The Second Revolution
The Seizure of State Power by the Revolutionary Worker’s Front
From a College-level History Textbook in Berlin, 1958
The German and the Soviet Revolutions bear several uncanny resemblances. A broad popular front of social forces ousted a reactionary monarch, opening the way to a year of contestation between different political factions. In the end, the most radical of them, representing the most advanced and class-conscious element of the proletariat, won power, and proceeded to restructure the basic institutions of the state. Conservative-liberal elements which supported the initial revolution now rose in revolt and protest, only to find themselves outmaneuvered by the new government, which managed to form alliances with sections of the population previously thought to be inimical to revolutionary socialism.
Recent historians have been eager to qualify this picture. They point out that the Revolutionary Worker’s Front won power legally, in council and parliamentary elections; that the first revolution was a socialist and not a bourgeois one, and that, therefore, there is little sense in speaking of a “Second Revolution”; and finally, that the conquest of state power did not occasion a second round of civil war, and was, in fact, already a foregone conclusion given the nature of the German constitution. While it is necessary to avoid unduly assimilating the German revolution to the Soviet one, it is equally important to guard against treating the ascendancy of the Revolutionary Worker’s Front (RAF) during the first half-decade of the DSR as a routine matter of electoral politics, something which several recent studies have come close to doing.
…The Revolutionary Worker’s Front was formed as a clandestine organization in 1918, in the wake of the failure of the November uprising. It was coordinated by local activists with ties to both the council movement and the left-wing of the Trier caucus. There were more than a few sympathetic trade union officials and social-democratic party chapters that were involved as well. The RAF was initially employed to facilitate communications between the various branches of worker’s councils; in this way, it became a form of social infrastructure. Over time, it also served as an outlet of propaganda and recruitment, acting to expand the council-movement and refine the ideology of revolutionary councilism (also known as Marxism-Luxemburgism). The spread of the movement to the traditionally conservative catholic workers of the Rhine-Ruhr area was likely the death knell of capitalism in Germany, even if for some time the Catholic Worker’s League would constitute an independent though allied political formation.
During the November Revolution, the councils seized power in Berlin, Saxony, the Rhineland, Alsace-Lorraine, Baden-Wurttemberg, Bremen, Hamburg, and the Ruhr Valley. A situation of de facto dual power emerged after the councils arranged elections on December 15th 1919, during which the first All-German Congress of Soviets was formed. This body was dominated by representatives sympathetic to the RAF, but it co-existed with an unelected Council of People’s Commissars which was divided evenly between descendants of the left-centrist social democrats, such as Kautsky, Wels, and Haase, and the RAF. Luxemburg, Jogiches, and Levi, the most prominent representatives of the centrist and right wings of the RAF, refused to carry out a split with the Social-Democratic Party, which had now been purged of the social-fascists of the wartime era. The consequence was a continued struggle for control of the party, as well as an ongoing war of position between the All-German Congress of Soviets and the centrist and right-wing social democrats, who formally acknowledged the place of the councils in the new system but wished to retain a place for more traditional bourgeois government structures.
Among the right-wing Social Democrats, led now by the revisionist Eduard Bernstein, the repeated mantra was “not yet”. The workers may have seized power and overthrew Ludendorff, but they were not yet ready for the full practice of socialism. German industry, shattered by the war, was not yet prepared for the transition to worker’s ownership and economic planning. In this manner, the right-wing Social Democrats embraced the revolution, which was necessary to “place the reins of political power in the more responsible stewardship of the worker”, while denying its essential meaning. Hence the need for a parliament, for all the manifold institutions of bourgeois rule, to “complete the phase of capitalist development”, which Bernstein and the revisionists insisted was necessary before any leap ahead into socialism. As for the left-centrists, the likes of Kautsky, Wels, Ledebour, and Haase, one must conclude that they believed in the revolution, but were frightened of what it might entail, and hence held on to the devices of bourgeois rule in the hopes that they would provide a more stable and painless transition.
The revolutionary workers of Germany did not concur in these assessments. The All-German Congress remained in session over the entirety of 1919, and sent the largest delegation of deputies to the constitutional convention, at which they won a preponderance of power. They won the right to determine the composition of the next Council of Commissars, thereby cementing the councils’ position in the new state. This prompted the left-centrists to begin breaking more decisively with the party’s right-wing, hoping to compete in the upcoming council elections, which were scheduled to occur simultaneously with parliementary ones in September. In areas where workers were still loyal to the trade union movement, left-centrists made some gains, but they still had little hope of challenging the hegemony of the RAF and its Catholic Allies.
