Editorial: Armistice — And After. (1918)

Editorial from the December 1918 issue of the Socialist Standard

With a suddenness only equalled by that of its starting the vast slaughter machine of the capitalist world has come to a standstill as far, at least, as the chief opponents are concerned.

While the strain imposed upon Germany became apparent to all when it was seen that she was unable to spare men or material to help Bulgaria, the strict censorship, combined with the skilfully conducted retreat of her armies on the Western front, prevented outsiders from realising how near the breaking-point had been approached internally.

Innumerable rumours are flying about concerning the conditions in Germany, but the amount of reliable information is small possibly due as much to the English censor as to the lack of correspondents on the spot.

In some aspects the experience of Russia in 1917 is seemingly being repeated in Germany. A so-called Socialist cabinet has been formed consisting of three members of the Social-Democratic Party— Ebert, Scheidemann, and Landsberg—and three from the Independent Socialist Party—Haase, Dittman, and Barth. The last is claimed by some papers to be a member of the "Spartacus" group of the "Independents," but other papers deny this.

It would appear that a conflict is already raging as to whether a Constituent Assembly shall be called or a Soviet Parliament on the model of Russia shall be set up.

That the Scheidemann group should have seized the opportunity to take office is quite in line with their previous actions. In outlook and conception of social forces and developments they stand on about the same level as the Labour Party of this country, who have always been ready to assist the capitalist parties and hope for offices in return. Thus the Scheidemann "Socialists" gave their whole-hearted support to the prosecution of the war by the German capitalists, just as the Labour Party here placed its "whole services and party organisation" at the disposal of the English capitalists for the prosecution of the war by them.

The position of the "Independents" is not quite so easy to follow. That Bernstein and Kautsky should have "wobbled" on this question of taking office in such a Cabinet is not surprising, though it completely stultifies their action in withdrawing from the Social-Democratic Party during the war. But it certainly seems strange that Franz Mehring, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and the like should have agreed, as they appear to have done, to this step being taken.

As far as can be judged from the information to hand, the only grounds upon which Socialists in Germany could take office at the present juncture would be for the purpose of arranging for a general election to be taken as soon as possible, based upon adult suffrage without property qualifications. In such an election the Socialists would, of course, stand solely for the establishment of Socialism and so would apply a real test as to whether the working class desired to establish Socialism.

If they desired to do so then a majority of Socialists would be returned. Failing this it would be quite clear that, due either to apathy or ignorance, the majority desired to retain capitalism. It would show the need for further Socialist propaganda being carried on until a sufficient number became convinced of the need for, and set to work to establish, the Socialist Commonwealth.

Socialism, that is a system of society based on the social ownership of the means of life, cannot be established till those who produce and distribute the wealth of society decide that it shall be produced and distributed socially for the benefit of all. Any attempt on the part of a so-called Socialist Cabinet to use the positions the peculiar circumstances of the moment have placed in their hands, for the purpose of establishing "Socialism" from above must end in a fiasco.

And greater than this internal question stands the huge powers outside. It would be the height of folly to suppose that the two greatest capitalist countries in the world, America and Great Britain, entered into this gigantic struggle to abolish capitalism. On the contrary, it was to maintain and extend that system that the unparalelled slaughter has taken place, and these nations will take all the steps necessary still to be taken for the achievement of that object. Let the working class attempt to take possession of the means of production, even in the indeterminate manner that they have done in Russia and as soon as they can be spared armed forces will be sent to ''restore order" and "establish peace."

The significant terms of the Armistices granted to Austria, Turkey, and Germany show clearly the end in view. Turkey is to be allowed to retain sufficient forces to "preserve order" in Armenia. The cold-blooded cynicism of this arrangement after all the howling of the capitalist Press about "Armenian massacres by the Turks," shows to what depths of foul hypocrisy the capitalist class can descend.

Austria is to retain twenty divisions under arms, While we are not told the number of men assigned to a division, a moderate estimate would give over 300,000 men under this clause. The people of Austria have thrown over their royal family and its relations, and the Allies are afraid that in the confusion existing there the working class may fail to appreciate properly the beauty and benefit of fully-developed capitalism. So the 300,000 are left for the purpose of persuading them to adopt a right view. In the case of Germany, while the Allies have demanded the surrender of sufficient guns and munitions to render the reopening of the war by the German army against the Allies quite hopeless, that army is allowed to retain as much of the war material remaining as they can carry across the Rhine inside the period of the Armistice. Here again the need for "preserving order" and "safeguarding property" is the reason behind the "concession."

The formation of Soldiers' Councils by the men stationed in various parts of the country is already arousing anxiety among the master class. The capitalist Press calls upon these councils to exercise a "moderating" influence upon the extremists, who are said to be "Bolshevist agents." Doubtless we shall soon hear of Russian gold being used to corrupt the Germans!

According to the correspondent of the "Daily News" (25.11.1918)—

 "Order may be preserved in Germany if the troops can be got to their homes quickly and disarmed, and if the respective federated Governments have courage and energy to master the Soldiers' and Workmen's Councils."

The idea behind this suggestion is not difficult to discover. Evidently the capitalist class is hoping that a sufficient number of officers and soldiers may be found still holding "patriotic" and "nationalist" views, who can be persuaded to take orders from the master class for the purpose of "saving society." If these "loyal" troops can be selected quickly, and if— as the "Daily News" correspondent suggests—the others can be rapidly returned home and disarmed before serious conflicts arise, the capitalist class of Germany may hope to steer through the troublesome times ahead without disaster to themselves. And if they fail ?

The answer can be seen in Russia. Allied troops have entered both on the Eastern and the North-Western frontiers. Further detachments are now being sent to the latter district from the Western Allies, while according to the "Daily Telegraph" (25.11.1918) the Japanese are claiming "recognition of the Japanese necessity to preserve order in Siberia to protect the integrity of Japan." In August 1914 the Socialist Party of Great Britain issued its War Manifesto, which was published in the September issue of the Socialist Standard. Therein we stated :

"The capitalists of Europe have quarrelled over the question of the control of trade routes and the world's markets, and are endeavouring to exploit the political ignorance and blind passions of the working class of their respective countries in order to induce the said workers to take up arms in what is solely their masters' quarrel.
"These armed forces, therefore, will only be set in motion to further the interests of the class who control them—the master class—and as the workers' interests are not bound up in the struggle for markets wherein their masters may dispose of the wealth they have stolen from them (the workers), but in the struggle to end the system under which they are robbed, they are not concerned with the present European struggle, which is already known as the BUSINESS war, for it is their masters' interests that are involved, and not their own."

The S.P.G.B was the only party in Great Britain who laid down the Socialist position when the war began and told the working class the truth about the situation. We have been the only party to maintain that position through the four and a quarter years of slaughter.

