WAS WEIMAR NECESSARY?
Pachter, Henry
I deologists tend to see the future in terms of the past. The pioneers of the Great French Revolution paraded as Brutuses. The Bolsheviks in turn imitated the Jacobins, hoping to improve on...
...The rump USPD continued under the leadership of Ledebour and Theodor Liebknecht...
...In fact, the first decree issued by the Executive Council ordered "all communal, provincial, national, and military authorities to continue their activities...
...The socialist parties, on the other hand, lacked the trained personnel needed to get rid of and replace the old civil service...
...The study of this pattern may be of more than historical or theoretical interest...
...Had this been the whole story, it would be incorrect to speak of a "November revolution" at all...
...Although an "alliance with Russia" also was the propaganda line of the Communist party, Lenin and Radek felt that a "Soviet Germany," too, would have to sign a harsh treaty...
...Ebert was furious when Scheidemann proclaimed the Republic from a Reichstag window, undercutting his flimsy legitimacy...
...Here was another turning point where the USPD had to choose between losing revolutionary credit and losing power...
...From the concept of a specific organ of workers' power and workers' control on all levels of social and economic policy, it was transformed into the concept of an alternative form of government...
...Socialism cannot be introduced by decrees...
...When in the spring of 1920 a military coup ousted the republican government, the workers arose to defend the Republic, called a general strike, formed Rate, and put "red militias" into the "Korsch, op...
...briefly from 1917 to 1921, thought that radical policies were not only compatible with democracy but essentially linked up with it...
...19 But the Independents, by now dogmatically sold on the Rate idea, and unable to forget the Social Democrats' many betrayals, refused to join in...
...the two workers' parties, USPD and SPD, might reunite one day...
...by daylight, when I see the blokes—not quite yet" (February 20, 1919...
...The home-coming soldiers, however, above all wanted jobs, and the Provisional Government agreed that its foremost task was the conversion of industry to peacetime work...
...22 Since each had to live down its past, a quasi-inexorable necessity drove them into different directions: the SPD into its obsession with procedural legalism, the USPD into declamatory revolutionism...
...Indeed, until the January elections, the government's legitimacy rested on the revolutionary power of the Rate alone...
...A more radical policy might have provoked chaos and foreign intervention...
...My italics, H.P1 14 This rabble Congress, however, presented the Independents with a grave disappointment...
...but nowhere did they supersede the 12Karl Korsch, in "Wandlungen des Problems der Arbeiterräte," Politische Texte, stresses that the National (Reichs-) Rate Congress was called by the government, not built up by the Rate themselves...
...See also Karl Korsch, Politische Texte, Erich Gerlach and Jfirgen Seifert, eds...
...Their contempt for the abortive revolution and its sorry product, the Weimar Republic, was based on the conviction that the collapse of the monarchy should have been followed by nothing less than a "total revolution...
...I 'The conspiracy involved Gustav Stresemann, Count Kessler, Count Brockdorff-Rantzau (the ambassador to Moscow), and apparently some military persons (perhaps Schleicher, who again in 1932 tried to pose as "the social general...
...Thus, the revolution became retrograde almost at its inception: instead of radicalizing the masses, it stifled their revolutionary enthusiasm...
...22 In his second book Der historische Materialismus (pp...
...Korsch later repudiated some of the articles published in this collection, See Peter von Oertzen, Die Probleme der wirtschaftlichen Neuordnung and der Mitbestimmung in der Revolution von 1918 (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, no date...
...The separation of political from socioeconomic actions, which also means separation of Marxist theory from the everyday practice of class war, was indeed one of the major charges that Rosa Luxemburg had leveled against Germany's prewar Social Democratic party...
...See "On the Periodization of German History," in the New York Review of Books, October 12, 1972, and my reply, March 17, 1973...
...730 ff...
...Michael Freund, an exUSPD man himself, admits this in Deutsche Geschichte (Giltersloh: Bertelsmann, 1960...
...This party had split off from the old SPD over the latter's support of the Kaiser's war effort...
...Should they not have insisted that the revolutionary government immediately depose the Kaiser's judges, county presidents, and generals, indict the war criminals, abolish the Lllnder (the various separate German states), expropriate the big landowners and industrialists...
...3 Leninist theory asserts that only the treason of the Social Democrats prevented the creation of conditions that might have led to intensified revolution and civil war...
...15 Instead of fighting to extend their own influence, the Independents left the revolution in the hands of Ebert, the Republic's future president, who already had made a deal with the Kaiser's generals and appointed Gustav Noske to be "the bloodhound...
...At the same time, the Rate idea began to change in the direction of its Russian meaning...
