the plebeians attempt to break this stranglehold on power in favour of the non-identical and indeterminate character of political being. The consequences of this can be further drawn out through Gustav Landauer’s understanding of the state as “a social relationship; a certain way of people relating to one another” (2010b, p. 214). The state is a relation that corrupts the social by incorporating people into their own oppression via a repressive mode of sociality. Such a relation—which Abensour terms “all-One” (tous Un)—is predicated upon a “unitarian

INSURGENT DEMOCRACY AND THE GERMAN COUNCILS 

279

totality” that alienates political power from society, and ties all to a singular will (Abensour 2011b, p. 345). Moreover, as the imposition of an absolute identity, the all-One aims to erase the traces of social division (between state and society, and the division internal to the social) in the service of proclaiming a reconciled society. Such a politics suppresses any semblance of community and, in inaugurating a singular identity, breaks the possibility of social bonds, which are founded via plurality and the indeterminacy of the social. For Abensour, the contrary of the all-One of the state relationship is the all-ones (tous uns), which is rooted in the creation and defence of solidarity between individuated beings as a unity of the diverse, or an aleatoric formation constituting a relationship of “friendship-freedom” (2009, pp. 354–355). As he defines this intersubjective relation: “it signifies the passage from power over human beings to power with and between human beings, the between being the place where the possibility of a common world is won” (2011a, pp. 96–97). This distinguishes the sovereign power contained in the state relation as an all-One (a relation of command-obedience or power over) from the aleatoric web of egalitarian relations emblematic of the non-state relation as an all-ones (a relation of solidarity or power between). The fundamental consequence of this understanding of the state and non-state relation is that democracy can only exist against the state: democracy is the demos’ attempt to rupture any attempts to efface their indeterminacy and multiplicity, as well as to establish the state as a separate political power alienated from the subject that institutes it. In these terms, democracy is not thought of as a state form, but as a form of action and experience. It is thus defined more specifically as insurgent democracy, a permanent negativity which attempts to block the emergence of a state relation. This calls for the creation of alternative social bonds within and against the power of the state relation: by opening up the antagonism between the all-One and all-ones, and creating “a community of people outside the State,” the demos enacts a freedom that seeks to tear down the isolation, loneliness and antagonism of tyranny by producing, to quote Landauer, “an organic unity, a web of many groups” (2010a, p. 168). Abensour rejects the possibility of a harmonious reconciliation, asserting a permanent antagonism (2008, p. 418) against the all-One, acknowledging the temporality of any political event/experience and seeing the continual possibility of regressing into a new state: the democratic impulse battles not merely the ancien regime, but the new state in statu nascendi (2011a, p. 96).

280  P. MAZZOCCHI

Institution, Constitution and the Right to Insurrection The sort of radical vision of democracy that Abensour mobilises has faced two persistent criticisms. To begin with, because it emphasises moments of insurgency, it is said to be episodic or “revoltist,” incapable of concerning itself with solidification or the creation of an institutional infrastructure (Gauchet 2005; Critchley 2010, p. 52). Radical democracy is thus dismissed as defeatist, insofar as democracy is never more than an ephemeral experience; moreover, this suggests the need for elite rule, insofar as the people always regress into disorder. At the same time, radical democracy confronts the opposite problem: that of abridging insurgency via the establishment of institutional forms, and their consequent reification or pacification—a situation in which the demos’ participation recedes as politics becomes “formal” rather than “extraordinary” (Kalyvas 2008, Chapter 9; Muldoon 2011, pp. 410–412). Under these conditions, institutionalisation potentially leads to democracy’s abridgement via the exclusion of the demos’ constituent power from politics. In defending insurgent democracy against such criticisms, Abensour begins by reconceptualising the meaning of institution via the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For Merleau-Ponty, institution signifies: those events in an experience which endow the experience with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will make sense, will form a thinkable sequel or a history – or again the events which deposit a sense in me, not just something surviving or as a residue, but as the call to follow, the demand of a future. (2010, p. 77)

Here, institution refers to the sedimentation of experience into a coherent field of meaning that embodies the conditions of possibility for praxis. But, at the same time, it is not merely sedimentation. Sedimentation brings into being the means of transforming and giving new expression to the experiences that institution draws together: as the instituting-instituted, it is an opening that creates the conditions of possibility for its own transformation. In this vein, Abensour posits “institution” as an experiential matrix, possessed by an “imaginative dimension, one of anticipation, which in itself has the potential to engender customs, or rather attitudes and behaviours, consistent with the emancipation it announces” (2011a, p. xxvii). Thus, far from being mutually exclusive, institution and insurgence become necessary compliments:

INSURGENT DEMOCRACY AND THE GERMAN COUNCILS 

281

it is possible that, due to a circulation between present and past, certain institutions informing a given political context serve to underpin insurgence. It is even possible that insurgent democracy, in order to endure and not be reduced to a flash in the pan, summons or in some way gives rise to the institution, for the purpose in this case of articulating the principle of non-domination and a certain anchorage in time, in the confrontation of two temporalities. (Abensour 2011a, p. xxvii)

In effect, there are mediations between institution and insurgence, with institution underpinning and informing insurgence, insurgence necessitating institution, and each acting as the launch pad for the other. In turning to the problem of the pacification of insurgency, Abensour turns to the right to insurrection in the French Constitution of 1793. Such a right codifies the demos’ ability to assert itself and its political capacities via bodies that maintain constituent power and political participation after the insurgent moment has passed. While insurgent democracy depends on a rupture with the regime of domination, democracy is persistent in its continual attempt to wrest politics away from an elite that would exclude the demos from politics. Such a right would continue to recognise the conflictual character of democracy as a form of insurgency, one faced with the constant possibility of counter-democratic action. As Abensour states: [Democracy] involves the birth of a complex process, where the social is instituted and the institution directed at non-domination, one permanently inventing itself to better perpetuate its existence and to defeat the counter-movements that threaten to annihilate it and to effect a return to a state of domination. (2011a, pp. xxiii–xxiv)

This situates democracy within time, rather than treating it as a momentary action or part of a static constitution. Rather, the constant dialectic or struggle between the demand for freedom, and the attempt to inaugurate forms of domination, necessitates a radical check on political institution(s), lest it/they be wrested from the people and wielded against them. This requires a defence of the constituent moment, the refusal to allow it to translate into a constitution that permanently reifies the political community. The right to insurrection gives the demos a constant right to enter the realm of the political vis a vis those who would seek to exclude them.

282  P. MAZZOCCHI

But it is not merely the right to insurrection that Abensour is endorsing. Rather, it is the primacy of the originary institutions that facilitate the constituent moment. In other words, insurgent democracy “is selective” in placing primacy on particular institutions that defend the capacity of the demos. Abensour sees a hostility between institutions and law, with law holding out the potential of becoming the arbitrary assertion of those in power. In privileging insurgent institutions, the constitution and laws are subject to a “reduction” that challenges their transformation from the objectification of the demos’ existence to its alienation. In Abensour’s words, it is “necessary to reduce this objectification to what it is – a mere moment of a more global process – and to determine quite exactly the limits of the objectification in order better to control the theoretical and practical energy dispensed in the political realm” (2011a, p. 53). Insurgent institutions can situate political objectification within a specific spatio-temporal location, defying closure: a complete, identical objectification is defied by the indeterminate and self-creating character of the demos, as well as its location in time. Moreover, this links the institutions and their insurgent intention back to the principle of intersubjectivity, defying the ability to use them as a power over people and seeking to maintain their status as creating webs of relations between people and facilitating forms of action. While Abensour’s work has often been criticised for endorsing plurality and indeterminacy to the point of precluding the development of a concrete institutional form (Levitas 2013), councils constantly appear in his work (Cervara-Marzal 2012, p. 24) as the expression of insurgent democracy: they are the means through which the demos gains political existence, and are expressive of the right to insurrection not merely as a check on power or a form of better democratic representation but as a concrete counter-power always attempting to resist the alienation or abrogation of political power. In these terms, the councils contain a positive right (action/participation), but one that is fundamentally defined by the attempt to maintain the political as a lieu vide or empty place, which militates against any singular will filling it. Marx’s understanding of the “Communal Constitution” enacted during the Paris Commune is instructive here. In its simplest form, the Communal Constitution’s resistance to the state was contained in the principle of the revocability of the members of the Commune. In these terms, the constitution was characterised by a perennial “against” that sought to make permanent the gap between an old order of domination and the potential

INSURGENT DEMOCRACY AND THE GERMAN COUNCILS 

283

emergence of a new one. In Abensour’s words: “[insurgency] can also set in motion a circular flow between the present of the event and the past, insofar as this involves encounters among emancipatory institutions holding out a promise of liberty. Here, the people rose up against the liberating institutions’ lack of a present, demanding that these institutions be respected” (2011a, p. xxvi). The attempt to wrest institutions away from their popular expression into codified and pacifying laws must be blocked by drawing those institutions back to the revolutionary past/ origins from which they emerged (Abensour 2011a, pp. 87–88, 94). The constituent moment sought to tear down the state; the attempt to twist the new forms of the political back to the state form requires the re-enactment, and constant vigilance, of a power that exists alongside and against any such recurrences. Thus, the right to insurrection provides a means to drawing back the instituted/constituted to its instituting/constituent moment, as an acknowledgement that the instituting/ constituent moment is never fully realised via an institution/constitution.

The Councils as a Form of Institution In its classical image, the council movement has spontaneously emerged. As Arendt states: “Each time they appeared, they sprang up as the spontaneous organs of the people, not only outside of all revolutionary parties but entirely unexpected by them and their leaders” (2006, p. 241). Part of Arendt’s point is that the formation of councils was an egalitarian mode of democracy that emerged against the potential bureaucracy and hierarchy of political parties. But she seems to equally suggest that the emergence of councils was itself a spontaneous act—something emerging both unexpectedly and in the moment. This is precisely the image that emerges of the council movement during the German Revolution: it was a spontaneous uprising of sailors, soldiers and workers, who spontaneously formed councils as the fundamental means to their political subjectivity. This sought to break with their subordination to the formal state, as well as the larger “relation” of the state as embodied in the unions and political parties that sought to keep in check their discontent (Icarus 2012, pp. 6–11; Broué 2005, pp. 91–97, 130–131; Hoffrogge 2015, p. 50). Yet, it is precisely these “temporary” and insurgent elements that have often lead critics to dismiss the events of November 1918 as not a true revolution, and as a largely “transitory,” and disorderly/anarchic, event caught up in hopeless romanticism (Broué 2005, p. 157).

284  P. MAZZOCCHI

The spontaneist understanding of the councils ignores the institutional matrix that facilitated this type of action in the first place. The type of relation that Abensour posits between institution and insurgency lies at the heart of Rosa Luxemburg’s writings, which attempt to re-think the binary between spontaneity and organisation. Her understanding of spontaneity is directed against the abstract version posited by the “anarchist” mentality that permeates both anarchist and vanguardist understandings of the mass (or general) strike: the idea that the mass strike is a matter of the pure will—whether this will is to be exercised at any moment or repressed until the moment is “right.” For Luxemburg, spontaneity involves a “spontaneous” element, but one that is educated and transformed through its own emergence, and which is therefore not rooted in the “immediacy” of the act but mediated and shaped by and through experiences that are drawn together as an “institution.” In analysing the Russian Revolution of 1905, she provides a phenomenology of working-class resistance via the mass strike as the mode of becoming of the working class as revolutionary subject—as its form of institution (Luxemburg 2004). But, in these terms, institution denotes a threefold concept: the act of instituting a subject; the institutional matrix within which, and because of which, action becomes possible (the institutinginstituted); the concrete bodies that come to represent an infrastructure or architecture for the “becoming” of the democratic ideal. The Russian experience shattered the theorisations from German which saw the mass strike as occurring both from above via party/union organisation and emerging all in one moment/movement. Instead, Luxemburg discerned a series of seemingly disparate phenomenon that came together into a mass strike through the dialectic of spontaneity and organisation, with each spontaneous outburst or uprising in turn spurring an organisational movement that in turn further spurred more mass spontaneous uprisings outside the organisational moment. This implies the opening of the mass strike as a particular form of action, as well as its transformation in the process of its utilisation. As the parties/unions aimed to grasp and direct the spontaneous emergence of mass movements, these movements further expanded their own force beyond the organisational efforts. Hence, the matrix introduced by the institution is also the means to transforming it or taking it in new directions—the opening of a particular mode of being includes innovation, opening a path rather than providing an ending. This dynamic includes the mutual conditioning of individual and mass strikes, with mass strikes taking up

INSURGENT DEMOCRACY AND THE GERMAN COUNCILS 

285

the momentum built by local ones, and with each expressing the strike in new forms. Thus, there is a “reciprocal action,” in which cause and effect constantly change places. This included traversing a series of “defeats” which made such actions look “premature,” but were actually the condition of possibility of a larger transformation (Luxemburg 2004, pp. 188–199). Also central to this process was the intersubjective solidarity formed in the mutual act/event that the institution drew together. Luxemburg gives the example of a bloody suppression in St. Petersburg that became a rallying cry for a larger phenomenon, whereby solidarity strikes broke out elsewhere that escaped the organisational capture of social democratic parties, further expressing the spontaneity of the masses. As she describes such a phenomenon: But this first general direct action reacted inwardly all the more powerfully as it for the first time awoke class feeling and class consciousness in millions upon millions as if by an electric shock. And this awakening of class feeling expressed itself forthwith in the circumstances that the proletarian mass… quite suddenly and sharply came to realize how intolerable was that social and economic existence which they had patiently endured for decades in the chains of capitalism. Thereupon there began a spontaneous general shaking of and tugging at these chains. (2004, p. 181)

This is a coming together or coming into being of the proletariat, founded on a form of intersubjectivity in which a response to a set of circumstances/events leads to co-feeling and mutual action via the mass strike as a vehicle for that expression. Drawing on Luxemburg’s insights, the very principle of institution demands more than a notion of connecting a series of experiences. Rather, we need to understand this connection of experiences, and their solidification, as the inauguration of an insurrectionary or insurgent institution or matrix—one that gives, to use a French term, sens (both meaning and direction) to modes of action and being-in-the-world. Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of institution suggests a social matrix as a field of vision that patterns ways of being and behaving, giving them a logical sens, which in turn “merges into our way of patterning the world and co-existing with other people” (2005, p. 219). More pertinently, this logic or matrix becomes the condition of possibility of any insurgent uprising: the more minor events are part of the very foundation of

286  P. MAZZOCCHI

social institution, including an existential project that creates a mode of being predicated on solidarity. In his analysis of the Russian Revolution of 1917, Merleau-Ponty focuses on the coming together of three fundamentally dissimilar class figures as the creation of proletarian institution: the factory worker, the peasant day-labourer and the tenant farmer. Proletarian institution emerges from a common situation and potential modes of being-together: it emerges through the process of these subjects being caught up with one another in carrying social institutions anew, the condition of possibility of which lies in their interaction via the general strike as a meeting place of intersubjective transformation. This opens the possibility of a transcendence of the singular position of each class figure—their synchronisation—in feeling themselves as caught up in a common situation and subject to connected conditions that repress or defy the existence of each. Synchronisation transcends an original difference in a manner that allows for a form of unity via solidarity and being-together, which does not annul their alterity or singularity. Merleau-Ponty saw this specifically when the Russian peasants joined the cause of the workers of Moscow and Petrograd. In such situations, “class is coming into being” (Merleau-Ponty 2005, p. 517) with the full becoming implying a transformation of the affective capacities of the working classes and their relations to one another. As Merleau-Ponty states: “Social space begins to acquire a magnetic field, and a region of the exploited is seen to appear. At every pressure felt from any quarter of the social horizon, the process of regrouping becomes clearly discernible beyond ideologies and various occupations” (2005, p. 517).

Insurgent Institution and the German Revolution This provides us with a new means of thinking through the insurgence in Germany. To begin with, we can acknowledge that the German Revolution and its council movement cannot be limited to the singular year of 1918, nor extended only to include the so-called Spartacist Uprising of 1919, nor extended merely up to a final wave of council actions and general strikes in 1923. Rather, the revolution must be understood as a longer process. The concept of insurgent institution establishes something more than the ephemeral emergence of insurgency in November 1918: the conditions of possibility of insurgence positions this moment in a sequence that transcends its singularity/ spontaneity, giving a series of strikes and political actions a larger meaning.

INSURGENT DEMOCRACY AND THE GERMAN COUNCILS 

287

This larger meaning must be situated within the context of the organisational activities of the left parties, including the Revolutionary Stewards, well before the emergence of a full-blown revolt in November 1918. Rather, the first mass strike, which took place in June 1916, as well as the organisational efforts prior to it, must be understood as a moment in the “spontaneous” emergence of November 1918. As should the Bread Strike of 1917, the mass strikes of the summer and autumn of 1917, including the revolt of sailors against the Imperial Naval Command, and the January strike of 1918 (Hoffrogge 2015, Chapter 2). Moreover, the insurrectionary institution in Germany must also be extended in accord with Luxemburg’s own elaboration of the discovery of the means of proletarian insurgency inaugurated by the 1905 general strikes in Russian—as well as the 1917 Revolution, and even the Kronstadt (Icarus 2012, p. 11). The practice or logic of this sequence of events gives sens to the logic of revolt, not only informing the further actions and practical energies of the demos but also spurring them on beyond the organisational capture of the parties. Indeed, while the parties played a fundamental role in a number of the strikes prior to November 1918, the eruption of insurgence by the sailors of Wilhelmshaven, and the sympathy strikes in Kiel, emerged outside of this organising power and its potentially inhibiting effects. The spread of the revolutionary fervour—particularly to Berlin—escaped this organising power, as the parties maintained a “wait and see”-attitude. The revolt represents not the birth of subjectivity—as a spontaneous endowment—but the coming into being of the concrete character of a new mode of subjectivity. Furio Jesi argues that “Every revolt is a battle, but a battle in which one has deliberately chosen to participate. The instant of revolt determines one’s sudden self-realisation and self-objectification as part of a collectivity” (2014, p. 53). The possibility of making the choice to participate only emerges or takes place once revolt takes on a logical or rational meaning for those who might join it—once it becomes something that makes sense to those responding to their oppressed condition. In effect, the logic of revolt had become widespread, informing the very self-conception of those taking part, and giving revolt a logical sens in the context of a collective endeavour or action. The idea of a collective endeavour is also important, for this is something that transcends the simplistic notion of a logic of identity in traditional understandings of proletarian identity. Jesi notes the central way in which the space of existence (or the space of the city) becomes a

288  P. MAZZOCCHI

collective possession: “only in the hour of revolt is the city really felt as your own city – your own because it belongs to the I but at the same to the ‘others’” (2014, p. 54). For him, this speaks to the formative importance of democracy in Luxemburg’s thought. Luxemburg concerned herself not merely with the revolutionary struggle and its tactics, but with a problem that transcended these: “that of the relations between one’s own truth and that of others – not only between one’s own experiences, one’s own language, and other’s experiences and languages but especially between one’s own ethical predicament and those of others” (Jesi 2014, p. 174). The dialectic of spontaneity and organisation that she conceptualised suggested the possibility not of annulling the difference between self and others but of sublating it via the event and struggle. Here, the institution takes on its intersubjective character in seeking to avoid reproducing the logic of the all-One, which annuls difference in reducing the social to an identity. The all-ones constitutes not a static coming together, but the realm of play and creation that searches for a political relationship within an alternative institutional matrix that defies solidified relations—that draws bonds without bonding permanently together into an order. Thus, it sublates insofar as it draws singularities into a collective but does not annul this singularity in establishing a realised or permanent social: it acknowledges that every collective is an aleatoric coming together. The formation of councils in the November 1918 uprising was something symptomatic of this aleatoric collective, but in a more complicated way than reducing it to a contingency. The event of revolt—and the logic or institution it was predicated upon—was not the singular assertion of an identity or a particular truth associated with it. In the immediate case of November, the insurgent institution had been taken up by the sailors of Wilhelmshaven, but it had then required the emergence of solidarity via spontaneous revolts among other fractions of the politically excluded. And, again, this emerged outside of the control of the unions and parties. But we further need to note the way the event came to represent precisely the self-objectification that Jesi suggests: it caught like wildfire, drawing in the workers who were perhaps predisposed or preconditioned towards such a revolt given the turbulent insurgences that had occurred since 1916. But it also drew in fractions of the soldiers as well. Indeed, the face-to-face appeal that occurred in many circumstances mirrors the proliferation of strikes after the bloody suppression in St. Petersburg in 1905, as well as the synchronisation of class positions.