Overwhelming proof of the correctness of our attitude is now available in the terms of the "secret treaties" that have been published, quite apart from those known to exist but whose terms are still secret, in the action of the Allies in seizing the German colonies, in the various peace terms that have been formulated, in the declarations of "economic war after the war," and in the claims now being made by the various countries of the Allied group upon territories and "spheres of influence." Deceived by the delusion so sedulously spread by the master class that their "national existence was in danger," that "civilisation trembled in the balance," and so on, the workers have slaughtered each other by millions—and for what ? That the chains of wage slavery may be more firmly rivetted upon themselves the world over.

This applies as much to the victors as to the vanquished. While the capitalists have made huge fortunes out of war contracts the workers, despite "bonuses," "allowances," and increased rates, have been worked longer hours driven harder, and exploited to a greater degree than in the time of "peace'' preceding August 1914. Speeding up of machinery, improved methods of organisation, greater "hustle" in the works and factories, further sub-division and "dilution" of labour processes, premium bonus schemes and extension of piecework, have resulted in a greatly increased output during the war.

On the return of "peace" conditions these methods will be extended and elaborated, resulting in still greater "driving" and intensification of toil with its consequent increased profits for the master class and greater misery for the workers. The urge of "patriotism" and "helping the boys in the trenches," will be replaced by the more deadly, if more stealthy, whip of hunger. Schemes have been prepared and discussed for this purpose, and one set of such schemes has been critically examined and analysed in the Socialist Standard for April and May, 1917, under the heading "Promises and Pie Crust."

The vast army of demobilised workers—from both military service and munition works—will supply a staggering number of unemployed which the masters can use to beat down wages and to impose stricter conditions of employment. The reconstruction of industry and the re-building of shell-shattered towns in the war area will afford but a relatively short, and by no means complete, respite from the operation of these conditions. Their application will be world-wide, affecting "new" as well as "old" countries where capitalism rules.

The contradiction and antagonism between the increasing powers of wealth production faced with a relatively decreasing capacity, under private ownership of the means of life, on the part of the majority of society to absorb the products, will grow greater year by year. This growing antagonism, coupled with the inability of the capitalist class to control the effects of this vicious system, will drive the workers to realise that not national boundaries but class barriers are the matters for them to study. Then they will see the sound and impregnable truth of the closing lines of our War Manifesto, where we say—

"Having no quarrel with the working class of any country, we extend to our fellow workers of all lands the expression of our good will and Socialist fraternity, and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of capitalism and the triumph of Socialism."

Make no mistake about it; the capitalist nations of the globe will unite to form a solid phalanx in defence of their properties and interests the world over. The huge war just finishing is rapidly being overshadowed by the vaster CLASS war, moving into the last phases of the greatest of all struggles the world has ever, seen—the war over the ownership of the means of life ; the war to decide whether the producers shall be SLAVES OR FREEMEN.

In the great war now closing various races— black and brown, white and yellow—were marshalled against each other by the master class. In the final phases which we are approaching, of the greater war between the classes, race, colour, and sex barriers will be swept aside, and humanity as a whole will line up for the last great struggle of the human race—the struggle for the emancipation from Capitalism—for the establishment of the Socialist system.

Editorial Committee

Rosa Luxemburg, political democracy and mass action (2019)

SPGB Pamphlet

From the January 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rosa Luxemburg, who was murdered a hundred years ago this month, had been a socialist member of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) until it supported the German government in the First World War, sharing its basic positions. She advocated that the working class should win control of political power with a view to replacing capitalism with a society based on the common ownership of the means of production by the whole of society, with production directly for use. She held that the exercise of political power to bring this change should take place within the framework of political democracy, and that even under capitalism political democracy was the best framework for the development of the working class and socialist movements; in fact, a consistent theme of her political views was that the ‘proletariat’ (the working class) had to take up the torch for democracy abandoned by the once-progressive ‘bourgeoisie’.

Reforms

She also accepted that, in addition to the ‘maximum’ programme of socialism, a socialist party should also have, as did the SPD and parties in other countries modelled on it, a programme of social and political reforms to be achieved under capitalism. In her famous pamphlet Reform or Revolution (1898) her opposition was not to reforms as such nor to campaigning for them, but to reformism as the doctrine that capitalism could be gradually transformed into socialism by a series of social reform measures enacted by parliament. This was the view of the ‘Revisionists’ within the SPD and was the target of her pamphlet.

Elsewhere she explained the official SPD (and her) attitude towards parliamentary action:

  ‘The parliamentary struggle, however, the counterpart of the trade-union struggle, is equally with it, a fight conducted exclusively on the basis of the bourgeois social order. It is by its very nature, political reform work, as that of the trade-unions is economic reform work. It represents political work for the present, as trade-unions represent economic work for the present.’ (The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, chapter VIII).

This is the correct meaning of the word ‘parliamentarism’. It does not mean participating in elections and going into parliament but using parliament to get reforms under capitalism.

The Revisionists lost the vote but they won the war as the SPD came to concentrate more and more on parliamentary activity, prioritising increases in its representation in national and regional parliaments and pursuing social reforms, in some places through deals with the Liberal or Catholic parties. Luxemburg could see where this was leading. And where in fact it did eventually lead: to the SPD becoming a democratic social reform party, relegating its maximum programme of socialism to a distant future or to conference rhetoric. Naturally, she was opposed to this.

Her alternative was the ‘mass strike’, basically extra-parliamentary action, initially still to get reforms, what the anarchists call ‘direct action’. Her argument was that reforms obtained in this way would not lead to encouraging mere ‘parliamentarism’ but would prepare the working class for the mass action that the establishment of socialism would have to involve.

Knowing Marx’s insistence on the need for the working class to win control of political power so as to be in a position to change the basis of society from class to common ownership, she was at pains to distinguish her position from that of the anarchists. This was obvious enough anyway since the actual ‘mass strikes’ that she supported were aimed at obtaining or extending political democracy.

Mass strikes to get the vote

This was how she analysed the uprising in Russia in 1905 in her pamphlet The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906). She knew perfectly well that a socialist revolution was out of the question in Russia and that what was on the agenda was a ‘bourgeois revolution’ to establish a democratic republic with a parliament within which the working class could press for social reforms. As she wrote:

  ‘. . . the mass strike in Russia has been realised not as a means of evading the political struggle of the working-class, and especially of parliamentarism, not as a means of jumping suddenly into the social revolution by means of a theatrical coup, but as a means, firstly, of creating for the proletariat the conditions of the daily political struggle and especially of parliamentarism’ (chapter 1).

The events in Russia confirmed a view that she had already come to a few years earlier in relation to the campaign in Belgium for universal suffrage, as not just votes for everybody but equal votes for everybody, i.e., with no mechanism to make the votes of rich property-owners count more than those of workers.

