by Chris Harman
The living embodiments of this challenge were the best-known opponents of the war – Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Liebknecht in particular had massive support among the soldiers and workers of Berlin. The Social Democrat leaders manoeuvred with the military high command to destroy this. They provoked a rising in the city in order to crush it with troops from outside, blaming the bloodshed on Liebknecht and Luxemburg. The pair were seized by army officers. Liebknecht was knocked unconscious and then shot. Luxemburg’s skull was smashed by a rifle butt, she was shot in the head and then thrown in a canal. The Social Democrat press reported that Liebknecht had been shot ‘while trying to escape’ and that Luxemburg had been killed ‘by an angry crowd’. When respectable members of the middle class read the news, they ‘jumped for joy’. 89 Nothing had changed since the days of the Gracchus brothers and Spartacus in the attitude of the ‘civilised’ rich towards those who resisted their rule.
However, subduing the revolutionary ferment was not an easy task for the alliance between the Social Democrats and the military. Historians have often given the impression that the German Revolution was a minor event, ended easily and rapidly. This is even the message conveyed by Eric Hobsbawm’s often stimulating history of the twentieth century, The Age of Extremes . He writes that after a few days in November ‘the republicanised old regime was no longer seriously troubled by the socialists … [and] even less by the newly improvised Communist Party’. 90 In fact the first great wave of revolutionary ferment was not brought to an end until the summer of 1920, and there was a second wave in 1923.
As with every great revolution in history, that of November 1918 led to vast numbers of people becoming interested in politics for the first time. Talk of revolution and socialism was no longer confined to the core of workers who had voted socialist before 1914. It spread to millions of workers and lower middle-class people who had previously voted for the Catholic Centre Party, the liberal Progressives, the illiberal ‘National Liberals’, or even the agrarian party run by the Prussian landowners. In the course of the war many of the old Social Democrat workers had begun to identify with the left-wing opponents of the pro-war leaders – around half the members of the old SPD went over to the left-wing Independent Social Democrats. But for every one of these, there were many other people who had moved to the left from the bourgeois parties and still saw the Social Democrat leaders as socialists. Where in the past they had opposed the Social Democrats for this, now they supported them.
The Social Democrat leaders played on these feelings, continuing to make left-wing speeches but insisting that left-wing policies could only be introduced gradually, by maintaining order and resisting revolutionary ‘excesses’. They claimed it was Luxemburg and Liebknecht who endangered the revolution, while secretly arranging with the generals to shoot down those who disagreed.
They were helped in putting across this message by the leaders of the Independent Social Democrats. These had not been happy about the war, but most remained committed to reforming capitalism. Their ranks included Kautsky, Bernstein, and Hilferding – who would be economics minister in two coalition governments with the bourgeois parties in the next decade. For the crucial first two months of the revolution the party served loyally in a government led by the majority SPD and helped sell its policies to the mass of workers and soldiers.
But, as the weeks passed, people who had been enthusiastic supporters of the Social Democrat leaders began to turn against them. Troops, sent to Berlin to help the government assert control in November, rose against it in the first week of January, and many of the workers and soldiers who helped suppress the January rising were themselves in revolt in the capital by March. Elections in mid-January gave the SPD 11.5 million votes and the Independent Social Democrats 2.3 million. Yet in the next few weeks workers who had voted solidly for the Social Democrats in the Ruhr, central Germany, Bremen, Hamburg, Berlin and Munich went on general strike and took up arms against the policies of the government. By June 1920 the SPD vote was only 600,000 higher than that of the Independent Social Democrats.
The Social Democrat leaders rapidly discovered that they could not rely simply on their own popularity to ‘restore order’. Late in December 1918 the Social Democrat minister of the interior, Noske, boasted that ‘someone has to be the bloodhound’, and agreed with the generals to set up a special mercenary force, the Freikorps. Drawn from the officers and ‘storm battalions’ of the old army, it was thoroughly reactionary. ‘It was as if the old order rose again,’ observed the conservative historian Meinecke. The language of the Freikorps was vehemently nationalistic and often anti-Semitic. Its banners were often adorned with an ancient Hindu symbol for good luck, the swastika, and many of its members went on to form the cadres of the Nazi Party.