INSURGENT DEMOCRACY AND THE GERMAN COUNCILS 

289

This emerged in the German experience both via sympathy strikes, but also via direct appeals for the soldiers not to act on their orders to shoot the strikers, with soldiers ultimately joining the revolt. In the subsequent formation of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils during the November Revolution, we see the formation of a constituent power that united the excluded in showing their political capacity. Indeed, far from being pure anarchy, the formation of councils sought to establish a concrete power representing the political existence of workers and soldiers.

The State and Anti-state Relation: Parties, Councils and the Dialectic of Emancipation Insurgent democracy posits a constant conflict between the political relations of all-One and all-ones. In this vein, attempts at retaining constituent power, and the institutions that express it, face challenges from the will to domination contained in the grandees and their attempt to reinaugurate forms of domination. The German Revolution follows this trajectory, alternating between the constituent moment and the attempted re-assertion of political relations of domination, as well as a resistance to this regression. The councils were an act of reduction against political alienation, attempting to assert the capacity for political subjectivity by the demos—here constituted by the coming together of sailors, soldiers and workers—and, as an institution, were founded to maintain this capacity. But Jesi argues that revolutionary movements often fail to fully transcend the symbols and structures of power of the oppressor. Under such conditions, the power relations that oppress often simply shift hands from one set of grandees to another and “the collective organized realities of the exploited become ever less collective, to the degree that they imitate the structures proper to the class of the exploiters” (Jesi 2014, p. 73). Ultimately, the same state relation continues to exist, as state power is simply seized by a new ruling class, rather than being destroyed. We can see these types of reproductions in the party system that constantly haunted and inhibited the councils. Indeed, the SPD’s attempts to undermine them constitutes an attempt by the grandees to re-assert their authority in imposing new forms of domination—a new state relation emblematic of the all-One. This also points to a larger distinction between council democracy and parliamentary or party democracy.

290  P. MAZZOCCHI

In enunciating this democratic distinction, Arendt states: “The councils, as distinguished from parties, have always emerged during the revolution itself, they sprang from the people as spontaneous organs of action and of order” (2006, p. 263). The councils facilitate the direct action and entrance of the demos into politics and provide an institutional means for such an entrance and expression. This is predicated upon constituent power, as a power existing between people premised on equality. The party system facilitates the action of elites, hedged in the hierarchical power of sovereign command, and largely functions as a means of legitimating the action of such elites. This line of criticism was enunciated by participants in the German council movement. According to Otto Rühle, in the context of capitalism’s heterodox nature and the different interests it represents, parliament developed along party lines to accommodate dispute within a capitalist framework. This forced the working class to organise itself into parties to send representatives to parliament. But the working-class parties mirrored the political failings of the bourgeois ones: they were organised based on a top-down, hierarchical structure, which forced the masses to “march in step,” “to believe, to be silent and pay up” or to “receive their orders and carry them out.” In essence, the masses are forced into “silent obedience and devoted passivity” and deprived of action beyond casting a ballot (Rühle 2007, p. 159). In these terms, the party, no less than the tyrant, acts to homogenise the political body through means of incorporation and subsumption of the will of the demos in an overarching and reified identity—the will of the party member becomes subservient to the will of the party as a homogenous mass. The difference between the tyrant and party lies in the number of unitary wills, not in the fundamental political relation: the essence of the party still lies in obedience/passivity, though one now has more options to choose from. Against such an abridged democracy, the councils sought to embrace and facilitate the plural or multiple being of the demos, as distinguished from a delegated “will of the people.” As Arendt posits the Jeffersonian vision of a ward/council system: [they were] not meant to strengthen the power of the many but the power of ‘every one’ within the limits of his competence; and only by breaking up ‘the many’ into assemblies where every one could be counted upon ‘shall we be as republican as a large society can be’. (2006, p. 246)

INSURGENT DEMOCRACY AND THE GERMAN COUNCILS 

291

This system is intended to allow for the emergence of “acting minorities”—small groups capable of engaging each member of the demos, without necessitating a simplistic majoritarian system that would usurp the constituent power of each citizen. From Arendt’s perspective, these different “democratic” systems are in constant tension, something that “came to the fore in all twentieth-century revolutions” (2006, p. 265). This is no less true of the German Revolution, where the direct democracy of the councils came into direct conflict with the parliamentary democracy favoured by a number of parties. While the conflict was often phrased as a choice between “democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat” by the radical left, or as a choice between “democracy and dictatorship” by the centre left and the right, Luxemburg adeptly points out that it was really a choice between “Bourgeois democracy or socialist democracy?” (2012a, p. 92). Jesi suggests that the power of the party or union is effectively suspended during the phase of the revolt (2014, pp. 59–60). The effect of suspending their power was to allow for the autonomous development of a truly democratic form of expression. Thus, the councils were formed to retain the constituent power that was being asserted, rather than acquiescing to the re-consecration of power by the parties—particularly as a sovereign form of command embedded both in the nature of parliament and the relation of party to mass. And the defenders of the councils asserted the need to assume this power (Müller 2012a, pp. 32, 36; Däumig 2012, pp. 51–53; Luxemburg 2012b, pp. 100–106). The parties took a different tact in understanding the revolution and the council system. While a number of parties acknowledged—even if after the fact— the necessity of mass participation to engage and complete the constituent phase of revolutionary struggle, they largely saw this as a momentary necessity. Hence, in Karl Kautsky’s formulation, the constituent moment was necessary to tear down and destroy the old order, but this was merely the first phase of the revolution, which would then need to cede power to a National Assembly in order to institute a socialist society via parliamentary means (Müller 2012b, pp. 69–71). Hence, the councils originally faced no opposition. But this slowly gave way to the formation of counter-councils meant to undermine the power of the working class and, then, ultimately, to the attempt to form a National Assembly that would entirely cede the power of the councils to this higher body (Broué 2005, pp. 163–165) organised by parliamentary/party democracy. This would be the abridgement of the constituent moment.

292  P. MAZZOCCHI

In this vein, the transition from the councils to parliament (the National Assembly) cannot be seen simply as a natural growth and development of liberal democracy. Rather, it is a conflict between a democratic and a state logic, with the latter being victorious. In their interim form, the power of the councils was tolerated by the SPD and USPD, insofar as party representation was forced onto the councils. But this move effectively divorced constituent power from the people and awarded it to the parties. Here, the parties sought to maintain their power within the representative organs of the council movement, and then attempted to castrate the power of the councils. Ultimately, there was an attempt to alienate the effective power of the councils from their moment of birth—to render them still-born at birth, so that the oligarchic logic of “bourgeois democracy” could reproduce the political exclusion of the demos as an active force. But this was also a result of the failure to entrench the very constituent authority of the councils. As Karl Korsch (1921) said of the founding of the councils: The most important organizational failing consisted in the fact that, in most cases, the political Councils were not elected by proletarians themselves organized by factories and trades…but by the socialist parties… Nevertheless, if afterwards the will to create authentic councils were to have been clearly asserted and seriously invigorated, this shortcoming could very well have been rectified over the following months. But this happened practically nowhere.

The authentic council system was to be comprised of localised bodies, allowing for the participation of each and every citizen; they would then elect representatives to engage in democratic decision making with collections of councils. But, as Korsch points out, this process continued under the sway of the party system, effectively undermining the full “democratic” or council credentials of the bodies. As problematic was the failure to “have demanded full powers in the legislative, executive and judicial fields” (Korsch 1921). This points to the dialectic between emancipation and new forms of domination. In this context, we see the birth of the German council ideal with the formation of a council system in November 1918. Next emerges the phase of struggle for their maintenance, which occurred at the time of their formation but continued in a more insurgent form with the attempt to form a National Assembly. The consecration of the National Assembly and its system of parliamentary

INSURGENT DEMOCRACY AND THE GERMAN COUNCILS 

293

democracy saw the political neutralisation of the power of the councils, and a regression into a party system that undermined constituent power.

Councils as an Expression of the Right to Insurrection The fate of the councils raises Ernst Däumig’s warning regarding the constitutionalisation of the council idea: “To enshrine workers’ councils in the constitution is a curse disguised as a gift, just like a Trojan horse. Making councils elements of a capitalist constitution means to strangulate, or at least paralyze, any serious implementation of the council idea” (Däumig 2012, p. 55). Whither the constitutional right to insurrection? On the contrary, Däumig’s statement must be understood in the context of the conflict between the council system and the attempt to establish a representative system of democracy via the National Assembly. The National Assembly would rob the councils of their innovative character—constituent power—while establishing something closer to a tripartite or corporatist model in which councils merely act as representative bodies within the state artifice, while reproducing hierarchical political relations via the party system (Korsch 1921). Here, the codification of the councils via Article 165 of the Weimar Constitution acted not to entrench the councils, but to limit their power and scope. Such a model of democracy served the legitimating function that representative democracy demands in procuring the consent of the people for a fundamentally oligarchic government system through democratic means. In this context, Däumig’s argument suggests a more complex formula for understanding the constitutional right to insurrection. Indeed, returning to Abensour’s qualifications, we cannot simply see this as a “constitutional” right or as a constitution in the traditional manner; rather, the moving principle of the right lies in the recuperation of the constituent power that lay at the formation of the councils, and the continuation of their originary force—their power of reduction. Thus, we then confront his distinction between laws and institutions, with the laws taking on the possibility of reifying the political community and, consequently, political power. We see this when, during the Congress of the Councils, Däumig’s motion to declare the councils the basis of legislative and executive power was roundly defeated (Broué 2005, p. 187). He had previously declared the Congress a “suicide club” for the councils and this was coming to fruition: the attempts to found a National

294  P. MAZZOCCHI

Assembly would legally deracinate constituent power from the demos. Article 165 fundamentally accomplished precisely this deracination. But institutions as public organs of popular power can recuperate their agency against this legal transmutation and abrogation—they can still exist as the avenues for the insurgence of the demos. As Abensour suggested, this involves “a circular flow between the present of the event and the past” whereby “the people [rise] up against the liberating institutions’ lack of a present, demanding that these institutions be respected” (2011a, p. xxvi). He saw this phenomenon in the French Revolution. As an expression of insurgent democracy, the Revolution lasted from 1789 to 1799 because the people had to constantly emerge in combatting the re-emergence of the ancien regime and the emergence of a new state form, both of which would act to exclude them. Central to this struggle was the attempt “during the events of Prairial” to make the “Parisian sections”—outlawed by a previous decree—permanent organs of the Revolution. It was not merely the repression of the Revolutionary Constitution of 1793 that lead to the victory of the counter-revolution, but the suppression of the very institutions that directed insurrection, the Parisian sections, that completed the counter-revolution (Abensour 2011a, p. xxiv). In the German Revolution, in the face of the victory of the National Assembly, there were attempts to utilise “official” avenues to resurrect the council idea (Hoffrogge 2015, Chapters 6–9). But the right to insurrection was more prominently involved in the form of extra-parliamentary insurgence intended to re-institute the constituent power of the councils. This can be seen in the Spartacist Revolt of January 1919 and the strike wave of 1921. In the context of a number of strikes leading up to the Spartacist Revolt, Luxemburg wrote: The strike wave across the country is spreading like a wildfire…They are breaking the chains that the government, the parties and the union have held them in…. These are the forces, which the assembled councils can count on, which they have to serve and guide at the same time. Here is the source from which their strength and energy must come. The revolution will live without the councils; but the councils will die without the revolution. (2012c, p. 111)

As with the initial outbreak in November 1918, through the action of striking, the demos broke the chains of hierarchical and bureaucratic

INSURGENT DEMOCRACY AND THE GERMAN COUNCILS 

295

authority in expressing its constituent force. This insurgence sought to resurrect the power of the councils as an institutional infrastructure, returning to the councils their presence/present as emancipatory and participatory force—organs of democratic expression whose legitimacy had been acknowledged by the grandees prior to their own usurpation of power. Yet, in the context of defeat, such irruptions no longer take place in the realm of the reified state where the grandees have re-asserted their power, but through extra-parliamentary activities that enact political reduction. In these terms, the idea of insurgent institutions becomes dislodged from the state, without negating the political. Abensour draws a contrast between the political and the political state, with the latter denoting a reified and oppressive political form as a mode of government, and the former denoting a political expression of human sociality. Rather than being an institution in the traditional sense, or an organ of government, the councils represent—to borrow Joshua Clover’s description of the Commune—“a social relation, a political form, an event” (2016, p. 187). The persistence and institution of insurgency thus conceptualises the extra-parliamentary expression of the councils via strikes as no less political given the failures of the Spartacist Revolt in particular. The declaration of the power of the councils in this form merely symbolises the temporal location of every struggle against the state, and the persistent need for the continuation of the council form as a medium of democratic expression.

Note 1. Research for this project was supported by a CUPE 3903 Research Grant.

References Abensour, Miguel. 2008. Persistent Utopia. Constellations 15 (3): 406–421. Abensour, Miguel. 2009. Pour une philosophie politique critique: Itinéraires. Paris: Sens & Tonka. Abensour, Miguel. 2011a. Democracy Against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Moment, trans. M. Blechman and M. Breaugh. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Abensour, Miguel. 2011b. Is There a Proper Way to Use the Voluntary Servitude Hypothesis? Journal of Political Ideologies 16 (3): 329–348.

296  P. MAZZOCCHI Arendt, Hannah. 2006. On Revolution. New York, NY: Penguin Books. Broué, Pierre. 2005. The German Revolution, 1917–1923, trans. J. Archer. Leiden: Brill. Cervara-Marzal, Manuel. 2012. Miguel Abensour, Cornelius Castoriadis. Un conseillisme francais? Revue du MAUSS 40 (2): 300–320. Clover, Joshua. 2016. Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings. London: Verso Books. Critchley, Simon. 2010. Five Problems in Levinas’s View of Politics and the Sketch of a Solution to Them. In Radicalizing Levinas, ed. P. Atterton and M. Calarco, 41–55. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Däumig, Ernst. 2012. The Council Idea and Its Realization. In All Power to the Councils: A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, trans. G. Kuhn, 51–58. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Gauchet, Marcel. 2005. La Condition Historique. Paris: Folio. Hoffrogge, Ralf. 2015. Working Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Müller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Icarus. 2012. The Wilhemshaven Revolt: A Chapter of the Revolutionary Movement of the German Navy, 1918–1919. In All Power to the Councils: A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, trans. G. Kuhn, 5–18. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Jesi, Furio. 2014. Spartakus: The Symbology of Revolt, trans. A. Cavelletti. London: Seagull Books. Kalyvas, Andreas. 2008. Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt. New York: Columbia University Press. Korsch, Karl. 1921. Evolution of the Problem of the Political Workers Councils in Germany. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/ korsch/1921/councils.htm. Accessed 3 Oct 2018. Landauer, Gustav. 2010a. Revolution. In Revolution and Other Writings, ed. and trans. G. Kuhn, 110–187. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Landauer, Gustav. 2010b. Weak Statesmen, Weaker People! In Revolution and Other Writings, ed. and trans. G. Kuhn, 213–214. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Levitas, Ruth. 2013. Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Luxemburg, Rosa. 2004. The Mass Strike, the Political Parties and the Trade Union. In The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, ed. P. Hudis and K.B. Anderson, 168–199. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. Luxemburg, Rosa. 2012a. The National Assembly. In All Power to the Councils: A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, trans. G. Kuhn, 90–92. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Luxemburg, Rosa. 2012b. What Does the Spartacist League Want? In All Power to the Councils: A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918– 1919, trans. G. Kuhn, 99–106. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

INSURGENT DEMOCRACY AND THE GERMAN COUNCILS 

297

Luxemburg, Rosa. 2012c. To the Entrenchments. In All Power to the Councils: A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, trans. G. Kuhn, 109–112. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2005. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith. London: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2010. Institution and Passivity: Course Lectures from the College de France (1954–1955), trans. L. Lawlor and H. Massey. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Muldoon, James. 2011. The Lost Treasure of Arendt’s Council System. Critical Horizons 12 (3): 396–417. Müller, Richard. 2012a. Report by the Executive Council of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils of Greater Berlin. In All Power to the Councils: A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, trans. G. Kuhn, 31–39. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Müller, Richard. 2012b. Democracy or Dictatorship. In All Power to the Councils: A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, trans. G. Kuhn, 59–75. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Rühle, Otto. 2007. The Revolution Is Not a Party Affair. In Non-Leninist Marxism: Writings on the Worker’s Councils, 157–164. St. Petersburg, FL: Red and Black Publishers.

Forgotten Uprisings and Silent Dialogues: Hannah Arendt and the German Revolution Shmuel Lederman

Among the notable political theorists of the twentieth century, few were as centrally concerned with the phenomenon of revolution as Hannah Arendt. The French and American revolutions were the major case studies of On Revolution, although other revolutions were also examined in her oeuvre such as the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. More generally, Arendt declared revolutions to be among the major phenomena of our time, a remark that seems quite prescient in light of events in the last decades, from the East European revolutions of the late 1980s to the 2011 “Arab Spring.” However, as several scholars have pointed out, the absence of certain revolutions from Arendt’s discussion is sometimes as revealing as those present. In particular, scholars have focused in recent years on the absence of a major modern revolution that took place at the same period of the American and French revolutions—the Haitian Revolution, with some interpreting this absence as an expression of Arendt’s Eurocentrism and even racism (Gines 2014, pp. 74–75; for a more nuanced reading of Arendt’s omission of the Haitian Revolution, see, Gaffney S. Lederman (*)  The Weiss-Livnat International Center for Holocaust Research and Education, The University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel © The Author(s) 2019 G. Kets and J. Muldoon (eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13917-9_15

299

300  S. LEDERMAN

2018). Yet, while Arendt’s neglect of this revolution, whatever its reasons, seems quite unremarkable in light of the general neglect of the Haitian Revolution, it is usually overlooked that there was another revolution which Arendt rarely mentioned, and certainly did not explore in any detail, despite the fact that it had a much more direct and decisive influence on her thought than any other: the German Revolution. In this chapter, I explore the distinctive influence the revolution had on Arendt through various personal and intellectual ties. I suggest that despite the little discussion Arendt devoted to it, it constituted an important part of a broader “silent dialogue” Arendt had with the European socialist left, in which she implicitly incorporated various lines of thought into her reflections on modern revolutions while reframing them along the lines of her own political theory.