Votes for every man had been obtained in Belgium as a result of a general strike in 1893 but with the rich having more than one vote. An attempt to make this more democratic in 1902 by abolishing plural votes had failed despite another general strike. Luxemburg argued that this failure was due to the leaders of the Belgian Workers Party concentrating on doing a deal with the Liberals in the Belgian parliament and calling off the strike to facilitate this. She argued that if the strike had been maintained the aim could have been achieved (see: LINK).

Precisely the same issue came up in Germany itself in 1909 in relation to the electoral system in Prussia. Prussia, the dominant state within the German empire and where its capital Berlin was situated, had a three-class electoral system which gave more weight to the votes of the rich. The SPD launched a campaign for all votes to count equally. Luxemburg fully supported this campaign but argued that mass strikes would be the best way to secure this.

Her position was a bit incoherent because she argued, on the one hand, that mass strikes could not be planned in advance and launched by a decree from on high but had to break out spontaneously from below, while, on the other, she was criticising the SPD leadership for not calling for one. Her position seems to have been that the SPD should accept and encourage the general idea of a mass strike as a weapon to obtain reforms and support such strikes when they broke out.

No Leninist

This position of support for ‘spontaneous’ mass action meant that her views were the exact opposite of Lenin’s. If she thought that the SDP bureaucracy should not seek to call strikes this would apply even more to Lenin’s much more centralised vanguard party. She had in fact criticised in 1904 Lenin’s views in his What is To Be Done? when they became known outside Russia:

  ‘If we assume the viewpoint claimed as his own by Lenin and we fear the influence of intellectuals in the proletarian movement, we can conceive of no greater danger to the Russian party than Lenin’s plan of organization. Nothing will more surely enslave a young labour movement to an intellectual elite hungry for power than this bureaucratic straightjacket, which will immobilize the movement and turn it into an automaton manipulated by a Central Committee’ (Her italics. See: LINK).

Her reaction to the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in November 1917 was to support the overthrow of the pro-war provisional government and the new government’s appeals for world revolution – but she was severely critical of some of the policies the Bolsheviks adopted, including the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly (she said they should have called fresh elections to it) and minority dictatorship:

  ‘Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously – at bottom, then, a clique affair – a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins (the postponement of the Soviet Congress from three-month periods to six-month periods!). Yes, we can go even further: such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc. (Lenin’s speech on discipline and corruption.)’ (See LINK).

Spartacus League

As it happened, in both Russia and Germany autocratic rule was overthrown as a result of unplanned mass action. By then, following the slaughter of the First World War, Luxemburg had become convinced that socialism itself – the ‘maximum’ programme – was on the agenda and that the alternative was ‘socialism or barbarism.’ She was now a member of the Spartacus League, a party formed by anti-war ex-members of the SPD. Introducing its new programme, which she had drafted, to the party’s conference on 31 December 1918, she identified what had gone wrong with the SPD as the division of its programme into maximum and minimum parts and its concentration on parliamentary activity to achieve the latter:

  ‘Until the collapse of August 4, 1914, German Social Democracy took its stand upon the Erfurt Programme, by which the so-called immediate minimal aims were placed in the forefront, while socialism was no more than a distant guiding star, the ultimate goal. (….) Our programme is deliberately opposed to the standpoint of the Erfurt Programme; it is deliberately opposed to the separation of the immediate, so-called minimal demands formulated for the political and economic struggle from the socialist goal regarded as a maximal programme. In this deliberate opposition [to the Erfurt Programme] we liquidate the results of seventy years’ evolution and above all, the immediate results of the World War, in that we say: For us there is no minimal and no maximal programme; socialism is one and the same thing: this is the minimum we have to realize today’ (LINK).

The programme itself is a 1918 version of the Communist Manifesto of 1848. It reads very well and proclaimed:

  ‘Down with the wage system! That is the slogan of the hour! Instead of wage labour and class rule there must be collective labour. The means of production must cease to be the monopoly of a single class; they must become the common property of all. No more exploiters and exploited! Planned production and distribution of the product in the common interest. Abolition not only of the contemporary mode of production, mere exploitation and robbery, but equally of contemporary commerce, mere fraud’ (LINK).

The programme went into more detail about the form that the ‘mass action’ Luxemburg had always favoured (previously for political reform) would take, at least in the conditions in Germany at the time, when the aim was to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism: workers and soldiers councils which would challenge the capitalist state politically and employers economically. She personally, as in her speech, didn’t rule out contesting elections to the National Assembly and using it for ‘revolutionary purposes’ or as ‘a new school of education for the working class’, a position rejected by a majority of the League’s members. In any event, this wasn’t central to the revolution she believed was imminent.

Unfortunately, just as Marx and Engels had misjudged the situation in 1848 in expecting an ‘immediately following proletarian revolution’, so Luxemburg and the Spartacus League misjudged the situation in 1918. Only a relatively small number of workers supported the League’s programme, and their uprising in January 1919 was crushed. Luxemburg had considered it premature but had loyally gone along with the majority decision. It cost her her life.

We can only speculate as to what position she would have taken later had she not been murdered in 1919 but it is unlikely that she would have abandoned her life-long commitment to democracy or her view that socialism had to be established by the conscious mass action of workers themselves ‘from below’ rather than by the action ‘from above’ of a parliamentary or vanguardist party.

Adam Buick

Germany, November 1918 (1998)

From the November 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The German revolution of 80 years ago was the only ever nation-wide workers' revolt in an advanced capitalist society. It overthrew the Kaiser but not capitalism. It didn't and couldn't have done this as there was no majority for socialism amongst the workers.

Last Autumn saw the spectacle of Trotskyists and other assorted Leninists remembering the 80th Anniversary of the Russian revolution with great enthusiasm. The Trotskyist "Marxist" Party held a meeting for the occasion round my way. When asked by myself at a stall promoting the revolution meeting (with some very pretty looking flyers, it must be said) what exactly their platform was, their reply was "well, you know the Russian revolution?". I indicated that I was aware of its existence. "Well, we, er, well, we think it was a good thing". Great, nice platform, well thought out, mate. Likewise our local SWP enthusiast exhorted me to come to their big meeting on the Russian revolution and "see Tony Cliff before he dies", which struck me as insufficient incentive to attend what would doubtless have been a very tedious evening.

All of this inevitably led me into numerous dog-fights with these sort of people, about quite why the Russian revolution isn't the best thing that's ever happened, including one very nasty and terrifying encounter with a bloody-thirsty professional revolutionary from the SWP head office ("The Cheka were necessary, to stop counter-revolutionaries," she said, and I contemplated suicide, despairing over the condition of a human race that produced such a "socialist"). Inevitably, whenever I elucidated the crimes of the Bolsheviks, pointed out the many failings of the revolution, demonstrated how even Nice and Shiny Mr Lenin perpetrated the sorts of crimes they normally said only started with that Evil Mr Stalin, they had one last line of defence: "The Russian Revolution turned rotten because of invasion by umpteen foreign countries, and the failure of the German Revolution."

