#pierre broue

[dailytrotsky]

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“At the opening session of the Second Comintern Congress on 19 July 1920, Zinoviev struck a solemn note: 

‘The Second Congress of the International entered history at the same moment as it opened. Remember this day. Know that it is the recompense for all our privations, for our hard, determined struggle. Tell your children, and explain what it meant. Hold the imprint of this hour in your hearts!’

Later he was to recall:

In the congress hall hung a great map on which was marked every day the movement of our armies. And the delegates every morning stood with breathless interest before this map. It was a sort of symbol: the best representatives of the international proletariat with breathless interest, with palpitating heart, followed every advance of our armies, and all perfectly realised that, if the military aim set by our army was achieved, it would mean an immense acceleration of the international proletarian revolution.

On this point, the foreign and the Russian delegates were in agreement. During the discussion of an appeal drafted by Paul Levi and addressed to the world proletariat on the subject of the Polish War, Ernst Däumig, one of the four delegates of the USPD, declared: ‘Every kilometre which the Red Army wins . . . is a step towards the Revolution in Germany.’ The Russians modified the draft texts at the last minute to take into account what they regarded as a new conjuncture of events. For this reason, the resolution which Lenin drafted on tasks on 4 July which included the phrase: ‘However, it does follow that the Communist Parties’ current task consists not in accelerating the revolution, but in intensifying the preparation of the proletariat’ was charged in the draft finally submitted to the Congress to: ‘The present task of the Communist Parties is now to accelerate the revolution, without provoking it by artificial means before adequate preparation can have been made.’

All this seemed to prove to the Communists that the postwar revolutionary wave, hitherto confined to the defeated countries, was in the process of extending to the victorious ones, France, Britain and Italy. From this viewpoint, the construction of real Communist Parties was becoming ever more urgent. For an approaching revolution, an organisation, an instrument, a leadership were needed very quickly. Lenin wrote:

The Second International has definitely been smashed. Aware that the Second International is beyond hope, the intermediate parties and groups of the ‘centre’ are trying to lean on the Communist International, which is steadily gaining in strength. At the same time, however, they hope to retain a degree of ‘autonomy’ that will enable them to pursue their previous opportunist or ‘centrist’ policies. The Communist International is, to a certain extent, becoming the vogue. The desire of certain leading ‘centre’ groups to join the Third International provides oblique confirmation that it has won the sympathy of the vast majority of class-conscious workers throughout the world, and is becoming a more powerful force with each day.

The requests of the centrist parties to join the International had to be examined with the greatest caution. If they were accepted unconditionally, it would be with the opportunist leaders at their head. The Bolsheviks thought that they had nothing to expect from such leaders but ‘active sabotage of the revolution’, as the experiences in Hungary and Germany had shown. There was not enough time to eliminate them by a political struggle from within. It was therefore necessary to take precautions in advance to prevent them bringing problems into the International, ‘to put a lock . . . a solid guard on the door’, as Zinoviev said.

This concern, plus the need to concentrate the Bolshevik experience within a few points as an instrument of political clarification for parties joining the International, led the Russian Communists to propose to the Congress nineteen conditions with which applicants were to comply. This applied both to existing members and to parties applying for admission, whether they were centrist, such as the USPD, which still included strong social-democratic currents, or ultra-leftist, such as the KAPD. These nineteen conditions were modified by the congress to become the celebrated ‘Twenty-One Conditions’, which expressed the Bolsheviks’ conception of what a Communist Party should be. 

The first duty of Communists was to give a ‘genuinely Communist’ character to their day-to-day agitation and propaganda. The objective of the dictatorship of the proletariat must be presented to the working masses in such a way that its indispensability would be clear from their day-to-day experience. Reformist and centrist elements were to be systematically dismissed – the word is emphasised in the draft – from positions of responsibility in workers’ organisations, and replaced by tested Communists, workers promoted from the rank and file if necessary. The activity of Communists could not be confined within the limits approved by bourgeois legality:

In almost all the countries of Europe and America, the class struggle is entering the phase of civil war. In these conditions, Communists can place no trust in bourgeois legality. They must everywhere build up a parallel illegal organisation, which, at the decisive moment, will be in a position to help the party fulfil its duty to the revolution.

In connection with this, Communists must carry out systematic agitational and propaganda work within the army, and create Communist cells in it. Refusal to carry on such activity, which would be partly illegal, was considered as incompatible with membership of the International. The Communist Parties must develop systematic agitational work directed at the working people of the countryside, relying upon workers who had preserved their rural connections.

One of the most important tasks facing Communists consisted of a determined break from both the social-patriotism of the reformists and the social-pacifism of the centrists. Communists must systematically demonstrate to the workers that, ‘without the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, no international arbitration courts, no talk about a reduction of armaments, no “democratic” reorganisation of the League of Nations will save mankind from new imperialist wars’. The break from the reformists and the centrists must be carried through ‘imperatively and uncompromisingly’ in every party, particularly in respect of notorious reformist personalities like the Italian Turati. At the same time, the Communist Parties must resist the imperialist undertakings of their own bourgeoisie, and ‘must support – in deed, not merely in word – every colonial liberation movement’. 