Arendt’s Räte It is not that Arendt ignores the German Revolution entirely. Often, especially when she tells the story of the council tradition that emerged in the revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Arendt mentions also the years 1918 and 1919 in Germany, when, after the defeat of the army, soldiers and workers in open rebellion constituted themselves into Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte, demanding, in Berlin, that this Rätesystem become the foundation stone of the new German constitution, and establishing… in Munich in the spring of 1919, the short-lived Bavarian Räterepublik. (Arendt 2006b, p. 254)

Arendt places the Räte within what she calls “the hidden treasure” of modern revolutions, starting with antecedents like the revolutionary societies in the French Revolution and—in Arendt’s quite idiosyncratic narrative—the American town-halls and Jefferson’s ideas of dividing the American Republic into wards. These precedents, Arendt tells us, anticipated with an utmost weird precision those councils, soviets and Räte, which were to make their appearance in every genuine revolution throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each time they appeared, they sprang up as the spontaneous organs of the people, not only outside all revolutionary parties but entirely unexpected by them and their leaders…. They

FORGOTTEN UPRISINGS AND SILENT DIALOGUES: HANNAH ARENDT … 

301

were utterly neglected by statesmen, historians, political theorists, and, most importantly, by the revolutionary tradition itself. (Arendt 2006b, p. 241)

One cannot stress enough how important this legacy was to Arendt, although few Arendt scholars have paid much attention to it or have taken Arendt’s support for it seriously (Isaac 1994; Sitton 1994; Bernstein 1996, Chapter 6; Reinhardt 1997, Chapter 5; Medearis 2004; Kalyvas 2008; Totschnig 2014; Muldoon 2011; 2016; Lederman 2018; 2019). Moreover, Arendt’s own sense, as can be gathered from the quotation above, was that the council tradition was forgotten almost entirely and had to be recovered. Even historians sympathetic to the revolutions, she insists, “failed to understand to what an extent the council system confronted them with an entirely new form of government, with a new public space for freedom which was constituted and organised during the course of the revolution itself ” (Arendt 2006b, p. 241). In this statement and others, one can discern Arendt’s divergence from the common accounts and interpretations of the councils that emerged in the twentieth century, as I discuss further below. But it is important to note that while Arendt never says, as far as I know, more than a few sentences on the German Räte, it is clear that they were of the utmost significance to her. It is evident, in particular, in a statement she made in a recently published text from 1958, where she explains her decision to add the essay on the Hungarian Revolution to the second edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism. What impressed her most in the Hungarian Revolution, Arendt explains, was the fact that this last of the European revolutions has brought forth once more a form of government which, it is true, was never really tried out, but which one cannot call new because it has appeared with singular regularity for more than a hundred years in all revolutions. I am speaking of the council system, of the Russian soviets, which were abolished in the initial stages of the October Revolution, and the Central European Räte, which first had to be liquidated in Germany and Austria before their short-lived and insecure party democracies could be established. (Arendt 2018a, pp. 158–159)

This last statement is remarkable, as it demonstrates, first, Arendt’s conviction that the appearance of the Räte during the German Revolution was a crucial part of the council tradition and their demise constituted a decisive blow. In other words, it shows that Arendt was

302  S. LEDERMAN

well aware that after the Russian Revolution, in Sheila Cohen’s words, “the heart of the workers’ council movement was found in Germany, where the potential for a revolution to build on and support the Soviet example was as strong as its failure tragic” (Cohen 2011, p. 50). Second, and even more importantly, Arendt presents here a clear continuity between the persistence of the failed party systems of Germany and Austria and the destruction of the Räte. The implication seems to be that the Räte were a crucial potential remedy to the inherent failures of the party system. They constituted such a remedy, in Arendt’s view, first and foremost because of their participatory character, namely the fact that they enabled citizen participation in government. This in contrast to the multi-party system, which created the opposite effect and thus risked the most dangerous of consequences. This requires some explanation. It is essential to remember that in Arendt’s analysis, the fragility of the multi-party system of the European nation-state was one of the factors that led to the emergence of totalitarian movements and then to the Nazi regime. The pan-movements that preceded the totalitarian ones could rely on the “profound distrust for all parties that was already widespread in Europe at the turn of the century […]” (Arendt 1973, p. 251). Arendt distinguished between the Anglo-Saxon two-party system and the Continental multi-party system, arguing that in the latter, parties were never more than the “organization of private individuals who want their interests to be protected against interference from public affairs” (Arendt 1973, p. 255). This very structure, which existed within the context of the European class society, made the rise of nationalism almost inevitable, as the sense of a public good which could unite the citizens could be achieved only by arousing national feelings (Arendt 1973, p. 255). The multi-party system kept citizens away from actual participation in government while at the same time it made them into nationalists who suspected the extent to which the parties actually represent either their own interests or the national interest. Since the end of the nineteenth century, wrote Arendt, the reputation of parliaments and parties across Europe has constantly declined, to the people at large they looked like expensive and unnecessary institutions. For this reason alone each group that claimed to present something above party and class interest and started outside of Parliament had a great chance for popularity. (Arendt 1973, p. 256)

FORGOTTEN UPRISINGS AND SILENT DIALOGUES: HANNAH ARENDT … 

303

This was an important part of the appeal of the totalitarian movements— the very term “movement,” as distinguished from “party,” and the claim to be “above all parties” and to come from outside the corrupt party system. They could build on the political passivity of the citizens under this system and recruit their members from the “mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention” (Arendt 1973, p. 311). In that, they exposed the illusions of the Continental nation-state and its party system: that the “people” somehow take part in government and that the indifferent masses are better left indifferent and passive (Arendt 1973, p. 312). Is it important to note that like many in the socialist tradition, Arendt saw contemporary parliamentary democracy in Europe as “bourgeois” democracy, namely as a system built by the bourgeoisie, corresponding to their worldview, serving their interests and reflecting a society based on their norms. Again, it cannot be stressed enough how Arendt conceived the political passivity of the citizens as inherent to this system—a kind of passivity that became prominent among all social classes. As she insisted: The competitive and acquisitive society of the bourgeoisie had produced apathy and even hostility towards public life not only, and not even primarily, in the social strata which were exploited and excluded from active participation in the rule of the country, but first of all in its own class… Both the early apathy and the later demand for monopolistic dictatorial direction of the nation’s foreign affairs had their roots in a way and philosophy of life so insistently and exclusively centered on the individual’s success or failure in ruthless competition that a citizen’s duties and responsibilities could only be felt to be a needless drain on his limited time and energy. (Arendt 1973, p. 313)

One can almost feel the sense of frustration with which Arendt observed the return of the status quo in Europe after the Second World War. In Origins, which was written in the late 1940s, she declared that “the only country in Europe where Parliament is not despised and the party system is not hated is Great Britain” (Arendt 1973, p. 251), and concluded her discussion of the Continental party system with the following words: Nothing proves better the irreparable decay of the party system than the great efforts after this war to revive it on the Continent, their pitiful

304  S. LEDERMAN results, the enhanced appeal of movements after the defeat of Nazism, and the obvious threat of Bolshevism to national independence. The result of all efforts to restore the status quo has been only the restoration of a political situation in which the destructive movements are the only ‘parties’ that function properly. (Arendt 1973, p. 266)

It is against this background that we find Arendt stating that the establishment of this failed system in Germany and Austria had to go through the crushing of the German and Austrian Räte. Not only did the sole democratic alternative which ever existed to the party system, as Arendt once described the council system, disappear and was forgotten, but the ground was laid for the rise of Hitler. When one bears in mind the impact of the Holocaust on Arendt—as a Jew, as a political theorist and as an individual, one realises that the failed German Revolution had an enormous historical, theoretical and personal significance for Arendt. Arendt’s writings after the Second World War contain only hints of the impact the German Revolution. In 1945, she warned against the return to the pre-Second World War status quo and supported the ideas of the resistance movements, particularly the French Resistance, to internally federalise the European states along the lines of the council system (Arendt 1994a; see also, Lederman 2018). In Palestine, Arendt proposed in the late 1940s the establishment of Jewish-Arab village and neighbourhood councils as an alternative to the creation of a Jewish nationstate, in an attempt to stop the war in the country and to build grass roots cooperation between Arabs and Jews as part of a larger, European or Mediterranean federation (Arendt 2007a, pp. 400–441). In the 1950 essay, “The Aftermath of Nazi Rule,” she supported proposals for the division of Germany into states with extensive powers of local selfgovernment, arguing that among other benefits, it would “teach grassroots democracy in the field of communal or local affairs where people had their immediate interests and were supposed to know the ropes […]” (Arendt 1994b, p. 267). Arendt stressed, in this context, that centralisation of the kind achieved by the European nation-states, among them Germany, “succeeded in destroying all authentic desire for local autonomy and in undermining the political vitality of all provincial or municipal bodies” (Arendt 1994b, p. 267). In Origins, Arendt not only analysed the failures of the Continental party system but also briefly and implicitly referred to the councils, arguing that the national liberation movements of the East “were revolutionary

FORGOTTEN UPRISINGS AND SILENT DIALOGUES: HANNAH ARENDT … 

305

in much the same way as the workers’ movements in the West; both represented the “unhistorical” strata of Europe’s population and both strove to secure recognition and participation in public affairs” (Arendt 1973, p. 271). There is little doubt that Arendt had in mind the councils when she wrote this, and despite the fact that she did not elaborate further in Origins on this attempt by the workers’ movements to achieve recognition and participation in public affairs, it formed an important continuity from her early mentions of the councils to her later essay on the Hungarian Revolution and On Revolution, in which the councils played a prominent role—a continuity many ignore (see, for example, Schell 2006). Moreover, recent studies have shown how Arendt implicitly drew in Origins and earlier writings on national autonomy and federalism on figures like Otto Bauer and Karl Renner (Rubin 2015; Selinger 2016). These figures helped Arendt think not only about regional federations and cultural autonomies—as these studies demonstrate—but also about the potentialities of the councils in allowing the coexistence of different national groups as part of the same political community, as Bauer and Renner were themselves supporters of the councils who, of course, drew their experience from the German and Austrian revolutions (see also, Lederman 2019). Yet Arendt learned about the importance of the Räte in the German Revolution from a much more direct and personal experience: that of her husband, Heinrich Blücher, who participated in the German Räte during the revolution (Young-Bruehl 2004, p. 125). It is hard to overestimate Blücher’s experience on Arendt’s political thought, yet it is a complicated issue that requires some elaboration, which I undertake in the next section.

Arendt and Blücher In one of her letters to her mentor and friend Karl Jaspers, Arendt noted how much her support for the council system owed to Blücher’s participation in the German Räte (Kohler and Saner 1992, p. 507). As I try to show elsewhere (Lederman 2017), one needs to turn to Blücher’s own words to appreciate the importance of this impact. Here I can only illustrate the most important points. That Blücher played a crucial role in the development of Arendt’s political thought is well acknowledged by commentators. Jerome Kohn, who edited many of Arendt’s posthumously published writings, stresses

306  S. LEDERMAN

that Blücher’s influence on Arendt’s political education “can hardly be exaggerated” (Kohn and Feldman 2007, p. xviii). Similarly, Lotte Kohler, in her introduction to the correspondence between Arendt and Blücher, noted that Blücher’s concepts had “an inestimable influence” on the development of Arendt’s thought (Kohler 2000a, p. xiv). Wolfgang Heuer pointed out that Blücher was Arendt’s “most important discussion partner” (Heuer 2004, p. 1). Yet the actual influence Blücher had on Arendt as well as his own philosophical and political positions have barely been explored in scholarship (see, in particular, Neumann 1998; Bazelow 2005; Nixon 2015, Chapter 7) and the fact that he did not publish any writings makes such a study quite difficult. However, Blücher’s class lectures over the years are quite revealing for anyone interested in Arendt’s political thought. Particularly through the figure of Socrates, Blücher presented to his students again and again a vision of philosophy and politics in which these two human activities became mutually supportive rather than mutually exclusive. That is to say they both were conceived of as highly democratic activities in which all citizens can and should participate. To take just a few representative statements of Blücher, he stressed it was the great discovery of Socrates that the philosopher needs for everything that he proposes the agreement of the other free human beings, because he knows that in matters of the conduct of life there can be no other way except to reason it through mutual agreement and take the common risk one might have been wrong, that one might not have had sufficient insight, because we never have sufficient insight… That is how philosophy moves. (Blücher 1954, pp. 5–6, emphasis in the original)1

Philosophy, according to Blücher, is not the lonely pursuit of the philosopher who moves among his own thoughts and the thoughts of other philosophers across the ages; rather, it is an activity one shares with one’s fellow citizens in a joint search for human wisdom, which is never final but requires constant conversation and revision. This search proceeds through the mutual exchange of perspectives among citizens on important questions on which they try to reach an agreement. Socrates demonstrates that human beings have the capability of sitting together and arguing with one another about the best reason that can be found to do such and such. They can design

FORGOTTEN UPRISINGS AND SILENT DIALOGUES: HANNAH ARENDT … 

307

their own deeds and if they do it according to this higher reason, philosophic reason, then whatever proofs they are able to give in support of their own ‘reasons’ are proofs of philosophy…. This capability of man is infinite and it guarantees the establishment and creation of something in the world that is more meaningful, more beautiful, more just, more courageous, and more judicious than had ever existed before it. (Blücher 1954, p. 13, emphases in the original)

Philosophy, in Blücher’s Socratic sense of it, is for all citizens. “Socrates’ formula,” as he called it, was the development of reasoned judgement through the practice of setting aims and exploring them “in community with other human minds” (Blücher 1954, p. 11). We can practice philosophy only in the company of others, since we do not hold the truth and therefore our only way to seek wisdom is by exploring the experiences of others, their perspectives on the meaning of existence and the aims for which they strive. When one understands the meaning of a truly philosophical endeavour as such an activity, one realises that this is at the same time a political activity—perhaps the most important one. Politics itself becomes then “a creative activity, not a destructive one, and it must be our intention… to aim at only one thing: to meet humanity in our capacity as political beings” (Blücher 1967, p. 1). Anyone familiar with Arendt’s writings should recognise this “Arendtian” stress on the importance of the exchange of opinions in the public sphere as an essential part of politics, and on politics as an activity that is not reducible to struggles over interests and worldviews but rather is a creative engagement with others in speech and action in the public sphere. We find here Arendt’s unique concept of “the political” shared by Blücher. In itself, it is not very surprising. As Arendt once put it in reference to another major figure who played an important role in the German Revolution and had, as discussed below, a decisive influence on Arendt’s political thought: “We shall never know how many of Rosa Luxemburg’s political ideas derived from Jogiches; In marriage, it is not always easy to tell the partners’ thoughts apart” (Arendt 1968, p. 52). In Arendt’s correspondence with Blücher, we can find similar hints of his influence on the development of Arendt’s political thought. In 1937, for example, he wrote to her that “[t]he Greeks dreamed the first dream of freedom, carried as they were in innocent ignorance on the backs of their slaves […]” (Kohler 2000b, p. 29). As is evident from his lectures, this is a position he kept and about which he tried to educate his students

308  S. LEDERMAN

in the years to come. As he himself puts it in a letter to Arendt from 1952, clearly echoing his admiration for Socrates: “I will try all the harder to entice the youths and maidens to the eternal and mostly invisible Athens” (Kohler 2000b, p. 196). One can imagine Arendt and Blücher, from early on after they met in 1936, discussing the Greeks and the need to come back to them in order to understand what true political freedom means, as well as Socrates as an exemplary figure of a philosopher-citizen. Can we separate Arendt’s and Blücher’s shared admiration for the Greeks and the way they perceived freedom from Blücher’s experience in the German Räte? I would argue that we cannot. In the letter to Jaspers mentioned above, Arendt in fact says as much, affirming Jaspers’ reading of her recovery of the Greeks’ understanding of “the political” as closely linked to the legacy of the councils and to Blücher’s experience in the Räte (see also, Lederman 2019). We are faced here with a surprising possibility. Since the publication of Margaret Canovan’s Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (1992), Arendt’s political theory has been understood as grounded in the experience of totalitarianism and the Holocaust. Accordingly, her support for the council system, when it is addressed at all by her interpreters, has often been perceived as a response to the Holocaust or as a hopeful, enthusiastic response to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution against Soviet totalitarianism. I would suggest that our understanding of the development of Arendt’s political theory should be reversed; that we should see it as grounded in the experience and promise of the councils, which Arendt and Blücher interpreted as recovering the promise of political freedom. For Arendt, the Greeks were the first—and until the appearance of the councils and their immediate predecessors, the last—to understand this experience. Furthermore, it was not simply the general historical appearance of the councils that influenced Arendt; it was her personal familiarity with a specific set of revolutionary councils, the German Räte. Let us try to see Arendt’s political theory as exemplifying the way she interpreted the experience which the councils made possible. A key theme in Arendt’s political thought is her claim that action and speech in the public realm with our fellow citizens enormously enriches and strengthens our understanding and sense of reality itself. For human beings, argues Arendt, appearance, namely what we see and hear as well as what others see and hear—constitutes reality. If we had only our own senses to rely on we could have never been sure they do not deceive

FORGOTTEN UPRISINGS AND SILENT DIALOGUES: HANNAH ARENDT … 

309

us; the fact others see and hear the world and can communicate their experience to us “assures us of the reality of the world and of ourselves” (Arendt 1998, p. 50). Although this is a general statement about the way human beings experience reality, Arendt clarifies that the public sphere—as distinguished from the private and the social sphere—has a crucially important role in strengthening our sense of reality. In Arendt’s description, there is a special formality of the public sphere that makes it a privileged site for the presence of others to become a constitutional element of our perception of reality. This capacity of the public realm to enrich our understanding of the world, writes Arendt, “relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself…” (Arendt 1998, p. 57). Each of us has a different location in this common world—quite literally a standpoint, a place from which we look at the world that determines the way we understand it. There can be multiple perspectives that emerge from the different positions different people occupy yet they are all concerned with the same “objects” in the common world. “Only where things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects without changing their identity,” insists Arendt, “so that those who are gathered around them know they see sameness in utter diversity, can worldly reality truly and reliably appear” (Arendt 1998, p. 57). Reality becomes “real” for us not because we share the same nature as human beings, not because we are the same, but rather because we are different and therefore can confirm to each other the way we perceive the world as well as reveal different aspects of the same world. But more than in any other arena of our lives, it is in the public realm that we reveal these different perspectives and exchange them. One of the main problems with modern mass society is that in their isolation from each other, because they have been “deprived of seeing and hearing each other,” citizens are “imprisoned in the subjectivity of their own singular experience” (Arendt 1998, p. 58). Arendt repeats this insight over and over again in her writings. Our very sense of reality depends on the presence of others, yet it is neither the presence of people close to us in the private sphere of the family and our close friends, nor the atomised presence of people around us in mass society. It is the specific presence of our fellow citizens when we speak and act with them. It is essential, although not very often acknowledged in the scholarship on Arendt, that one must understand this presence literally:

310  S. LEDERMAN

citizens have to be so close together as to be able to see and hear each other, namely it is a face-to-face interaction (Benhabib 1996, p. 201). The self-disclosure and world-disclosure that Arendt found so unique to action and speech in the public sphere depends, as she put it in The Human Condition, on “men’s acting and speaking directly to one another” (Arendt 1998, pp. 182–183, emphasis added). Action is “entirely dependent upon the constant presence of others” (Arendt 1998, p. 23). Once we understand this, we realise that long before The Human Condition, where Arendt lay out the meaning of the public sphere at length and in largely theoretical terms, she already applied an understanding of its conditions of possibility to practical situations. I have already mentioned how during the 1940s, in Palestine, in Europe and in Germany specifically she consistently insisted on the need to divide the political communities at stake into smaller units, small enough as to allow active participation of citizens in the public sphere.

Arendt and Luxemburg Arendt wanted to dedicate her essay on the Hungarian Revolution to Rosa Luxemburg, yet the publisher raised objections. In her response, Arendt wrote: If we have to explain in black and white what we mean, we must cut the dedication. It won’t work then; one can’t explain anything in a dedication. Poor Rosa! She has been dead now for forty years, and still falls between all stools… The dedication cannot be rephrased, because one would have to explain that Luxemburg wan neither really a socialist nor a communist, but ‘only’ stood for justice and freedom and revolution as the only possibility for a new form of society and state. (cited by Jerome Kohn in Arendt 2018b, p. 156)

The idea that Luxemburg was neither a socialist nor a Marxist must strike the reader as quite outlandish, which indeed it is. Nevertheless, it is an example of Arendt’s quite bold tendency to offer her own, often idiosyncratic yet thought-provoking reinterpretation of key institutions and figures in Western history and political thought. Arendt’s explanation above is also indicative of the fact that she could also engage in a dialogue with certain figures without explicitly informing the reader,

FORGOTTEN UPRISINGS AND SILENT DIALOGUES: HANNAH ARENDT … 

311

sometimes because doing so would be too complicated to explain without delving into Arendt’s own understanding of the figure. The reason for Arendt’s initial intention to dedicate the essay to Luxemburg seems clear enough: Luxemburg was one of the most prominent supporters of the councils, whether the soviets in Russia or, more directly the Räte in Germany. As Arendt puts it in an essay she wrote on Luxemburg in the collection of essays Men in Dark Times, Luxemburg learned from the revolutionary workers’ councils (the latter soviets) that ‘good organization does not precede action but is the product of it’, that ‘the organization of revolutionary action can and must be learnt in revolution itself, as one can only learn swimming in the water’, that revolutions are ‘made’ by nobody but break out ‘spontaneously’, and that ‘the pressure for action’ always comes ‘from below’. A revolution is ‘great and strong as long as the Social Democrats… don’t smash it up’. (Arendt 1968, p. 52)

Luxemburg learned from the councils, in other words, precisely the insights Arendt tried to elaborate on in her writings on the phenomena of revolution, and which she emphasised so much in her essay on the Hungarian Revolution. It was only natural for Arendt to think of Luxemburg as she observed this revolution and to interpret it in light of Luxemburg’s insights. Indeed, in the essay itself she remarked that “[i] f there was ever such a thing as Rosa Luxemburg’s “spontaneous revolution”—this sudden uprising of an oppressed people for the sake of freedom and hardly anything else… then we had the privilege to witness it” (Arendt 1958, p. 8). Arendt, one might say, re-learned these lessons during the Hungarian Revolution, but she was well aware, not only from Blücher but also from her more theoretical engagement with Luxemburg’s writings, of the importance of the councils in the revolutions; not only in Russia but in Germany as well. It is particularly in this celebratory essay in Men in Dark Times, that Arendt expressed her full appreciation for this great figure of the European left and of the German Revolution in particular. In Arendt’s portrayal of Luxemburg, she transforms Luxemburg from an iconic socialist and Marxist revolutionary into a paragon of truth, freedom and revolution in the Arendtian sense of these terms. Luxemburg, writes Arendt, “was not an orthodox Marxist, so little orthodox indeed that it might be doubted she was a Marxist at all” (Arendt 1968, p. 38).