The point about invasion largely makes a mockery of their whole support for the victorious revolution, if in fact it wasn't victorious, and so can be dismissed. But their second point is worth a closer look. It is true that Lenin was probably predicating the success of his revolution upon a successful socialist revolution in Germany as well and hoping that it would spread world-wide from there. Fine and dandy, but all this changes Lenin from instead of being a dangerous man who thought he could lead the world to socialism, to a dangerous gambler who thought he could lead the world to socialism. Further, the proponents of such a thesis seem remarkably capable of over-looking the obvious conclusion to which this line of defence points—that Russia was really the side-show, an historical footnote, to the only ever attempted workers' revolution in an advanced capitalist state; and that all their celebrations of Russia and desire to follow its model are flawed, because Germany is the real case history that bears examination.

At the time of the first world war, Germany was the second biggest industrial economy in the world. This was despite having a full third of the population still living as feudal peasantry, and still retaining a quasi-feudal government under an autocratic hereditary ruler. It also had one of the largest workers' movements in Europe (despite socialism having been a criminalised creed for many years in Germany). The Social-Democratic Party of Germany (the SPD) had over a million members and some 4½ million voters, along with numerous papers, affiliated social groups, etc.

The SPD still talked of—and reckoned itself as—being a radical socialist party, though over the years running up to the war it drifted further and further towards outright reformism, partly because it had become so institutionalised. Running its own papers and allied with unions, it was very much a part of the fabric of society. Despite this, a small section of revolutionary socialists remained within the SPD, typified by Rosa Luxemburg, and who numbered some three to four thousand.

The true colours of the SPD were shown during the war, when nearly all of its members in the Reichstag openly backed the war, and the party spread propaganda to the effect that the war was necessary to stop the threat of tyranny from Russia. This slowly led to a split in the SPD, three ways, with the eventual formation of the Independent Social-Democratic Party (USPD) within the parliamentary party and then more slowly within the membership itself. The "far-left" contingent formed themselves into the Spartakusbund (Spartacist League) with Karl Leibknecht and Rosa Luxemburg as prominent members. However, they remained within the official ranks of the USPD.

By September 1918 it was clear that Germany had already lost the war. The most the ruling class could expect was to preserve their state more or less intact. They were desperate to avert a repetition of events in Russia and the massive upheaval there. The powerful generals in the army proposed a way of saving the German state by liberalising it and bringing some of the more obliging elements of the SPD into the government. These latter accepted and joined a government under Prince Max von Baden as Chancellor.

Workers' Councils

Under this regime events deteriorated. Long suffering workers began to vent their frustration at the grind and penury they faced after four years of draconian war-time restrictions. More and more workers and disenchanted soldiers and sailors began to strike and mutiny. By late October insurrection was spreading, as workers throughout the country rose up against the government. Beginning in the northern port of Kiel workers' councils began to be formed all across the country. By 5 November, Hamburg (one of the biggest cities in the country) became subject to control by a workers' council. By the 8th so had many of the great cities of Germany, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt and even Berlin.

The outcome of the uprising was that the leader of the SPD, Erbert, took power, and his colleague Scheidemann unilaterally declared Germany a republic, in a bid to appease the rebels by ending the rule of the German aristocracy. The Kaiser went into exile. Whilst this part of the revolt was successful, it in fact merely finished the job begun by the revolutions of 1848, in establishing a fully bourgeois republic in Germany.

Very few of the German working class were revolutionary socialists. The vast majority of workers supported the SPD as a matter of course, including its general programme of the reform of capitalism. On the other hand, the revolutionary workers were tiny in number. When in February 1919 the Spartakusbund renounced its links with the USPD and formed a German Communist Party (KPD) it recognised this problem: "Socialism cannot be created by decrees; nor can it be established by any government. Socialism must be created by the masses themselves, by every proletarian". Their problem was that not enough proletarians wanted socialism. The November uprisings had been a reaction to hardship and tyranny, not a coherent wish to establish socialism. Contrary to what the SWP's Chris Harman writes in his book The Lost Revolution, in which he patronisingly claims that the workers were "confused" by the splits within the "socialist movement", what most workers wanted was for the SPD to end their hardship. The Spartacists recognised that the mass support needed to establish socialism was lacking and that socialism was not on the agenda at that time, and so they resolved to oppose the calling of a constituent assembly which they felt would help consolidate the German state and instead to try and make socialists within the workers' councils.

Some hot-headed elements of the German left (in the USPD and another group called the Socialist Shop-Stewards) were not satisfied with this reality, and 5 January 1919 mounted the misnamed Spartacist uprising ("Spartacist" within SPD circles had become was a catch-all for anyone vaguely disagreeing with the leadership, much as "Trot" has become in the modern Labour Party—the Spartacists, including Rosa Luxemburg, actually opposed an uprising, realising as they did that mass support for socialism just wasn't there). These elements led the workers of Berlin in a putsch to try and seize power, with the hope of it spreading nation-wide. It failed. Lacking any plan the workers who had followed the glorious revolutionaries stood around waiting to be told what to do, and when they were told it was a mish-mash of confused orders and muddle. On 11 January 1919 the SPD government sent in the troops, the notorious Freikorps, which very effectively crushed the abortive putsch. By 17 January both Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg had been murdered by Freikorps troops, and Berlin was under government control once more.

Crushed by the state

This was a pattern that was to be repeated in many parts of the country, as any struggles and gains by the workers were brutally crushed by military might. The workers discovered too late the danger of following leaders, and, much as the Bolsheviks crushed all independent working class activity in Russia to establish their dominance, so too did the SPD in Germany to preserve the German capitalist state. The workers discovered to their cost the impossibility of fighting against a co-ordinated and well-armed state, and if little blood was spilt in the initial revolt much was spilt when it was put down.

The workers of Germany persistently followed their old leaders, believing these would solve their problems for them, and even bring about socialism, and for a while they believed the lip-service the SPD government gave to "socialisation" of industry. In the end, however, they had to learn the hard way the folly of following leaders. The German revolution shows, not as Chris Harman believes, that if the KPD had had more discipline (read had it enacted the Leninist principle of "democratic-centralism" and obedience to the leadership) it might have controlled events more and thus been able to lead the workers to successful revolution (on Russian lines). It was that where the working class does not have the resolve to establish socialism, it will not, and trying to make socialists in the heat of an ongoing quasi-civil war is almost impossible. No amount of leadership but only a majority of socialist-minded workers could have made the revolution in Germany. The bloody defeat of the putsch and the uprisings showed how violence, especially by a minority, is suicidal against an existing organised state. History shows it is not the state that gets "smashed" but the revolutionaries and many innocent workers too.

