The Lost Revolution

Germany 1918 to 1923

Chris Harman

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781608463169
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The swastika first entered modern history in the uniforms of the German counterrevolutionary troops of 1918 to 1923—and because of the defeat in Germany, Russia fell into the isolation that gave Stalin his road to power. Here, Chris Harman unearths the history of the lost revolution in Germany, and reveals its lessons for the future struggles for a better world.

Chapter 1

Before the storm

Social upheavals do not begin because political organisations summon them. Governments and oppositions alike usually fear the unleashing of the passions of the masses. If the state is torn asunder, it is because the very development of events confronts millions of people, peripheral to the old political institutions, with no choice but to change things.

Germany in the summer of 1914 was apparently the most stable of societies. Two forces contended for the allegiance of the population: the Prussian state and the million strong Social Democrat Party (SPD). Each regularly abused the other, and on occasions engaged in carefully restricted forms of direct action against its antagonist. Neither recognised the legitimacy of the other. Yet neither thought seriously of upsetting the stable framework within which they both operated, a framework whose main components had endured for nearly half a century without serious challenge, and which the state and social democracy alike assumed would circumscribe their actions into the indefinite future.

The German state

The German state was not a conventional bourgeois democracy. In Germany, unlike France, the middle class had not fought an all out battle to bring power into its own hands, and after its miserable failure in 1848 it had meekly subordinated itself to the Prussian monarchy. The result was a compromise in which the old monarchic structure continued, but adapted itself increasingly to serve the ends of big business. Concessions were made to the middle classes—and in a very limited form to the working class—but the state machine continued to be run by the Prussian landowning aristocracy, a governing class whose allegiance was to the emperor and not to any elected parliament.

This compromise involved a welter of hybrid political institutions. Germany was a unified empire, or Reich—yet in addition to the Prussian state (more than half the territory of the empire), there remained a motley patchwork of kingdoms, principalities, free states and free cities, all accepting Prussian rule, but each with its own local powers and distinct political structures. The empire had a parliament, the Reichstag, chosen by male suffrage—but its powers did not go beyond vetoing government bills, and the choice of the government rested with the emperor. Each local state had its own form of ‘democracy’, in the most important instances involving a restricted franchise based upon a three or four class system of voting; in this the upper class held most of the votes, and those for a parliament whose powers over the hereditary monarchy were severely restricted.

There was freedom of speech, but only within tight limits. The Social Democrats, despite being the largest political party, had been formally banned until the early 1890s, and the law was used with great frequency against the socialist press on one pretext or another in what one study has called ‘a policy of persistent guerrilla war against the party by the authorities’.1 The Social Democrat Max Beer described how, during a 22 month spell as an editor in Magdeburg, he spent, all told, 14 months in prison.2 Between 1890 and 1912 Social Democrats were sentenced to a total of 1,244 years in prison, including 164 years of hard labour.3 As late as 1910 the Bremen city senate sacked some school teachers for the heinous crime of sending a telegram congratulating the Social Democrat leader Bebel on his 70th birthday.

The use of police and troops against demonstrations and strikes was frequent—as in 1912 when cavalry used sabres and bullets against striking miners in the Ruhr.

The middle classes had originally been hostile to the Prussian state. But in the 1860s and 1870s Bismarck had used it to advance the interests of German industry and, in the process, won the collaboration of the bourgeoisie. Most of the old liberal opposition to the monarchy now swung behind the pro-monarchist National Liberal Party (later the German National People’s Party) which took a position on the question of ‘subversion’ barely distinguishable from that of the Prussian aristocracy. Authentic ‘liberal democracy’ was a feeble force, and the only other ‘bourgeois’ opposition was a Catholic party in parts of southern Germany which distrusted the Protestantism of Prussia. By and large, the children and grandchildren of the bourgeois revolutionaries of 1848 were ardent supporters of the empire.4 In some states, the result was that the regime became more illiberal as time passed.

Yet it would be wrong to imagine imperial Germany as a grim, totally oppressive despotism. German capitalism had experienced more than 40 years of sustained economic expansion, overtaking Britain in industrial capacity. A by-product of this success was the state’s ability to make economic concessions to the lower classes. Large sections of the population experienced the years before the First World War as a period in which their lives had become a little less burdensome.