The history of Germany in the first half of 1919 is the history of the march of the Freikorps through the country attacking the very people who had made the November Revolution and voted Social Democrat in the January election. It met repeated armed resistance, culminating in the proclamation in April of a short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic with its own Red Army of 15,000.
‘The spirit of revolution’
The months of civil war in Germany were also months of unrest throughout much of the rest of Europe. The British prime minister Lloyd George wrote to his French equivalent, Clemenceau, in March: The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution … The whole existing order in its political, social and economic aspects is questioned by the mass of the population from one end of Europe to the other. 91
The US representative in Paris, House, expressed similar fears in his diary: ‘Bolshevism is gaining ground everywhere … We are sitting upon an open powder magazine and some day a spark may ignite it’. 92
The immediate cause for their concern was the taking of power by a soviet regime in Hungary, led by Béla Kun, a former Hungarian prisoner of war in Russia. The liberal nationalist regime established at the end of 1918 had collapsed, unable to prevent Czechoslovakia and Romania seizing parts of the country, and a Communist–Social Democrat government had taken power peacefully. It pushed through domestic reforms and nationalisation, and attempted to wage revolutionary war against Czechoslovakia and Romania, hoping for support from the Russian Red Army to its east and an uprising of Austrian workers to its west.
Nowhere else did revolutionary governments come to power, but nowhere was the situation stable, either. The newly formed nationalist republics of central and eastern Europe all contained ethnic minorities who resented the new order. In Czechoslovakia, German speakers were in the majority in some sizeable regions and Hungarian speakers in others. Romania and Yugoslavia contained large Hungarian-speaking minorities. Yugoslavia and Austria had bitter border disputes with Italy, and Bulgaria with Romania. There was continual fighting between Polish and German forces in Silesia, and all-out war erupted between Turkey and Greece, with large-scale ethnic cleansing on both sides. Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria contained large numbers of workers with revolutionary sentiments opposed to the middle-class nationalism of their governments.
Revolutionaries led unemployed workers in an attempt to storm the Austrian parliament in April 1919. For a moment it was not absurd to conceive of the revolution in Hungary linking with Russia to the east and, through Austria, with soviet Bavaria to the west, overturning the entire setup in the former German and Austro-Hungarian empires.
It was not to be. The Austrian Social Democrats used a language somewhat to the left of those in Germany, but they were just as adamantly opposed to further revolution. They persuaded the Viennese workers’ councils to allow the protests to be crushed, ensuring the survival of Austrian capitalism. Meanwhile, the Communist–Social Democrat government in Budapest did not form real workers’ councils. It relied on the old officers to run its army, and made the fundamental mistake of alienating the peasantry by failing to divide up the great estates which dominated the countryside. The regime collapsed after 133 days when the Social Democrat
s abandoned it, opening the door to a right-wing dictatorship under Admiral Horthy.
The ferment in 1919 was not confined to the defeated empires. It affected the victors too, even if not usually to the same degree. The British and French armies were shaken by mutinies among troops forced to wait before returning home. The armies sent against the Russian Revolution were not immune to the unrest – British, French and US troops in Archangel refused to go into battle, while French forces had to be evacuated from Odessa and other Black Sea ports after staging a mutiny. 93
At the same time there was a rising wave of industrial unrest in Britain itself. Engineering strikes at the beginning of the year led to bitter clashes with the police in Glasgow and to a near general strike, uniting Catholics and Protestants, in Belfast. There were police strikes in Liverpool and London. The government narrowly averted a miners’ strike by making promises it later broke, but it could not avoid a nine-day shutdown of the railway network. The formation of a ‘triple alliance’ between the mining, transport and railway unions in January 1920 terrified the government. ‘The ministers … seem to have got the wind up to a most extraordinary extent,’ wrote the head of the cabinet secretariat. 94
Spain had not taken part in the war because its rulers were split between the pro-German sentiments of the court and the pro-Anglo-French sentiments of the bourgeoisie (and the Socialist Party of Pablo Iglesias). But rising prices had devastated the living standards of its industrial and agricultural workers. There had been a widespread but unsuccessful general strike in the summer of 1917, and a new wave of militancy erupted as 1918 progressed.