312  S. LEDERMAN

Luxemburg identified the flaws in Marx’s theories and predictions, and was willing to accept them as such. What concerned her was not adherence to a preconceived ideology, but rather “reality, in all its wonderful and all its frightful aspects, even more than revolution itself” (Arendt 1968, p. 39). She did not hesitate to develop on the foundations of Marx’s theory her own political and economic analysis, whereas the SPD kept to obsolete theoretical assumptions, which happened to also legitimate the “state within a state” it created within the German party system (Arendt 1968, p. 49). Lenin, in particular, recognised how unorthodox her analysis was and chastised her for it. The trouble, Arendt pointed out, was that “what was an error in abstract Marxism was an eminently faithful description of things as they really were” (Arendt 1968, p. 40). Similarly, in contrast to the leaders of the SPD, Luxemburg and her close circle from Eastern Europe were the only ones who were genuinely committed to the revolution. They treated the prospects for revolution not merely as a prediction for the future but as something that required action to achieve it, and they strove to achieve it because they could not bear the injustice of contemporary society. They shared, as Arendt puts it, a “moral taste” (Arendt 1968, p. 41). For readers of Arendt, the term “moral taste” invokes her efforts to tease out from Kant’s writings, and more specifically his Critique of Judgment, his “nonwritten” political philosophy. Her use of this term to describe Luxemburg and her Eastern European circle is quite suggestive and worth reflecting on. Arendt turned to Kantian judgement both as a from of distinctly political thought and, especially after the Eichmann trial, as an alternative to common perceptions of morality, in which morality, in Arendt’s analysis, is a code of behaviour derived from general rules or, more commonly, from the ethos and norms of our communities. What we could learn from Germany during the Holocaust and particularly from Eichmann, Arendt argued, was that morality turned out to be no more than superficial rules of behaviour that could be easily replaced with new ones once a new regime entrenched its power and imposed its own norms and imperatives: “It was as though morality suddenly stood revealed in the original meaning of the word, as a set of mores, customs and manners, which could be exchanged for another set with hardly more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of an individual or a people” (Arendt 2003, p. 50). Kantian judgement, in contrast, is based on a spontaneous ability each person potentially has to judge without predetermined rules and to

FORGOTTEN UPRISINGS AND SILENT DIALOGUES: HANNAH ARENDT … 

313

determine our course of action independently of the prevalent norms of our societies. It corresponds to the specific sense of taste as it is, on the one hand, a subjective faculty that reflects our own independent preference, and on the other hand, on our expectation of agreement by others whose consent we attempt to “woo” (Arendt 1992). It is, in other words, inter-subjective and we may change and improve our “taste,” namely our judgements, following our exposure to the perspectives and judgements of others, yet at the same time it is our own judgement rather than the simple conformity to society around us or to the political imperatives of the ruling regime. As Arendt puts it in the essay “The Crisis in Culture”: In aesthetic no less than in political judgments, a decision is made, and although this decision is always determined by a certain subjectivity, by the simple fact that each person occupies a place of his own from which he looks upon and judges the world, it also derives from the fact that the world itself is an objective datum, something common to all its inhabitants. The activity of taste decides how this world, independent of its utility and our vital interests in it, is to look and sound, what men will see and what they will hear in it… For judgments of taste, the world is the primary thing, not man, neither man’s life nor his self. (Arendt 2006a, p. 219)

When Arendt uses the term “moral taste” to characterise what Luxemburg and her circle shared, then, it is to mark their freedom of thought, their independence from preconceived theories—including from socialist and Marxist ideologies—and their shared commitment to justice and freedom. It is this moral taste in the specific Arendtian meaning of the term, rather than any deterministic view of history, that made them act to promote revolution in Europe and to celebrate it once it arrived. It is also this that made Luxemburg, when the revolution came in 1917 in Russia, insist that it had to be established on republican principles, namely on public freedom of action and expression under all circumstances (Arendt 1968, p. 52). One can see how Arendt consistently tended to interpret figures like Luxemburg and institutions like the councils along the lines of her own political theory, often in a way that made commentators familiar with them quite justly cringe. Yet this tendency reveals also the constant, often silent dialogue Arendt engaged in with the legacy of the twentieth-century revolutionary left. This, in itself, is not surprising, as some of the main figures Arendt was close to and admired came from this tradition. The institution she embraced as her own “people’s utopia,” the

314  S. LEDERMAN

council system, came directly from this tradition, even though she interpreted it in her own distinct way. Moreover, as we have seen, Arendt was personally and intellectually close to figures for whom the German Revolution was a watershed experience. This begs the question why she did not write more about this revolution—a question I address in my concluding remarks.

Concluding Remarks: Arendt and the German Revolution In her response to Gershom Scholem’s famous letter after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt protested against his assumption that she came “from the left”: “If [I] can be said to have come from anywhere, it is from the tradition of German philosophy” (Arendt 2007b, p. 466). As I attempted to show in this chapter, Scholem was, in fact, not as wrong as Arendt made him appear. Her political thought in general and her support for the council system in particular constitutes a rich dialogue with the radical revolutionary tradition of the European left. Part of this dialogue—for example, her critique of the imperialist and anti-democratic tendencies of the bourgeoisie in The Origins of Totalitarianism—is quite explicit. But much of it remained silent and has to be reconstructed from her writings through careful attention to the figures that influenced her political thought and the many references to the celebrated yet in many ways forgotten council system. Typically, Arendt “de-socialized” this tradition, or perhaps more accurately—“Arendtized” it, as she did to every other stream of political thought on which she drew. Perhaps one of the reasons the presence of the Räte and more broadly the German Revolution in her thought remained for the most part a silent one had to do with her conscious reinterpretation of this institution. Another reason might be that by the time she “re-discovered” the potential of the councils and the hope for their re-appearance, namely during the Hungarian Revolution, the German Revolution was already a forgotten one for the vast majority of her audience; the Räte much less known than the soviets; and her need to paint a broad picture in which one can draw a line between the American town-halls and Jefferson’s wards to the revolutionary societies of the French Revolution up to the soviets and the revolutionary councils of the Hungarian Revolution, and to present the councils as a “republican” institution—more urgent than the largely obscure Räte.

FORGOTTEN UPRISINGS AND SILENT DIALOGUES: HANNAH ARENDT … 

315

Be that as it may, it should not obscure the crucial role the German Revolution played in the development of Arendt’s political thought. It is doubtful that any other revolution had more impact on her than this one, or perhaps more accurately: that any other failed revolution constituted more of a promise, its demise more of a tragedy and its experience more of a personal significance than this revolution. It is specifically with the meaning of this revolution that Cato’s words, which Arendt liked so much to quote, should resonate for Arendt’s readers: “The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the defeated one pleases Cato.”

Note 1. The lecture transcripts I use here are not paginated. The page numbers mentioned in this chapter mark the order of the pages as they appear on the archive’s website.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1958. Totalitarian Imperialism: Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution. The Journal of Politics 20 (1): 5–43. Arendt, Hannah. 1968. Rosa Luxemburg, 1871–1919. In Men in Dark Times. New York: Harcourt Brace. Arendt, Hannah. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism, 3rd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Arendt, Hannah. 1992. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, edited with an interpretative essay by Ronald Beiner. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1994a. Approaches to the ‘German Problem’. In Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books. Arendt, Hannah. 1994b. The Aftermath of Nazi Rule. In Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books. Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Hannah. 2003. Some Questions of Moral Philosophy. In Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books. Arendt, Hannah. 2006a. The Crisis in Culture. In Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Penguin Books. Arendt, Hannah. 2006b. On Revolution. New York: Penguin Books. Arendt, Hannah. 2007a. To Save the Jewish Homeland: There Is Still Time. In The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman. New York: Schocken Books.

316  S. LEDERMAN Arendt, Hannah. 2007b. A Letter to Gershom Scholem. In The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman. New York: Schocken Books. Arendt, Hannah. 2018a. Totalitarianism. In Thinking Without a Banister, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books. Arendt, Hannah. 2018b. Postscript to the Hungarian Revolution and Totalitarian Imperialism. In Thinking Without a Banister, ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books. Bazelow, Alexander R. 2005. How and Why Do We Study Philosophy: The Legacy of Heinrich Blücher. www.hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/ download/82/129. Benhabib, Seyla. 1996. The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. London and New Delhi: Sage. Bernstein, Richard J. 1996. Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Blücher, Heinrich. 1954. Socrates. Blücher Archive Lecture Transcripts. Bard College. http://www.bard.edu/library/archive/bluecher/lectures/socrates/ socrates_pf.htm. Blücher, Heinrich. 1967. Politics, Man, and Freedom. Final Lecture at Bard College. Blücher Archive Lecture Transcripts. http://www.bard.edu/library/ archive/bluecher/lectures/pol_man_free/politics_pf.htm. Canovan, Margaret. 1992. Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, Sheila. 2011. The Red Mole: Workers’ Councils as a Means of Revolutionary Transformation. In Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Councils from the Commune to the Present, ed. Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini, 48–65. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Gaffney, Jennifer. 2018. Memories of Exclusion: Hannah Arendt and the Haitian Revolution. Philosophy and Social Criticism 44 (6): 701–721. Gines, Kathryn T. 2014. Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Heuer, Wolfgang. 2004. Hannah Arendt and Her Socrates: Heinrich Bluecher. http://www.bard.edu/bluecher/rel_misc/heuer. Isaac, Jeffery C. 1994. Oases in the Desert: Hannah Arendt on Democratic Politics. American Political Science Review 88 (1): 156–168. Kalyvas, Andreas. 2008. Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kohler, Lotte (ed.). 2000a. Introduction. In Within Four Walls: The Correspondence Between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blucher, 1936–1968, trans. Peter Constantine. New York: Harcourt. Kohler, Lotte. 2000b. Within Four Walls: The Correspondence Between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blucher, 1936–1968, trans. Peter Constantine. New York: Harcourt.

FORGOTTEN UPRISINGS AND SILENT DIALOGUES: HANNAH ARENDT … 

317

Kohler, Lotte, and Hans Saner (eds.). 1992. Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers: Correspondence, 1926–1969, trans. Robert Kimber and Rita Kimber. New York: Harcourt Brace. Kohn, Jerome, and Ron H. Feldman. 2007. Preface: A Jewish Life: 1906–1975. In Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman. New York: Schocken Books. Lederman, Shmuel. 2017. Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher: Reflections on Philosophy, Politics and Democracy. Arendt Studies 1: 87–100. Lederman, Shmuel. 2018. Hannah Arendt, the Council Tradition and Contemporary Political Theory. In Council Democracy: Towards a Democratic Socialist Politics, ed. James Muldoon, 150–167. New York and London: Routledge. Lederman, Shmuel. 2019. The Centrality of the Councils in Arendt’s Political Thought. In Arendt on Freedom, Liberation and Revolution, ed. Kei Hiruta. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Medearis, John. 2004. Lost or Obscured? How V. I. Lenin, Joseph Schumpeter and Hannah Arendt Misunderstood the Council Movement. Polity 36 (3): 447–476. Muldoon, James. 2011. The Lost Treasure of Arendt’s Council System. Critical Horizons 12 (3): 396–417. Muldoon, James. 2016. The Origins of Hannah Arendt’s Council System. History of Political Thought 37 (4): 761–789. Neumann, Bernd. 1998. Hannah Arendt und Heinrich Blücher: Ein DeutschJüdisches Gespräch. Berlin: Rowohlt. Nixon, Jon. 2015. Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship. London: Bloomsbury. Reinhardt, Mark. 1997. The Art of Being Free: Taking Liberties with Tocqueville, Marx, and Arendt. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Rubin, Gil. 2015. From Federalism to Binationalism: Hannah Arendt’s Shifting Zionism. Contemporary European History 24 (3): 393–414. Schell, Jonathan. 2006. Introduction: The Arendtian Revolutions. In Hannah Arendt, On Revolution. New York: Penguin Books. Selinger, William. 2016. The Politics of Arendtian Historiography: European Federation and The Origins of Totalitarianism. Modern Intellectual History 13 (2): 417–446. Sitton, John F. 1994. Hannah Arendt’s Argument for Council Democracy. In Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman, 307–329. New York: State University of New York Press. Totschnig, Wolfhart. 2014. Arendt’s Argument for the Council System: A Defense. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 1 (3): 266–282. Young-Bruehl, Elizabeth. 2004. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Rosa Luxemburg on the Dialectic of Spontaneous and Party Politics Paulina Tambakaki

Rosa Luxemburg is an interesting thinker to put in conversation with segments of the radical left who champion self-activity as a way of overcoming the limits of institutional politics. She develops a nuanced reflection on its place in a democratic polity and, in so doing, she offers an intricate account of its relation with institutional, and particularly party, politics. Can contemporary political theory gain something from the interplay that Luxemburg stages between party and spontaneous politics? The chapter argues that Luxemburg’s strong emphasis on the interrelation between party and spontaneous politics challenges the strand of radical democratic theory that proposes that self-activity can on its own have (transformative) effects. Self-activity, the chapter argues, needs to be accompanied by, and supplemented with, party politics. Of course, party politics are, as we have already suggested, intrinsically problematic, according to large segments of radical democratic theory. As the chapter shows in its first section, for Sheldon Wolin and Jacques Rancière, party

P. Tambakaki (*)  Centre for the Study of Democracy, DPIR, University of Westminster, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Kets and J. Muldoon (eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13917-9_16

319

320  P. TAMBAKAKI

politics is bureaucratic and managerial, dismissive and forgetful of the people. Change, if possible at all, remains confined to moments of rupture. Similarly, for Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, whose work the chapter also explores in its first section, party politics is by definition an obstacle to the realisation of democracy. Transformation, they argue, not only arises out of self-activity but also crucially consists in self-activity. These two approaches to spontaneity, the chapter argues, confront us with narrow projections of radical democracy: either spontaneity as (empty) moment, or spontaneity as necessary beginning (and form) of post-representative politics. Questioning the narrowness of these two projections, the chapter finds in Luxemburg’s insights into spontaneity a third possibility: the rise of a party out of spontaneous action that, in seeking to govern, furthers the prospects of democratic transformation—as the case of the rise of Syriza in Greece, exemplifies. This third possibility, concludes the chapter, keeps spontaneity in focus without either under or overplaying its potential. The next section begins to explain spontaneity by probing the two approaches that underplay/overplay spontaneous action. The last section discusses the ways in which Luxemburg’s work fills in the gaps in radical democratic theory.

Spontaneity in Contemporary Political Thought Contemporary reflections on spontaneity unite around two interconnected currents. The first concerns the temporal dimension of spontaneous politics. The second concerns the identification of the spontaneous with the popular, that is, with popular action rather than institutionalist democracy. In particular, a politics considered as spontaneous, as the term immediately reveals, is impulsive and impromptu— otherwise, it does not make sense to consider it spontaneous (Wolin 2006). This impulsiveness, which characterises all spontaneous acts, entails a break from the ordinary and a promise of the unexpected. It consists of a break from the ordinary because the very meaning of spontaneous politics arises from an interruption to the expected. At the same time, by interrupting the flow of the everyday, a spontaneous act opens up possibilities that can have potentially transformative effects— from deepening the workings of democratic institutions to transforming institutional democracy. Given, therefore, that a spontaneous act only springs relationally, vis-à-vis the ordinary and the expected, its very

ROSA LUXEMBURG ON THE DIALECTIC OF SPONTANEOUS … 

321

relation with the exceptional and the unexpected furnishes it with a peculiar type of temporality that does not transpire on first inspection. One way to approach this temporality is to take the angle of the exception, and read the spontaneous act as short-lived interruption, a disruption of the “normal,” ordinary or “natural” order of things. Another way is to approach it from the angle of the promise of change it contains, and see it as a transformative beginning, the beginning of a perhaps different political configuration. Temporality, then, as moment and as beginning. In both variations, the connection with the popular dimension of spontaneity—the second current that unites accounts of politics as spontaneous—is strong. In one sense, the connection with the people as the subject of spontaneous politics is self-evident. The case is not only that the people often acts spontaneously and disrupts institutional hegemonies but also the very idea of the people acting spontaneously enfolds action of a specific form. This is action that is unplanned, unregulated and horizontal. Uncontrolled by party or union leadership, spontaneous popular action sharply contrasts with other forms of action such as protest (organised by social movements or trade unions), participation (revolving around single issues or party policies) and deliberation (that facilitates citizen input to governing institutions through a combination of top-down and bottom-up initiatives). Not only the agenda and objectives of spontaneous popular action are wider (and often more blurry), in contrast with other forms of political action, but also its leaderless or network shape, is seen to exemplify popular rule. Contemporary accounts of spontaneous politics affirm this popular, unregulated and immediate nature of spontaneous democracy, but they differ on the role they reserve for self-activity in the wider political landscape. While for theorists of spontaneous politics-as-moment, democratic spontaneity can only be a temporary break from institutionalism, a reminder of its popular basis and of democratic dynamism, for theorists of spontaneous politics-as-beginning, it is the telling onset of something new and different. In this second case, popular action transpires not simply as supportive of representative democracy, but as one alternative to institutional representation—or at least so is the case for those theorists who investigate the possibilities of post-representative politics (Tormey 2006, 2012). Therefore, what we are confronted with here are two different readings of spontaneous popular action. In the case of spontaneous

322  P. TAMBAKAKI

politics-as-beginning, the people is seen as a transformative, constituent, power and unmediated democracy. The people are also a means to and, crucially, an end of radical transformation. In the case of spontaneous politics-as-moment, there is a sceptical approach to transformation (which explains the emphasis on the momentary dimension of politics), the idea that institutionalisation is inevitable, and hence an emphasis on the exceptionality of popular action. Along the lines of the familiar distinction in political theory between politics (la politique) and the political (le politique), the sphere of institutional power and the sphere of the polity or of political action, the argument of theorists who endorse the momentary approach to spontaneity is that the political might always disturb, and perhaps even destabilise, institutional/administrative/ representative politics, but it never displaces it—for the two, politics and the political, are inseparable (Marchart 2007). The work of Sheldon Wolin and Jacques Rancière exemplifies this second, momentary approach to spontaneous politics, while the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri exemplifies the approach to spontaneity-as-beginning—and as the next two sections show, both approaches are not without their problems.