Real wages had risen in the 1880s and 1890s from the very low levels of the 1860s and 1870s, even if they stagnated or fell a little after 1900 when ‘a minority of workers suffered an actual decrease in their living standards; the majority experienced stability or moderate wage rises.’5

One element in Bismarck’s attempt to weaken the socialist opposition had been his provision of limited welfare benefits to the working class. There was a general reduction in working hours during the first decade of the 20th century. In many older established industries, employers had reluctantly recognised unions and allowed employees a limited degree of control over their pace of work. And if the working class movement was prevented from exercising its full political clout both nationally and in most of the states, it could still organise, still temper the wilder excesses of those who ran the empire, and thus wield a certain influence in many localities. It might not enjoy the same degree of freedom as its fellows in France or Britain, but it still operated in a markedly more favourable environment than that of the neighbouring Tsarist empire.

German social democracy

Men and women make history. But they do so in circumstances not of their own choosing, in conditions which react back upon them and shape their own behaviour and thinking. That was certainly true of the men and women who built the German working class movement in the last third of the 19th century.

The Social Democratic Party embodied the political aspirations of nearly all organised workers. Its only competitors were a handful of isolated and ineffectual anarchists on the one hand and weak, ineffectual Catholic and yellow unions on the other. The party is usually characterised by historians as being revolutionary in theory, gradualist in practice. It had originated from two rather different movements within the young working class of the 1860s and 1870s: an openly revolutionary current inspired by Marx and a current inspired by Lassalle, who envisaged winning reforms through a compromise with the Prussian state. But the experience of organising within that state had pushed the two currents together. The Lassalleans, whatever their reformist dreams, had to face the reality that the working class movement was persecuted and its leaders denied any place in national decision making. As for the Marxists, their revolutionary aspirations were tempered by the fact that the state was too powerful to overthrow, thus forcing them to avoid policies of open confrontation.

The whole movement was driven to the expedient of acting as a cast-out minority within German society, laboriously using every opportunity to build up its strength through those legal means permitted to it by the state. It contested elections, held meetings, sold its newspapers, distributed its propaganda, built up trade unions. But it was never able either to infiltrate its way into the ‘corridors of power’ nor to storm the buildings through which they ran.

The party activists responded to state persecution by accepting the revolutionary notions argued by the Marxists. In the 1880s the party had declared itself ‘revolutionary’ with ‘no illusions’ in parliamentary methods. These notions were embodied in the general declaration of principles (the ‘maximum’ demands) of the programme adopted by the party at its 1891 Erfurt Congress. At the same time, however, the leeway available in society for the party’s operations also influenced the views of its members. They were able to construct powerful institutions, which seemed inexorably to increase in might from year to year. Even if they could not overthrow the state, the socialists could erect their own ‘state within the state’. With its million members, its 4.5 million voters, its 90 daily papers, its trade unions and its co-ops, its sports clubs and its singing clubs, its youth organisation, its women’s organisation and its hundreds of full time officials, the SPD was by far the biggest working class organisation in the world.

The activists treasured this achievement, and continually searched out ways to develop it further by involving working class people in the party’s organisations, even if on the basis of activities that seemed a million miles from the struggle for state power. But decades of working through legal aid schemes and insurance schemes, of intervention in the state run labour exchanges, above all of electoral activities, inevitably had an effect on the party membership: the revolutionary theory of the Erfurt programme came to seem something reserved for May Days and Sunday afternoon oratory, hardly connected with most of what the party actually did.

The scope for forms of action which involved direct clashes with the state was limited. In the 1890s strikes were few and far between, involving only half a million workers in the whole decade (fewer than those involved in strikes in the very non-revolutionary conditions of Britain in the first month of 1979). There was a certain upturn in strike activity in 1905-6, but of the three years that followed, the best historian of German social democracy concludes, ‘Not even the most militant revolutionary could discover a concrete opportunity for radical action’.6

The Erfurt programme itself had contained a programme of minimum demands as well as the maximum principles. It was these minimum demands that became the real concern of SPD party activists on a day to day basis. The theory of the party came to reflect its practice. The party’s leading theorist, Karl Kautsky, author of the Erfurt programme, defended Marxist orthodoxy and gained the title ‘the Pope of Marxism’. But for him the goal of revolution was something that had shifted into the indefinite future, an inevitable occurrence to be waited for, but to which it would be quite wrong to try to find a short cut. In the meantime, party members had to commit themselves totally to the decidedly non-revolutionary round of daily party activities. Political lessons did have to be drawn from agitation, but the key lesson was the need to win a majority of votes in elections before socialist change could begin.

The transformation of socialist activity involved in all this was not something imposed on the party by treacherous leaders. It followed from the circumstances in which the membership found themselves. But it did produce within the party an increasing number of activists for whom the daily non-revolutionary routine became the be all and end all. This was especially the case with t...