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Breaking the Mold of Socialism
Left-Wing Communism,
19171923
THE GEOGRAPHY OF REVOLUTION
Outwardly, Bolshevik predictions of general European revolution bore fruit. Signs of a potential revolutionary crisis came with the great
strikes of January 1918. Protesting the German handling of peace nego- tiations with the Bolsheviks at Brest-Litovsk and spreading outward from Vienna and Budapest, these snowballed into massive working-class actions against the war, embracing Berlin and much of Germany, the Czech lands, and Krakow before subsiding.3 Lack of coordination ultimately blunted the challenge, but the Bolshevik wager on Western antiwar sentiments clearly had some basis. Another dramatic turn of the wara worsening of popular hardships or military defeatmight bring a less manageable crisis.4
It came eight months later in October 1918, with the collapse of the Bulgarian front,
the
breakup
of
Austria-Hungary,
and
imperial
Germanys
demise. The first act was a
sequence of national revolutions, erecting new republican
sovereignties
on
the
ruins
of
the
Habsburg
monarchy:
first
(29 October), German-Austria (30 October), Hungary (31 October), Poland (28 October14 November), and West Ukraine (Eastern Galicia), where the Peoples Republic was proclaimed on 31 October.5 These new states, except West Ukraine, which was annexed by Poland in July 1919, secured their constitutional legitimacy, not least via international recog- nition at the peace conference in Versailles. The chain of republican rev- olutions was concluded, moreover, with the toppling of the Hohenzollern monarchy and the proclamation of a German Republic on 9 November
1918. Overall, these events were hardly less imposing than the February rev-
olution in
Six months of radicalization ensued. The German Revolution reached
crisis
point
with
a
renewed
SPD-USPD
split
in
December
1918,
the
ill-fated
Spartacist Rising in early January, and the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl
Liebknecht.
Though
a
bloody
defeat,
the
Left
read
this
as
a
sharp-
ening of the contradictions, from which revolutionary apocalypse would result. The
Third
Internationals
launching
in
a
hastily
convened
congress
in
rising opportunity, in which ever greater initiative devolved to the working class, just as dual power had worked for the Bolsheviks.
This dynamic came through
in
The Hungarian Soviet Republic lasted only four months, from March to August 1919. But coming immediately after the Cominterns founda- tion and coinciding with Soviet Republics in Bavaria (7 April to 1
May)
and
Slovakia
(16
June
to
1
August),
it
preserved
the
revolutionary
momen-
tum. The main axis was now central European, with a
strong leftward shift in
Czechoslovakia
and
violent
radicalization
in
Germany.
Spurred
by
anti-Left
repression,
German
workers
were
switching
from
SPD
to
USPD,
whose membership grew from 300,000 to 750,000 between March and November 1919.
Revolutionary
ferment
also
spread
further
afield,
through
the
Trienio
Bolchevista
of
191820
in
20 in
the First and Third Comintern congresses of March 1919 and June 1921. The Second Comintern Congress (July 1920) was the apex, reflecting the Red Armys advance on Warsaw in the Soviet-Polish War.8 But by August, the tide was running the other way. After the Polish counteroffensive of 16
August, the Red Army was in full flight till the armistice of 12 October, followed by
the
Peace
of
Riga
in
March
1921.
This
was
matched
by
dra-
matic
turns
elsewhere.
In
October
1920,
the
factory
council
movement
in
Milan and Turin brought Italy to the point of general revolution before subsiding into
demoralization.
In
THE
After Russia, there were no socialist revolutions in 191723, except the short-lived Hungarian Soviet. However, there were many revolutionary sit- uations: popular insurrections that toppled existing regimes; radicalizations tending toward dyarchy, where extreme Left confronted new constitu- tional governments, inspired by Bolshevik example; popular militancy pushing nonsocialist regimes into preemptive reform, which was common- est of all in 191723; isolated acts of revolutionary insurgency; and of course counterrevolution.
Extraordinary drama was concentrated into these years. The chain of central European revolutions creating the so-called successor states between
28 October and 14 November 1918 did so via demonstrations, strikes, riots, mutinies,
and
the
forming
of
workers
and
soldiers
councils.