The ninth condition returned to the themes which were developed in the polemic against the ultra-leftists. It instructed the Communist Parties to work within the trade unions, by establishing cells within them that were ‘completely subordinate to the party as a whole’. It was these cells – later to be called ‘fractions’ – which ‘by their sustained and unflagging work, win the unions over to the communist cause’ and ‘unmask the treachery of the social-patriots and the vacillations of the centrists’. Within the unions, it was necessary to fight against ‘the yellow Amsterdam International’, and the International must do all that is possible to break the unions from Amsterdam, and strengthen ‘the emerging international federation of red trade unions which are associated with the Communist International’. 

Communists must use bourgeois parliaments as platforms for revolutionary agitation, but must ensure the reliability of the parliamentary groups by purging them of unreliable elements, and subordinating them to the Party’s Central Committee. The publishing and press departments of the Party must be under the control of the Central Committee. 

In matters of organisation, Communist Parties must be organised in conformity with the principle of democratic centralism. The thirteenth condition laid down:

In this period of acute civil war, the communist parties can perform their duty only if they are organised in a most centralised manner, are marked by an iron discipline bordering on military discipline, and have strong and authoritative party centres invested with wide powers and enjoying the unanimous confidence of the membership. 

Moreover, the leaders of Communist Parties needed to ensure the integrity of the rank and file by carrying out a periodic purge, which in the case of parties which carried on legal activities, meant systematically removing dubious members.

The fifteenth condition laid down that Communist Parties were obliged ‘selflessly to help any Soviet republic in its struggle against counter- revolutionary forces’.

The last four conditions spelt out the immediate requirements for parties that were either actual or prospective members of the International. They were to revise their former programmes to meet both national conditions and the decisions of the International, with the revisions being ratified by the ECCI. The decisions of the International’s congresses and the ECCI were to be strictly followed. Every party which wished to join must call itself ‘the Communist Party of the country in question (Section of the Third International)’, in order to bring out clearly the difference between the Communist Parties and the old Socialist or Social-Democratic parties which had betrayed the working class. Lastly, they were all to convene their own congresses at the end of the World Congress in order to put on record that they accepted these conditions.

These were draconian conditions, and they were further strengthened at the congress. They implied for every party of social-democratic or centrist origin, whether in the International or not, as well as for the ultra-left groups which wanted to join or to remain in the International, an early split on their part, as the Bolshevik leaders were well aware. Trotsky declared:

There is no doubt that the proletariat would be in power in all countries, if there were not still between them [communist parties] and the masses, between the revolutionary mass and the advanced groups of the revolutionary mass, a large, powerful and complex machine, the parties of the Second International and the trade unions, which in the epoch of the disintegration, the dying of the bourgeoisie, placed their machine at the service of that bourgeoisie. . . . From now on, from this congress, the split in the world working class will proceed with tenfold greater rapidity. Programme against programme; tactic against tactic; method against method.

To be sure, no Communist underestimated the negative consequences of any split in the workers’ movement. However, convinced as the Communists were that the world was in a period of ‘sharp civil war’, and that the time of the seizure of power was near, at least in the most advanced countries, they decided, without a real preliminary discussion, to apply these conditions.”

- Pierre Broue, The German Revolution, 1917-1923. Translated by John Archer and edited by Ian Birchall and Brian Pearce. Brill: London & New York, 2005. pp. 422-427

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“On the morrow of the putsch, the Ruhr stood in the van of the armed struggle and the organisation of workers’ power. In a number of places, a network of workers’ councils and action committees had taken power. The action committee in Hagen was a genuine revolutionary military leadership which could call on 100,000 armed workers. The workers’ units went on the attack on 18 March, and the Reichswehr pulled back its scattered forces, one of which left behind for the workers of Düsseldorf 4,000 rifles, 1,000 machine- guns, cannon, mortars and ammunition. Although the workers in the Ruhr appeared to be the masters during the following week, they were so far ahead of their comrades in the rest of the country that they were dangerously isolated. Social Democrats, Independents and even Communists everywhere else had willingly or unwillingly accepted the situation created by the return to work and the breakdown of the discussions about forming a workers’ government. The delegates from the Ruhr, Wilhelm Düwell on 21 March, and Graul on the 23rd, described to the Berlin strike committee the situation in their region and the danger created by the shortage of food. On 23 March, the Zentrale sent Wilhelm Pieck to the scene. 

Political divisions ran deep. The committee in Hagen was formed of Majority Social Democrats, Independents and two Communists, Triebel and Charpentier. However, their party had just disavowed them, because they agreed to open negotiations without being mandated to do so. In Essen the executive committee, which was under Communist influence, reacted to Hagen’s support for negotiations by considering how to outflank its committee. On 18 March, the action committee in Hagen called on workers who were not armed to return to work. On 20 March, it made known its demands in respect of the Reichswehr to General von Watter, who had waited until 16 March to dissociate himself from von Lüttwitz: these were that the Reichswehr be disarmed and withdrawn from the whole industrial region, and that a militia be formed under the control of the workers’ organisations. In the meantime, ‘public order would be ensured by armed formations of workers’. Bauer replied by telegraph that these conditions were not acceptable, because von Watter and his forces had not taken the side of the putsch. The Ministers Giesberts and Braun came to the support of Severing, the Reich’s Commissioner, in negotiations aimed at an agreement based on the ‘nine points of the trade unions’. 