...In between, it included Karl Kautsky, the pillar of Marxian orthodoxy and Lenin's pet villain, and also Rudolf Hilferding, on whose Finance Capital Lenin based his theory of "imperialism...
...For the Independents, democracy and Rate were not contradictory—that was the way the bourgeoisie saw the matter: either Rate or a Constituent Assembly...
...The soldiers had elected mostly Social Democrats, and the majority refused to let Karl Liebknecht speak in favor of a Rate constitution...
...Alas, even sooner he had to forget what people used to mean by socialism...
...12 While they pretended to "supervise" the local or state administrative organs, most often they were used as the latter's public-relations channel...
...The USPD was usually called either "USP" or "Independents...
...Rate is usually—and correctly—translated as "councils" to distinguish them, on the one hand, from mere economic shop stewards and, on the other, from the Russian concept of soviets as instruments of a party dictatorship...
...Korsch charged that the more the Rate were assigned economic tasks, the less they were capable of acting as a revolutionary ferment...
...but, wisely, the USPD refused to participate in the hairbrained scheme.'' Half a year later, the republican Constitution was promulgated with the compromise Article 165, which incorporated the Rate into the fabric of parliamentary democracy: Workers and salaried employees shall elect councils on the factory level, district councils by economic areas, and a National Workers' Council to represent their social and economic interests...
...It had emerged in the turbulent beginnings of the German revolution, in November 1918, as the only conception of popular power, the 'Morgan wonders why the USPD held its founding convention at "remote Gotha"—why, that's where the Marxists and the Lassalleans had united in 1875...
...the soviet system as a goal is something very different...
...They failed to purge the civil service and to penetrate the executive with their own men, but they pressed to convene a National Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Councils (a Rate Congress...
...Other countries now are facing situations that somewhat resemble the condition of Germany in 1918: a regime dominated by traditional forces has broken down, leaving a mess of illplaced investments and privileges...
...Alas, the revolutionaries did not have enough trained jurists, economists, and managers to fill even the lower cabinet positions—truly, a lame excuse for inaction...
...This is surprising...
...Characteristically, he and Willer left the KPD a year after they had merged with it...
...But neither was Kurt Weill a Rouget de Lisle nor Tucholsky a Danton nor Brecht a Bilchner...
...Not the day of revolution but the '"The flight of one set of supervisors and the coming of another," said Walther Rathenau, the industrialist turned statesman and philosopher, organizer of the German war economy, parlor bolshevist and foreign minister, murdered by proto-Nazis in 1922...
...In Russia, the provisional government was legitimate...
...Ever so reluctantly, the USPD leaders bowed to this reasoning...
...Insofar as the German revolution of November 1918 aspired to the fullest political, economic, and social selfdetermination of the people, to effective equality of the classes, to participation especially of the working class, the withering away of the Rate meant that democracy shriveled into the political power game of the parties, and only in this sense can it be said that the parliamentary regime fell short of the expectations of a significant part of the people...
...dynamic faction pushing the revolution toward radicalization...
...Earlier, he had called for a confiscatory tax and designed a scheme of industrial self-determination, which influenced Hilferding's Rate idea...
...Late in 1920, their majority decided to merge with the Communists...
...I shall try to show that a meaningful critique of the November Revolution, and of the Weimar Republic that emerged out of it, is possible only from the viewpoint of the Rate movement, but not from that of the Jacobin ideology that still dominates the literature...
...To overcome the mutual suspicions might have required superhuman efforts on both sides...
...where such 21 Some old-timers who had first joined the KPD returned to the SPD in 1921...
...Later, in his anti-Kautsky pamphlet, he identified the soviets as such organs and described them as an ideal system of government...
...Kautsky blames "the split in the labor movement" for its failure...
...Now the bourgeois parties formed their own government, and Germany became "a republic without republicans...
...republican government—the Social Democrats, the (Catholic) Center party, and the (liberal) Democrats—totaled 75 percent and formed the "Weimar Coalition...
...In Bavaria, Kurt Eisner's Volksrepublik was supported by hastily formed peasants' Rate...
...Kautsky, however, had called his pamphlet "The Social Revolution," not "The Socialist Revolution...
...But this indeterminate nature, which the two revolutions shared, conceals their great difference: successive Russian governments were unable to take root in Russian soil, whereas in Germany the republican majority—formed previously, during the last year of the First World War, by the opposition parties in the Reichstag—asserted itself rather quickly...
...85 Although the article incorporated ideas by Hilferding, the left denounced it as an attempt to emasculate the political meaning of the Rate concept...
...That new National Assembly then met in the little town of Weimar, far away from Berlin and Munich and the turmoil of revolution...
...Politically, the Rate did not develop in the direction of the Russian soviets, and it is erroneous to describe the condition of the German state at the turn of 1918-19 as a "dual government...