The
new
democratic constitutions in
Reform responding to radical pressure was a
common syndrome of these years. As revolutions elsewhere maximized governments anxieties about their
own
societies,
even
revolutionary
minorities
had
disproportion-
ate effect. This was true during 1919 in
1918 in response to events in Germany, thereby galvanizing his horrified party and trade union comrades into a major reform statement, which de- manded nationalization of suitable industries, repeal of the 1903 strike ban for public employment, the eight-hour day, old-age pensions, and abolition of the upper chamber. While the SDAP had managed only 22 percent in the first democratic elections in July 1918, a strong reform package re- sulted, including votes for women. Most of all, a new corporative deal was framed for organized labor, including the Ministry of Social Affairs and the consultative High Council of Labor in October 1919, which convened the four main employers associations, three trade union federations, gov- ernment agencies, and private expertise.9
Fear
of
Bolshevik
contagion
was
vital
in
western Europe, but other
fac-
tors
also
favored
reform.
Social
harmony
and
patriotic
consensus
were
the
watchwords:
the
impetus
was
not
sectional
class
interest
but
the
new
dem-
ocratic consciousness and the new social consciousness which have come
to birth in the long agony of the present struggle (the war).10 The non- partisan appeal
of
this
belief
in
social
regeneration
cant
be
underestimated.
In
1917, plus the Ministry of Pensions (1917), the reports of the Board of Education (191718), plans for the Ministry of Health (formed 1919), and a more democratic franchise offered a grand vision of the social contract. The corporative arrangements of the Ministry of Labour formed the polit- ical cornerstone. As King George V said in his address to Parliament in February 1919: We must stop at no sacrifice of interest or prejudice to stamp out unmerited poverty, to diminish unemployment, to provide decent homes, to improve the nations health, and to raise the standard of well- being throughout the country.11
These reformist opportunities were inconceivable without the staggering growth of trade unions in 191820.
The trade-union density in Britain, Germany, Denmark and Norway at the end of World War I was between twice and three times the per- centage of 1913, in Sweden and the Netherlands more than three times, in Belgium almost five times as high. . . . [I]n some casesnota- bly Britain and Germanythe strength of trade unions as a percentage of the labor force was higher than it has ever been since, in others France, Denmark, perhaps Norwayit was not reached again before the middle or late 1930s.12
These phenomenal figures came from the short-lived boom as industry re- converted for peacetime. With pent-up demand for goods, a lag in produc- tive capacity, availability of investment capital, relaxed government con- trols, and inflationary fiscal policies, a remarkable upswing occurred in spring 1919summer 1920 (lasting somewhat longer in central Europe), ending in an equally sharp contraction. After a flash flood of unemploy- ment in winter 191819, therefore, returning troops were rapidly absorbed into an expanding labor market. Neither the reform-proneness of govern- ments, the scale of militancy, nor the massive union expansion were pos- sible without this boom. When it abruptly passed, unemployment rose alarmingly high, and workers were cast unceremoniously onto the defen- sive.
Postwar circumstances briefly gave union leaders enormous leverage an opening for which wartime corporatism had prepared them. Under con- ditions of nearly revolutionary turbulence, as workers practised flexing their industrial muscle, responsible union leaders became the best hope
for holding disorder at bay.13 With British labor unrest approaching its peak in early 1919, Winston Churchill elaborated: The curse of trade unionism was that there was not enough of it, and it was not highly enough developed to make its branch secretaries fall into line with the head of- fice.14 That was precisely the point. Union leaders faced their own loss of control. The revolutionary climate after 191718 raised the entire temper of working-class hopes, such that workplace militancy could already be passing the leaders by.15
In eastern Europe, the revolutionary upheavals of 191723 had pow- erful nationalist
dimensions
too,
because
the
post-1918
political
settlement
involved not only social changes and political reform but also territorial revision and new relations among states. The Treaty of
1919)
was
followed
by
the
east
European
supplements,
most
of
which
were
preceded
by
wars.
Not
accidentally,
most
involved
the
great
power
absent
from
(Britain
and
France)
via
the
First
World
War
was
momentous
for
the
Left
as
nationalism
favored
the
Right,
but
territorial
revisions
were
qualitatively
different
in
the
east,
where
they
accompanied
the
collapse
of
existing
states.
These revisions involved less
the
adjustment
of
older
boundaries
than
the
creation of entirely new countries, whose political systems had to be in- vented from
scratch.