Pik Smeet

Workers' Councils: Solution or Delusion? (1974)

From the October 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has been argued, in opposition to the case of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, that an analysis of working-class struggles shows that the setting up of Workers’ Councils is the way to success in the struggle for Socialism. The “evidence” cited in support of this idea is:

1. The unsatisfactory nature of all political parties (including the SPGB), and
2. The “success” of workers’ councils.

It is urged that revolutionary political parties merely re-iterate a series of abstractions and wait for the workers to eventually accept them, whereas taking part in workers’ struggles, for which Workers’ Councils are formed, educates workers through “day-to-day” experience. The notion is by no means a new one. It goes back to the formation of the Communist Party, the Communist International and the Russian Revolution in 1917.

As a result of the effect of the Russian eruption a “Conference of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils” was held in 1918 at which people like Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden had proclaimed their support of workers’ councils. On July 31st 1920 the Communist Party of Great Britain was formed, based on the following resolution:

  For the Soviet (or Workers’ Council) system as a means whereby the working class shall achieve power . . . they declare the Dictatorship of the Proletariat as a necessary means of combating counter-revolution. (Report, Foundation Conference, CPGB 1920).

In the same year the Second Congress of the Comintern had concerned itself with the German question, and the problems of getting Continental “Left-Wing” Social Democrats to form Communist Parties. But the main discussion, led by Zinovieff (in his capacity as President of the Comintern) was to convince and overwhelm the British delegates (Gallacher, Murphy, Ramsay, Jack Tanner, Dick Beech) of the necessity for a political party. For several weeks, one after another, from Lenin downwards (and Lenin had written about it in Left-Wing Communism) the Russians pounded and pummelled the poor British delegates with argument after argument, fact upon fact, to prove the indispensability of organizing a political party.

Those Comrades who take a stand against the necessity of a party sometimes consider themselves a Left opposition. It is not Left, but just the other way. The propaganda against a workers’ party is a capitalist trick. Don’t all good capitalists support their parties as soon as they grow up ?

squeaked Zinovieff at them. The Soviets (Workers’ Councils), he said, do not take the place of the party; they presuppose it.

I tell you the party has been our guiding star . . . the advanced Russian worker cherishes the party as something sacred. (Report of the Second Congress of the Communist International 1920).

Highly interesting was the comment of Jack Tanner, chairman of the Shop Stewards’ movement and later president of the Engineering Union:

  The main point of Zinovieff’s argument was the absolute necessity for a strong disciplined Communist Party and also that the Dictatorship of the Proletariate is synonymous with the dictatorship of the Party. He has not clearly proved his argument. What has taken place in Russia must not be set up as a model for all other countries. In England, we are sure, things will be quite different. (Report of the Second Congress, Comintern).

As editor of the Trade Union opposition paper Solidarity he was evidently well aware of the articles on Russia in the Socialist Standard. What Lenin and Zinovieff were arguing, therefore, was the imperative necessity of a political party to take political power.

What we have now however is the claim that “times have changed”, that a large number of workers are “white collar” hands, and that the numerous cases where Workers’ Councils have emerged in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Ireland etc. show the necessity for enlarging these councils to include “everybody” on any and every qualification or pretext — Old Age Pensioners, Tenants, School-kids, Squatters. Once this happens of course it is no longer a Workers’ Council in the old sense of the Russian Soviet which claimed to be Proletarian Democracy by excluding “parasites”, the sole qualification for representation being what International Socialists still called “workplace delegation”. This could only be a loosely federated political party calling itself “Workers’ Council”, somewhat like the Labour Party with its nebulous “affiliated” membership (half of which is moonshine) advocating contradictory reforms, and a constant hotbed of internecine struggles between opposing sections or factions.

One delusion concerning political power had its origin in the abortive Spartacus “putsch” in Germany in 1918, and the curious myth that the German ruling class suspended or rebelled against Parliament by organizing the so-called “Freikorps.” Nothing is farther from the truth. The Spartacus episode was the Comintern’s most disastrous and irresponsible stunt — so bad that on learning the sorry facts the ECCI sent telegrams calling the revolt off, after a few hundred German workers had gone to their doom.

In fact the Freikorps was recruited, paid and ordered by the German Social-Democratic Government. Their political commander was Gustav Noske (Ebert’s “bloodhound”), and the first thing Ebert did was get the support of the Army Supreme Command. This was decisive; Ebert promised the Berlin Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils elections for a Constituent Assembly (which never materialized). On January 11th Noske’s volunteers crushed the Spartacus putsch in the name of Parliament, the Constituent Assembly. The Weimar Republic was proclaimed. And what had this to do with Socialism? Nothing. The German workers were Social-Democrat-Liberals with a few Marxian phrases: reformists.

The criticism of parliamentary activity — that it discourages activity by delegating power and therefore encourages passivity — can apply equally to unions or Workers’ Councils. Without the consciousness of Socialist workers they are just as reactionary, leader-dominated, and ineffectual without political power. But above all, support for Workers’ Councils against Parliament means the dissolution of the Socialist Party, and in fact, the demise of Socialism. Its one-time members would be swimming aimlessly in a flood of Squatters, Claimants’ and Pensioners’ “demands" not knowing which to support first or most.

Why is the only form of organization which can take political power a political party ? Because only a party based on individual conscious voluntary membership, where every member knows the aim and understands it, can operate unitedly for it. The actual work of Parliamentary activity will build a Socialist membership in the localities which will dispel confusion by debating the mistaken views of reformers. This is no set of permanent abstractions The abstractions are applied to life by party activity. The establishment of Socialism is the work of the working class as social man, irrespective of trade or profession.

In every instance where neo-Communists have tried sporadic revolts for limited objectives with workers’ councils, it has ended in disaster. Socialism is the political interest of the whole working class, and only represented by a political party.

Horatio.

A German Tragedy (1975)

Book Review from the February 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Leviné by Rosa Leviné-Mayer. (Saxon House, £2.50)

This is yet another biography by the wife of a well-known revolutionary. Mrs. Kusinen has written Before and After Stalin; Heinz Neumann’s wife has recounted by her harrowing experiences in Soviet labour camps; and now Mrs. Leviné has delved into the details of her comrade’s revolutionary career.

Eugen Leviné, a prominent member of the Spartacus Group of Liebknecht and Luxembourg, was sent to Munich to organize the Bavarian Soviet Republic. An extraordinary situation prevailed in Germany at the end of the first World War. On 9th November 1918 the Kaiser abdicated. Power was assumed by the leader of the Social Democratic Party, Friedrich Ebert.

The army transferred its loyalty to the new régime and General Gruber, speaking for the army, telephoned Ebert to say the armed forces were at his disposal “if he would fight Bolshevism and maintain army discipline”.

Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils had sprung up all over Germany and elected a Central Council dominated by the Social Democratic Party. Included as an Appendix to the book is Leviné’s own report on the first All-German Soviet Congress. His lengthy speech can be summarized in one extract. Recounting the failure of the “left” to get any motion passed, he said of the first point:

to declare Germany a United Socialist Republic is one to which the SPD is particularly opposed. They do not want a Socialist Republic.