The years 1918–20 were known as the Trienio Bolchevista (‘the Bolshevik three years’) in southern Spain, with its vast estates manned by seasonally employed day-labourers. There was ‘a rising wave of organisational activity, strikes, confrontations and meetings’, 95 encouraged by news that the Bolsheviks in Russia were dividing estates up among the poorer peasants. ‘Here, as everywhere else,’ wrote the American novelist Dos Passos, ‘Russia has been the beacon fire’. 96 Three great strikes swept the area, with labourers occupying the land, burning down the houses of absentee landlords and sometimes setting fire to the fields. ‘Bolshevik-type republics’ were proclaimed in some towns, and it took the dispatch of 20,000 troops to break the momentum of the movement. 97 The agitation was not confined to the south. During a week-long strike in Valencia workers renamed various streets ‘Lenin’, ‘Soviets’ and ‘October Revolution’, and widespread bread riots in Madrid led to the looting of 200 shops. 98 The most serious struggle was in Catalonia early in 1919. Workers struck and occupied the La Canadiense plant, which supplied most of Barcelona’s power, paralysing public transport and plunging the city into darkness. Some 70 per cent of the city’s textile plants went on strike, as did the gas and water workers, while the printers’ union exercised a ‘red censorship’. The government imposed a state of emergency and interned 3,000 strikers. But this did not stop what seemed like a capitulation by the employers. There was a short-lived return to work until the government provoked a new strike by refusing to free some imprisoned strikers. It brought troops with machine-guns into the city, armed 8,000 bourgeois volunteers, closed down the unions and crushed a general strike within a fortnight. The back of the workers’ movement in Catalonia was eventually broken as gunmen in the pay of the employers shot down union activists. Anarchist CNT members like Juan García Oliver, Francisco Ascaso and Buenaventura Durutti retaliated by assassinating ruling-class figures. Their activities only served to further fragment the workers’ forces. But a deep-seated class hatred remained within the Catalan working class, to explode at intervals over the next 17 years. 99
The rising tide of workers’ struggle in 1919 was not confined to Europe. The US witnessed the biggest attempt yet to unionise its unorganised industries, with a bitter strike of 250,000 steel workers. Australia exploded in ‘the most costly series of strikes yet known … in 1919, some 6.3 million days were lost in industrial disputes’. 100 Winnipeg in Canada experienced a general strike as part of a wave of agitation across western Canada and the north west coast of the US.
The revolutionary upheavals in western Europe peaked in 1920 with decisive struggles in Germany and Italy.
The series of regional civil wars in Germany inflicted massive casualties on workers as they moved from a parliamentary to a revolutionary perspective – the usual estimate of the number of dead is 20,000. But the country’s traditional rulers were still not happy, and many now felt strong enough to dispense with the Social Democrats and take power themselves. On 13 March troops marched into Berlin, declared the government overthrown and appointed a senior civil servant, Kapp, in its place.
The thugs armed by the Social Democrat leaders had moved from attacking the left to attacking those same leaders. It was a step too far, and produced a bitter reaction among rank and file workers who had accepted the Social Democrats’ past excuses for working with the generals. The head of the main trade union federation, Legien, called for a general strike, and across Germany workers responded.
In key areas, however, the response was not just to stop work. People also formed new workers’ councils, took up arms and attacked columns of troops known to be sympathetic to the coup. In the Ruhr thousands of workers, many with military experience, flocked to form a Red Army which drove the national army, the Reichswehr, from the country’s biggest industrial region. Within days the coup had collapsed. The Social Democrat ministers returned to Berlin and made a few left-wing noises before throwing in their lot once more with the Reichswehr as it used its normal bloody methods to restore ‘order’ in the Ruhr. 101
In Italy 1919 and 1920 were known as ‘the two red years’. Workers started a wave of strikes and flocked into the Socialist Party, which raised its membership from 50,000 to 200,000, and into the unions. Strike wave followed strike wave. The summer of 1919 saw a three-day general strike in solidarity with revolutionary Russia. In the spring of 1920 Turin metal workers waged a bitter but unsuccessful strike aimed at making the employers recognise factory councils – which were viewed by revolutionaries around Antonio Gramsci’s journal Ordine Nuovo as the beginning of soviets.