...Social and economic legislation shall be examined by the National Economic Council (to be composed of worker, management, and consumer representatives...
...There were soldiers' Rate, housewives' Rate, and of course Rate of intellectual workers, Rate of the unemployed, and even the PTA began as "Parents' RAte...
...and civil war was launched against the Republic by those very civil servants whom it had neglected to fire...
...The Rate were to assure the resumption of "production," and the USPD was to "guarantee civil peace and work discipline" (Kessler, op...
...Both had in common the heritage of a collapse, the contrast between vague hopes for a better future and awareness of the dire choices and impending disasters, the makeshift character of the provisional government...
...the Versailles Treaty could not have been more onerous for a revolutionary regime than it was for republican Germany...
...SPD or "Mehrheitssozialisten": the (majority) Social Democratic party of Germany...
...See his Der historische Materialismus (Berlin: Dietz, 1929, vol...
...These "workers' governments" of 1923 in Saxony and Thuringia were deposed by the army...
...But he makes believe that the Spartakists (an insignificant sect in 1919) had caused the split...
...6 Now, after the violent overthrow of the Allende government in Chile and the narrow salvaging of the Portuguese republic, socialists in many countries are wondering whether a popular revolution is fated either to be stopped in its tracks before achieving its aims or to fall prey to a dictatorship, be it of the military or the party variety...
...It had the singular distinction of being the only party to oppose the nationalist "Ruhr Action" of 1922-23—the perverse "strike" of the miners against the French occupation power financed by the German government...
...As soon as possible, with the adoption of a constitution on July 31, 1919, the new republicans tried to forget the revolution...
...The latter is ahistorical, since it presupposes a revolutionary ruling party, or at least a ",Concluded between Carl Legien, chairman of the Free Trade Unions (ADGB), and, for the industrialists, Hugo Stinnes, owner of a steel, coal, and shipping empire, first in November 1918 and enlarged in 1920...
...The Communist International refused to sanction this movement...
...See also Note 21...
...Neither existed, and with the two-stroke model of the Russian Revolution (or rather its legend: in February, a bourgeois revolution...
...Rudolf Hilferding finally saw the Rate as a means to democratize economic life, from the factory level up to the formation of a Supreme Workers' Council endowed with the right to initiate legislation and examine and veto bills before the Reichstag...
...persons were available, they often lacked the sense of power to institute a spoils system...
...He foresaw the decline of parliamentarianism, and therefore assigned to the working class the historical function of rescuing and reviving parliamentarianism's "invaluable blessings...
...They usually decreed the reinstatement of suspended labor laws and civil rights and then got involved in the tasks of assuring supplies, issuing permits, and the like...
...Everybody seemed too busy reconverting his own job and family life to peacetime, and the majority feared chaos more than it wanted change...
...A new "shopsteward law" restricted the Rate to little more than the role of grievance committees on the factory level...
...Both were based on the abolition of the "servants' order" and of similar feudal laws, on the introduction of the eight-hour day and unemployment insurance, the recognition of collective bargaining, and other such matters that, however, were of little concern to the "Weimar intellectuals...
...It was only consistent that workers now were looking to the political parties rather than to the direct organs of their class to represent them...
...Here the Independents made their decisive mistake...
...the event had symbolic significance for both sides...
...Democracy, Kautsky wrote, "is first of all a condition that makes the higher forms of revolutionary struggle possible...
...Its leader was a metal worker, Richard Willer, who had syndicalist tendencies...
...But many speakers at the USPD's convention argued that the Rate should be a means to unite workers across party lines, to bridge the gap between unions of different persuasions ("red," "free," liberal-democratic, and "Christian"), to close the gulf between partisans of the parliamentary republic and partisans of the dictatorship of the proletariat...
...The Independents, with the Social Democrats as junior partners, ruled in the name of the Rate over all of Saxony and Brunswick, using the larger towns as power bases...
...After Gramsci's death, Togliatti denied that factory councils had ever been conceived as organs of revolutionary power...
...It was briefly allied with the Austrian Socialist party, the British Independent Labour party, and like-minded "centrists" in the so-called International 21/2...
...They agreed that the constitution should be written by a National Assembly— but not soon, and it should incorporate faits accomplis, which the Rate were to create in the meantime...
...KPD: the Communist party of Germany (then...
...5 But in 1918 a new movement—the Rate (councils)—promised, or seemed to promise, a way of overcoming the limitations of both the old-style parliamentary party— accustomed to a sterile opposition policy while accumulating votes—and old-style trade union reformism...
...Arnheim in Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities—confided to Kessler: "At night I am a bolshevik...