(p. 194)

The Spartacus Revolt in Berlin and Hamburg was crushed but a group of intellectuals, poets, artists and anarchists managed to proclaim a Soviet Republic in Munich, which hung on for two months, headed by Ernst Toller the dramatist. Sensing collapse and defeat Toller’s group packed it in and Leviné, instructed by the Spartacus Group and assisted by the Russians, took over.

His régime was soon crushed by the army under Social Democratic orders. In its proclamation the SPD asserted:

The troops of Hoffman’s [the SPD Prime Minister] come not as enemies of the working class, not as White Guards, but as protectors of public safety and order. Comrade Hoffman is no reactionary but a radical champion of the socialist movement.

(P-194)

The Bavarian Soviet was ruthlessly suppressed by working men, Social Democrats. Leviné was sentenced to death and faced the firing squad on the first day of May. His last speech to his murderers in the court showed him to be a man of considerable perception and boundless party loyalty: he was aware that the policy of the Spartacists was wrong, but was unable to betray it.

Horatio.

Rosa Luxemburg's Writings (1973)

Book Review from the January 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rosa Luxemburg. Selected Political Writings ed. and introduced by Robert Looker. Cape. £1.50.

Rosa Luxemburg was born in 1870 in Russian Poland but later moved to Germany. Very early on she made a name for herself in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) as an opponent of Bernstein's Revisionism. Her pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution was an attack on the view that capitalism could be gradually transformed into Socialism by social reforms, trade-union pressure, co-ops, etc.

But she never argued that a socialist party should not advocate reforms at all. In fact she agreed with the SPD's tactic on reforms: that the working class should be encouraged to struggle for them or against specific capitalist measures in order to prepare itself for the eventual capture of political power for Socialism (see some of the articles published here in the section "Defending the Tactic"). When, in the decade or so up to 1914, she came to realise how reformism in the SPD was not confined just to Bernstein and the Revisionists but also permeated the thinking of the whole leadership, she blamed its concentrating on getting reforms through Parliament. She did not blame advocating reforms as such and in fact her answer to the danger of reformism was to involve the mass of the workers themselves instead of just a few MP's in the reform struggle by means of the "mass strike". This was a tactic she had picked up from the Russian revolution of 1905 (which she had participated in to a certain extent, most of Poland then being part of Russia).

The final bankruptcy of the SPD was exposed in Luxemburg's eyes by its notorious vote for war credits for the German government on 4 August 1914. Luxemburg began to call for a new Socialist International and eventually helped to form a new party, the Spartacus League. She herself was a determined opponent of the War and went to jail for her anti-war activities. Some of her best writings date from this period, especially the classic socialist statement against the First World War, The Junius Pamphlet (also called The Crisis of Social Democracy). Some of the articles selected here, especially "Rebuilding the International" and "Either Or", could have come from any of the SOCIALIST STANDARD  of 1915 and 1916. Indeed the first one could quite literally have done since most of it was reprinted, with a slight reservation, in our issue of September 1915.

In November 1918 the Kaiser and his government were overthrown and political power passed into the hands of pro-war Social Democrats. They pursued the policy of establishing a bourgeois, democratic state in Germany, establishing stable capitalist rule through Parliament. The Spartacus League, including Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, urged the workers to oppose this and to set up rival workers' and soldiers' councils as the first step on the long road to the capture of political power for Socialism. For the Spartacus League (unlike the Bolsheviks) did not believe in a minority seizure of power. As its 1918 pamphlet What Does The Spartakusbund Want? put it:

The Spartacus League will never assume government in any way other than through the clear unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian mass in all Germany, never in any other way than on the strength of the masses' conscious agreement with the views, aims and methods of the struggle of the Spartacus League.

Or, as Rosa Luxemburg herself put it:

Without the conscious will and action of the majority of the proletariat, there can be no Socialism.

Even so, some of the members of the Spartacus League were over-enthusiastic and—despite warnings from Luxemburg—were provoked in January 1919 into an armed uprising in Berlin. Loyally she went along with them. It cost her her life. On 15 January soldiers responsible to the Social Democratic Minister Noske smashed her head in.

This book selects some of her previously untranslated articles, though it omits any of those where she discusses nationalism and exposes "the right to self-determination" as a fraud. Could this be because the translator is associated with "International Socialism" and would therefore find her views on this embarrassing?

Adam Buick

Backwaters of History - 3 (1953)

From the December 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

The German Spartacists

She was born on March 5th, 1871, of comparatively well-to-do parents in the poverty-stricken little Polish town of Zamosc in the Lublin district, not far from the Russian frontier. Her Jewish parents were in the timber trade and afforded her and their other four children an education above the average, despite the hostility to Jews in the Warsaw schools which they attended.

He was born on August 13th in the same year in Germany. His father, a close associate of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and a prominent member of the German Social Democratic Party, was for many years a member of the Reichstag. He spent his early life as a law student before he, too, became a prominent member of the German Social Democratic Party.

These two, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were driven closer together during the 1914-18 war. Both had a hectic political career, she in Poland, Russia and Germany, and he mainly in Germany. Their opposition to the war caused them both to serve frequent and lengthy periods of imprisonment.

In 1914, that organisation of national so-called Socialist parties, known as The Second International, fell to pieces. Each of the parties that comprised it threw aside its talk of international fraternity of the working class and lined up with its own capitalist class in the prosecution of the war, urging its members to take up arms against their fellow workers in other lands. The German Social Democratic Party was no exception. Karl Liebknecht, under pressure of party discipline, together with other Social Democratic members of the Reichstag, voted for war credits. But, only once. Thereafter he consistently opposed the prosecution of the war, often being the only one in the Reichstag to do so. The English and French capitalist press applauded him, the German capitalists imprisoned him.

As the war continued and the pressure on the German workers became heavier, Liebknecht received more and more support. The German Social Democratic Party split. On January 1st, 1916, at a meeting in Liebknecht's house, a programme drawn up by Rosa Luxemburg, was accepted and published under the nom-de-plume of Junius. It was further decided to publish a clandestine journal entitled "Spartacus" and the group became known as the "Spartacus League," until January 1st, 1919, when it became the Communist Party of Germany.

Another group, led by Kautsky and Haase, broke away from the Social Democratic Party after a conference at Gotha in early 1917. This group, unwilling to line up with the Spartacists, formed itself into the German Independent Social Democratic Party. It was approximately parallel to the British Independent Labour Party and, like the Spartacists, opposed the continuation of the war.

By September 1918 it became apparent to the German military high command that the war was lost. General Ludendorff resigned and President Hindenburg wrote to the chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, demanding that the government should accept the responsibility of asking the allied powers for an armistice. A new cabinet was appointed, but the German workers were too war weary to be impressed.