These same organizations were busily preparing for parliamentary elections. In the hope of capturing the working-class vote of the defunct Catholic Centre Party, the Catholic Worker’s League chose to campaign as an independent party. The RAF decided to nominally remain a single faction within the Social-Democratic Party, a move which was only possible because the reforms which decentralized the party in 1917 under the guidance of the Trier Caucus were put back in place at the insistence of the Luxemburgists, the councils, and most of the left-centrists. This produced the strange situation where the campaign of 1920 had more the spirit of a Social-Democratic civil war than a genuine contest between differing parties. The right, centre, and left fought vigorously for control of the party-list and for the right to nominate their preferred candidates in the single-member constituencies. Control of regional party chapters was vital for the latter task, a battle that the councilists narrowly won with the assistance of dozens of targeted strikes and industrial actions that cowed local party leaders. There were dozens of cases in which Social-Democrats ran against one another during the election when multiple nominees claimed to be the “rightful” candidate, typically to the advantage of whichever one had the support of the local party apparatus and worker-councils.
The RAF established its own headquarters in Berlin, and accumulated a host of local chapters and affiliates over 1920. It considered itself to be an association of the most revolutionary and class-conscious elements of German society rather than a traditional party. In certain respects, it still acted as one in 1920: its executive committee coordinated strategy, helped conduct campaigns, and delegated important tasks. However, its connection to the council movement and the Congress of Soviets meant that the activity of regional affiliates and chapters frequently leapt far ahead of the Executive Committee’s dictates, producing confusion at times but also giving the RAF an extraordinary dynamism which the other parties lacked.
The RAF also conducted a campaign in Pomerania and East Prussia, seeking to win the support of landless agricultural laborers and other elements of the rural proletariat. These were the traditional heartlands of Prussian conservatism, and were now home to a terroristic insurgency of landowners who opposed the recent efforts at land reform. With their political machinery decimated by the revolution, there was a great void of power here, and the efforts to organize the agricultural proletariat, though halting and uneven, did bear fruit when RAF candidates carried more than a dozen rural districts in low-turnout elections.
As a whole, the campaign of 1920 occurred in an atmosphere of both extraordinary tension and heady proletarian optimism. Conspiracies proliferated of a coming British invasion of the northwestern coast that would force the country back onto a war footing, and the entire public square was given over to politics. Observers described it as a “permanent campaign”, in which marches, rallies, and speeches constituted the main form of public entertainment. Both the mainstream social democrats and people’s social union struggled to match this mood; in their rhetoric and their slogans, they lacked the sense of militancy and revolutionary elan that had swept the nation.
September 1920 People’s Assembly Election
| Party | Vote % | Seats (Proportional Party-list) | Seats (Single-member) | Seats (Total) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Social-Democratic Party (RAF) | 65.7 | 99 | 135 | 234 |
| Social-Democratic Party (Remainder) | 65.7 | 105 | 85 | 190 |
| People’s Social Union | 21.2 | 66 | 69 | 135 |
| Catholic Workers League | 8.9 | 28 | 20 | 48 |
| National-Liberal Party (Disqualified by Court) | 4.1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
September 1920 Council Elections
| Party | % of Seats | All-German Congress Seats |
|---|---|---|
| Social-Democratic Party (RAF) | 60.5 | 1210 |
| Social-Democratic Party | 18.1 | 280 |
| People’s Social Union | 3.6 | 72 |
| Catholic Workers League | 17.5 | 350 |
September 1920 has been called the “Second Revolution” because it settled, after an initial period of uncertainty, that the revolutionary proletariat would take the leading role in the construction of the new socialist order. It determined that, far from reaching a resting point with the constitution of 1920, the revolution was still ongoing and would continue for some time. Few expected the RAF to emerge as the largest grouping in both parliament and the council elections. Even though it may not have won an absolute majority in the former body, it had secured unquestioned executive power through its crushing victory in the council elections. The rearguard efforts of the left-centrists had come too late. Now fearing being shut entirely out of power, the left-centrists and their one hundred parliamentary deputies agreed to participate in a coalition government with the left, giving the RAF control of parliament as well as the All-German Congress. Shortly thereafter, the Congress gathered to appoint a cabinet dominated by the RAF. The left-centrists did not make out too badly here: though they did not control the most vital commissariats, they achieved representation out of proportion to their performance in the council elections, setting them up as key power-brokers in the new government.