The talks opened in Bielefeld on 23 March in the presence of a vast gathering of representatives of the councils in the principal cities, several mayors and the representatives of the workers’ parties and trade unions, including Charpentier and Triebel, the two Communist members on the Hagen action committee. A small commission drew up a statement which all the participants finally approved on 24 March. The representatives of the government confirmed in it that they agreed with the programme of the trade unions, and that they accepted a temporary collaboration between the military authorities and the workers’ representatives whilst the terms of the agreement were fulfilled. Josef Ernst was attached to Severing and General von Watter. It was expected that, in a first stage, the workers would retain under arms a limited number of men whom the authorities would control, and who would be recognised as auxiliary police. Most of the workers’ arms would be handed in, and fighting was to stop immediately. 

These agreements were not respected in practice. Nonetheless, Wilhelm Pieck, who learned that they had been signed when he arrived in Essen, insisted that an armistice must be enforced which would enable the workers to retain their arms, and to organise solidly the militia which had provisionally been conceded to them. But he failed to convince the members of the executive council in Essen, who did not regard themselves as bound by an agreement in which they had had no say. Moreover, the men from Duisburg and Mülheim, on the Left of this committee which the KPD(S) controlled and under the influence of the opposition Communists, together with the members of the powerful local new ‘unions’, amongst whom anarchists had real influence, denounced the ‘traitors’ who had signed, and called for the struggle to be continued. There was a crowd of rival revolutionary authorities, six or seven ‘military leaderships’, and each was trying to outflank the others.

On 24 March, the Essen executive council met in the presence of Josef Ernst and of a ‘front-line’ delegate from Wesel, where the workers were attacking the barracks. The representatives from Mülheim condemned any armistice in advance, but admitted that they were short of ammunition. The council refused to recognise the agreements, at which point the Hagen committee declared that it was dissolved, and repeated its order that fighting must end. This decision was ineffectual. On the next day, 25 March, a meeting was held, again in Essen, of delegates of seventy workers’ councils in the Ruhr, with the principal leaders of the ‘Red Army’. Pieck spoke to emphasise that the agreements offered no guarantees, and he suggested that the workers should retain their arms in the meantime, although he warned against provoking fights. The assembly elected a central committee formed of ten Independents, one Majority Social Democrat and four Communists. Pieck said: ‘We have not succeeded in convincing the front-line comrades that it would be better to stop fighting.’ 

Two days later, however, the central council in Essen decided, against the opinion of its military leaders but in the light of the general situation, to demand that the government open armistice negotiations.  The next day, there was a conference in Hagen of delegates of the three workers’ parties. Pieck spoke there to the effect that the situation was not ripe for a conciliar republic, but that they should fight to arm the proletariat, to disarm the bourgeoisie, and to reorganise and re-elect the workers’ councils.  The decision was taken to negotiate, but also to prepare to resume the general strike in the event of an attack from the Reichswehr. A second meeting of the councils, which was called for the 28th by the Essen central council and at which Levi was present, confirmed this position.  But on the same day, Hermann Müller told the central council that he demanded as a precondition for any negotiations that the illegal authorities be wound up and the arms be handed in. 

Fighting continued during these days, and the central council did not succeed in imposing throughout the industrial region sufficient authority to make its policies effective. In Wesel, the barracks had been under siege for several days, and the ‘Red Army’ chiefs in Wesel issued fiery summonses to battle which the central council criticised as ‘adventurist’. In Duisburg and Mülheim, ‘unionist’ elements threatened to sabotage the industrial installations and to ‘destroy the plant’ in the event of an advance by troops. 

A revolutionary executive committee, installed in Duisburg under the authority of the ultra-leftist Wild, decided to seize bank accounts and all foodstuffs, and called for the workers’ councils to be elected exclusively by workers ‘who stand for the dictatorship of the proletariat’. Incidents began to break out between workers of opposed tendencies, supporters or adversaries of the armistice, and partisans or opponents of sabotage. A member of the opposition, Gottfried Karrusseit, issued inflammatory proclamations, and signed them as ‘Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army’. Pieck treated him as a ‘crazed petty bourgeois’. 

The central council in Essen was in no better position to guarantee a cease-fire than the Hagen action committee had been a few days earlier. General von Watter took advantage of this disunity and the internal differences in the workers’ camp. He demanded from the Essen leaders that within 24 hours they hand in to him four heavy guns, 10 light guns, 200 machine-guns, 16 mortars, 20,000 rifles, 400 boxes of artillery shells, 600 mortar bombs and 100,000 cartridges. If the arms and ammunition were not handed over to him within the time limit, he would regard the workers’ leaders as having refused o disarm their forces, and having broken the agreement. The Essen council replied to this provocative ultimatum by calling for a general strike. 