Spontaneous Politics-as-Moment Sheldon Wolin’s work on fugitive democracy (in his 1996 essay of the same title) and Jacques Rancière’s writings on dissensual politics (in the book Disagreement) share more common ground than it first appears. For a start, both theorists introduce a split within politics by distinguishing between the institutional order (the world of parties, parliaments, administrations and politicians) and politics as an exceptional ­experience that disrupts and (re)activates institutional democracy. For Wolin this split, between the institutional and experiential dimension of politics, transpires in the distinction he draws between politics and the political, while in Rancière it transpires in his distinction between politics and the police. The police, Rancière argues, is that order of configuration and visibility, where particular parts, functions and positions have been identified, distributed and fixed. Politics is that opposite logic, which “disidentifies,” disrupts and challenges the fixed, given and naturalised (Rancière 2001). Along similar lines, the political for Sheldon Wolin, “the moment of commonality,” when collectivities emerge and actively defend the common, is distinct from and acts upon the “continuous, ceaseless, and

ROSA LUXEMBURG ON THE DIALECTIC OF SPONTANEOUS … 

323

endless” world of institutional politics (Wolin 1996, p. 31). This political moment is democratic and spontaneous, episodic and disruptive of conventional politics. The political moment is democratic because it elicits a process of democratic subjectification, when the people act on their common concerns vis-à-vis the institutional order (Wolin), or assert their equality and stage their disagreement with the inequality which permeates the police order (Rancière). Although this difference between the associative and dissociative dimension of the political moment is certainly no small difference between the two thinkers (Marchart 2007), it is not a difference that bears on our discussion of the (spontaneous) democratic moment, given that we are only concerned here with its shape and effect, rather than content and manifestation. For our discussion, that which is noteworthy is the similar way in which Wolin and Rancière approach the people who initiate the political moment, for both thinkers view the democratic subject as surplus to the institutional order (Wolin 1996, p. 39; Rancière 1999, pp. 58, 99–100; 2001, thesis 14–17). In one sense, the people are surplus because they are not part of the conventional world of politics/police—not only because the term envelops the poor and unaccounted (Wolin 1996, pp. 37–38; Rancière 1999, pp. 8–9) but also because the people exceed the spatial configuration of the institutional order. In a second, related, sense therefore the people are surplus because the world of governing and expert rule, the police order in the vocabulary of Rancière, always forgets its founding principle. Parliaments, parties and expert politicians fail and, at times, dismiss the people. Pointing, thereby, to the excess “nature” of the popular moment, Wolin and Rancière affirm on the one hand the incompleteness and non-finality of the democratic ideal (the impossibility of realising democracy, which as we will later see Hardt and Negri in their own way anticipate), and they encircle, on the other, its spontaneity. The spontaneous dimension of popular action that follows from its form-exceeding “nature,” suggests that this can only be momentary (fugitive or exceptional) and self-acted. Of course, the self-activity typical of the democratic moment does not mean that popular action is devoid of all coordination, but it does mean that it is leaderless and unregulated. On one level, this is because of the overflowing, eruptive and transgressive nature of momentary popular action. Given that it is episodic for Wolin and necessarily contingent for Rancière, popular action can neither be grounded (in party organisations and leadership) nor be

324  P. TAMBAKAKI

itself grounding. On a second level, popular action is spontaneous— momentary and, inevitably, horizontal—because it acts on the order of politics/police. Nonetheless, spontaneous action does not replace the institutional order, for this would cancel out the very distinction between politics/political (Wolin) and police/politics (Rancière). In the words of Wolin: Institutionalisation marks the attenuation of democracy: leaders begin to appear; hierarchies develop; experts of one kind or another cluster around the centres of decision; order, procedure, and precedent displace a more spontaneous politics: in retrospect the latter appears as disorganised, inefficient. (1996, p. 39)

What we are, therefore, confronted with here is the circular, yet exceptional, political logic. Although popular democracy disrupts, transgresses and (re)activates institutional democracy (circularity), it always withdraws (exceptionalism). It withdraws in the double sense of both mutating to institutionalisation/“policing” and dissipating (becoming forgotten). Spontaneity is precisely what oils the wheels of this political logic, because it serves as explanation for withdrawal and as justification for the exceptionality of politics. For Wolin the experience of concerted action is exceptional (as fugitive), because social inequalities, conflicts of interests, fragmentation and apathy—that arise with institutionalisation— atrophy popular action (Wolin 2008). For Rancière, by contrast, depoliticisation strengthens the conditions for spontaneous politics. However, it does not warrant it (Rancière 2012). The political moment is contingent (not necessary) and it only “occurs as a provisional accident in the history of forms of domination” (Rancière 2001, thesis 6). Hence the question arises: If the political moment only “occurs as a provisional accident,” and popular democracy is fugitive, then to what extent is it transformative? On first reflection, this appears to be an awkward question to pose. After all, what Wolin and Rancière precisely do not suggest is that spontaneous democracy will be the way forward to some transformative end. Instead, they emphasise its disruptive and dislocating effect, and in so doing, they highlight its exceptionality and carve out its difference from what goes by the name of politics. Still, given that spontaneous democracy is exceptional and only lasts a moment, so to say, then certainly something more than the obvious disruption must be happening the moment it occurs. The very emphasis on the exceptional and momentary

ROSA LUXEMBURG ON THE DIALECTIC OF SPONTANEOUS … 

325

dimension of spontaneous democracy thus opens questions about what its disruptive and dislocating effect might be. Wolin is, for his part, sceptical of transformation, yet sophisticated in the approach he takes. While he retains references to “revolution,” he empties these of connotations of institutional overthrowing. Institutional overthrowing, he suggests, is impossible at the state level, where fugitive democracy acts on. However, new forms of democratic life can be created at the slower tempo of the local level, and together with the immediacy of agitation, they can unsettle state democracy. Therefore, some aspiration to change remains for Wolin. Although it is tempting to read this “aspiration” as striving for reform, Wolin clarifies in his more recent writings, that the immediacy of democratic agitation “rather than merely dissipate, can be a means of educating particularism, energising it to challenge the centre” (Wolin 2006, p. 11). By contrast, Rancière gives a different justification for spontaneity. Instead of seeking an explanation for what its disruptive effect might be (as Wolin does), he is content with its non-aim and “democratic self-manifestation.” Or at least, this is his answer to a question recently posed to him about the subversive potential of the indignados, the occupy movements and the Arab Spring: that the very form of the “gathering of the people,” its horizontality, and the fact that they demand nothing specific of the state and parties is the most important aspect of the present situation. Its importance lies in the fact it stages the opposition between the two worlds of politics and policing (Rancière in Papastergiadis and Esche 2013, pp. 9–10). However, can spontaneous democracy—horizontal and momentary— be separated from the objective of transformation? As Wolin aptly recognises when he turns to the educative role of spontaneity, effacing the link between spontaneity and transformation is not straightforward. Not only because transformative-seeking objectives slip into spontaneous politics and support the emphasis on spontaneity (otherwise why emphasise spontaneity) but also because it is precisely the quest for transformation that triggers spontaneous democracy in the first place. Therefore, to suggest as Rancière does, that democratic self-manifestation is all that spontaneous democracy does, is to suggest as George Kateb argues in relation to Wolin’s work that spontaneous democracy creates very little (Kateb 2001, p. 40). This is then where its limits reside: while it suspects institutionalisation, rejects party organisation and doubts transformation, the momentary approach to spontaneity hollows the disruptive effect of

326  P. TAMBAKAKI

the democratic moment and, ultimately, hollows its creativity—or transformative potential. Thus, today, the momentary approach finds itself in a cul-de-sac. The democratic moment is repeated, yet the momentary approach to spontaneity lacks the resources to explain this repetition and, in the end, it lacks the resources to grasp its ramifications and creative possibilities. Does the second approach to spontaneous politics-asbeginning escape this cul-de-sac?

Spontaneous Politics-as-Beginning In Declaration (2012) and more recently in Assembly (2017), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri lay considerable emphasis on the transformative potential of the socio-political struggles that have been taking place worldwide since 2011. These are struggles that refuse the subjectivities produced by neoliberalism. They are also horizontal, leaderless, movements that often reject representation. Seeking to develop their own democratic mechanisms of inclusive participation (notably assemblies), they “create the potential to throw off systems of political representation and assert their own powers of democratic action” (2012, p. 7). Hence new politics, in the form of assemblyism and commoning, is already discernible according to Hardt and Negri—the principles for a new common sense have been declared—and what remains to be done is to create the constituent power that will organise and take these principles forward. The first thing to notice here is that Hardt and Negri, entirely attuned to the spread of spontaneous politics, to the repetition of the democratic moment, immediately capture its creative potential—and thus escape the cul-de-sac that confronts the momentary approach to spontaneity. Although this focus on creativity, on the transformative potential of social struggles, is already nascent in Empire and Multitude—the books where Hardt and Negri examine the shift to immaterial labour and the transformations it unleashes—in Declaration and in Assembly it becomes further refined and proclaimed. Linked directly to the crisis of neoliberal capitalism and the system of representative democracy that sustains it, political creativity for Hardt and Negri, or more precisely transformative politics, arises out of three moves: rebellion and refusal (that we have already experienced); singularisation and coming together (that we begin to detect); and the construction of independent nonsovereign institutions (that we need to prepare for). Together, these three moves

ROSA LUXEMBURG ON THE DIALECTIC OF SPONTANEOUS … 

327

spearhead the multitude “as the prince of the common in a way that reinvents and realises democracy” (Hardt and Negri 2012, p. 44). Therefore, what instantly becomes apparent, without going into the details of each step, is that spontaneous struggles for Hardt and Negri, far from withdrawing once they have disrupted the institutional order, as is the case for Wolin and Rancière, remain and change it. On the one hand, this is because transformative politics, for Hardt and Negri, the possibility of an alternative, grows within the networked form of political organisation that immaterial labour brings into being. As a form of biopower, empire controls social life and produces singularities. It nourishes the multitude, the ensemble of “singularities that act in common” (Hardt and Negri 2004, p. 105). On the other hand, however, it is also because the event, the crisis of neoliberal capitalism, facilitates the inversion of internalised subjectivities and, therefore, of transformative politics. Hence the very possibility for transformation, for institutional overturning and democratic realisation, which Hardt and Negri insist on and hold open throughout their work, entails a different approach to spontaneous politics. Spontaneous politics for Hardt and Negri is offloaded of its eruptive, unregulated, dimension—or at least, its eruptive dimension is not what primarily interests them. Instead, what interests Hardt and Negri is the self-realisation of spontaneous—self-acted—politics and, therefore, its onset and duration, rupture and effect. In contrast then with Wolin and Rancière, for whom spontaneous action is short-lived because institutional transformation is impossible, for Hardt and Negri spontaneous action is enduring because institutional transformation is possible. A different tempo and, inevitably, a different form defines the politics that Hardt and Negri make the case for. Closely connected to the three moves to transformation, that we earlier identified, the tempo of spontaneous politics is an extended period of assemblyism and democratic transformation (Hardt and Negri 2009, pp. 173–178; 2012, pp. 31–32; 2017, pp. 231–245, 254–258, 274–280). Although a crisis, an event, initiates spontaneous politics, once this has accelerated, it inevitably encounters slow time—for horizontality and assemblying take time. Or, to be more accurate, spontaneous politics develops its own autonomous management of time where slowness mixes with speed and intensity. Spontaneous action assumes, therefore, a horizontal form. It extends and, crucially, it expands. It extends to subjectivities engaged in biopolitical production and it expands to new domains. In so doing,

328  P. TAMBAKAKI

spontaneous action realises democracy—since spontaneity becomes synonymous with horizontality and self-organisation in this context. Of course, Hardt and Negri insist in Assembly that the rise of the multitude in no way implies the end of leadership—only its transformation. But can the same also be said about representation? Hardt and Negri answer this question arguing that to make democratic organisation a reality: we need to question the progressive assumption that political representation is the royal road to democracy and recognize it instead as an enormous obstacle. Don’t misunderstand us, we are not questioning representation in order secretly to support some vanguardist solution or to refuse any participation in institutional structures that mix representation with democratic elements. Our base assumption instead is that those are not our only choices. (2017, pp. 31–32)

Hardt and Negri give several reasons why representation is not our only option. Most of these are discussed extensively in Declaration and some are shared by both Rancière (2006) and Wolin (2008). All of these have to do with problems inherent in the concept such as: exclusion, as a result of expensive electoral campaigns which prevent the poor from entering the world of politics; opacity of information, as a result of powerful lobbies and their control over the media; citizen immobilisation, partly because of fear and securitisation and partly because of the invisibility of participatory structures (the demise of civil society, trade union and party politics); global decision making which increasingly substitutes for democratic decision making; and, finally, the impurity that is inherent to representation, since “by definition, representation is a mechanism that separates the population from power, the commanded from those who command” (Hardt and Negri 2012, p. 27). But there is a difference in the way in which Hardt and Negri, Wolin and Rancière “negotiate” these problems and their ramifications for democratic action. Whereas Wolin and Rancière view the democratic moment as a threatened, contingent moment, because of all the problems with representative politics, Hardt and Negri view the political moment as a necessary, perhaps inevitable, process that begins democratic transformation. This allows us to see that spontaneous activity constitutes for Hardt and Negri both the means to democratic transformation and its end. The limit that confronts, therefore, their argument is the opposite

ROSA LUXEMBURG ON THE DIALECTIC OF SPONTANEOUS … 

329

to that of Wolin and Rancière. Hardt and Negri overplay the effect of spontaneity on institutional politics. On the back of the assumption that institutional politics can be transformed (and not just reformed), they exaggerate the ease with which spontaneity could transfer us to another order. Rosa Luxemburg’s reflections on the means/end distinction, particularly her synthesis between party and spontaneous politics, challenges the terms of this debate. The next section explains why.

Rosa Luxemburg: Between Spontaneity and Party Politics To elucidate the meaning of spontaneous politics we have so far in the chapter distinguished between two different approaches to spontaneity: spontaneous politics-as-moment, exemplified in the work of Wolin and Rancière, and spontaneous politics as self-realisation exemplified in the work of Hardt and Negri. Both approaches set up a contrast between spontaneous and party politics. They also pay close attention to the idea of spontaneity, which they tie to popular action freed from party organisation and leadership. However, the two approaches differ on the place they reserve for spontaneous politics in the face of ever-growing institutionalisation. For Wolin and Rancière, the problem with party politics is that it cannot deliver what it promises. Bureaucratic and managerial, party politics dismisses and forgets the people. Therefore, spontaneity, taken as the moment of exceptional, unregulated, popular action, is destined to be just that: a moment, that reminds the institutional world of its popular basis. By contrast, for Hardt and Negri, spontaneity is the means to and, decisively, the embodiment of a real democracy—unobscured by party politics. The various suspicions they hold of party politics alongside their distinctive renditions of spontaneity lead Hardt and Negri, Wolin and Rancière to give focus to different aspects of spontaneous politics: eruptive, contingent, momentary and, arguably, empty of transformative effects (Wolin and Rancière); or, necessary, enduring and, therefore, a backbone to democratic transformation (Hardt and Negri). Two opposing projections of radical democracy confront us here: on the one hand, a self-assuring but ultimately unavailing type of spontaneous politics (Wolin and Rancière), and, on the other hand, a self-emancipatory but, ultimately, one-dimensional politics (Hardt and Negri). Both these projections, suggested the previous section, leave us with narrow readings of spontaneous politics. The first approach of Wolin and

330  P. TAMBAKAKI

Rancière leaves us with a palpable circularity that prompts us to resign from transformative politics—as popular eruptions break out, achieve little and then break out again. The second approach of Hardt and Negri leaves us with the obscure anticipation of a political telos—a democracy realised. Both approaches end up either under or overplaying the potential of spontaneity. Can we escape these projections of radical politics, while keeping spontaneity in focus? Or to put the same point differently: can we sustain the case for spontaneity, without either resigning from transformation or seeking all-out institutional overhauling? Rosa Luxemburg, a political activist and structural Marxist, writing at the height of class struggle and revolutionary politics in the 1900–1920s opens the way to addressing this question. Renown for her defence of spontaneity, Rosa Luxemburg is an interesting thinker to put in conversation with contemporary radical democrats. The reason for this move is obvious. Luxemburg probes spontaneity. More than that, Luxemburg’s writings touch on themes that are lodged at the centre of contemporary accounts of radical democracy. For Luxemburg not only emphasises the need to secure the widest involvement of the (unorganised) masses into class struggle throughout her work (Luxemburg 2008a, pp. 102–103; 2008b, pp. 158–159; 2010b, p. 101)—thus foreshadowing the later shift of radical thinking from the class struggle to multiple subject positions and pluralisation of struggles (Trend 1996, pp. 1–18; Laclau and Mouffe 2001, pp. 149–194)—but she also sees democracy as the “indispensable” horizon or terrain on which class struggle evolves. The class struggle unfolds on a democratic terrain because democratic rights for Luxemburg “serve the proletariat as fulcrums in its task of transforming bourgeois society” (2008a, p. 93). Operating as enabling mechanisms, democratic rights open the way for the experience of struggle. They both raise class-consciousness and they solidify class interests. Or as she puts it in Reform or Revolution: Democracy is indispensable not because it renders superfluous the conquest of political power by the proletariat, but because it renders this conquest of power both necessary and possible. (2008a, p. 93)

Moreover, given that the conquest of power, “the triumph of socialism,” involves for Luxemburg “the triumph of freedom and equality for all,” it is tempting to read in her argument for socialist transformation an

ROSA LUXEMBURG ON THE DIALECTIC OF SPONTANEOUS … 

331

argument for a specifically democratic form of revolution (Luxemburg 2010a, p. 45). This temptation grows stronger when we reflect on Luxemburg’s fervent defence of democratic institutions in her disputes with Lenin and Trotsky, which have famously framed her as a “spontaneist.” In The Russian Revolution, Luxemburg insists, for example, on the role of the people in correcting the shortcomings of bourgeois representative institutions and in The Organisational Questions of Russian Social Democracy she extols “movements in ferment” and the way these spontaneous popular struggles ventilate, create and foster revolutionary transformation (Luxemburg 2010b, p. 91). Of course, Luxemburg’s defence of democratic struggle by no means implies that she uncritically embraces bourgeois parliamentarianism and the institutionalised bureaucracy of the SPD—the Social Democratic Party of which she was a member. However, it does mean that, viewed within the particular context of social democracy in Germany where Luxemburg lived and worked, democracy for her both envelops and facilitates political struggle and incites the transformation of representative institutions. Therefore, three points become apparent by reading Luxemburg’s work through a democratic lens. The first is that her very insistence on struggle, her defence of the necessary link between class struggle and socialist transformation, speaks to contemporary radical democrats who seek to entangle the political specificity of the democratic moment with the experience of popular struggle. The second, related point is that Luxemburg’s necessary link between political (institutional) struggle, democracy and (socialist) transformation challenges the radical democrats of today who reject as we have seen the idea that transformation can issue from party politics. Third, and perhaps, more daringly, it is in Luxemburg’s necessary link between democracy and socialist transformation that we perhaps find an explanation for her defence of spontaneity. But what does spontaneity mean exactly for Luxemburg? The notion of struggle is lodged at the centre of Luxemburg’s account of spontaneity. By struggle Luxemburg understands an ongoing series of actions that seek to challenge and eventually transform what she often refers to as bourgeois democracy (2008b, pp. 64–65, 130–131). This is an important first point to take note of because it explains that the kind of activity which qualifies as spontaneous according to Luxemburg encompasses but is not reduced to isolated incidents or short-lived reactions to events. Understood as part of a wider

332  P. TAMBAKAKI

struggle, spontaneous activity is ongoing and multifarious. It includes issue-specific protests which aim to reform early twentieth-century German democracy; mass strikes which challenge absolutism as in the case of 1900s Russia; and daily acts of agitation that strive for the socialist transformation of society. Another way to approach this emphasis on struggle is to view it as part of a wider process of consciousness formation. “From Luxemburg’s perspective,” explains Jon Nixon, “collective action springs from a critical understanding … [that while] based on the experience of exploitation must be mediated through a process of critical consciousness whereby one’s experience is understood within a broader social and economic totality” (2018, p. 89). Without this reference to socio-economic totality and the broader process of forming a critical agency, spontaneous activity makes little sense for Luxemburg. Alex Levant makes a similar point when he suggests that Luxemburg understands spontaneity as an awakening that initiates a change to the conditions of exploitation that working people find themselves in (2012, p. 372). This awakening, inspired and directed by political parties according to Luxemburg, makes spontaneous activity appear somewhat less spontaneous—if by spontaneity we understand only an impulsive reaction to an event. While impulsiveness is certainly one marker of spontaneity, this does not make it any less directed or prepared. Indeed, it appears that spontaneous activity for Luxemburg is prepared and directed—that is, planted by parties and channelled through (extra)parliamentary struggle—towards the path of socialist transformation. As Luxemburg explains in The Mass Strike, sudden and impromptu ruptures are “not just ‘made,’” or “decided at random, or propagated” (2008b, pp. 117–118). They are the fruits of ongoing work done inside and outside social democratic parties. To sum up, then, spontaneous activity for Luxemburg is ongoing, multifarious, popularly led (or self-acted) and directed—that is, prepared by political parties. It is neither simply impulsive as some of the critics of spontaneism suggest (Wolfe 1961; Waters 1970; Glückstein 2012) nor simply subject to party control—a necessary step in the way to revolutionary politics (Lukács 1968; Glückstein 2012). Following a democratic reading of her work—and siding in the process with Frölich (2010), Memos (2012) and Geras (1973)—we could argue that it is precisely the interplay that Luxemburg stages between the two, between party and