...Since at the same time the Democrats also lost to the Nationalists, the Weimar Coalition no longer had a majority...
...In Saxony and in the newly formed state of Thuringia, for a short time SPD-USPD majorities were able to govern constitutionally...
...This rubber formula could be interpreted as an endorsement of parliamentary or of Rate government, of majority rule or of dictatorship...
...At its Fifth World Congress (1924) it declared that soviets could be developed only after the Party had seized political power...
...This point, though of utmost importance, has not received any attention in the literature, which even today is still totally enthralled with the Leninist conception of history: either the proletarians have the power or they don't...
...9 Indeed, 90 percent of the German people wanted first of all to see the boys come home, and if the high command wanted to keep the troops under the flag, it was to fight against the revolution...
...45 ff...
...But from the USPD point of view, their presence also meant power and the recognition of a proletarian force...
...it hoped for a socialist revolution and believed that the Russians had made a good start...
...Though a member of the USPD and later of the KPD, he tried to keep the political and the economic arms of the revolution apart...
...21 ) In the years 1921 to 1923—years of catastrophic inflation, civil strife, and foreign entanglements—workers again staged futile uprisings that only drove them deeper into alienation...
...Similarly divided sentiments are found in Harry Count Kessler's Diaries (Frankfurt: Insel-Verlag, 1961), which disclose strikingly how the most progressive faction of the bourgeois democrats, such as Kessler himself and Walther Rathenau, alternated between fear of the Rate and hope that they might be used to legitimize a coup d'etat...
...2 Yet, without that revolution it would be hard to explain two things: the hatred that the former ruling classes bore the Republic, and the loyalty of the working classes...
...80 revolutionaries had charged ahead...
...The conditions in the young German republic did not resemble those in Russia between February and October 1917...
...Michael Freund, op...
...Theodor Leipart, the president of the Free Trade Unions' Confederation (ADGB), proposed that the workers' parties form a socialist coalition, perhaps to be joined also by the Christian trade unions...
...and 558...
...10 It had rejected Lenin's call to "transform the imperialist war into a civil war...
...Recent theatrical productions have revived the interest in these authors of the Weimar left...
...See particulars in Arthur Rosenberg, op...
...His theoretical companion was Ernst Daumig, a former theology student, soldier of fortune, and officer turned war-resister...
...All these scruples might have been overcome had the German people been prepared to act on its own behalf...
...Daumig saw the councils largely as political instruments that would prepare the workers for the dictatorship of the proletariat...
...those who were interested in securing a republic could do so only by denying it the chance to evolve into the social revolution or so participants said they felt...
...The Independents were preparing fora long period of protracted class struggle and therefore tried to prevent an early stabilization of the regime in the form of a constitution...
...Now the Bolsheviks again serve as models by which other turning points in history are judged...
...cit., pp...
...The program the USPD adopted read more ambiguously: "The USPD supports the Rate in their struggle for economic and political power...
...That habit could have been acquired only in the year of revolution, when the two causes of democracy and socialism were parallel or identical...
...Instead, the Rate voted (400 to 50...
...these parties were to share power in Prussia until 1932...
...2Geoffrey Barraclough even denies that the Republic deserves a special chapter in Germany's history...
...86 rejoined the SPD...
...The quoted article dates from 1923, when Korsch had joined the KPD, and refers to a different situation...
...Single-handed, with merely a few sailors, the enthusiastic Kurt Eisner seized Munich and imposed on the rest of Bavaria a flimsy "Rate" scheme along with a new anthem he himself had composed...
...Thus the Rate might be a strategic instrument of revolution, a tactical means of ongoing class war, or a republican institution...
...And so they gave Ebert another excuse to ally himself with the very forces that had just tried to overthrow him...
...either the revolution is socialist or it isn't...
...2. joining such a government in order to gain positions of power and to introduce more 79 decisive policies aiming at social transformation...
...25 q 25 It may be of interest to trace a similar development in Italy, where syndicalism looked back on a great tradition...
...83 decrees...
...Founded in protest against the war, it was predominantly pacifist...
...81 only organized source of legitimacy for the provisional government...
...6 Kessler quotes Rathenau as saying: "Noske is the only great man in the Republic" (Kessler, ibid...
...In Germany the Rate, rather, were the source of power...
...On January 23,1920,40 workers marching in protest against this new law were killed and over 100 wounded...
...The mutinous officers were pardoned or even promoted...
...Daumig indignantly called the Congress a suicides' club...
...Should not the 1918 revolution, in one fell swoop, have finished at least the job the aborted "bourgeois revolution" of March 1848 had left undone 70 years earlier...
...3. fighting outside the government for more advanced programs and against the government for total revolution...
...This pamphlet was remarkable for its many insights...