On 30 March, delegates from the Essen council were in Berlin, where they took part in a meeting which included the leaders of all the trade unions and workers’ parties, including Pieck and Levi. They unanimously decided to demand from the Müller government that it take measures to ensure that the Bielefeld agreement was respected, and that the military authorities were rendered harmless. Five representatives, including Levi, were received by Chancellor Müller, and demanded from him that General von Watter be recalled.129 Their effort was in vain. The Chancellor replied that the agreement had been one-sidedly broken, and he used the robberies, seizures of bank accounts and threats of sabotage to justify ‘the maintenance of order’.

When Pieck returned to Essen, he found a state of extreme confusion. A majority of the members of the central council had gone to Münster to negotiate with Severing, and nearly all of them had been arrested by the army on the way. Nonetheless, another general assembly of the councils for the industrial region was held in Essen on 1 April, with 259 representatives from 94 councils. Pieck, an Independent, Oettinghaus, and the representative from Mülheim, Nickel, reported on the events in Berlin, and the assembly adopted a position on the armistice conditions. It issued an appeal to defend and develop the network of workers’ councils. 

On 3 April, von Watter’s troops began their advance. They met only sporadic resistance because the confusion and disagreement between different leaders paralysed every slight attempt at coordinating the defence. The behaviour of the soldiery when they were reoccupying the coalfield was such as to provoke the anger even of Severing himself. Soon, military courts were passing heavy prison sentences on militant workers accused of crimes or misdemeanours which were really requisitions or measures of struggle. A month after the putsch had been crushed by the general strike, the accomplices of the putschists took ample revenge in the Ruhr. 

The events of March 1920 were to have far-reaching effects. The Reichswehr had restored order, and the crisis in the workers’ movement seemed to be reaching its peak. The Zentrale’s vacillations, its evasions and its turns had prevented the KPD(S) from reaping the rewards it might have expected from the event. However, it was to try to deepen the crisis which surged up again in the Social-Democratic Parties.”

- Pierre Broue, The German Revolution, 1917-1923. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006, pp. 372-377. Photographs all show the ‘Red Army’ of the Rhineland during the March 1920 fighting. Sources are, from top to bottom: 1) The Rhineland during the World War. 2) RF News. 3) South German Photo Archive. 4) Getty. 5) Otto Dix, “Streetfighting.” Photo of destroyed 1920 art. Art for a Change.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

“The problem of the workers’ government. 

The political consequences of the putsch ran very deep, even in the regions where neither workers’ councils nor workers’ militias were formed, even where the working people were content to follow the order to strike without taking up arms. For millions of Germans, the main lesson of the putsch was its demonstration of the bankruptcy of the Social-Democratic leadership. Noske, ‘the generals’ socialist’, whom they discarded as soon as his job was done, was completely discredited, and his political career was at an end. 

Moreover, it was the workers who had defeated the putschists, by a general strike which was started without the knowledge of the Majority Social- Democratic government, and in a certain sense in spite of it. During the struggle, activists of the different parties, who until that time had been opposing each other, drew closer together. For the first time since before the War they had fought side by side against the class enemy. The prestige of the trade- union leadership rose; Legien had issued the order for the general strike when Noske and Ebert ran away. From that point, the trade-union leaders were expected to take on political responsibilities. There was deep confusion in the ranks of the SPD. The President, Otto Wels, posed the problem on 30 March in these terms: ‘How are we going to get the Party out of the chaos into which it has been plunged by the common fight against reaction?’ In very many localities, the Social-Democratic activists and even their organisations had marched with the Communists and the Independents with slogans contrary to those of their national leadership. For example, in Elberfeld, a leader of the SPD had gone so far as to sign with the representatives of the Independents and the KPD(S) a call for struggle ‘for the dictatorship of the proletariat’  Vorwärts expressed the sentiment of nearly every German worker when it wrote on 18 March: ‘The government must be rebuilt. Not to its right but to its left. We need a government which makes up its mind unreservedly to fight against the militarist, nationalist reaction, and which knows how to win the confidence of the workers as far as possible to its left.’ 

It was clear before Kapp’s flight that the bourgeoisie was trying to assemble a front of the Reichswehr and the governmental parties against the reawakening of the working class. Vice-Chancellor Schiffer and General von Seeckt together issued in the name of the government an appeal for a return to calm, for national unity ‘against Bolshevism’. The SPD was torn between opposing tendencies. But this also happened in the USPD to some extent, particularly in places where its right-wing leaders had lined up with the Majority’s capitulatory approach. The USPD’s activists expressed the united pressure of the working class, shoulder to shoulder in the strike, and the demand for guarantees at the level of government; the Party’s press broadly reflected this response. 

The Party apparatus and the parliamentary group, however, were inclined to favour restoring the parliamentary coalition. The latter issued an appeal in which it declared that the continuation of ‘the people’s strike’ after the leaders of the putsch had fled was a threat to the unity of the ‘republican front’. At the same time, a proclamation signed jointly by Schiffer and the Prussian Minister of the Interior, the Social Democrat Hirsch, assured everyone that the police and the Reichswehr had done their duty throughout, and had at no time been accomplices in the putsch. This ‘amnesty’ was evidently necessary for order to be restored, and the government proclaimed a state of extreme emergency on 19 March. 