This
was
clearest
in
German-occupied
18, where the German military sledgehammer smashed
whatever
was
left
of
the
old
social
fabric
in
much
of
the
Baltic,
By intruding itself between the peoples of the Empire and their self- determination in
the
very
moment
of
revolutionary
changeafter
the
old
order
had
gone
but
while
the
new
was
struggling
to
be
bornthe
German
army
suspended
democracy
before
it
had
barely
begun.
Bolsheviks,
auton-
omists, left-nationalists, separatists, and counterrevolutionaries found themselves in
confused
relationships
to
local
populations,
but
in
most
cases
nationalisms practical logic worked against
with an integrity of their own. In strategic vision, popular experience, and practical delimitation, these were national revolutions, in ways that con- fused conventional political or social labels.17
Competing claims of nationality and class shaped these revolutionary dynamics in the former tsarist territories during 191723.18 This was no simple dichotomy in which one identity precluded the other. Appealing to national solidarity could suppress or deemphasize class hostilities, harness- ing working-class politics to larger patriotic coalitions led by conservatives or liberals, where socialist departures were practically ruled out. But the Left might also claim leadership of national coalitions for itself, by offering distinctive programs inside the developing nationalist framework. At least, it could advance specifically working-class or other popular interests in more modest and defensive ways. Assumptions about the national bases of political identity could enable socialist strategy rather than undermining it. The creation of the new eastern European nation-states in 1918 shaped politics into this framework of national revolution, and socialists found few prospects outside the heterogeneous founding coalitions of the new republics, with temporary exceptions in Bulgaria and Hungary. The small Romanian Social Democratic Party was entirely marginal to this process, as was the breakaway Communist Party of 1921, which had no impact before being banned in 1924. In Poland, the Communist Workers Party formed from various Zimmerwaldians in December 1918 had stronger na- tive roots but lost all influence on the new states founding coalition because of its antiparliamentary revolutionism and dogmatic internationalism. Its self-marginalizing was sealed in the summer of 1920 by its identification with the invading Red Army. In the new Yugoslav polity, where party formation was badly fragmented along national lines, the unified Com- munist Party of 1919 showed more potential: but if the 1920 Constituent Assembly elections brought much success, in 1921 it too was banned.19
In these countries, the dominant nationalist framework militated against the Social Democratic and Communist Left. But one case of socialists win- ning space inside the new nationalist framework was Czechoslovakia, where Social Democrats formed a new government with Czech Socialists and Agrarians after the local elections of June 1919, and the left began enlarging its strength in the party. This Social Democratic left stayed avow- edly within the parent party rather than splitting it, giving critical support to the government and party right for the April 1920 elections. When the split eventually arrived, this strategy of consolidation allowed a sizeable majority of the CSDSD to follow the left into the Communist Party, which retained strong continuities with the national labor movements earlier traditions, unlike other Communist parties of 191821. Czech Communist strength grew from organic radicalization inside the framework of na- tional revolution, whose legitimacy the left leaders had carefully accepted and whose constitutional conditions allowed a strong CSDSD left to flour-
ish. Moreover, the Czech Community Partylike the Yugoslavwas the only party in its nationally fragmented state that was proving genuinely national in structure, basing itself deliberately on all national territories rather than on single constituent nationalities.20
COUNCIL COMMUNISM AND THE REVOLT OF THE RANK AND FILE
The distinctiveness of revolutionary activity in 191723 lay in the workers councils, though militancy varied greatly in exact forms. These ranged from unofficial strike committees developing larger political aims, like the shop stewards movements of Clydeside, Sheffield, or Berlin, to sophisticated rev- olutionary innovation, like the factory councils in Turin.21 In between came a rich assortment: the Rate in Germany and Austria, claiming functions of class representation in a locality; councils based in factories, firms, or other economic units; and local action committees for specific ends, like the Councils of Action opposing British military intervention against Soviet Russia in summer 1920 or the revival of councils in Germany to oppose the Kapp Putsch in March 1920.22
Anew medium of working-class activity, councils differed from both socialist parties, which acted through parliamentary and state institutions, and unions, which worked on the capitalist economys given assumptions via the wage relation. Their supporters departed from the mainstream of European labor movements between 186475 and the First World War, sharing some affinities with prewar syndicalists, particularly in their enmity toward union officialdom and party machines. But the militantly distinctive council communist vision materialized only during the radicalizations of
191821. Few council activists originally saw them as a permanent alter- native to parliamentary institutions, rather than transitional bodies during the initial breakthrough to democracy, possibly with lasting watchdog func- tions in the future republican constitution.