...At first, Rate sprang up in haphazard, disorderly patterns—by usurpation, by simple show of hands, or by various election procedures...
...established administrative departments or wrest executive power from the structures of the ancien regime...
...in the interim a "Central Council" was set up to keep an eye on the government itself...
...The Rate Congress (still the government's source of legitimacy) ordered the government to nationalize (sozialisieren) "without delay all industries that are suitable, especially mining...
...despite the more radical composition of that council, it 14 Quoted by Walter Tormin, ed., Die Weimarer Republik (Hannover: Verlag ftir Literatur and Zeitgeschehen, 1962...
...Well, the boys might have found their way home without the General Staff's help...
...to yield their power to a Constituent Assembly, which was to be elected at the earliest possible date...
...Each in its way prevented the Rate from becoming a creative instrument of an ongoing revolution...
...He warned that class war would be intensified in the coming era, even in the countries where democracy had prevailed, and that it would continue for a long time even after the proletariat had seized political power...
...The author is a leader of the left wing in the SPD, and coauthor of its controversial long-term action program...
...He then defended "workers' government" against its ultra-left, "undialectical" opponents...
...44-47...
...it is Kautsky's best work— must have known by heart...
...either revolution leads to a parliamentary regime, and then it is bourgeois, or it leads to a soviet dictatorship, and then it is socialist...
...Falling into disuse, the Rate ceased to be a living reality—the proletariat fighting for its place in society— and instead became a dream, an ideology...
...What seems clear now to posterity, however, may not have been so to contemporaries: Daumig probably thought the Russian Soviets were like the German Rate...
...It is said that 1,200 demonstrators then perished in the streets—while Ebert declaimed, on opening the Weimar Assembly: "The idealism of our great poets and thinkers must fill the life of our new republic...
...This, however, was not the reality either in Russia or in Germany...
...when the states stopped financing their offices, they ceased to exist...
...Karl Kautsky had described the relationship between revolution and democracy in his prewar book The Social Revolution," which every USPD militant oFirst published in 1902, amended in 1906 under the impression of the first Russian revolution (Berlin: VorwArts, 112 pp...
...Soon indeed the Independents' political Rate lost all their power...
...However, the Rate failed to build up an independent structure of power on the national or even provisional leve1...
...This time the Rate hoped to seize the opportunity for a push toward socialism and beyond the bourgeois republic...
...Here is the respectable Vossische Zeitung reporting, in December 1918, on the Rate Congress: . . . wild men, soldiers with fear-frayed nerves, foaming at the mouth, babbling with excitement...
...5See "The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg" by her one-time disciple Georg Luldcs, in History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), and Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1970...
...The significance of this distinction shall presently be clarified...
...See also Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus (Stockholm: Fischer, 1947, pp...
...Both books have ample bibliographies and biographical data and are useful for the wealth of information they provide, but both offer little theory...
...78 tribute the braking of the revolution to the old practice of collaboration between trade unions and management, culminating in the "Agreement to Cooperate,"4 which might be called the real constitution of the Weimar Republic...
...The Rate, though failing to substitute themselves for the executive power, were indispensable in providing an ideology for revolutionary rule...
...But neither were the Independents...
...The Council of People's Deputies in Berlin also was supported by an "Executive Council" (Vollzugsrat) of local Rate—though precariously and in constant rivalry over jurisdiction...
...Gramsci—now a saint of the PCIwas then fascinated by the idea of councils and based on it his theory of "stato operaio" (see my article in the Summer 1974 issue of Dissent...
...But the SPD also could take other partners: the parties that had pledged support for a I 5 Haase would have stayed but was forced to quit by his irate comrades...
...Thus critics of the Weimar Republic compare its origins in 1918 unfavorably with the enthusiastic faith of 1789 or with the social radicalism of 1917...
...The character and constituency of the USPD was not uniformly Marxist and revolutionary...
...Meanwhile, the Social Democratic workers also had had enough of Noske...
...The USPD was the party of the Rate—an idea that was popular far beyond the circles of those who sympathized with the Russians...
...No customary rituals of liberation and planting of freedom trees, no public rejoicing and dancing in the streets graced the birth of the hapless Weimar Republic, born in despair and confusion...
...Only once more were the Rate called upon to perform an important political task...
...today the name is copyrighted by the Maoists...
...The Rate idea by now had become utopian...
...from the German (New York: Pantheon, 1974...
...The Rate seemed ideal instruments of a revolutionary policy, as means to unite the proletariat and exclude its enemies from political action, as executive and administrative organs to meet the emergency situation, and as a two-way channel to electrify the revolutionary potential of all classes...
...but actual power was falling back into the hands of the old civil service...