The government had been saved by the general strike. But would it use against the workers the generals who had refused to resist the putschists? Were Ebert and Noske to retain power? Had the workers fought for nothing else but to keep them there? The reply to these political questions depended largely on the leaders of the workers’ parties and trade unions. 

The workers had a very powerful weapon at their disposal: the general strike. Legien was aware of this. On 17 March, he called on the USPD Executive to send representatives to a meeting of the General Commission of the trade unions. The Executive delegated Hilferding and Koenen, and Legien proposed to them that a ‘workers’ government’ be formed, made up of representatives of the workers’ parties and the trade unions. He justified his proposal by explaining that from now on, no government could rule in Germany against the trade unions, and that in an exceptional situation the latter were ready to take on their responsibilities. Clearly, neither the representatives of the Independents nor the railway worker Geschke, who had also been invited to the meeting, where he represented the KPD(S), could give a reply before they had consulted the responsible bodies in their parties, which they then did. 

During the meeting of the Executive of the Independents, Koenen and Hilferding spoke in favour of accepting Legien’s proposal, and of opening negotiations with a view to forming a workers’ government. Crispien, who was Chairman of the Party and the leader of its right wing, protested that he could not possibly sit at the same table with people who ‘had murdered workers’, and that no discussion was possible with ‘betrayers of the working class’ such as the members of the General Commission. Däumig, the leader of the left wing, supported him, and said that he was ready to resign his function and even to leave the Party if the Executive engaged in such negotiations. Koenen and Hilferding did not find much support amongst their comrades. Stoecker and Rosenfeld, other leaders of the Left, expressed surprise at Koenen’s views, and demanded simply that the Executive should not brusquely reject them, for fear of not being understood by the millions of striking workers. When the vote was taken, the categorical refusal which Crispien and Däumig proposed was carried by a large majority.

But Legien did not withdraw from the game. On the next day, 18 March, despite the pressure on him from Social-Democratic elements close to the apparatus who urged him to call off the strike now that the putsch had been defeated, he prevailed upon the General Council to prolong it until the working class had received sufficient guarantees about the composition and the policies of the government. Laborious discussions began between the leaders of the trade unions and the representatives of the government. Legien warned his questioners that he would not hesitate, if he thought it necessary, to form a ‘workers’ government’ himself, which would use force to prevent the return of the Bauer government in Berlin, even if this initiative were to lead to civil war, as he knew it might. Legien put forward a number of non-negotiable conditions. Noske must resign from the government of the Reich, as must two ministers, Heine and Oeser, from that of Prussia; trade-union delegates must have key posts in the government; the putschists and their accomplices must be severely punished, and the army and the police must be thoroughly purged. He repeated that there existed an immediate possibility of forming a workers’ government with representatives of the trade unions and the two Social-Democratic Parties. The trade-union leadership opened an unprecedented crisis in the SPD by its call for a general strike, and by its open opposition to the Party’s leaders. This shook the Party to the very top of its apparatus, the Executive and the parliamentary group. But the attitude of the Independents was decisive. The problem was not simple for them. The Left was divided, with Däumig opposing Koenen. One section of the Right, including Crispien himself, went back on its first response on the evening of 17 March, when a new delegation from the Executive sought out Legien to tell him that they wanted to continue the discussions. Däumig, however, stood completely firm; he declared that he could not agree to the Party approving any ‘workers’’, government unless it called for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the régime of workers’ councils.

Despite the opposition of his comrades of the same tendency who controlled the trade unions in Berlin, he carried the day. The majority of the Left agreed with him that the workers’ government which Legien proposed would amount to nothing but a fresh version of ‘the Noske régime’, a new edition of the Ebert-Haase government of 1918. As for the right wing, it finally reached its decision in the light of the risks involved in forming such a government under the fire of criticism from the Left and the threat of a split, in a situation in which it would become nothing more than a fragile left cover for the government. Legien had to drop his proposal. 

However, Legien still had to present to the government his conditions for resumption of work. On the morning of the 19th, after long negotiations, the representatives of the government solemnly undertook to fulfil the conditions which Legien dictated, and which were called ‘the nine points of the trade unions’. These were: 

Recognition by the future government of the role of the trade-union organisations in the economic and social reconstruction of the country. 

Disarming and immediate punishment of the rebels and their accomplices. 

Immediate purge of all counter-revolutionaries from the state administration and state undertakings, and immediate reinstatement of all workers dismissed for trade-union or political activity. 

Reform of the state on a democratic basis, in agreement and cooperation with the trade unions. 

Full application of existing social legislation and adoption of new, more progressive laws. 

Immediate resumption of measures to prepare for the socialisation of the economy, convocation of the socialisation commission, and immediate socialisation of the coal and potash mines. 

Requisition of foodstuffs to control the food supply. 

Dissolution of all counter-revolutionary armed formations. 

