New Perspectives
What was required they argued, was not some new tactic or alliance, but new
principles, new perspectives. There was a new basis for struggle which
imposed new tasks. This process of fundamental re-orientation matured
throughout the war period. It had hardly begun to develop its practical
revolutionary expression within the working class, when it was caught up
and all but destroyed by the capitalist counter revolution against the very
current within the working class which it was trying to express.
'Unitary Organisation'
The earliest uncertain attempts to draw up the consequences of the new role
of Social Democracy and its policies for the revolutionary working class,
included some development of the idea of 'unitary organisation'. This was
to unite the functions of a political party and industrial organisation
within the same structure. This idea can be found in the main wartime organ
of the ISD Bremen based journal 'Workers Politics'. However in this early
version the unitary organisation was still viewed as taking part in
parliamentary and reformist trade union struggles. Only later was this
organisationally based model of a revolutionary synthesis considered and
thought of in less literal terms.
At this time Ruhle as the main spokesman for this group was still a deputy
in the Reichstag for the industrial region of East Saxony. In a speech to
the Reichstag in October 1918 and speaking for the newly renamed IKD, he
expressed opposition to the war and criticised the Berlin strikers demand
for a negotiated peace in the January of that year,
'In the epoch of imperialism, a compromise peace which can be in the
interests of the people, of the working class, is something purely and
simply impossible. This proposed peace is only designed to save the system
of exploitation and enslavement form the catastrophe which is threatening
it.'
[This speech is reproduced, in French, in 'Le Spartakisme' G Badea,
L'Arche pp 335 - 337]
It was this entire tendency which along with other politically independent
groups of industrial workers, thrown up by the more political tone of the
strikes in the last year of the war, who formed the majority of delegates
to the founding conference of the KPD on 30 December 1919. This was where
the parliamentary line of the leading Spartakists at the conference was
defeated. [This defeat was accomplished with the support of an opposition
current within the Spartakist's own movement] A number of members of both
currents crossed from one side of the debate to the other during this whole
period. Undoubtedly this suggests a continuing process of political
re-alignment within the German socialist movement and was why it was
believed there was a genuine basis for a merger of both currents into the
KPD in 1918.
[The process in Britain of political re-alignment that led to the formation
of the CPGB in 1921, was totally different - this should form the subject
of a similar study.]
The Movement for Workers Councils
The November [1918] Revolution shifted the centre of activity temporarily
from the Reichstag to the Workers Councils which had sprung up all over
Germany. This experience of creating widespread class based unitary
organisations illustrates precisely the difference between bourgeois
democracy and working class democracy. Bourgeois democracy is a democracy
of form which hides the reality of class society. Working class democracy
is a democracy of content, the workers create institutions capable of
responding to their needs as a class. However these newly created 'Workers
Councils' never had the chance to develop this content.
They functioned essentially as local decentralised caretaker organs of
German bourgeois social democratic society, keeping production and social
relations turning smoothly and normally in the social vacuum following the
overthrow of the Kaiser and the defeat of the German armed forces. They
were to function until a Constituent Assembly could be elected to resume
control of the business of the state.
Everyone, from workers and soldiers, to army officers, factory managers,
white collar workers and members of the professional classes, joined the
councils.
In most parts of Germany they were dominated by SPD members [this party was
the biggest of the pre war opposition parties, having polled four and a
half million votes pre war] In only a handful of centres, usually in the
most industrialised areas did the councils have anything resembling a
revolutionary political content. [See for example the pamphlet 'The
Wilhelmshaven Revolt' by 'Ikarus' who took part in the events he
describeS.] In a few other places the revolutionary elements left the
Social Democratic dominated councils to set up their own revolutionary
alternatives. The old hierarchical traditions of Church, Army, the 'fear of
Bolshevism' as the Devil's own medicine, held undisputed sway over the vast
masses of the working class in a still recently industrialised country.
Post-feudal patriarchal relations were still socially dominant, especially
in the large scale family-owned heavy industrial companies such as Krupp
and Thyssen, and the SPD reaped the harvest of custom and superstition for
the old ruling class.
Working Class votes 'Not to Take Power'
When the Left Communists and Spartakists urged 'All Power to the Councils',
the National Congress of Workers Councils met in Berlin in December 1918
and refused entry to the Congress to Luxemburg and other 'political
elements'. They further voted by a large majority to give up all claims to
political power and to support the efforts of the 'Peoples Commissioners'
[among whom were Ebert, Scheidemann and Noske ] to arrange elections to a
new Constituent Assembly.