The militancy reached a climax in August. Engineering workers in Milan reacted to a lockout by occupying the factories. Within four days the movement had spread throughout the country’s entire metal-working industry and involved 400,000 workers: ‘Wherever there was a factory, a dockyard, a steelworks, a forge, a foundry in which metallos worked, there was a new occupation’. 102 An estimated 100,000 workers in other industries followed the metal workers’ example. People no longer regarded this as a simple economic struggle. They began to make and store weapons in the factories. They kept production going because they believed they were inaugurating a new society based on workers’ control: ‘These hundreds of thousands of workers, with arms or without, who worked and slept and kept watch in the factories, thought the extraordinary days they were living through “the revolution in action”.’ 103
The government was paralysed. In the south, peasants returning from the war had begun to spontaneously divide the land. Soldiers in Ancona had mutinied to avoid being sent to fight in Albania. The prime minister, Giolitti, feared unleashing a civil war which he could not win. He told the Senate:
To prevent the occupations I would have to put a garrison in each of … 600 factories in the metallurgical industry … 100 men in the small, several thousand in the large. To occupy the factories I would have to deploy all the forces at my disposal! And who would exercise surveillance over the 500,000 workers outside the factories? It would have been civil war. 104
Instead he operated on the assumption the metal workers’ union leaders would concede a peaceful outcome to the dispute and the Socialist Party leaders would not challenge the union leaders’ decision. This would leave the employers free to fight another day. He was proved right. The Socialist Party formally decided the occupations were the responsibility of th
e union leadership, and a special convention of the main union federation then decided by three votes to two to reject calls for revolution and reach an agreement with the employers. The core of the movement, the metal workers in the major factories, felt demoralised and defeated. They had fought for a revolution and all they had got were a few minor and temporary improvements in wages and conditions.
Revolution in the West?
The Ruhr Red Army and the Italian occupations of the factories give the lie to the argument that there was never any possibility of revolution in western Europe – that it was all a fantasy in the minds of Russia’s Bolsheviks. In the spring and summer of 1920 very large numbers of workers, who had been brought up in capitalist society and taken it for granted, embarked upon struggles, and in doing so turned to a revolutionary socialist view of how society should be run. World revolution was not a fantasy in August 1920, with the Russian Red Army approaching Warsaw, the memory of the defeat of the ‘Kapp Putsch’ in the mind of every German worker and the Italian factories on the verge of occupation.
It did not happen, and historians of socialism have been discussing ever since why the revolution in Russia was not repeated. Part of the reason clearly has to do with objective differences between Russia and the West. In most Western countries capitalism had grown up over a longer historical period than in Russia, with more chance to develop social structures which integrated people into its rule. In most Western countries, unlike Russia, the peasantry had either been granted land (as in southern Germany or France) or been obliterated as a class (as in Britain), and therefore was not a force with the potential to challenge the old order. Most Western states were also more efficient than the aged ramshackle state apparatus of tsarism, and so had managed to survive the trauma of the war better.
But such objective factors cannot explain everything. As we have seen, millions of workers in the West did move towards revolutionary actions and attitudes, even if this happened a couple of years after the same shift in Russia. But moving to a revolutionary attitude, or even engaging in revolutionary action, is not the same as making a revolution. That requires more than a desire for change. It requires a body of people with the will and understanding to turn that desire into reality – the will and understanding provided in the great bourgeois revolutions by Cromwell’s New Model Army or Robespierre’s Jacobins. Such bodies simply did not exist in Germany and Italy in the vital months of 1920.