Formation of defence leagues on the basis of the trade-union organisations, with the units of the Reichswehr and the police which remained loyal at the time of the putsch to be unaffected. 

Sacking of Noske and Heine.

On this basis, the ADGB and the AFA decided to call for a return to work, and most of the ministers and the parliamentarians made their way back to Berlin. But neither the Independents nor the Greater Berlin strike committee had given their agreement, and the decision remained on paper awaiting the meetings of the strikers, which were generally called for Sunday, 21 March.

Indeed, the agreement of the strikers was far from having been won. Many of the meetings decided to reject the decision of the trade-union confederations, believing that the government had given nothing but promises for which the workers had no guarantee, and that to endorse the decision would effectively be giving the government a blank cheque. Furthermore, when ‘government’ troops had entered the suburbs of Berlin, there had been several violent confrontations with armed workers, exchanges of shots, and arrests.

 A messenger presented himself at the Greater Berlin strike committee bearing an appeal for help from the workers in the Ruhr who were under pressure from the Reichswehr. The representatives of the KPD(S), followed by many Independent workers, opposed ending the strike. Pieck and Walcher argued that they should protect the Ruhr workers and continue the movement until their security was ensured, that is, until the proletariat was armed. 

Then the question of the workers’ government was raised publicly for the first time. Däumig denounced what he considered to be the manoeuvres of Legien and his ‘government operation’, the sole purpose of which was to pull the Independents into the parliamentary game and to provide a left-wing cover for the enfeebled coalition. The Communists had no mandate on this question. They said that they were only learning about Legien’s proposals in the meeting itself, and that they could speak only as individuals.

Walcher emphasised that the sort of workers’ government that the trade unions proposed would be a ‘socialist government against Ebert and Haase’, and that it did not need, contrary to what Däumig demanded, to announce formally that it recognised the dictatorship of the proletariat, in order to be, by its very existence, a step forward and a victory for the workers’ movement. He turned to the trade-union delegates and said:

If you take your undertakings seriously, if you really want to arm the workers and to disarm the counter-revolution, if you really want to purge the administration of all the counter-revolutionary elements, then that means civil war. In which case, it is not only obvious that we support the government, but still more that we shall be at the forefront of the struggle. If, on the contrary, you betray your programme and stab the workers in the back, then we – and we very much hope that we shall be supported by people coming from your ranks – we shall undertake the most resolute struggle, without reserve and with all the means at our disposal.

At the end of a stormy session, it was finally decided, with the support of the KPD(S) delegates, to demand that the strike be continued until guarantees had been obtained, especially about the eighth point, the integration of workers in the forces of ‘republican defence’. At the end of the meeting, negotiations opened between the delegates of the two Social-Democratic Parties and the trade unions. The Majority Social-Democratic delegates had a vital interest in driving a wedge between the Communists and the Independents, and in ending the general strike. In the name of the Social-Democratic fraction, Bauer undertook to respect these four conditions: withdrawal of the Berlin troops to the line of the Spree; lifting of the state of siege; undertaking to take no offensive action against the armed workers, especially in the Ruhr; and enrolment in Prussia of working people in ‘defence groups’ under trade-union control.”

- Pierre Broue, The German Revolution, 1917-1923. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006, pp. 361-367. Photographs are: Top: Berlin, U-Bahn Bülowstraße, März 1920 Generalstreik Kapp-Putsch.  Above, left: Postcard showing women fetching water during the General Strik in Berlin. Source. Above, right: Funeral procession in Solingen, Rhineland, of fallen militants, who died at Hahnerberg ( Wuppertal ), 1920. Source. Bottom: Portrait of Carl Legien.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

Scenes from the Straßenkämpfe in Leipzig, März 1920. [Scenes of the General Strike in Kiel, March 18, 1920]. “Nothing moved in Berlin, where the Regime could not get a single poster printed. In the Ruhr, on the contrary, when the Lichtschlag Free Corps began to move, it immediately came under attack from bands of armed workers.31 In the same way, there was fighting in Leipzig, Frankfurt, Halle and Kiel. The sailors in Wilhelmshaven mutinied, and arrested Admiral von Leventzow and 400 officers. In Chemnitz, still under the leadership of the Communists, a committee of action formed of representatives of the workers’ parties called on the workers to elect their delegates to workers’ factory councils. A few hours later, these delegates, elected by 75,000 workers on a basis of lists and proportional representation, in turn elected the workers’ council of the city, ten Communists, nine Social Democrats, one Independent and one Democrat. Brandler was one of the three chairmen of this revolutionary body, the authority and prestige of which extended through a whole industrial region where the forces of repression were disarmed or neutralised, and the workers were armed. He was to write, not without pride:

In Chemnitz, we were the first party to issue the slogans of the general strike, disarming the bourgeoisie, arming the workers and immediately re- electing the political workers’ councils. We also were the first, thanks to the strength of the Communist Party, to make these slogans a reality.