...In other words, unless one chooses to say that the German revolution began with its "Thermidor," one should study it as a phenomenon sui generis that followed a pattern of development totally independent of the French and Russian models...
...This, obviously, was not the mood of the Independents' left wing: it hated both the policies and the style of the old SPD and trade-union leadership...
...Thus, the SPD leaders eagerly seized upon the easiest excuses: the Entente threat of intervention, the impending famine, the fear of civil war, the need to bring the soldiers home...
...24 23Cf...
...Could this break have been prevented...
...cit., March 4, • 1919...
...food supplies were denied to prostrate Germany even after the armistice...
...It included idealistic, quasi-anarchistic literati such as the playwright Ernst Toiler, who was to found a Rate Republic in Munich, and also such Jacobins as Clara Zetkin, who was one of the first members of the Spartakusbund, nucleus of the KPD, which was founded only in January 1919...
...Korsch was the only theoretician of revolutionary syndicalism in Germany...
...The minority was fated to drift back to the SPD the next year, there to play the inglorious role of "opposition" to the leadership's unpopular coalition policies...
...Since the USPD was active in both parliamentary campaigns and trade unions, in the government, and in the Rate, its ultimate commitment remained vague...
...the new regime, searching for a balance between innovation and stability, must call on Socialist or even Communist parties to share responsibility...
...These parties must decide among three basic courses: 1. lending conditional or critical support to a government that can be expected to push reform policies far enough to justify such support...
...Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1974...
...Under the one-citizenonevote rule, and with women voting for the first time, this Assembly was almost certain to have a moderate majority...
...Moreover, the impending chaos and famine, pressure from the Entente powers, and the urgency of peace and reconstruction made it necessary to cooperate with the pillars of the ancien regime, such as the civil service, the army, and business...
...But there is no evidence that the fear of bolshevism was warranted or the masses were pressing for revolution...
...Perhaps there is some relevance in the recent spate of studies and texts that deal with the Rate movement in the early days of the Weimar Republic and with its political sponsor, the short-lived Independent Social Democratic party...
...field against the militarists...
...The conception with which the USPD started the November 1918 revolution, therefore, anticipated two levels of action, a political and a social one...
...But a significant part of the middle class, and notably the intellectuals, would support a revolutionary policy only if it had, at the same time, been a nationalistic uprising against the Versailles powers...
...In Berlin, too, mass demonstrations scared the rump government into the use of violence...
...This difference was stated clearly by Ernst Daumig at the USPD congress in 1919: "I should like to ask you to make this distinction: on the one hand, Rate now are the means we have to use in order to strive for socialism in the midst of chaos and destruction...
...The party's political head and leading parliamentarian was Hugo Haase, who never, until his assassination in 1919, abandoned hope that With the exception of some national-bolshevist authors, few writers recognize the cardinal point that in 1918 one could hardly be for peace and pursue the revolution at the same time...
...In November 1919 Noske's troops were able to expel the Executive Council in Berlin (which by then consisted only of Communists and Independents) from its headquarters...
...The Bolsheviks in turn imitated the Jacobins, hoping to improve on their predecessors' performance while escaping their fate...
...Even in the brief period of prosperity that followed, many German workers either did not take part in the political process of the Republic or lacked the habit of defending it with militant means...
...The revolution produced no great ideas, did not sweep great personalities to the fore, did not release creative energies...
...More sophisticated critics at3 Rouget de Lisle: composer of the Marseillaise...
...Very soon the troops came marching home, hailed by the middle class as saviors from disorder and ruthlessly used by Noske to suppress demonstrations...
...Exasperated by their defeat, they refused to participate in the Central Council, on the ground that it had been given insufficient powers...
...here the mere supersession of one leading elite by another,' and, after a brief interlude of revolutionary spasms, a step-by-step retreat into a new legality...
...The Rate never had more than local significance...
...His philosophy is now very influential on the left within and outside the SPD...
...Rosenberg charges that the sailors wanted money, not revolution...
...workers who had defended the Republic were beaten down cruelly...
...Although their slogan was, "All power to the Rate," they had joined the Provisional Government...
...The link between the two was cut in the last days of 1918 and in the gruesome experience of the class war of 1919-20...
...But in Bavaria, Eisner was disowned by the voters and shot on his way to the Diet, where he planned to submit his resignation...
...1974), p. 27...
...521 ff...
...The government was still so shaky and discredited that some adventurous national-bolsheviks were hatching a coup that, significantly enough, was to have delegated certain economic powers to the Rate...
...Workers' and economic councils may be assigned to function as control and administrative organs in cer4fied areas...