Stronger versions of the council idea were hostile to orthodox trade unionism and socialist electoralism, recoiling from the accepted model of separately organized, centralized, nationally focused political and economic movements. Instead, councils were based within production: inside the unit of production itself, in the factory, the plant, or the shop. Councils raised issues of industrial democracy, workers self-management, and workers control. They transcended the fractured pursuit of political and eco- nomic goals typical of the pre-1914 labor movements, joining industrial direct action to the political project of a workers government. Measured against the socialist mainstream since the Paris Commune, this interest in workers democracy, as against the parliamentary representation of the people, was new.23
One model of council activity was community based but linked to fac- tories via shop stewards or similar workplace networks. Another was pro- duction based but connected to broader social arenas. In national emer- gencies like the Kapp Putsch, the socialization campaign in the Ruhr and central Germany in spring 1919, or the northern Italian factory occupa- tions, the two converged. In Germany, for example, it was only after the demise of the original Rate, in the radicalization after the Spartacist Rising and the January 1919 elections to the National Assembly, that a more radical council movement developed. Earlier, constitutional respect and loyalty to the parliamentarist SPD kept Rate from expanding their com- petence. Once radicalized, councils articulated extraparliamentary, direct- democratic, self-consciously class-based alternatives to the labor move- ments existing strategies and institutions. The strongest version was the Russian system of dual power around the Petrograd Soviet.
For the most part,
local
councils
coexisted
in
parallel
with
legal
govern-
ment
and
local
state
representatives.
The
key
was
how
far
workers
councils
overturned
existing
legality.
In
moderate
versions,
councils
confined
them-
selves
to
general
supervisory
roles,
leaving
local
administration
practically
intact. But supervision could also be highly intrusive, with purging and replacement of local government personnel and strict accountability for implementing new left-wing policies. In 191821,
German council communism crystallized around demands for sociali- zationa strong combination of public ownership and workers control.25
On 18 November 1918, government appointed a
commission of inquiry on the
subject,
but
the
real
impetus
was
the
militancy
of
the
miners
in
the
western Ruhr, escalating on 15 December into strikes over wages and hours. After
a
partial
settlement
on
28
December,
actions
resumed
in
Jan-
uary, incited by the Spartacist Rising in
(515 March). Actions
repeated
the
cycle
of
impressive
mobilization,
brutal
suppression, and embittering defeat. The workers exasperated militancy produced one
further
round
of
conflict:
another
general
strike
in
the
(130
April),
involving
73
percent
of
all
March7 April); and
the
events
of
the
whose violence undermined the unions policy. Such attacks were hugely resented, sowing the very violence they alleged. But if the movement was driven by anti-SPD bitterness, it was steered by neither USPD nor KPD. Militancy was spontaneous, though not unorganized. It proceeded beyond the framework of any parties and against the official union from a pithead democracy of delegates and mass meetings. In its local base in production, its informal agitational methods and mine-to-mine coordination, its pref- erence for decentralized nationalization via mine-based workers control, and its suspicion of national bureaucracies, the movement echoed the themes of syndicalismand indeed, a local syndicalist, Heinrich Heiling, a leader of the small syndicalist miners union formed in 1908, was promi- nent in the Hamborn agitation.26 In the volatile circumstances of early
1919, the boundaries separating an older syndicalist tradition, a newer brand of industrial unionism, the infant KPD, and unaffiliated grassroots militancy were blurred. The key was the alienation of militants from the SPD and its unions.27
This was the conjuncture that produced council communism. Council communismand the rank-and-file militancy it sought to theorizedis- missed the political complexities of revolution. There were huge areas coun- cil communists ignored. Questions of women, the family, and the sexual division of labor were one. Coalition building was another, for the council movement refused to worry about peasants, petty bourgeoisie, and other nonproletarian social groups. Council militants were untroubled by the ad- ministrative consequences of organizing revolutionary government around the point of production. If the councils had a factory rather than a terri- torial basis, training workers for running production rather than society in general, then how would the noneconomic functions of government be ad- dressed? How would the councils deal with social welfare and education? How successfully could they represent the interests of nonworkers?