ROSA LUXEMBURG ON THE DIALECTIC OF SPONTANEOUS … 

333

spontaneous politics, that renders her account significant for contemporary debates in radical democracy. This interplay makes Luxemburg spontaneist enough to converse with radical democrats of today and party-conscious enough to overturn the terms of their debate. Luxemburg is spontaneist enough because she insists on, and repeatedly emphasises in her work, that self-activity by the working class is an indispensable part of political agitation. In The Mass Strike, working class self-activity is described as fluctuating and unregulated (Luxemburg 2008b, pp. 120, 123, 128, 134). Arising out of some trivial cause, an “accidental outbreak,” spontaneous action is eruptive and transgressive of party designs and discipline (Luxemburg 2008b, pp. 122, 140). Therefore, parties can neither control nor regulate the pulsations of the movement while these last (although, as we have already seen, parties can certainly lay the groundwork for the emergence of such spontaneous movement). Luxemburg’s emphasis on self-activity shares common ground with the spontaneous politics of Hardt and Negri, Wolin and Rancière. With Wolin and Rancière, it shares the focus on eruption—and arguably, the awareness of the episodic dimension of spontaneous rupture. With Hardt and Negri it finds common ground on the suspicions it harbours of centralisation. It also shares the confidence in transformation. Spontaneous action provides the proletariat with experience of struggle; it elicits changes in party tactics and policies—thus penetrating institutions of representation (Luxemburg 2010b, p. 91; 2010d, p. 230); and, crucially, for the argument of this chapter, spontaneous action initiates “work of organisation,” key to revolutionary transformation (Luxemburg 2008b, pp. 134–135, 157; 2010c, p. 153; 2010d, p. 227). In contrast, therefore, to Wolin and Rancière, Hardt and Negri, that reject party politics as a vehicle for democratic transformation, Luxemburg casts party structures as indispensable to revolutionary transformation. They are one of its pillars. If class struggle constitutes one vector of transformative politics, party work constitutes the other. Parties assemble the masses and inform them of their tactics and aims (Luxemburg 2008b, pp. 161–166); they direct action during turbulent times (Luxemburg 2008b, pp. 149–150); they unify struggles and forward revolutionary objectives (Luxemburg 2010b, pp. 91–93; 2010d, pp. 227–228). In other words, when revolutions—such as mass strikes— spontaneously arise, they give birth to and precipitate party organisation

334  P. TAMBAKAKI

according to Luxemburg. But party organisation, and therefore work of reform, needs to be infused with spontaneity to set the groundwork for revolutionary work. In Luxemburg’s words: The question ‘Reform or revolution?’ as it is posed by Bernstein, equals for the social democracy the question: ‘To be or not to be?’ … It is not a question of this or that method of struggle, or the use of this or that set of tactics, but of the very existence of the social democratic movement’. (2008a, p. 42)

In this connection, then, which Luxemburg draws between revolution and reform, spontaneity and party politics, we find that the way opens for a third projection for radical democracy today: the rise out of spontaneous action of a party that, seeking to govern, engages in parliamentary work for social reform that complements and furthers democratic transformation. Of course, there are radical theorists that already suggest that spontaneous politics must give birth to a political party if it is to have any serious transformative effect on society (among others see Žižek 2012). Jodi Dean, for example, argues in her recent book Crowd and Party that parties “maintain fidelity to the crowd discharge” and, in so doing, they “provide an apparatus for the endurance” of crowd events—Dean’s preferred term for spontaneous politics (2016, pp. 126, 217). The difference between Dean’s argument and what I am suggesting here is that parties for Dean do not tie in with democracy, for democracy has failed to deliver for the people it is supposed to serve and it must be for this reason discarded. Democratic parties are, nonetheless, precisely what the third projection of radical democracy focuses on. Two objections immediately arise about this project. The first concerns the very case for a party (Memos 2012). Doesn’t this case speak, ultimately, past Wolin and Rancière, Hardt and Negri? This is a strong objection. However, it could be argued that from the vantage point of today’s political landscape, the case for a left party points, ironically, to what appears to be missing from their respective attempts to circumvent the autonomy of the democratic moment (Wolin and Rancière) and to assert its potential for transformation (Hardt and Negri): the desire, as Jodi Dean puts it to “take the risk of politics” (2009, p. 35)—for neither the experience of the democratic moment is sufficient enough nor the necessity for institutional overthrowing is credible enough. The second objection concerns the emergence of a left party out of spontaneous politics. How would this come about and how can it

ROSA LUXEMBURG ON THE DIALECTIC OF SPONTANEOUS … 

335

escape, if at all, the reformism and bureaucratisation of party politics, which Wolin, for instance, so eloquently demonstrates? The example of Syriza, which in the face of the Greek crisis, came to prominence to become the main opposition party in Greek Parliament in the elections of June 2012 is a case in point here (Douzinas and Bourke 2012). As to the strengths of this third radical democratic projection? One strength is that it shows that spontaneous action does not necessarily divorce from creative, transformative, ends—as Wolin and Rancière suggest with their respective references to “education” and “democratic self-manifestation.” To be sure, education and self-manifestation are, indeed, necessary features of spontaneous action. But there is more to it as Luxemburg teaches us. By eliciting social reforms and propelling (the need) for party (re)organisation, spontaneous action opens uncharted paths to democratic transformation. Of course, for Rancière, who strongly opposes vanguardism, the very idea of transformative party politics is a contradiction in terms. However, far from ascertaining vanguardism, Luxemburg’s defence of party organisation invites us to reassess both the role and place of organisation in journeys of democratic transformation and its necessary, incessant, interplay with spontaneous democratisation.1 The second strength of this third projection of radical democracy is that far from seeking democratic realisation, as Hardt and Negri anticipate, an “exodus” from the world of institutional politics (2009, p. 160), the case of a party, rising out of (spontaneous) politics, yet staying in and fighting politics, offers different insights to democratic transformation. According to these insights, transformation not only implies institutional overthrowing and DIY politics—the spectre of large segments of radical thinking since 1968—but, as Luxemburg reminds us, transformation also encompasses work for social reform (not reformism) and party agitation. To reject, therefore, party politics, as Hardt and Negri do, certainly entails exit from obtrusive institutionalisation, but it also entails (an easy) exit from the struggle of and for politics.

Conclusion Seeking to explore the meaning and role of spontaneous politics in imaginaries of radical democracy, this chapter distinguished between two versions of spontaneity and identified their limitations. United by their focus on self-activity and divided by their different conceptions of

336  P. TAMBAKAKI

temporality, the two approaches to spontaneous politics, as moment and as beginning, the chapter suggested, offer narrow projections of radical democracy. Whereas the first approach of Wolin and Rancière valorises spontaneous politics, yet empties it of transformative effects, the second approach of Hardt and Negri enthuses in the transformative effect of spontaneity, yet narrows it to one form—self-activity. Can we retain a focus on spontaneity without either underplaying or overplaying its transformative effects? Drawing upon Luxemburg’s synthesis between spontaneity and organisation, revolution and reform, the chapter identified a third possibility for transformative politics that neither resigns from democratic transformation nor anticipates its telos in some realisation of the democratic idea. This third possibility, that asserts the role of party organisation, while distinguishing between democracy and vanguardism, constitutes the particular contribution of Rosa Luxemburg to radical democratic theory.

Note 1. Prentoulis and Thomassen (2013) as well as Kioupkiolis (2018) suggest something similar. The difference is that they focus more narrowly on the type of leadership that develops in socio-political struggles.

References Dean, Jodi. 2009. Politics Without Politics. Parallax 15 (3): 20–36. Dean, Jodi. 2016. Crowds and Party. London and New York: Verso. Douzinas, Costas, and Joanna Bourke. 2012. A Syriza Victory Will Mark the Beginning of the End of Greece’s Tragedy. The Guardian, June 17. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/17/syriza-victory-greece-austerity-crisis. Accessed 14 July 2013. Frölich, Paul. 2010. Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, trans. J. Hoornweg. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Geras, Norman. 1973. Rosa Luxemburg: Barbarism and the Collapse of Capitalism. New Left Review 82: 17–37. Glückstein, Donny. 2012. Standing the Test of Time: Reform or Revolution. Critique 40 (3): 389–403. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Books. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

ROSA LUXEMBURG ON THE DIALECTIC OF SPONTANEOUS … 

337

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2012. Declaration. New York: Argo Navis. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2017. Assembly. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kateb, George. 2001. Wolin as a Critic of Democracy. In Democracy and Vision: Sheldon Wolin and the Vicissitudes of the Political, ed. W. E. Connolly and A. Botwinick, 39–57. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kioupkiolis, Alexandros. 2018. Movements Post-hegemony: How Contemporary Collective Action Transforms Hegemonic Politics. Social Movement Studies 17 (1): 99–112. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 2001. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Levant, Alex. 2012. Rethinking Spontaneity Beyond Classical Marxism: Re-reading Luxemburg Through Benjamin, Gramsci and Thompson. Critique 40 (3): 367–387. Lukács, Georg. 1968. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. R. Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Luxemburg, Rosa. 2008a. Reform or Revolution. In The Essential Rosa Luxemburg, ed. H. Scott, 37–104. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Luxemburg, Rosa. 2008b. The Mass Strike. In The Essential Rosa Luxemburg, ed. H. Scott, 105–181. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Luxemburg, Rosa. 2010a. The French Revolution. In Socialism or Barbarism, ed. P. Le Blanc and H. Scott, 39–45. London: Pluto Press. Luxemburg, Rosa. 2010b. Organisational Questions of Russian Social Democracy. In Socialism or Barbarism, ed. P. Le Blanc and H. Scott, 81–102. London: Pluto Press. Luxemburg, Rosa. 2010c. Theory and Practice. In Socialism or Barbarism, ed. P. Le Blanc and H. Scott, 145–165. London: Pluto Press. Luxemburg, Rosa. 2010d. The Russian Revolution. In Socialism or Barbarism, ed. P. Le Blanc and H. Scott, 223–237. London: Pluto Press. Marchart, Oliver. 2007. Post-foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Memos, Christos. 2012. Crisis of Theory, Subversive Praxis and Dialectical Contradictions: Notes on Luxemburg and the Anti-capitalist Movement. Critique 40 (3): 405–421. Nixon, Jon. 2018. Rosa Luxemburg and the Struggle for Democratic Renewal. London: Pluto Press. Papastergiadis, Nikos, and Charles Esche. 2013. Assemblies in Art and Politics: An Interview with Jacques Rancière. Theory, Culture and Society 31 (7–8): 27–41. Prentoulis, Marina, and Lasse Thomassen. 2013. Political Theory in the Square: Protest, Representation and Subjectification. Contemporary Political Theory 12 (3):166–184.

338  P. TAMBAKAKI Rancière, Jacques. 1999. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. J. Rose. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2001. Ten Theses on Politics. Theory and Event 5 (3). Project MUSE. https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2001.0028. Rancière, Jacques. 2006. Hatred of Democracy, trans. S. Corcoram. London and New York: Verso. Rancière, Jacques. 2012. Entrevista a Jacques Rancière: Hablar De Crisis De La Sociedad Es Cuplar A Sus Víctimas. Público, January 15. https://www.publico.es/culturas/hablar-crisis-sociedad-culpar-victimas.html. Accessed 29 June 2013. Tormey, Simon. 2006. Not in My Name: Deleuze, Zapatismo and the Critique of Representation. Parliamentary Affairs 59 (1): 138–154. Tormey, Simon. 2012. Occupy Wall Street: From Representation to Postrepresentation. Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies 5: 132–137. Trend, David. 1996. Radical Democracy: Identity, Citizenship and the State. New York: Routledge. Waters, Mary-Alice. 1970. Introduction. Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, 7–49. New York: Pathfinder Press. Wolfe, Bertram. 1961. Rosa Luxemburg and V. I. Lenin: The Opposite Poles of Revolutionary Socialism. The Antioch Review 21 (2): 209–226. Wolin, Sheldon. 1996. Fugitive Democracy. In Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. S. Benhabib, 31–45. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wolin, Sheldon. 2006. Agitated Times. Parallax 11 (4): 2–11. Wolin, Sheldon. 2008. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2012. The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. London and New York: Verso.

The Birth of Council Communism James Muldoon

Workers’ councils arose spontaneously during the revolutionary uprisings of the 1917–1919 period in Russia and Europe. The spread of councils across Germany in early November 1918 appeared to mirror the initial formation of councils in Russia. Socialists hoped that the German Revolution would be the beginning of a proletarian revolution in Western Europe. However, such predictions proved inaccurate as Germany transitioned to the democratic republican institutions of the Weimar Republic leading to the dissipation of the council movements in Germany (Bourrinet 2016, p. 177). Nevertheless, it was in the German and Dutch sections of the Communist International that council communism first developed. The term “council communism” as distinguished from official communism started to be used in 1921 (Kool 1970, p. 575). Among its early proponents were Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter and Henriette Roland-Holst in the Netherlands and Otto Rühle, Karl Korsch, Karl Schröder, Franz Pfemfert, Karl Plättner, Gustav Landauer, Erich Mühsam and Paul Mattick in Germany.1 At its core, council communism is a theory of working-class struggle and revolution based on the principle of the self-emancipation of the working class and the organisational form of J. Muldoon (*)  Department of Politics, University of Exeter, Penryn, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 G. Kets and J. Muldoon (eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13917-9_17

339

340  J. MULDOON

workers’ councils as the most effective means to overthrow capitalism and to establish the basis of a new society. Previous studies of council communism have tended to emphasise the dispute between Lenin and the council communists over interpretations of the Russian Revolution and a Leninist model of revolutionary strategy (Rachleff 1976; van der Linden 2004). This chapter demonstrates the pivotal importance of the German Revolution on the development of council communist thought. The political experience of the German council movements was essential because it tested the viability of Lenin’s political strategy in Western Europe. The starting point of the split between Lenin and the group he called the “Left” Communists was over the universal applicability of Russian strategies. The failure of the German Revolution provided evidence to council communists of the specificity of the Bolshevik model to Russia and the need to develop new strategies for Germany (Pannekoek 1920). In particular, theorists such as Anton Pannekoek, Otto Rühle and Karl Korsch came to the conclusion that the ultimate reason for the failure of the German Revolution was the resilience of the strong hold of bourgeois mentalities over workers. They believed that this bourgeois ideology was reinforced through participation in parliamentary institutions and traditional party and union organisations. While political power had passed temporarily into the hands of workers during the revolution, council delegates had freely voted for the formation of a constituent assembly and the disempowerment of the councils. When the Bolsheviks promoted their model of revolution as an international strategy within the Communist International, it was not so much the course of the Russian Revolution which was in question, but rather the lessons of the German Revolution. Although council communists would develop a critique of the centralisation and bureaucratisation of the Russian Revolution, the initial split occurred over the question of revolutionary strategy for Europe. Council communists were critical of the proposed replacement of the self-organisation of the working class with the direction of a party and union leadership and advocated instead for workers’ councils as a proletarian form of organisation for empowering workers. This chapter also traces a shift in theorists’ understanding of the workers’ councils during and after the German Revolution. It argues that while participants in the revolution such as the Revolutionary Shop Stewards were more inclined to view the councils as the initial structures of a post-capitalist society, this shifted in later council communist

THE BIRTH OF COUNCIL COMMUNISM 

341

ideology, which arose in the early 1920s, after the realistic possibilities of establishing a council republic had already faded from view (Kuhn 2012, p. xiii). Peter Rachleff (1976) claims “‘Workers’ councils’ does not designate a fixed form of organization, elaborated once and for all and for which all that remains is to perfect its details; it concerns a principle, that of workers’ self-management of the enterprise and of production.” While this may be true for certain council communists, it was not the case for many participants in the council movements. A long tradition within council thought—from Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune to the theoretical elaboration of a council system by Richard Müller and Ernst Däumig and the writings of Cornelius Castoriadis—has sought to demonstrate how specific institutional features of a council form are superior to bourgeois and liberal political institutions. The outlines of council communism did not emerge immediately during the experience of workers’ councils in the German Revolution. Rather, they emerged gradually through theoretical debates within the Communist International. In the early stages of the International, key theorists still supported aspects of the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik Party’s program. For example, Herman Gorter (1918) declared Lenin the revolutionary who “surpasses all other leaders of the proletariat,” while in 1919 Pannekoek (1919b) still considered the Russian Revolution a communist revolution. When theorists did begin to shift on their understanding of the Russian Revolution and other issues of principle and strategy, they did not move as one. Council communism developed in the early 1920s primarily through debates between Lenin, Gorter, Rühle and Pannekoek in which council communists grew increasingly more critical of the prospects of the Russian Revolution and Bolshevism. This chapter provides an outline of these debates in order to unpack the development of council communist ideology following the experiences of the German Revolution.