...The bulk of the radical left, however, consisted of a new movement of shop stewards (Obleute), mostly active in the defense industries, who had first banded together to oppose the wartime restrictions and deprivations but then had turned to the pursuit of civil rights, political reform, and eventually revolution...
...At the polls, in June 1920, Ebert received the answer: the SPD lost nearly half of its constituency...
...Still not reassured, the Weimar Coalition then proceeded to pull the few teeth Article 165 (above) might have had...
...24Comintern President Grigory Zinoviev, speaking for 41/2 hours at the USPD's "merger" congress at Halle (1920), promised those willing to join that the spark of the world revolution, once permitted to set Germany aflame, would engulf the Western countries, "and ten years hence, no one will remember what capitalism used to be like...
...and "democracy is an indispensable means to prepare the proletariat for the social revolution, but it is not a means to make such a revolution superfluous...
...See Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets in Russia 1905-1922, tr...
...Morgan has little background in, and feeling for, the inner life of European mass parties...
...The Congress finally called for a second Rate Congress that was to convene simultaneously with the Constituent Assembly...
...wThe USPD enjoyed the sympathies of non-Marxist intellectuals and artists...
...Lenin, as is well known, had called for democratic organs of government that would combine the functions of the legislative and the executive (in State and Revolution, where, however, the term "soviets" does not yet occur...
...Its leaders ranged from old Eduard Bernstein, the archrevisionist, and Kurt Eisner, an ethical socialist and pacifist, to the firebrand oppositionist Georg Ledebour and to Ernst Thalmann, who would soon be Stalin's hand-picked leader of the German CP (KPD...
...This all happened in December 1918...
...Demagogues emerging from the deep dark, spouting evil thoughts and savage dreams . . . and yet this is the only power in the whole Reich capable of exercising authority: men in shirt-sleeves, sailors who were mute yesterday, incapable of mastering their own destiny, yet they are now our masters...
...See also his earlier Betriebsräte in der Revolution (Dusseldorf: IG Metall, 1963...
...This is a misrepresentation...
...The Rate, though, had not completely abdicated their power...
...This conception even pervades Rosa Luxemburg's great speech at the founding congress of the KPD: "It is an illusion to think that it suffices to install socialists in government and to issue socialist interestingly not republished after the war...
...We must bear in mind that for all prewar socialists—leftwing and right-wing—the fight for democracy was axiomatic and that, in particular for revolutionaries, there could be no conflict yet between civil rights and proletarian dictatorship...
...also Arthur Rosenberg, Geschichte der Weimarer Republik (1935...
...Kautsky had recognized the significance of finance capitalism, trusts, department stores, and predicted the shopkeepers' flight into fascism...
...Neither Morgan nor Krause mention Kurt Tucholsky, Carl von Ossietzky, Alfred DOblin (author of Berlin Alexanderplatz), and other Weltbahne authors who were USPD members...
...1974), pp...
...As predicted, the Independents had received only 8 percent of the vote, the Social Democrats 38 percent...
...Its vote dropped to 22 percent, the Independents' rose to 18 percent...
...Wherever people were gathered in political turmoil—in factories, the army, urban districts, even in villages—Rate were formed for every purpose...
...There followed a Rate seizure of power that began as an operetta and ended in bloody suppression...
...84 had not been able to keep the government in check...
...Rathenau—the Dr...
...87 The Rate too did not develop a dynamism of their own...
...To be sure, even Rosa Luxemburg did not think that Germany was "ripe" for a socialist revolution, and the Independents were committed to a policy of peace at almost any price...
...Georg Bachner's Dantons Tod and other revolution plays were restaged by Max Reinhardt in the early years of his Berlin Schauspielhaus...
...Other councils too made erratic, despotic inroads into the routines of government...
...in October, a socialist revolution) in mind, the easy conclusion follows: what happened in Germany in November 1918 can at best be compared to the Russian February 1917...
...The Rate Congress also spelled out a thorough reform of the army (but since no socialist now wanted to serve in any army, the government had to rely on mercenaries who were indoctrinated by reactionary officers...
...They had conducted bloody strikes for the right to vote, and they would not readily throw that right away...
...When the empire crumbled, the two workers' parties formed a "Council of People's Deputies" (Rat der Volksbeauftragten), which derived its legitimacy from the nascent Rate movement, but acted as a provisional government...
...Frankfurt: Fischer, 1961], p. 158...
...It is true that their experience in the first Executive Council of Berlin had not been encouraging...
...Here the Independents tried to leave things in suspense until the Rate could consolidate their power...
...Soon thereafter, the USPD withdrew its deputies from the national government too, on the even less plausible ground that Friedrich Ebert had used artillery against the mutinous sailors who had claimed allegiance to the USPD...
...2°Arthur Rosenberg argues in History of Bolshevism that this was not accidental...