Council communisms productivismthe conviction that true revo- lution began from the workplacewas so axiomatic that such questions were never posed. This was exacerbated by the movements towering vol- untarism. If 1917 was a Revolution against Capital, in Gramscis phraseagainst the Second Internationals economic determinismcouncil communists carried this to its sublime extreme.28 Their approach presup- posed western Europes ripeness for revolutionary transformation. If so, politics became necessarily confrontationist. Astrategy was needed in which absolute opposition to all non-revolutionary forces and the greatest possible purity of revolutionary principles . . . would empower the working class to construct the dictatorship of the proletariat.29 Consciousness came exuberantly to the fore. Minds were to be revolutionized: In the German Revolution the subjective elements play a decisive role. The problem of the German Revolution is the problem of the development of the self- consciousness of the German proletariat.30
Relations between the councils and trade unions were chronic, reflecting opposed ideals of organization. It was hard even for unions with a strong left, like the metalworkers in Germany (DMV) and Italy (FIOM), to assim- ilate factory or plant-based systems of council representation. Councils un- dermined union ability to negotiate national agreements and more generally to provide leadership in national affairs. Collective contracts were trade unionisms centerpiece before 1914, and devolving decisions back onto lo- cals would delight employers, who wanted nothing better than to deal ex- clusively with their own workforce. Union resources would no longer be mobilized to benefit weaker, less organized parts of the membership. Un- ions ability to influence national policy would be undercut, whether from reformist or revolutionary perspectives. Moreover, demands for local con- trol came at the worst possible time: just as unions acquired corporative leverage through the war economy, a disorderly shopfloor militancy threat- ened from the rear. Unions devoted great efforts in 191920 to neutralizing the councils challenge, not just from bureaucratic self-interest or resistance to democratization but from legitimate disquiet that workers collective in- terests were being undone.
In
In
union primacy. All radical aspects of industrial democracy and workers control were gonesovereignty of the mass meeting; direct democracy and power of recall; access to the books; control of hiring, firing, and the labor process; rights of negotiating with management; and independence from union bureaucracy. Employer sovereignty was intact. All key issues were reserved for the unions collective bargaining machinery. Councils were re- duced to the latters adjunct, with merely consultative status.32
In a moderate trade union
perspective
of
reform
under
capitalism,
these
measures were a
solid gain. Centralized, national organization was de- fended unbudgingly,
just
as
in
The workers council movement
was
destined
for
failure
once
a
national
revolutionary
breakthrough
didnt
occur.
In
SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC
the most striking thing about the German revolution was the unrelenting in- transigence of the SPDs moderation. Rather than harnessing working-class militancy, the leaders did their best to suppress it. The SPD upheld the constitutional reforms of late Sep- tember 1918 in the hour of Germanys mili- tarydefeat, as the old regime tried to legiti- mize itself for negotiating with the Western Allies. For the SPD Right, this constitutional transition completed the policies of August
1914. It vindicated their patriotism. The mea- sures making Germanya constitutional mon- archy, reached after the SPD joined the coali- tion government on 3 October, already satisfied the partys cochairmen, Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann. The partys impending parliamentarydominance seemed sufficient guarantee of further reforms.
The situation was transformed between 27
October and 5 November 1918, when naval mutinies in Kiel escalated via election of sail- ors councils, a garrison revolt, and a general strike into a local seizure of power bywork- ers and soldiers councils.1 During the previ- ous month the removal of censorship and re- lease of political detainees had stoked popular expectations, while recognition of the lost war brought troops to the point of mutiny.2 Pop- ular insurgencyspread across Germany, until a Bavarian revolutionarygovernment was formed in Munich on 78 November, fol- lowed the next daybythe kaisers abdication in Berlin. Although government now passed to Ebert and the SPD, theymade no conces-
sions to these profound changes. Theycalled the constituent assembly, while managing an orderlytransition. Theyfocused on bringing the troops home without disorders, maintaining the food supply, and at all costs avoiding Allied militaryintervention.3 This replicated the political logic of the civil truce: patriotic discipline and public order; exaggerated fears of mass action; angrycontempt for the irresponsible left; practical compro- mise with the old order.