The sailors at the Kiel naval base mutinied, took over the fleet and set up committees with the dockyard workers on November 4th. By November 7th the rising had spread to Hamburg and Munich, army reservists joining with the factory workers. On November 9th a general strike occurred in Berlin and the soldiers of the garrison elected representatives to attend the committees set up by the workers. On the same day, Ebert, a Social Democrat, was made chancellor and the Berlin workers and soldiers, at a giant meeting, elected a government called the Council of the Representatives of the People. It consisted of three members of the main Social Democratic Party and three of the Independents.

The Council of the Representatives of the People introduced legislation for an eight hour day, extension of the franchise, re-instatement of demobilised soldiers, participation of trade unions in wage agreements and the constitution of new legislative bodies. But capitalism remained unchallenged and the army facing the Russian border was left under the command of the old General Staff.

The Spartacists tried to carry the rising to further limits. They organised large demonstrations and armed conflict broke out all over Germany between workers and the state and municipal authorities. The Independents withdrew from the Council of People's Representatives and the majority group of Social Democrats had the government to themselves.

The soldiers who were being disbanded from the war areas were re-enlisted into detachments for "frontier defence" and picked and trusted men and officers were organised into "Free Corps" and trained for street fighting. They were still under the orders of the war-time officers and were still paid from the army funds.

The Spartacus League was a small organisation consisting of tiny autonomous groups scattered all over Germany. On November 18th it published a newspaper called Rote Fahne (Red Flag) with Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg as editors and with Paul Levi, August Thalheimer, Paul Lange, Hermann Dunker, Wilhelm Pieck and Leo Jogiches in support. In this paper the aims of the Spartacists were published. Rosa Luxemburg wrote: -

"The abolition of capitalist rule and the creation of a socialist order—this and nothing else is the historical theme of the German Revolution. It is a tremendous task and it cannot be performed overnight with a few decrees from above, but only be the conscious action of the toiling masses in town and country, and by the highest degree of intellectual maturity and idealism on the part of those masses pursuing their aim through all vicissitudes until final victory." - "Rosa Luxemburg," by Paul Frolich. Gollancz.

The Spartacists further demanded:

1. The disarming of the police force.
2. The seizure of all arms and ammunition by the workers commitees.
3. The arming of the entire male population as a workers militia.
4. Election of all officers from the rank and file.
5. A revolutionary tribunal to try those responsible for the war.
6. A united German Socialist Republic, abolishing the separate states.
7. Election of workers' councils all over Germany with the right of recall of the representatives at any time.
8. Abolition of all class distinctions and legal equality of the sexes.
9. A six hour working day.
10. Confiscation of all crown estates and revenue for the benefit of the people.
11. Annulment of state debts.
12. Confiscation of all land and other property exceeding an amount to be fixed by the people's councils.
13. Establishment of administrative councils in all industries and of a General Strike Committee to work in conjunction with the workers' political party.
14. Connection with workers' organisations abroad to establish an international brotherhood.

(Condensed from "The Aims and Objects of the German Spartacists," published in English by the British Socialist Party, 1919.)

Huge demonstrations organised by both sides, the Democratic Party and the Spartacists, took place during December, 1918. The Democratic authorities issued posters calling:

"Workers! Citizens!
Our Fatherland is threatened with destruction. Save it. It is no longer threatened from without, but from within. Spartacus threatens to kill it. Kill their leaders. Kill Liebknecht. When they are dead you will have peace, land and bread. Soldiers from the front."—("Rosa Luxemburg," by Paul Frolich. Gollancz.)

In January 1919 the government ordered the dismissal of all Independent Social Democrats from posts of authority, including Eichhorn, Berlin chief of police. Eichhorn refused to resign and, although his own Independent party did not support him, the Spartacists did. They occupied police headquarters and the offices of a number of capitalists' newspapers on Sunday, January 5th. Armed workers, supporting the Sparctacists, marched into railway stations, food warehouses, the Royal stables, the Chancellory, and other large buildings. The Spartacists issued a call for the overthrow of the government and the setting up of a workers' republic.

The government set to work and appointed Noske as Governor-General of Berlin with extraordinary powers. He called in the "Free Corps" and the Spartacists and their followers were soon dislodged from their buildings, and driven into their homes where they were relentlessly pursued. Most of the leaders were caught and imprisoned and many workers were killed. Liebknecht and Luxemburg escaped but on January 15th they were taken at their hiding place in 53, Mannheimer Strasse in Wilmersdorf by a group of soldiers.

They were taken to the Eden Hotel for questioning. When being taken from this building Liebknecht was struck on the head with a rifle butt, bundled into a car by a Captain Horst von Pflugk-Hartung, driven away and shot in the back by this officer. His body was taken to a mortuary and delivered as an unknown man found dead in the Tiergarten.

When Rosa Luxemburg came out of the Eden Hotel she was also struck on the head with a rifle butt by a soldier named Runge, who smashed her skull with two blows. A Lieutenant Vogel put her body in a car and later threw it into the Landwehr Canal, from which it was not recovered until the following May.

Thus ended the attempt by the Spartacist League to emulate the Bolshevik seizure of power of October, 1917.

Frederick Engels in his preface to Karl Marx's "Class Struggles in France" wrote these words 25 years before the Spartacist rising: -

"Even in the classic time of street fighting, therefore, the barricade produced more of a moral than a material effect. It was a means of shaking the steadfastness of the military. If it held out until this was attained, then victory was won; if not, there was defeat."
"But since then there have been very many more changes, and all in favour of the military. If the big towns have become considerably bigger, the armies have become bigger still."
"On the other hand, all the conditions on the insurgents' side have grown worse. An insurrection with which all sections of the people sympathise will hardly recur . . . "
"And, finally, since 1848 the newly built quarters of the big towns have been laid out in long, straight, broad streets, as though made to give full effect to the new cannons and rifles. The revolutionary would have to be mad, who himself chose the working class districts in the North and East of Berlin for a barricade fight."

It is a pity the Spartacists did not give heed to Engels words. Many lives could have been saved to continue the struggle in more useful fields. Even had the insurrection been successful it could only have resulted in the Spartacists governing a capitalist Germany. The majority of German workers had no understanding of socialism and as little inclination for social revolutionary change. The Spartacists would have been in the same position as the Russian Bolsheviks—governing by force and terror—forced into administering capitalism.

Books to read: -
"The Growth of Modern Germany" by Roy Pascal.
"A People's History of Germany" by A. Ramos Oliveira.
"Rosa Luxemburg" by Paul Frolich.
"Hammer or Anvil" by Evelyn Anderson.
"The Birth of the German Republic" by Arthur Rosenberg
"The German Spartacists, Their Aims and ObjectsT" published by the B.S.P.