However, a new danger appeared, precisely in the very region where the Communist initiatives seemed to be enabling a solid front of working-class resistance to the putschists to be created. An activist of the KPD(S) named Max Hoelz had during 1919 been the organiser of violent demonstrations of the unemployed in the Falkenstein region. Under threat of arrest, he went underground, where he met active elements in the Party opposition.

In this miserable Erzgebirge-Vogtland region, crushed beneath generalised unemployment, he had organised armed detachments, a kind of ‘urban guerrilla’, groups of unemployed or quite young people with weapons, who attacked the police or agents of the employers, and often seized the money in factories or banks to finance his troops. In this crisis-ravaged region, after three arrests and escapes, Hoelz cut the figure of a modern-day Robin Hood. On the news of the Kapp uprising, he attacked, forced open the prison gates at Plauen, recruited and summarily organised guerrilla units which he named ‘red guards’, and began to harass the Reichswehr. He organised raids against its isolated detachments, looted shops and banks, and spectacularly improved the food supply to the people of the workers’ suburbs. His ‘activist’ conception of action, the way in which he substituted commando raids for mass action, as well as the alarm which he provoked even in some of the working-class population, aroused the anxiety of Brandler and the Chemnitz Communists, who condemned him as an adventurist, and denounced some of his initiatives as provocative.

A similar phenomenon in the Ruhr attracted more numerous masses of workers, and gave rise to what was called a ‘Red Army’. In Hagen, a committee of action was formed on the initiative of Independent activists, Stemmer, a miner, and Josef Ernst, a metalworker, and set up a ‘military committee’. In a few hours, 2,000 armed workers marched on Wetter, where the workers were fighting the Free Corps.

It seemed on 16 March that there was either fighting or preparation for it throughout Germany, except in the capital, where the military superiority of the army seemed overwhelming. The Red Army of the Ruhr workers was marching on Dortmund. The Free Corps and the Reichswehr held the centre of Leipzig against improvised detachments of workers. In Kottbus, Major Buchrucker ordered any civilian bearing arms to be shot on the spot. In Stettin, a committee of action on the Chemnitz model had been formed, and the struggle between the supporters and the opponents of the putsch took place in the garrison itself.

Levi wrote to the Zentrale a very angry letter from the prison in Berlin where he had been held for several weeks. He criticised its passivity and lack of initiative, and its blindness to the possibilities which the struggle against the putsch offered to revolutionaries. Moreover, over most of the country, apart from Berlin, the leading Communists reacted in a similar way to him. The activists in the Ruhr called for the arming of the proletariat, and for the immediate election of workers’ councils from which the supporters of bourgeois democracy would be excluded. The instructions drawn up by the Zentrale on the 13th received a cool reception everywhere, and its orders were destroyed. Almost everywhere, without taking any notice of the instructions from the Zentrale, Communists called for a general strike, and played a part in organising it. Several opposition groups, however – notably that in Hamburg – took up a wait-and-see position which they justified by a refusal to join in common action with the ‘social traitors’. Neither in Berlin nor in Rühle’s group in Dresden did the ultra-leftists play any role. However, from various regions of Germany, opposition activists such as Appel from Hamburg and Karl Plattner from Dresden came to join the workers fighting in the Ruhr.

In Berlin, Kapp, in desperation, negotiated with Vice-Chancellor Schiffer, who was representing the Bauer government. In the common interest, Kapp agreed that General Groener should attempt to mediate with President Ebert. But Ebert was in no hurry. Kapp, confronted with the general strike, was in fact struggling ‘against problems too great for human strength’, as Benoist- Méchin put it. In a sense, his government was in a vacuum. Bread and meat were in short supply in the capital. The head of the Reichsbank was refusing to pay out the ten million marks which Kapp was demanding of him. On 16 March at one o’clock in the afternoon, Kapp gave the order that ‘agitators and workers on picket lines were to be shot down from four o’clock onwards’. This time, it was actually the big employers who reacted against a measure which could have unleashed civil war; Ernst von Borsig in person led a delegation to insist that Kapp should abandon any use of force. ‘Unanimity is so great amongst the working class that it is impossible to distinguish the agitators from the millions of workers who have stopped work.’ The workers in the Ruhr had recaptured Dortmund by six o’clock in the morning. During the night of 16–17 March, a regiment of pioneers mutinied in Berlin itself, and imprisoned its officers. Intervention by the spearhead of the putsch, the Ehrhardt naval brigade, was needed to free them. Civil war was inevitable if the putschists persisted, and the victory of the working class was probable, both over them and over the government, not least because the latter’s base and possibilities of action were narrowing hour by hour, as the army, whether putschist or ‘neutral’, had ceased to be reliable. 

On 17 March, realising that he was defeated, Kapp fled. General von Lüttwitz came under pressure from officers more politically aware than himself to put an end to the adventure, and he too fled a few hours later, even leaving to Vice-Chancellor Schiffer the task of drafting his letter of explanation. His collaborators could no longer answer for their troops, and demanded that command be handed over to a general who had not been compromised in the putsch. The man of the hour would be von Seeckt. The putsch had lasted for no more than a hundred hours in all, and it was well and truly crushed by the response of the workers, and in the first place by their general strike. 