The SPD leaders displayed no glimmers of doubt. They evinced the inev- itabilism of their pre-1914 outlook, now transposed to the necessarytri- umph of a parliamentaryconstitution. Theymade a virtue of hardheaded realism, of taking the tough decisions left-wing dreamers refused to face. The latter shirked responsibility, they complained, beguiling the masses with unattainable utopias and flirting with chaos. The path from 4 August
1914 to 5 October 1918 was difficult, Eduard David recorded in his diary,
But what would have been achieved bya revolutionarytactic? Onlythe most frightful dangers and suffering, he answered, ending in the triumph of reaction.4 The SPD leaders savored the complacencies of power. The October changes made them arbiters of a rapidlydisintegrating political situation, where the old order had lost popular legitimacy. Their left-wing rivals lacked the same certainty, resources, and support. The Independent Social Democrats (USPD) acquired a stronger profile in the freer atmo- sphere of October but were no convincing alternative. The Spartacists and far left were too fragmented. And while Karl Liebknecht personallycom- manded enormous popularity, he was too purist a revolutionary to join the new government.
The Council of Peoples Commissars formed on 910 November gave the left parity, with three SPD nominees (Ebert, Scheidemann, Otto Lands- berg), and three USPD (Hugo Haase, Wilhelm Dittmann, Emil Barth, the last also representing the Berlin Shop Stewards), cochaired byEbert and Haase. On 10 November, the Berlin Shop Stewards called workers and soldiers delegates to the Circus Busch to confirm the new government, and it too elected a parity-based Executive.5 But while the Circus Busch issued a socialist declarationfor the speedyand thorough socialization of the capitalist means of productionit was the SPDs pragmatism that called the shots.6
On 12 November 1918, the government issued its manifesto. With the aim of realizing the socialist progam, it listed its immediate commit- ments: the eight-hour day; full employment and unemployment legislation; expanded social insurance; housing reform; universal, equal, secret, and direct suffrage, with proportional representation and no distinction of sex; the calling of a constituent assembly; and an end to all wartime restrictions on civil freedoms and the free movement of labor. This was a solid cata- logue of reforms. But after the initial declaration, it made no mention of socialism as such and specificallyomitted salient demands like socialization. It also made no mention of the Rate. Dittmann called it the Revolutions
Magna Carta.7 But between the lines the SPD leaders were thinking less of socialist construction than of the orderlytransition to a parliamentary republic.
This was made clear bythree vital decisions. Most notorious was Eberts
alliance with the militaryagainst Bolshevism, broached on the tele- phone byQuartermaster-General Wilhelm Groener to Ebert after the Cir- cus Busch assembly. By committing the field army to Ebert, the High Com- mand protected the officer corps against democratization via soldiers councils. For his part, Ebert dismissed the democracyof soldiers councils, focusing onlyon demobilizing the armywithin the time limits of the Ar- mistice. He ignored not onlytraditional socialist demands for a peoples militia but also the SPDs own prior resolutions. He preferred the frame- work of the old order rather than something new. In a crisis, this would easilylicense repression. When Ebert approved the formation of voluntary units (the Freikorps) in late December against the Left, this is preciselywhat happened.8
If SPD leaders showed little desire to reform the army, deferring gra- tuitouslyto its prestige, the same applied to the civil service. In earlyNo- vember, cityadministrations commonlycoexisted with the Rate, giving the latter watchdog functions while keeping charge of day-to-day affairs, and this was repeated at the national level. The new government appealed to all levels and departments of the civil service to stayat their posts, including the judiciary. There was no thought of purging or democratizing the bu- reaucracy.9
Third and most decisive of all, on 15 November 1918 the Free Trade Unions came to agreement with the big employers, in the crucial sociopo- litical compromise of the revolution. Under this Central Working Agree- ment (ZAG), the employers recognized the unions as collective bargainers, accepted the principle of collective agreements, conceded the right of all workers to join a union, and abandoned companyunions. Theyagreed to the eight-hour day. Works committees would be formed in any establish- ment of at least 50 workers. Unions and employers agreed to cooperate for demobilization. In return, the unions tacitlydropped socialization. Overall, the big employers showed remarkable flexibility, considering their earlier dogmatism. For union leaders, the Agreement was a triumphant vindication of their collaborationist line since August 1914.10
In the abstract, added to the constitutional transition and the SPDs program of social reforms, these union advances seemed impressive. But the actual circumstanceswidespread working-class insurgencyand dem- ocratic hopes racing far ahead of the SPDs more moderate constitution- alismtarnished the luster of this success. Initially, the current of working- class sympathies flowed strongly in the SPDs favor. But as the SPD and USPD broke apart, the unityof popular opinion fractured. In a series of dramatic incidents between 6 and 28 December 1918, the SPD government members moved unilaterallyagainst the revolutions radical wingfirst
suppressing a Spartacist demonstration, with 16 fatalities, then trying to disarm the Peoples Naval Division, whose occupation of the royal palace symbolized the popular aspects of the 1918 revolution. These actions aligned the SPD with the reassembling forces of order. On 28 December, the USPD left the government.