...Day of the Constitution was declared a national holiday...
...Often they were simply appointed by SPD or USPD committees...
...These were not Leninist ideas but ideas based on Rosa Luxemburg's most exciting work, Mass Strike, Party, and Trade Unions, in which she demonstrated the mutual fertilization of political and economic struggle in great detail and minimized the need for the Party's guidance of the masses...
...There they see the everdeepening seriousness of the revolution, the emergence of ever-new strata from the depths of society and the release of ever-new and unsuspected energies...
...Like the prewar SPD, the USPD now had to become a party of sterile opposition...
...In the early months of the Revolution, both SPD and USPD still had vivid memories of their recent split...
...It must be a progression of acts by which power is achieved on each level, one after the other...
...they did not mind illiterate generals or commissars...
...The SPD majority was not prepared to run these risks of a socialist revolution...
...Daumig was to become a leading spokesman for the Rate concept and later for affiliation of the USPD with the Comintern...
...The February revolution of 1917 was bourgeois-democratic, the October revolution was socialistproletarian...
...The real split occurred down the middle, within the USPD, making that party incapable of deciding on a policy...
...In 1920 the workers occupied the factories and formed "factory councils...
...It has been estimated that about one-third of the old USPD's rank and file completely dropped out of politics, that one-third went to the Communists, where they quickly became the ultra-left, 20 and that nearly one-third soon ' 9Korsch, op...
...Liebknecht, meanwhile, had proclaimed the "German Socialist Republic...
...The Social Democrats argued for an early convening of a Constituent Assembly, which would allow the whole nation to share responsibility for the painful decisions that had to be made...
...Those who were interested in pushing on toward a social revolution could do so only by separating their cause from that of the Republic...
...The bourgeoisie was trembling in fear of the word Rate: to the bourgeois, the Rate were proletarian and seemed uncontrollable...
...It would have been a new form of "workers' government...
...This price, the conversion of Germany into the battlefield of an international civil war, seemed too high to men like Hugo Haase and Rudolf Hilferding...
...Where municipal Rate survived, they now performed merely narrow functions of supply, or acted as liaison for the administration...
...They were strong in the factories but did not develop into the organ of mass democracy...
...The seizure of power "cannot be accomplished in one blow...
...To tell the truth, the Rate themselves were sporadic, local, and unsure organs, often manipulated by the parties and in themselves incapable of exercising executive functions...
...And so, without the Independents' participation, the Central Council withered away—a self-fulfilling prophecy...
...16 In January 1919, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were slain by murderous mercenaries, and the peaceful citizens went to the polls to elect a National (Constituent) Assembly...
...The same Rathenau just then published a pamphlet in which he argued for "codetermination"—using the very same word that 50 years later was to become the SPD's fighting slogan...
...At no time in the life of the Republic were the workers' partiesSPD, USPD, KPD—to command a combined vote of more than 46 percent...
...In Russia, the 'Friedrich Ebert had taken the precaution of having himself appointed Germany's Chancellor by the Kaiser's last holder of that office, Prince Max von Baden— constitutionally a doubtful procedure since Prince Max himself had declined the dignity of Regent of the Realm...
...The radicals, even the most revolutionary among them, did not envisage the coming revolution as a takeover by the socialist party in a single act but as a long process of socialization after winning democratic liberties and socialist-democratic majorities...
...Equally mistaken—or rather: unhistorical—is Morgan in blaming "class war" for the USPD's failure...
...Muller, equally infuriated, acquired his nickname— the Corpse—when he exclaimed: "If they want to enter the National Assembly, they'll have to do it over my dead body...
...but the power of the soviets was increasing, and the civil service system was falling into their hands...
...The Independent Social Democratic party of Germany (USPD), 7 which flourished 6David W. Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution: A History of the German Independent Social Democratic Party, 1917-22 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975), and Hartfrid Krause, USPDZur Geschichte der Unabhiingigen Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands(Frankfurt: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1975...
...23 National-bolshevism thus would have been the German version of French Jacobinism, the only alternative to the Weimar Republic...
...Thomas Mann then wrote: "Communism as 1 understand it has much that is good . . . it aims at . . , a de-poisoning of the world by depoliticizing it" (Briefe 1889-1936, Erika Mann, ed...
...Over these developments, masses of workers left the SPD and joined the Independents...
...Even where the soviets were not a synonym for party rule, they were simply an interim power intervening in emergency situations with emergency measures...
...In his later writings, he lapsed into shallow legalism...
...It aspires to the dictatorship of the 82 proletariat, representative of the majority of the people, as a necessary precondition for the realization of socialism" (my italics, H.P...
Vol. 24 • January 1977 • No. 1