From the Räterepublik to Council Communism Councils initially arose spontaneously in Germany through a sailor’s revolt which began in Kiel on 4 November 1918 and quickly spread across the old German Empire. The councils arose without significant theoretical elaboration leading participants in the council movements to have to improvise their structure and purpose. It was widely considered that some form of socialisation of key industries would be an important

342  J. MULDOON

practical task of the workers’ councils, but much concerning their institutional structure and primary activities remained undefined. Richard Müller and Ernst Däumig of the Revolutionary Shop Stewards sought to provide a theorisation of the workers’ councils according to a “pure” council system, which was their outline for a lasting institutionalisation of the councils as a replacement of parliamentary democracy. Ralf Hoffrogge (2015) has provided an excellent account of Müller and Däumig’s theory of a council system published in their newspaper, Der Arbeiter-Rat [The Worker-Council], established in February 1919. As Hoffrogge explains, “[i]n the spirit of Marx and Engels, Müller and Däumig saw their model as both a radical form of democracy and a dictatorship of the proletariat understood as the class dominance of the working class” (p. 111). In these early articles, workers’ councils were envisaged as the institutional basis of a future German council republic [Räterepublik] in which a pyramidal system of economic and political councils would assume political authority and manage economic production. Däumig (2012) argued that the main goal of the council system was “the removal of capitalist production and the implementation of socialist production” (p. 52). A distinction can be drawn between the practices of the European council movements in the immediate post-war revolutionary period and the council communist ideology that developed during the early 1920s. Following the failure of the German Revolution and the bureaucratisation of the Russian council state, the emphasis of certain council theorists shifted from the councils as a distinctively proletarian institutional framework of a post-capitalist “council state,” to a more ambiguous organisational structure, which facilitated the mass action of the entire working class, rather than a party or bureaucratic elite. While Müller and Däumig had always been closer to the former position, theorists such as Pannekoek and Korsch tended towards the latter. During the period 1917–1921, there was a decline in the perceived importance of an institutional plan for a council republic and a movement towards an understanding of the councils as a method of struggle in an ongoing revolutionary process. The council communist tendency is commonly dismissed as a utopian current of ultra-leftism that remained fixated on workers’ councils as embodying the experience of the workers themselves outside of any form of mediation, whether party, union or state (Dauvé 2015, p. 99). Critics claim that Lenin (1920) rightly condemned this misguided ideology in his polemical pamphlet, “‘Left-wing’ Communism: an Infantile Disorder,”

THE BIRTH OF COUNCIL COMMUNISM 

343

for rejecting party discipline, political leadership and strategic participation in trade unions and parliaments. Lenin argued that the left communists’ strategies would lead to organisational incapacity and a lack of unity and direction. Following Lenin’s criticisms, Gilles Dauvé (2015) later complained that council communism developed into a rigid and undialectic ideology of “councilism” in which rejection of trade unions and parties became an article of blind faith rather than a considered strategy of working-class struggle (p. 95). However, the council communists deserve more than a small footnote to Pannekoek as one of Lenin’s defeated rivals in the history of Marxism. Their emphasis on workers’ self-emancipation led them to reflect upon a wide variety of issues related to the councils, which produced a rich body of literature irreducible to the simplistic image of “councilism” that now predominates. While council communists shared a common general direction and set of animating concerns, they differed widely in their political positions on key issues. Reflection on the councils led to an array of different political analyses, institutional models, revolutionary strategies and visions of a post-capitalist future. What is at stake is more than a simple organisational question of councils versus party. The origins of the council communist tradition lie in the theoretical disputes that occurred within the Dutch and German far left in the early twentieth century and later in the development of opposition movements to the war during the First World War in Germany.2 On the theoretical front, theorists such as Pannekoek and Luxemburg argued against Kautsky that class-consciousness needed to be developed not only through a bureaucratic party or trade union, but also in the course of a mass strike and revolutionary class struggle (Luxemburg 2004; Pannekoek 1978a). They favoured more spontaneous forms of action and more direct forms of workers’ control than that available within the established unions and parties. In practical terms, socialists who opposed the SPD’s decision to grant war credits to fund the German war effort would soon advocate for workers’ councils and would go on to find groups such as the USPD, Spartacus League and KPD. In January 1917, as the antiwar socialists were expelled from the SPD, plans were already under way for the creation of a new party of the Left with a different organisational structure and revolutionary strategies (Gerber 1989, pp. 118–120). In order to unpack some of the complexities of the council communists’ political thought, I will consider how theoretical debates within the movement developed along six main axes:

344  J. MULDOON

1. Reflections on revolutionary conditions in Russia and Western Europe; 2.  Criticisms of the centralisation and bureaucratisation of the Russian state under the Bolshevik Party; 3. Questions of the councils as a working-class government or revolutionary process; 4. Considerations of the role of revolutionary leadership; 5. Debates on the relationship between the councils and communist parties; 6. Refusal of participation in parliamentary elections. Revolutionary Conditions First, the basis of one of the fundamental differences between the Bolsheviks and the council communists can be found in Herman Gorter’s open letter in response to Lenin’s “Left Communism” pamphlet. Gorter argued that strategic disagreements between them were founded on different underlying analyses of class relations and the revolutionary conditions in Russia and Western Europe. He questioned the applicability of Lenin’s strategies because “the condition of the Western European Revolution, especially in England and Germany, are entirely unlike, and cannot be compared with, those of the Russian Revolution” (Gorter 1920). For Gorter, the Russian proletariat had the good fortune of the support of the poor peasants during the revolution, whereas “the workers in Western Europe stand all alone” (Gorter 1920). He considered that the lack of natural allies of the workers and the dominance of the bourgeoisie posed a greater challenge for the European proletariat that required more attentiveness to developing its own power and autonomy rather than relying on other classes for support. Gorter did not consider participation in trade unions and parliamentary elections to be effective strategies under these less favourable circumstances: As the Third International does not believe in the fact that in Western Europe the proletariat will stand alone, it neglects the mental development of this proletariat; which in every respect is deeply entangled in the bourgeois ideology as yet; and chooses tactics which leave the slavery and subjection to bourgeois ideas unmolested, intact. (Gorter 1920)

Pannekoek agreed with Gorter on the fundamental difference in political context of Western Europe in comparison to Russia. He argued that

THE BIRTH OF COUNCIL COMMUNISM 

345

the experience of the failed German Revolution offered further proof of the difficulty of a successful revolution in the West because “the forces which came to the fore in Germany are by and large at work throughout the rest of Europe” (Pannekoek 1920). In his insightful 1920 essay, “World Revolution and Communist Tactics,” Pannekoek also emphasised the strength of the hold of bourgeois mentalities over the masses, a dominance that he argued would be further entrenched if parliamentary politics and trade union tactics were employed: the spiritual and mental character of the masses here is quite different from that of the Eastern countries, where they had not experienced this domination of bourgeois culture. And herein above all lies the difference in the progress of the revolution in the East and in the West. (Pannekoek 1920)

Furthermore, Pannekoek was convinced that the spread of revolution from Russia to the West in the abortive 1918 German revolution demonstrated that conditions were increasingly fertile for more active confrontations with the state. For Pannekoek, the First World War marked the end of a long peaceful period of the growth of capitalism and the beginning of a more direct and antagonistic struggle led by the working class through their own political activities. What can be seen from these analyses is that the council communists’ advocacy of workers’ councils was based not on the assertion of dogmatic principles, but on the careful assessment of class relations and the future potential for revolutionary activity. Their various positions on this point, along with many others, were more nuanced than is commonly perceived. Criticisms of the Russian Revolution Second, council communism also developed a critique of the Russian Revolution as a bourgeois revolution that produced a form of state capitalism rather than a fully developed proletarian society. In his open letter to Lenin, Gorter had not yet come to view the Russian Revolution as anything but a proletarian victory, but even as early as 1921 he arrived at a notion of Russia as having experienced a “dual revolution,” with a communist revolution against the bourgeoisie in the cities and a bourgeois revolution of the peasants against the feudal lords in the countryside (Gorter 1921a). He asserted that this contradiction was resolved in favour of the bourgeois side by the new government in 1921 with the

346  J. MULDOON

introduction of the New Economic Policy. However, Gorter held this position for only a short time. Otto Rühle (1974, p. 8) soon convinced him that the Russian Revolution had been “the last in the line of the great bourgeois revolutions of Europe.” This became the general position of council communists across Europe and was supported by the increasing centralisation and bureaucratisation of the USSR. Pannekoek (1978b, p. 229) agreed that “the Russian revolution is a bourgeois revolution, like the French one of 1789.” In a later letter to Castoriadis, Pannekoek (1953) nuanced his position by suggesting that although “it was the last bourgeois revolution,” it was “carried out by the working class.” While workers supported the revolution through mass action in the councils, the Bolsheviks succeeded in appropriating power from the councils and implemented a form of state capitalism. The Councils as Revolutionary Process Third, as a result of their criticisms of the bureaucratisation of the soviet state, council communists became less likely to emphasise the idea of the council system as an institutional blueprint of a new state form. For Revolutionary Shop Stewards such as Richard Müller (2012) and Ernst Däumig (2012), who were at the centre of the councils’ struggles in Berlin in 1918–1920, the councils presented a new working-class system of government. Similarly, in Hungary and Bavaria where short-lived “council republics” were established in 1919, council delegates viewed these working-class governments as a new state form that was proletarian in character and could be radically distinguished from the institutions of the bourgeois state (Mitchell 1965). This view is also present in Marx’s text on the Paris Commune, which outlined a number of characteristics of this working-class government. In contrast, many of the theorists who became influential in the development of council communism viewed councils primarily as a strategic step in a process of revolutionary action towards a future stateless society. For Pannekoek, the importance of workers’ councils lay in the underlying principle of revolutionary self-activity, rather than in a precise institutional proposal for a post-capitalist society: ‘Workers’ councils does not designate a fixed form of organization, elaborated once and for all and for which all that remains is to perfect its details; it concerns a principle, that of workers’ self management of the enterprise and of production. (Pannekoek 1952, pp. 14–15)

THE BIRTH OF COUNCIL COMMUNISM 

347

Karl Korsch (1929) held a similar position, believing that there was an ambiguity in Marx’s text on the Paris Commune between the idea of the Commune as the finally discovered political form of working-class emancipation on the one hand, and his position that the value of the Commune rested mainly on its formlessness and openness to transformation on the other. While a close reading of Marx’s text indicates that he and Engels viewed the institutional structure of the Commune as of great importance, Korsch attempted to resolve this contradiction in favour of the formlessness of revolutionary activity. He argued that Marx did not go so far as to advocate the councils as the definitive form of revolutionary government. Rather, Korsch (1929) claimed that the final goal of proletarian struggle is “the classless and stateless Communist society whose comprehensive form is not any longer some kind of political power but is ‘that association in which the free development of every person is the condition for the free development of all.’” This view of the councils was based on an acknowledgement that the revolution in the West would not be “a single, world-convulsing act, but a process of gradual change” (Pannekoek 1913, 1947) writes: The revolution by which the working class will win mastery and freedom, is not a single event of limited duration. It is a process of organisation, of self-education, in which the workers gradually, now in progressing rise, then in steps and leaps, develop the force to vanquish the bourgeoisie, to destroy capitalism, and to build up their new system of collective production.

Pannekoek’s vision of the processual nature of the revolution stood against the dominant view of the revolution in the SPD as a series of consecutive and separate events in which a society would progress from one stage to another. If the revolution is envisaged as one single process, then it becomes more important that the means through which capitalism is fought are harmonious with the desired end point of a communist society. Since the revolutionary class fight against the bourgeoisie and its organs is inseparable from the seizure of the productive apparatus by the workers and its application to production, the same organisation that unites the class for its fight also acts as the organisation of the new productive process. (Pannekoek 1938)

Pannekoek began to understand the councils as pre-figurative organisations which would be used both in the fight against capitalism and as the

348  J. MULDOON

nascent institutional foundations of a new communist society. As organs of revolutionary struggle, the councils could lay the groundwork for non-state institutions, which would evolve into the associational form of a post-capitalist society. He contended that “the workers’ councils growing up as organs of fight will at the same time be organs of reconstruction” (Pannekoek 1947). Revolutionary Leadership Fourth, council communists approached the two interrelated questions of revolutionary leadership and the role of a communist party in political struggle from the same position of a suspicion of all forms of substitutionism. They understood this as the replacement of the revolutionary activity of the masses by an elite, whether party, trade union or other leadership group. For greater clarity, these debates can be separated into two questions. The first question centred upon the appropriate relationship between a leadership and the masses. In other words, what role should committed revolutionaries play immediately preceding and during a revolution? A second debate within council communism concerned the relationship between the councils and a communist party. Council communists took a variety of positions in relation to these issues, which were not always based on a complete rejection of the importance of leadership or a revolutionary party. To begin with, a supreme value was placed on the concept of the workers’ self-emancipation rather than socialist reforms legislated from above. As a result, one common principle shared by council communists was the necessity of mass action from as wide a section of the working class as possible. Regardless of their position on questions of parties and leadership, they all agreed that it would be desirable for as many workers as possible to be directly involved in revolutionary action. The majority of their criticisms of parties, unions and parliamentary activity were based on the perception that these forms of organisation and action would rob the workers of the opportunity to act for themselves. For example, Pannekoek (1940) criticised existing parties and unions to the extent that in “these organisations the actions and decisions of the leaders were substituted for actions and decisions of the workers.” He considered that “action, the actual class struggle, is the task of the working masses themselves… only the masses as a whole can achieve a victory” (Pannekoek 1936).

THE BIRTH OF COUNCIL COMMUNISM 

349

Pannekoek’s fear was that traditional models of leadership exercised by parties such as the SDP and Bolshevik Party inhibited revolutionary action of the masses themselves and led to their disempowerment. In his view, the leaders’ “influence determines the politics and tactical line of the party,” while the power of the members “is nominal and illusory” (Pannekoek 1938). Pannekoek decisively rejected all forms of organisation that relied on a command and control model of leadership in which leaders formulated all strategy and action plans to be obediently followed by party members. For Pannekoek (1920), “the most tenacious and intractable element in this [bourgeois] mentality is dependence upon leaders, whom the masses leave to determine general questions and to manage their class affairs.” Yet Pannekoek (1936) did not reject all forms of leadership and organisation. The role of revolutionaries should be to assist the working class to “bring clarity in their conflicts, discussions and propaganda.” Revolutionaries could play an important role as “a means of propaganda and enlightenment.” Throughout his life, Pannekoek struggled with balancing the strategic problem of how revolutionaries could develop class-consciousness in the masses with his deeply held conviction that this should be a task for the masses themselves. He explicitly rejected all forms of tutelage and paternalism. His most frequent advice was that revolutionaries should advise, enlighten and inspire, but not order, dictate and command. In his view, workers should “not blindly accept the slogans of others… but must think, act, and decide for themselves” (Pannekoek 1936). Pannekoek was more comfortable with the idea of leadership as education and propaganda rather than as strategic and organisational in nature. His belief that revolutions break out spontaneously among the masses due to long periods of spiritual development and revolutionary activity led Pannekoek (1920) to avoid some of the more practical questions of revolutionary leadership. In a letter to Castoriadis, Pannekoek (1953) questioned whether a revolutionary should act as a leader at all, preferring a more advisory role: “our task is essentially theoretical: to find and indicate, through study and discussion, the best path of action for the working class.” Pannekoek (153) considered that “it will be up to them to decide the best way to act… but in order for them to decide the best way possible they must be enlightened by well-considered advice from the greatest number of people possible.” In his reply, Castoriadis suggested that a revolutionary organisation must adopt a more robust

350  J. MULDOON

approach. For Castoriadis (2011), the task of revolutionary leadership is more than theoretical; it must be practically involved in “struggle and organization.” Castoriadis (2011) argued that a revolutionary organisation: must be capable of intervening in these struggles, combating the influence of bureaucratic organizations, proposing forms of action and organization to the workers; it must even at times be capable of imposing them. In these conditions, to say that a vanguard revolutionary organization will limit itself to ‘enlightening with well-considered advice’ is, I believe, what in English is called an ‘understatement.’

Other council communists also disagreed with Pannekoek’s conception of leadership as propaganda. Herman Gorter (1921b) concurred with Lenin that it would be necessary for a communist party to “show the masses the way in all situations, not only in words, but also in deeds.” While Gorter agreed with Pannekoek that class relations in Western Europe necessitated a greater role for the masses over the leaders, he believed that Lenin’s conception of leadership was still essentially correct. The problem for Gorter (1920) was not Lenin’s theory of leadership, but the lack of effective leaders in Germany: “Here we are still seeking the right leaders, those that do not try to dominate the masses, that do not betray them… the leader should form one united whole with class and mass.” Leadership was necessary for Gorter because in their situation in the factories, workers would not be able to gain appropriate knowledge of the working class as a whole. It was therefore important for an advanced section of the working class to provide strategic analysis and to act as “the one clear and unflinching compass towards communism” (Gorter 1921b). His remarks mirror Marx and Engels’ discussion of the role of the communist party in The Communist Manifesto: The Communists, therefore, are, on the one hand, practically the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement. (Marx and Engels 1848)

In general, however, the emphasis of council communism was on the spontaneous and independent action of the working class, which led to a

THE BIRTH OF COUNCIL COMMUNISM 

351

suspicion of actors and organisations that attempted to usurp the working class’ self-activity and autonomy. This suspicion of leadership directly relates to another major issue, the appropriate role of a political party in revolutionary struggle. Revolutionary Organisation Fifth, Lenin (1920) accused the “left communists” of “denying the necessity of the party and of party discipline.” But there was less agreement among the council communists concerning the relationship between councils and party than he believed. The hardline position presented by Otto Rühle was an indiscriminate rejection of all political parties as fundamentally bourgeois and unrevolutionary. Rühle’s views were shaped by his experience as a representative of the SPD and later as a member of the KAPD. His reasoning closely resembled Pannekoek’s distrust of revolutionary leadership due to its deterring of mass political action. For Rühle, in a political party, “the leaders have the first say. They speak, they promise, they seduce, they command. The masses… have to receive their orders and carry them out” (Rühle 2007). A second reason he offered for his rejection of political parties was that once formed as political parties, organisations become pacified and incorporated into the system. They no longer engage in revolutionary struggle and instead begin to focus exclusively on making bargains and compromises. In the place of political parties, Rühle called for revolutionary factory organisations that could be organised factory by factory into a General Workers’ Union, which would undertake economic and political functions. He advocated direct workers’ control in a federal structure of councils outside of any party as the most effective means to pursue revolutionary transformation. Unlike Pannekoek, Rühle (2007) still held a more Leninist conception of a revolutionary vanguard who would lead the way in this struggle: the most decisive and active elements, the most mature elements have to form themselves into a phalanx of the revolution.… They are the elite of the new revolutionary proletariat.… They demonstrate themselves as the vanguard of the proletariat, as an active will in relation to hesitant and confused individuals. At decisive moments they form a magnetic centre of all activity. They are a political organisation but not a political party, not a party in the traditional sense.

352  J. MULDOON

Not all council communists shared Rühle’s rejection of political parties. In 1919–1920, Pannekoek still acknowledged the indispensable role of a communist party in political struggle. In “World Revolution and Communist Tactics,” Pannekoek (1920) outlined his understanding of the precise role of a communist party: The function of a revolutionary party lies in propagating clear understanding in advance, so that throughout the masses there will be elements who know what must be done and who are capable of judging the situations for themselves. And in the course of the revolution the party has to raise the programme, slogans and directives which the spontaneously acting masses recognise as correct because they find that they express their own aims in their most adequate form and hence achieve greater clarity of purpose; it is thus that the party comes to lead the struggle.

While he still believed in workers’ self-emancipation and empowerment, at this stage, there was a focus on the decisive role of the party, a position which faded in Pannekoek’s work in the 1930s and 1940s. During this period, Pannekoek began to associate political parties with domination and became interested in exploring new organisational models of political struggle. His problem with political parties was that in practice they often aimed to “seize power for themselves” rather than acting as “an aid to the working class in its struggle for emancipation” (Pannekoek 1936). The party, for Pannekoek, “is an organization that aims to lead and control the working class.” A revolutionary party was “a contradiction in terms,” for a party “cannot be other than an organization aimed at directing and dominating the proletariat.” The central committee of a party had a tendency to become “masters of the organisations, masters of the money as well as of the press, while the members themselves lost much of their power” (Pannekoek 1938). As the Bolsheviks demonstrated, revolutionary parties would ultimately seek to seize power for themselves and create a dictatorship of party rule, which would exclude all opinions except their own. In “General Remarks on the Question of Organisation,” he considered new organisations that he referred to as “parties or groups based on opinions,” which he considered might become “organs of the self-enlightenment of the working class” (Pannekoek 1938). Rather than adopting a traditional top-down party structure, such groups would be more akin to reading circles or loosely organised propaganda groups,

THE BIRTH OF COUNCIL COMMUNISM 

353

which would engage in educational activities among the workers in order to present political analyses and arguments. Elsewhere, he outlined the structure and role of these new “opinion groups” as follows: persons with the same fundamental conceptions unite for the discussion of practical steps and seek clarification through discussions and propagandize their conclusions, such groups might be called parties, but they would be parties in an entirely different sense from those of today. (Pannekoek 1936)

In spite of the impractical nature of such a group and its questionable effectiveness in taking political action, Pannekoek was adamant that new organisational forms should not adopt the model of the revolutionary party. At his most critical, Pannekoek (1936) rejected all forms of parties, even putting forward a view that “directly contradicts the traditional ideas about the role of the party as an essential educational organ of the proletariat.” But to the extent that parties did exist, Pannekoek (1936) believed they should undertake educational and propaganda functions, while the councils should be the main organs of political action: For the parties—then remains the second function, to spread insight and knowledge, to study, discuss and formulate social ideas, and by their propaganda to enlighten the minds of the masses. The workers’ councils are the organs for practical action and fight of the working class; to the parties falls the task of the building up of its spiritual power. Their work forms an indispensable part in the self-liberation of the working class.