Superficially, the SPD had
won
an
imposing
victory.
It
had
consistently
outmaneuvered
the
USPD
to
control
the
council
movements
central
organs
in
Bolshevik approach were marginalized in the labor movements forums, from the Circus Busch assemblyof 10 November to the National Congress of Workers and Soldiers Councils on 1621 December. The climax from the SPDs point of view came with the far lefts defeat in the Spartacist Rising of 515 Januaryand the elections to the National Assemblyfour days later. On the one hand, the popular insurrection called against the Ebert government bythe RevolutionaryShop Stewards and the newly founded Communist Party(KPD) was decisivelycrushed, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were murdered, and Order Rule[d] in Berlin. On the other hand, the SPD polled 37.9 percent of the vote in the elections, against only7.6 percent for the USPD, and with the Democrats and the Catholic Center achieved a clear republican majority. The elections seemed
a resounding popular endorsement of the SPDs approach.11
Byother criteria, however, this achievement looked less secure. Byre- fusing a confrontation with militarism, bynot reshaping the bureaucracy and judiciary, by shying away from land reform, and by dissembling on socialization, the SPD deprived the republican political order of solid social foundations beyond the ZAG and the various welfare measures. This was all the more shortsighted because the disordering of social-political arrange- ments had created such unsurpassed readiness for radicalism. Wartime trau- mas, immediatelyfollowed bythe upheavals of revolution, had upturned the expectations of what might realisticallybe stabilized or restored, mak- ing citizens unusuallyreceptive to change.12 Yet, disabled bya sense of constitutionalist responsibilityand patriotic mission and full of traditional prejudices about the undisciplined instincts of the nonSocial Democratic masses, the SPDs political imagination failed to escape from a remarkably moderate legalism.
What is more, holding the revolution to a
narrowlyconstitutionalist
path meant restraining and then repressing the popular movement. The workers councils
were
the
main
basis
for
a
third
way
between
the
SPDs
constitutionalism
and
the
insurrectionarypolitics
inspired
bythe
Bolshevik
revolution,
and
Ebert
and
his
colleagues
were
lamentablyunimaginative
in
failing to harness this popular upsurge. Here was the energyand institu- tional leverage
for
the
further-reaching
democratization
whose
neglect
was
so
fateful
for
the
to grasp this positive opportunity; the partys own preferred strategy re- quired the councils active liquidation. In the name of one kind of democ- racyparliamentary constitutionalismanother kind had to go.13
From this contradiction came a popular radicalization that left much of the SPDs achievement nugatory. As repression of the left continued and government shilly-shallied on socialization, the SPDs hold on working-class loyalties slipped. Mass actions surrounding the defeat of the Kapp Putsch in March 1920 dramatized the widening gap between the SPD and many working-class hopes, and in the June 1920 elections the USPD now attained
18.6 percent of the vote against the SPDs 21.6, with another 1.7 percent for the KPD. In the labor movements old industrial strongholds the trend was all the more marked. Thus January1919 saw less the end of the rev- olution than its radical beginningand one proceeding both outside and against the framework of SPD policies.14
Byits own lights, the SPD had done a lot. The constitutional, corpo- rative, and welfare state advances could even sustain an optimistic projec- tion, in which structural reforms transmuted into socialist transformation. The Social Democrats saw themselves progressing in that direction. But their constitutionalist course was imposed at a double cost: the bases of authoritarianism in the state and economyhad been saved, indeed renewed, in their time of greatest vulnerability; and the best expressions of popular democracyhad been rebuffed, even brutallyrepressed. The real tragedyof
191819 was not the failure to force through a socialist revolution. The abstract merits of such a course maybe endlesslydebated, but it could only have succeeded through a long and bloodycivil war, and for manysocial- ists this was too high a price to pay. The real tragedy was the SPDs ex- cessivelylegalistic, stolidlyunimaginative, and whollyconservative notion of what a democraticallyordered politymight be. In 1918, the SPD had an unprecedented chance to expand the frontiers of democracy, both by dismantling the bases of authoritarianism in the discredited ancien regime and byharnessing the new popular energies the councils movement re- leased. The chances of a further-reaching reformism were squandered. It was byits own democratic lights that the SPD failed the test.
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