The powerful hold of Social Democratic ideology over large sections of the
German working class and their consequent refusal to make a proletarian
revolution have to be seen as the most important obstacle to the German
Revolution in the post war period. It was this obstacle, this view of
itself as a 'class for capital' that determined the tactics, attempts and
failures of the Left Communists between 1918 and 1923. This same obstacle
eventually overwhelmed and split this movement and then rendered it
impotent.
The return of the leading Spartakist currents of the KPD to Social
Democratic politics, the putschism of both the KPD and KAPD, the split
between the AAUD and the AAUD-E, the emergence of 'factoryist' and council
fetishist tendencies from the fragments of a demoralised German Left, the
split between the KAPD and the Third International, the rapid political
degeneration within the International itself - ALL these features are
accounted for in the first instance by the dominance of Social Democratic
sensibilities - for ideas is too truncated a word - over the large majority
of the German working class and over the movement internationally.
Its cultural influence is to be seen even amongst the revolutionary
elements themselves, the declared enemies of Social Democracy, even amongst
the most outstanding of them. No wonder the German ruling class referred to
'our good Sozi . . . . '
All this of course is not denying or minimising the concrete ways in which
the counter-revolution crushed the movement. The alliance between the SPD
and Army in the Arbeitsgemeinschaft, the social freedom of movement allowed
to the Freikorps, the private counter revolutionary armies formed by
members of the officer caste after the break up of the Kaiser's Army and
the myth of the 'Dolchstoss', the heavily repressive use of the State legal
apparatus against revolutionaries - all these activities took place with
the silent connivance of the majority of the working class in Germany. The
political lessons learned by the most advanced proletarian groupings in the
war time period had yet to be generalised and accepted within the class as
a whole, and in so doing take on the dimension of a powerful material
revolutionary force in society.
So that we are not misunderstood, when we talk about the revolutionary
current within the German working class after the war, we are no longer
talking of tiny handfuls of workers of the early war period, the
revolutionary embryos. But by now tens of thousands of class conscious
workers. At the time of their formation the [1918] KPD numbered 14,000
members and the KAPD in 1920, 40,000 [about four fifths of the current
KPD]. When the AAUD and the AAUD-E split they had about 100,000 members
each. You will see that we are not talking about obscure revolutionary
sects, as the legacy of the Third International would have us believe, but
of a significant current within the working class.
Defeat, Demoralisation and Isolation
But while the post war period brought further material hardship for German
workers by way of vicious reparations clauses in the Versailles Peace
Treaty of 1919 [so much for the Berlin strikers hopes of a 'just peace',
based on Wilson's Fourteen Points], the illusion still persisted that a
return to the pre war status quo was still possible. Moreover the 'school
of hunger and enslavement' that many referred to [see here for instance
John Maclean's 'War After the War'] was not for the majority the 'school of
inspiration and political awakening'.
This historically explicable failure of the German working class to acquire
a generalised revolutionary consciousness within this period, and the
subsequent defeat of the German Revolution were at the origins of a debate
on the relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis which took place in
this period. [see for example Wilhelm Reich's 'Mass Psychology of Fascism']
A Balance Sheet
So, we can locate the factors that throw light on the relationship between
the German Left Communists and the rest of the German working class in the
overall situation and in the consciouses of the workers. We can examine
both the positive and negative aspects of this relationship.
On the positive side we see the root and branch opposition to
parliamentarism and the trade unions - an opposition based equally on the
necessarily counter-revolutionary role of these institutions in the period
and on the related need for a revolutionary working class to develop its
own self consciousness, self reliance and above all its independence from
the old workers movement. An independence that was above all a rejection of
the class collaboration and 'representation of different interests' of this
old movement and an affirmation of a class politics - a class with a
revolutionary task to perform and a revolutionary identity to proclaim.
The negative side of this relationship can be seen in the tendency towards
'substitutionism', in attempts to incite a passive 'mass' of the class to
insurrection, as in the abortive March Action of 1921, when the KPD and
KAPD members in some parts of Germany fought with clubs, those large
numbers of workers, who refused to join them on the streets and instead
were attempting to enter the factories to work. The KAPD was also likewise
in support of the putschism of the KPD, during the disastrous insurrection
in the Hamburg area, which was begun by the KPD in October 1923.
There are other more detailed accounts for readers who want a better grasp
of events from the 1918 November Revolution to the inflation crisis of
1923. By this time the Left Communists current was already rapidly
shrinking in numbers and about to disappear once more into small political
grouplets.
Following the inflation crisis of 1923, the German economy was 'refloated'
on the basis of short term American loans under the Dawes plan. The short
term economic stability and economic growth that this injection of credit
brought about further reduced the already waning revolutionary tendencies
within the German workers.
Part 5
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