A number of council communists and Marxists who supported workers’ councils were less critical of political parties and defended the necessity of a traditional Marxist party alongside the councils. For example, Gorter did not deny the necessity of a centralised and disciplined party. He was critical of comrades who used party manoeuvres to exclude others and to function as a small minority clique, but he primarily agreed with Lenin in the need for a robust communist party, which could act as a vanguard for proletarian revolution. Georg Lukács was another early advocate for councils who also believed in the need for a communist party. Following his conversion to Marxism in 1918, Lukács considered the councils an ideal institution for authentic proletarian political activity. Lukács was the Deputy Commissar of Public Education in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet

354  J. MULDOON

Republic from April to August 1918 and participated in the political debates surrounding the council form. In his 1920 essay, “Question of Parliamentarianism,” he described the councils as the “true index” of the proletarian revolution whose mere existence “points the way forward beyond bourgeois society” (Lukács 1972, pp. 53–63). The councils were viewed as exemplary institutions, which were the most advanced expression of working-class consciousness and organisation. However, Lukács never completely abandoned his admiration for a Leninist party. His writings in this early period contain a mixture of support for both councils and a vanguard party. During the 1920s, in particular after Lenin’s criticisms of left communism, there was a general erosion of support for the councils and an increasing predominance of the party in his work (Jacoby 1981, p. 89). Antonio Gramsci, on the other hand, had a much briefer flirtation with the councils. Gramsci was a member of the Italian Socialist Party and in April 1919 began editing the weekly newspaper L’Ordine Nuovo. In a series of articles written for the newspaper, Gramsci advocated for workers involved in political disputes in Turin companies to convert their factory commissions into workers’ councils. He argued that such councils would be “organs of proletarian power which will replace the capitalist in all his useful functions of direction and administration” (Gramsci 1919). However, the political failure of the Turin councils led Gramsci to conclude that the working class required a Leninist vanguard party to avoid further defeats (Gramsci 1926). In contrast, Karl Korsch was a much firmer believer in the possibilities of the council system, serving as a delegate on one of the German soldiers’ councils and on the Socialisation Committee in 1918 (Kellner 2013, p. 9). In his conception, the councils were sovereign organs representing the political and economic power of the proletariat. He called for a socialist republic of workers’ councils in which they would hold full executive, legislative and judicial power, thereby destroying the old bureaucracy and political structures of the bourgeois regime. In a 1921 essay, “Evolution of the Problem of the Political Workers’ councils in Germany,” Korsch (1921) was critical of the ideological confusions of those who preferred to exercise mere oversight and control over existing governmental apparatuses, since this failed to recognise what for him were the true tasks of the councils. Some years later, Korsch (1924) recognised that a revolutionary act required a mass revolutionary party to provide the necessary discipline and strategic direction, but this would

THE BIRTH OF COUNCIL COMMUNISM 

355

only be a temporary step towards the ultimate goal of a direct democracy of workers’ councils. Korsch believed that the failure of the German Revolution was due to the ideological backwardness of the workers and the unpreparedness of the socialist leadership. As a result, he attempted to support workers’ councils as organs capable of developing the class-consciousness and organisational capacity of the workers. Participation in Parliamentary Elections Sixth, the council communist argument against participation in parliamentary activity covered similar ground to the rejection of political parties: parliamentarianism promotes dependence on leaders and obstructs the revolutionary activity of the masses. In 1920, Lenin defended the use of parliamentary activity and trade unionism as an essential tactic in class struggle. The council communist rejection of these strategies became one of the main divides between the Dutch–German tendencies and the Comintern. Pannekoek believed that revolutionary struggle had reached a new stage in Western Europe following the end of the First World War and that the communists needed to combat bourgeois mentalities among the masses, which were only further reinforced through participation in parliamentary elections. In order for there to be a development of class-consciousness, he argued that the communists should break from parliamentary democracy. Pannekoek (1920) summarises the position of the council communists as follows: Parliamentarianism inevitably tends to inhibit the autonomous activity by the masses that is necessary for revolution. Fine speeches may be made in parliament exhorting the proletariat to revolutionary action; it is not in such words that the latter has its origins, however, but in the hard necessity of there being no other alternative.

The arguments for and against parliamentary activity were played out in Lenin and Gorter’s exchange of 1920. Lenin argued that parliamentary struggle was far from “historically obsolete” and still represented one of the primary domains of political contestation of the early twentieth century. Participating in parliamentary activity is essential as a means to educate the masses and awaken bourgeois elements to socialist beliefs. Through their interaction with other parties, communists can make use of rifts between parties and encourage Leftist elements in the parliament to radicalise their views. Lenin provided the example of Russia, where

356  J. MULDOON

at key moments in the struggle the Bolshevik party benefited from the propaganda they were able to carry out in parliament. Gorter took issue with Lenin’s analogy to the Russian situation. He argued that in Western Europe, “the working masses in general are completely subjected, as far as ideas are concerned, to the bourgeois system of representation, to parliamentarism, to bourgeois democracy” (Gorter 1920). His central argument was therefore that “workers must in the first place act for themselves… because the workers stand alone, and because no clever tactics of leaders can help them.” Parliamentarianism would only encourage workers to stay in a state of dependence on leaders and dissuade them from taking necessary revolutionary action to overthrow capitalism. Similar positions were taken by other council communists. The Workers’ Socialist Federation in Britain did not participate in parliamentary elections because they saw it as “wasting energy.”

Conclusion Council communist tendencies developed during the 1920s, yet throughout the same period workers’ participation in council communist groups declined dramatically. In 1921 the KAPD had a membership of over 40,000, with another 200,000 in the closely aligned “factory organisations” of the General Workers’ Union of Germany (AAUD). By the time Hitler took power only a few small groups of the German Left were still active. The council communist international network, Communist Workers International (KAI), was founded in 1922, but never fully materialised due to the dissolution of some of its member organisations. Even at its peak it never contained more than 1000 members. By the 1930s, council communists only existed in tiny propaganda groups. The Dutch Group of International Communists (GIK), consisting of members such as Cajo Brendel, Henk Canne Meijer and Paul Mattick, formed in 1927 and published a number of important theoretical works in addition to the journal Rätekorrespondenz (Council Correspondence).3 Paul Mattick and other German revolutionary émigrés in the United States also started the publication of International Council Correspondence in 1934 (later entitled Living Marxism and then New Essays). Many of the council communists such as Karl Korsch, Anton Pannekoek and Otto Rühle continued to write and published some of their best work in these later years, however, the 1930s and 1940s were a period of decline for their political influence over workers’ movements.

THE BIRTH OF COUNCIL COMMUNISM 

357

This chapter has sought to develop a more complex picture of the development of council communist thought in the revolutionary period of 1917–1921. While a number of good studies currently exist on council communism by Philippe Bourrinet, Marcel van den Linden, Mark Shipway and Peter Rachleff, this chapter has attempted to make two additional contributions. First, it has highlighted the essential role that debates around the German Revolution and the spread of international socialism to the West played in its ideological formation. Second, it has distinguished an early phase of the German Revolution in which the Revolutionary Shop Stewards held out hopes for the establishment of a council republic from later theoretical developments of council communist ideology. It has examined the conditions for this shift in political ideology and analysed the central concerns which animated debates between key participants in the development of council communism in the early 1920s.

Notes 1.  Amadeo Bordiga in Italy and Sylvia Pankhurst in England held similar views. The Italian current of Left Communism formed around an idea of organic party centralism, which differed slightly from the Dutch-German current of spontaneous workers’ councils. Bordiga (1919). 2. For an overview of these debates see Bourrinet (2016). For council communism in Great Britain, Italy and Austria see Pankhurst (1920). 3.  The two most important essays were “The Fundamental Principles of Production and Distribution” and “The Origins of the Movement for Workers’ Councils in Germany”. For a detailed analysis of the activities of the Group of International Communists see Bourrinet (2016, pp. 277–430).

References Bordiga, Amadeo. 1919. Is It Time to Form Soviets? Il Soviet 2 (39), September 21. Bourrinet, Philippe. 2016. The Dutch and German Communist Left (1900– 1968): ‘Neither Lenin Nor Trotsky Nor Stalin!’—‘All Workers Must Think for Themselves!’. Leiden: Brill. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 2011. Letter to Pannekoek. Viewpoint Magazine. https://www.viewpointmag.com/2011/10/25/letter-2-castoriadis-to-pannekoe/. Accessed 8 Oct 2018. Däumig, Ernst. 2012. The Council Idea and Its Realization. In All Power to the Councils: A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, trans. G. Kuhn, 51–58. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

358  J. MULDOON Dauvé, Gilles. 2015. Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement. London: PM Press. Gerber, John. 1989. Anton Pannekoek and the Socialism of Workers’ SelfEmancipation, 1873–1960. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Gorter, Herman. 1918. The World Revolution. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/gorter/1918/.htm#foreword. Accessed 8 Oct 2018. Gorter, Herman. 1920. Open Letter to Comrade Lenin. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/gorter/1920/open-letter/index. htm. Accessed 8 Oct 2018. Gorter, Herman. 1921a. Manifesto of the Fourth Communist International. Quoted in Shipway, Mark. Council Communism. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/subject/left-wing/1987/council-communism. htm. Accessed 8 Oct 2018. Gorter, Herman. 1921b. Theses on the Role of the Party in the Proletarian Revolution. International Communist Current. http://en.internationalism. org/ir/041/KAPD-Theses-Party-1921. Accessed 8 Oct 2018. Gramsci, Antonio. 1919. Workers’ Democracy. L’Ordine Nuovo, June 21. Gramsci, Antonio. 1926. Theses for the 3rd Congress. Rome. Hoffrogge, Ralf. 2015. Working Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Müller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Jacoby, Russel. 1981. Dialectics of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kellner, Douglas. 2013. Korsch’s Revolutionary Marxism. In Karl Korsch: Revolutionary Theory. Austin. University of Texas Press. Kool, Frits (ed.). 1970. Die Linke gegen die Parteiherrschaft. Olten: Freiburg im Breisgau. Korsch, Karl. 1921. Evolution of the Problem of the Political Workers Councils in Germany. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/ korsch/1921/councils.htm. Accessed 3 Oct 2018. Korsch, Karl. 1924. Lenin and the Comintern. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1924/lenin-comintern.htm. Accessed 8 Oct 2018. Korsch, Karl. 1929. Revolutionary Commune. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https:// www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1929/commune.htm. Accessed 8 Oct. Kuhn, Gabriel. 2012. All Power to the Councils: A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918–1919. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Lenin, V.I. 1920. ‘Left’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Marxists’ Internet Archive.  https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/. Accessed 8 Oct 2018. Lukács, Georg. 1972. The Question of Parliamentarianism. In Tactics and Ethics: Political Writings, 1919–1929. London: Verso.

THE BIRTH OF COUNCIL COMMUNISM 

359

Luxemburg, Rosa. 2004. The Mass Strike, the Political Parties and the Trade Union. In The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, ed. P. Hudis and K.B. Anderson, 168–199. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. Marx, Karl, and Engels Friedrich. 1848. The Communist Manifesto. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/ communist-manifesto/. Accessed 8 Oct 2018. Mitchell, Allan. 1965. Revolution in Bavaria, 1918–1919: The Eisner Regime and the Soviet Republic. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Müller, Richard. 2012. Report by the Executive Council of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils of Greater Berlin. In All Power to the Councils: A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, trans. G. Kuhn, 31–39. Oakland, CA: PM Press. Pankhurst, Sylvia. 1920. Towards a Communist Party. The Workers’ Dreadnought 6 (4), February 21. Pannekoek, Anton. 1913. Socialist and Anarchism. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1913/socialism-anarchism. htm. Accessed 8 Oct 2018. Pannekoek, Anton. 1919a. The German Revolution—First Stage. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1918/germany.htm. Accessed 8 Oct 2018. Pannekoek, Anton. 1919b. The New World. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https:// www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1919/06/new-world.htm. Accessed 8 Oct 2018. Pannekoek, Anton. 1920. World Revolution and Communist Tactics. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/tactics/index. htm. Accessed 8 Oct 2018. Pannekoek, Anton. 1936. Party and Class. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https:// www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1936/party-class.htm. Accessed 8 Oct 2018. Pannekoek, Anton. 1938. General Remarks on the Question of Organisation. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1938/ general-remarks.htm. Accessed 8 Oct 2018. Pannekoek, Anton. 1940. Why Past Revolutionary Movements Have Failed. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/ 1940/revo.htm. Accessed 8 Oct 2018. Pannekoek, Anton. 1947. Workers’ Councils. Marxists’ Internet Archive. https:// www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1947/workers-councils.htm. Accessed 8 Oct 2018. Pannekoek, Anton. 1952. Uber Arbeiterate. Funken 3, January 6. Pannekoek, Anton. 1953. Letter to Socialisme ou Barbarie. Marxists’ Internet Archive.  https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1953/socialisme-ou-barbarisme.htm. Accessed 8 Oct 2018.

360  J. MULDOON Pannekoek. Anton. 1978a. Marxist Theory and Revolutionary Tactics. In Pannekoek and Gorter’s Marxism, ed. D.A. Smart. London: Pluto Press. Pannekoek, Anton. 1978b. Sovjet-Rusland en het West-Europeesche Kommunisme. In Pannekoek and the Workers’ Councils, trans. S. Bricianer. Saint Louis: Telos. Rachleff, Peter J. 1976. Marxism and Council Communism: The Foundation for Revolutionary Theory for Modern Society. New York: Revisionist Press. Rühle, Otto. 1974. From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution. Glasgow and London: Revolutionary Perspectives and Socialist Reproduction. Rühle, Otto. 2007. The Revolution Is Not a Party Affair. In Non-Leninist Marxism: Writings on the Worker’s Councils, 157–164. St. Petersburg, FL: Red and Black Publishers. van der Linden, Marcel. 2004. On Council Communism. Historical Materialism 12 (4): 27–50.

Index

A Abensour, Miguel, 18, 170, 175, 258, 259, 277–284, 293–295 anti-Semitism, 18, 48, 59, 63, 237, 239, 248, 252 Arendt, Hannah, 19, 34, 37–39, 55, 239, 259, 283, 290, 291, 299–315 B Berlin, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 14, 15, 25, 27, 29–31, 35–39, 49, 51, 52, 57, 61, 69, 71, 73, 75–77, 79–82, 85–89, 94, 101, 102, 105, 115–117, 123, 125, 199–201, 203–206, 208, 211, 212, 218, 223, 227, 243, 244, 246, 251, 262, 265, 268, 287, 300, 346 Bernstein, Eduard, 2, 13, 16, 73, 74, 138–157, 165, 239, 240, 301 Bremen, 2, 7, 8, 15, 27, 31, 32, 52, 92–97, 99–108

C council communism, 18, 92, 93, 102, 107, 339, 341, 343, 345, 346, 348, 350, 357 council democracy, 18, 82, 92, 93, 104, 108, 223, 230, 257–261, 263, 264, 269, 270, 272, 273, 277, 289 Council republic, 8, 9, 15, 17, 52, 54, 57, 101–107, 138, 152, 200, 201, 216, 217, 220, 224, 225, 232, 341, 342, 346, 357 council system, 6, 9, 10, 16, 17, 32, 97, 98, 102, 106, 119, 120, 130, 200–205, 208–211, 272, 290–293, 301, 304, 305, 308, 314, 341, 342, 346, 354 D Däumig, Ernst, 9, 17, 92, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120–123, 125, 126, 130, 200–205, 208–211, 291, 293, 341, 342, 346

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 G. Kets and J. Muldoon (eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13917-9

361

362  Index democracy, 10–12, 17, 29, 35, 50, 69– 72, 74–78, 80–84, 86–89, 95, 97, 106, 108, 119, 123, 126, 127, 133, 140, 141, 148, 151–157, 160, 161, 163, 165, 167, 170, 175–178, 183–194, 196, 205, 209, 211, 221, 225, 238, 241, 246, 252, 257, 259–261, 263, 264, 267, 272, 279–281, 283, 288, 290–293, 303, 304, 320– 326, 328–331, 342, 355, 356 democratic socialism, 160, 161 dictatorship, 8, 30, 35, 46, 48, 64, 70, 97, 98, 102, 105, 106, 114, 132, 146, 152, 166, 167, 183–193, 196, 205, 211, 216, 224, 242, 244, 291, 342, 352 F Freikorps, 6, 14, 35, 36, 46, 48, 50–55, 57, 59–63, 85, 86, 89, 105, 137, 216, 217, 224, 225, 230, 268 G German Revolution, 1–3, 5–7, 13, 14, 16–19, 26, 45, 64, 71, 86, 87, 89, 91, 92, 108, 115, 118, 122, 130, 132, 137, 138, 140, 142–144, 149, 157, 159, 184, 185, 199, 200, 203, 237, 259, 260, 262, 264, 268, 269, 272, 273, 277, 283, 286, 289, 291, 294, 300, 301, 304, 305, 307, 311, 314, 315, 339–342, 345, 355, 357 I Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), 6–8, 10, 15, 25, 27–33, 35, 37, 39–41,

49–52, 78, 82, 84, 85, 94, 97–103, 106, 107, 113–123, 126, 129–132, 138, 139, 141, 145, 146, 150–152, 155–157, 200–204, 220, 225, 249, 250, 292, 343 insurgent democracy, 18, 277, 278, 280–282, 289, 294 insurgent institutions, 282, 295 J Jewish revolutionaries, 239, 252 K Kautsky, Karl, 2, 8, 10, 15–17, 56, 73–75, 77, 78, 114, 118–121, 125, 126, 129–132, 159–168, 170–178, 185, 240, 241, 291, 343 L Landauer, Gustav, 16–18, 38, 215, 218, 219, 222–224, 226–231, 233, 244–247, 252, 278, 339 Luxemburg, Rosa, 2, 6, 8, 16–19, 26, 31, 35–38, 46, 50, 52, 71, 73–75, 78, 81–83, 85, 86, 89, 114, 115, 117, 118, 122–126, 128–131, 137, 141, 142, 145, 146, 183–194, 196, 218, 230, 231, 239–245, 250–252, 259, 266, 268, 271, 284, 285, 287, 288, 291, 294, 307, 310–312, 319, 320, 329–336, 343 M Müller, Richard, 5, 9, 11–13, 17, 84, 115–118, 123, 125, 132, 199–205, 208–211, 213, 341, 342, 346

Index

N Nazism, 1, 2, 55, 304 Negri, Antonio, 19, 320, 322, 323, 326–330, 333–336 non-violent non-cooperation, 17, 215, 223, 226, 228, 229, 233 P Pannekoek, Anton, 8, 75, 92, 93, 99, 107, 259, 266, 271, 272, 339–353, 355, 356 Paris Commune, 18, 96, 204, 258–260, 262–264, 267–269, 273, 282, 341, 346, 347 political ideology, 357 R radical democracy, 17, 19, 168, 170, 176, 178, 258, 320, 329, 330, 333–335 radical right, 14, 46–50, 52–55, 57, 59, 61–64 Rancière, Jacques, 19, 191, 259, 263, 319, 322–325, 327–329, 333–336 reformism, 16, 74, 140, 141, 144, 155, 164, 245, 335 republicanism, 161, 163, 176, 178, 179, 187 revolution, 1–19, 25–27, 29, 32, 34, 35, 38, 40, 41, 45, 48, 49, 51, 52, 54, 56, 60, 64, 71–75, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 85–89, 91–98, 100, 102–104, 108, 113–115, 117, 121, 122, 125–127, 130–132, 139–144, 147, 167, 184, 186, 188–193, 195, 196, 200–202, 220, 222, 224, 225, 228, 230, 232, 233, 237, 238, 240–242, 247, 249, 250, 277, 283, 286, 290, 291, 294, 299–302, 305, 310–315, 325,

  363

331, 334, 336, 339–341, 344, 345, 347, 348, 351–355 Rühle, Otto, 92, 259, 262, 263, 271, 290, 339–341, 346, 351, 352, 356 Russian Revolution, 2, 3, 13, 19, 78, 87, 114, 131, 187, 188, 192, 215, 221, 222, 240, 250, 260, 269–271, 273, 284, 286, 302, 340, 341, 344–346 S social democracy, 50, 56, 58, 71, 73, 92, 115, 138, 139, 141, 142, 147, 150–157, 159, 165, 195, 238–241, 247, 260, 268, 271, 273, 331, 334 socialist republicanism, 159, 161, 162, 166–168, 175, 177 Soviets, 18, 33, 77, 78, 88, 146, 238, 242, 258, 259, 261, 262, 264, 265, 267, 269, 270, 273, 314 Spartacus League, 4, 7–10, 31, 36, 41, 114, 122, 124, 125, 194, 199, 201, 202, 217, 224, 230, 343 Spartacus Uprising, 6 Spontaneity, 18, 19, 80, 188, 193, 271, 284, 285, 288, 320–325, 328–332, 334–336 W workers’ councils, 5, 8, 10–12, 17–19, 30, 32, 39, 49, 81, 85, 87, 94, 115, 118, 120, 125, 152, 194, 195, 200, 203, 205, 206, 208, 209, 221, 238, 242, 293, 311, 339–343, 345, 346, 348, 353–355, 357