Officeholders of the Council of People’s Commissars, Sept. 22, 1920
| Commissariat | Officeholder | Party |
|---|---|---|
| Chairperson | Rosa Luxemburg | SDP (RAF) |
| Internal Affairs | Leo Jogiches | SDP (RAF) |
| Foreign Affairs | Paul Levi | SDP (RAF) |
| Justice | Clara Zetkin | SDP (RAF) |
| Education | Otto Ruhle | SDP (RAF) |
| Planning | Ernst Meyer | SDP (RAF) |
| Light Industry | Joseph Joos | KA |
| Heavy Industry | Otto Wels | SDP |
| Railways and Transport | Wilhelm Pieck | SDP (RAF) |
| Trade | Georg Ledebour | SDP |
| Finance | Hugo Haase | SDP |
| Labour | Vitus Heller | KA |
| Agriculture | Wilhelm Dittmann | SDP |
| Army | Ernst Thalmann | SDP (RAF) |
| Navy | Paul Frolich | SDP (RAF) |
| Communications | Theodor Liebknecht | SDP |
| Minority Affairs | Julian Marchlewski | SDP (RAF) |
| Health and Welfare | August Thalheimer | SDP (RAF) |
| Culture | Kurt Eisner | SDP (RAF) |
| Housing and Urban Life | Adolph Hoffman | SDP |
| Confederal Affairs | Viktor Adler | SDP |
The right-wing Social Democrats, who had hoped to play some part in the coming government, now threatened a party split. The dissolution of the party was all but inevitable at this point, and this “threat” was welcomed by all involved as a reprieve to the year-long internal struggle. On September 21st, the right-wing delegation quit to form the “Free Socialist People’s Party”. Shortly thereafter, negotiations to maintain the unity of the Social Democratic Party broke down when the RAF made clear that it envisioned the left-centrists strictly as junior partners. Kautsky and Haase were willing to take on a subordinate role in the present government, but they hardly intended for this to be a permanent arrangement. On the 28th, they formed the “Party of Revolutionary Social Democracy”, bringing an end to the SDP and formalizing the tripartite division.
Rosa Luxemburg, 1st Address as Chairperson to the German Congress of Soviets on Sept. 26, 1920.
_Last November, workers and soldiers smashed the old German regime. The Prussian saber’s mania of world rule bled to death on the battlefields of France and Poland. The gang of bourgeois criminals who set off the present nightmare and drove all of Europe into a sea of blood has been shown the rope. The people - betrayed for a half-decade by their purported representatives - awoke at last from their slumber, roused by the class-conscious German worker. In November, the German proletariat rose up and threw off the shameful Hohenzollern yoke. Worker and soldier’s councils were elected, and repeated blows were struck against the class rule of the bourgeoisie. International capital, the insatiable god Baal, into whose bloody maw millions upon millions of steaming human sacrifices are thrown, now lies stricken and prostrated before the combined power of the European Proletariat.
With the conclusion of the Great War, the bourgeois has forfeited its right of existence. From Amsterdam to Vladivostok, its class rule has been shattered! It is no longer capable of leading society out of the terrible collapse of civil and economic order which the imperialist orgy has left in its wake. Means of production have been destroyed on a monstrous scale. Tens of millions of able workers, the fruit of this new century, have been slaughtered. The leering misery of unemployment beckons those who return. Famine and disease still sap at the strength of our people. A new round of chaos engulfs Europe.
We are now confronted with the choice: either a resurrection of capitalism, new wars, and the imminent return of anarchy, or the abolition of capitalist exploitation and the beginning of the work of socialist construction. Out of the present yawning abyss and bloody confusion, there is no help, no escape, no rescue other than socialism. Only the revolution of the world proletariat can bring order to the present chaos, can bring work and bread for all, can end the reciprocal slaughter which threatens to turn the remainder of Europe into a graveyard of peoples.
We must complete the socialization of the means of production, end the wage system, and introduce the planned production and distribution of social wealth. In place of employers and wage slaves, free working comrades! In place of national chauvinism, comradely love! Labor as a positive and social duty of all! The final end of exploiters and exploited, and the taking-over of all the functions of government by the workers themselves, so that the rule of men may give way to the administration of things.
All power to the worker’s councils! There can be no compromise with chauvinist and bourgeois elements as we establish a socialist order of society. Let us not pretend that the initial steps we have taken have built up the new society: the process of socialist transformation cannot be decreed by bureau, committee, union or parliament, nor engraved in a constitution. Not the rule of bureaucrats, whether they be those of the Prussian state or the old unions, but the rule of workers! Only the final subordination of the state and economy to the free collective organs of the working people will issue in the socialist order! In short: only the self-activity of the workers may liberate the working-class! Only in such a society may man recognize man. Only when we have built this new order shall the earth no more be stained by the present ignominy. Only then may it be said: this war was the last, this tragedy the final one that man has been asked to endure.
In this hour, can anyone doubt that socialism is the only salvation for humanity? The words of the Communist Manifesto flare across the globe, like a gleaming sign above the crumbling battlements of world-imperialism: Socialism or Barbarism! _
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