But the consequences of the putsch were not exhausted. The first armed fights broke out in Berlin that day. Shots were exchanged in Neukölln, and barricades were raised by the workers at the entry to Kottbus. In Nuremberg, the Reichswehr fired on a demonstration of workers and killed twenty-two people; this sparked off a real insurrection. In Suhl, the workers’ militia seized a Reichswehr training centre and took control of a substantial stock of arms and ammunition. In Dortmund, the police, controlled by the Social Democrats, took the side of the ‘Red Army’ against the Free Corps. The general strike continued across the country, and at that point the question was whether Kapp’s headlong flight would lead to the strike being called off, and at what cost, or whether the revolutionary wave which Kapp’s putsch had so imprudently set in motion was leading to fresh civil war.

Amid the fears voiced on the Right, it is difficult to distinguish the genuine fears from the attempts to spread hysteria. Indeed, whilst this time Germany was not covered by a network of elected workers’ councils – Chemnitz and the Ruhr remained exceptional – it was nonetheless covered by a tight network of executive committees [Vollzugsräte], or action committees, formed by the workers’ parties and trade unions. The struggle against the putschists and the organisation of defence led these committees to play the role of revolutionary centres, and this posed in a practical way, in the course of the general strike itself, the problem of power in general, and the more immediate question of the nature of the government.”

- Pierre Broue, The German Revolution, 1917-1923. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006, pp. 356-360.

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“To believe Ruth Fischer, for example, in the Berlin-Brandenburg district, which claimed 12,000 members on the eve of Heidelberg, only 36 were present to hear Wilhelm Pieck present his report. In Berlin, the split was finalised by a district conference on 4 January, during which the district leaders called for the conference decisions to be repudiated. After months of conflict, in March 1920, the district controlled by the Zentrale had only 800 members. Nonetheless, the Central Committee meeting on 4–5 January proceeded to apply the decisions of the Heidelberg Congress. It expelled en bloc all the districts and organisations where conferences had rejected the theses and refused to agree to the expulsion of the delegates of the opposition. From February 1920, the districts of the North, the North-East, West Saxony and Berlin-Brandenburg were expelled. Other organisations, such as those in Thuringia and in Elberfeld-Barmen, were in the process of being expelled. The members who remained loyal to the Zentrale – the frontier between the ‘Party’ and the ‘opposition’ lacked precision – were, for all that, not of the highest quality. At the Karlsruhe congress in February 1920, Heinrich Brandler, just returned from the Ruhr, did not hesitate to state:

We do not yet have a party. . . . What exists in Rhineland-Westphalia is worse than if we had nothing. . . . It will not be possible quickly to build the Communist Party there. . . . What has happened has discredited our name and our party. . . . The result is that our men have not the least authority amongst the working people.

- Pierre Broue, The German Revolution, 1917-1923. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006, pp. 324

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“It was then that the incredible happened. The masses were there very early, from nine o’clock, in the cold and the fog. The leaders were in session somewhere, deliberating. The fog grew heavier, and the masses were still waiting. But the leaders deliberated. Midday came, bringing hunger as well as cold. And the leaders deliberated. The masses were delirious with excitement. They wanted action, something to relieve their delirium. No one knew what. The leaders deliberated. The fog grew thicker, and with it came twilight. The masses returned sadly homeward. They had wanted some great event, and they had done nothing. And the leaders deliberated. They had deliberated in the Marstall. They continued in the police headquarters, and they were still deliberating. The workers stood outside on the empty Alexanderplatz, their rifles in their hands, and with their light and heavy machine guns. Inside the leaders deliberated. At the police headquarters, the guns were aimed, there were sailors at every corner, and in all the rooms overlooking the street there was a seething mass of soldiers, sailors and workers. Inside the leaders were sitting, deliberating. They sat all evening, and they sat all night, and they deliberated. And they were sitting at dawn the next morning – and still deliberating. The groups came back to the Siegesallee again, and the leaders were still sitting and deliberating. They deliberated and deliberated and deliberated.” - quoted in Pierre Broue, The German Revolution, 1917-1923. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006, p. 243

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“In the evening of 4 January, the KPD Zentrale discussed the situation which the measure against Eichhorn had brought about. There was complete agreement on how to appreciate the situation. Everyone present thought that it would be senseless to try to take over the government: a government supported by the proletariat would not have lasted for more than a fortnight. Consequently, the members of the Zentrale all agreed that they had to avoid any slogans which necessarily would have meant overthrowing the government of that time. Our slogans had to be formulated as follows: cancel the dismissal of Eichhorn; disarm the counter-revolutionary troops (Suppe’s guards, etc.); and arm the workers. None of these slogans implied bringing down the government, not even that of arming the proletariat, in a situation in which this government also still possessed a measure of support amongst the proletariat, which could not be ignored. We all agreed about that; these minimum slogans had to be defended with the greatest possible energy. It had to be the necessary result of a powerful act of revolutionary will. . . . This was the sense in which we launched our call for the demonstration.” - quoted in Pierre Broue, The German Revolution, 1917-1923. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006, p. 240