W. Waters

Socialism and "The Third International". (1925)

From the March 1925 issue of the Socialist Standard

(1.)

The Socialist Party of Great Britain stands for the International Organisation of the Working Class for the achievement of Socialism throughout the entire Capitalist World. It is not sufficient, however, for parties to call themselves Socialist or Communist to arouse our desires to affiliate with them. To be worthy of the name and to be useful in the struggle for Socialism, every party must be based upon a recognition of the class struggle and the line of action necessary for the workers to achieve victory over the capitalists.

The so-called Second International we long ago recognised as an anti-Socialist body, and therefore refused to affiliate with it. In the pages of the "Socialist Standard" we have exposed the opportunism and compromise of that body. The confusion and reformism exhibited in their International Congresses showed that it must be opposed and exposed, and the pages of this journal will testify to our criticism of the Bebels, Hyndmans, Millerands and Kautskys, who composed the leadership. We not merely exposed the leaders, but showed that the constitution and composition of the Second International were opposed to Socialism. We did not wait for the lessons of "wartime betrayals," but while people like Lenin and Rosa Luxembourg were active within it, we laid down reasons why it could not function for Socialists. The parties composing it were not Socialist, and the policy it pursued was therefore anti-Socialist.

The war gave added evidence to our criticism of the jingoistic and capitalist nature of it. Since the war the Noskes and Scheidemans, the MacDonalds and the Brantings have shown the entire capitalist character of this alleged Socialist International.

The fact the largest unit of it is the British Labour Party, which in no sense even claims to be Socialist, shows how little this International is entitled to be called Socialist. The German Social Democrats have supplied further evidence of the need for untiring Socialist hostility to this mockery of an International.

Those who seceded from the Second International took action following the war to form a "fighting" International—the so-called Third, or Communist, International. It is generally supposed to be a real live revolutionary body such as every revolutionary should join. We propose, therefore, to examine its claims for support. Our previous remarks about the "Second" International should be borne in mind, because it will be shown that, despite all the Moscow denunciations of the "Second International," the two bodies possess sufficient in common to make joint action between them possible, not only in conference, but as allies in government.

Soon after the conquest of power by the Bolsheviki, the call for an International Congress at Moscow was issued. It was signed by Lenin and Trotsky for the Russian Communist Party and by eight other organisations. Amongst these latter was Lenin's Secretary, Boris Reinstein, who signed for the Socialist Labor Party of America, without their consent or endorsement. Whether the other signatures had the backing of their organisations is not known.

The unsound position taken up at the inception of the 3rd International may be gathered from this call or manifesto.

"As a basis for the new International, we deem necessary the recognition of the following clauses, which we shall consider our platform and which have been worked out on the basis of the programme of the Spartacus Group in Germany and the Communist Party in Russia:-

"1. The present is the period of dissolution, and the collapse of the entire world system which will mean the entire collapse of European culture if capitalism with its unsolvable contradictions is not destroyed.
"2. The problem of the proletariat consists in immediately seizing the power of the State. This seizure of the power of the State means the destruction of the State apparatus of the bourgeoisie and the organisation of a new proletarian apparatus of power." The notion that Capitalism was collapsing in 1919 permeated the entire policy of the new "International." The framers of the manifesto knew little of the actual state of affairs outside Russia, and evidently thought the end of the war was the death knell of the system. Thus the passage quoted tells the workers that the problem is the immediate seizure of the power of the State. The danger of such advice was easily proved by the small bodies on Russian lines that arose throughout the world, and adopted these mottoes of "seizing power" and "now is the time," "the revolution is just around the corner." The great mass of the workers were in no mood to seize power and would not know what to do with it if they did. The majority of workers were ignorant of their class interests, and were still saturated with the ideas of their masters. To tell them to seize power was not the message of Socialism, for before they can seize power with advantage to themselves the workers needed Socialist education—an understanding of the system under which they lived and the forces controlling it. To tell the workers of the world to seize power at once was to invite them to be crushed by the forces of the State, whose death-dealing power had so recently been shown on the battlefield.

The other idea preached in the quotation given, that the workers were to destroy the State apparatus is a further indication of the sensational but worthless policy of the 3rd International. The State machine—that is, the instrument of government and the forces controlled through it—could not be dispensed with by a class rising to power in modern capitalist countries until Socialism had been established with the abolition of classes and the consequent dying out of the State.

Engels has well stated the attitude towards the State machine in his Introduction to Marx's "Civil War in France," where he says of the State:-

"At the very best it is an inheritance of evil, bound to be transmitted to the proletariat when it has become victorious in its struggle for class supremacy, and the worst features of which it will have to lop off at once until a new race grown up under free social conditions, will be in a position to shake off from itself this State rubbish in its entirety."

The idea of the immediate destruction of the power of the State is an anarchist policy. Lenin himself has opposed it, for in his criticism of the International of Youth ("Class Struggle," May, 1919) he says: "Socialists are willing to utilise the present government and its institutions in the struggle for the liberation of the working class, and also insist upon the necessity of so using the government in the creation of a suitable transition form from Capitalism to Socialism. This transition form, also governmental, is the dictatorship of the proletariat."

The manifesto of Moscow goes on to lay down its method:-

"The fundamental means of the struggle are mass action of the proletariat even to armed and open warfare with the State power of capital." 

This became the accepted policy of Communists throughout the world, so that in a short time most of them had driven themselves underground into secret societies through such an insane programme. Some of their followers, such as the Spartacans in Germany, attempted to carry out this suicidal policy of armed and open warfare with terrible results to those concerned.

Mass action meant in Communist circles the "spontaneous upsurge of the proletariat." One of the leaders of the Moscow International, Louis Fraina, defines mass action in his "Revolutionary Socialism" (p.196) as "the instinctive action of the proletariat, gradually developing more conscious and organised forms for certain purposes."

"Organisations," says Fraina (the International Secretary of the C.P. of U.S.A.), "have a tendency to become conservative," and he relies upon the workers "acting instinctively under pressure of events."

This mass-action nonsense preached by Moscow is the very thing relied upon by our masters. The only sound action for Socialism must be guided by the workers' intelligence and knowledge. The blind instinctive actions of the workers are dangerous to workers' welfare, and are easily worked upon by capitalist orators and intellectuals in war time and peace time. Mob action is not the action to overthrow Capitalism and establish Socialism. Socialism depends upon organisation plus knowledge. Armed warfare by workers while capitalists control the forces of government is a policy both useless as well as suicidal. The advocacy of such a policy is reactionary, and provides the capitalists with excellent opportunities for butchery of the insurgents. To propose such a method as the 3rd International and its sections did, especially in view of the minority of workers in their ranks, was directly opposed to workers' interests. It betrayed the illusions which the 3rd International suffered and which still are general with that body.

A further examination of the policy of this so-called revolutionary International will be made in our next issue.

Adolph Kohn