Ninety years ago, on the morning of 13th March 1920, a brigade of
soldiers marched into Berlin and declared the German government of the
Social Democrats to be overthrown. Not a shot was fired by any side and
the response of the leaders of the government was simply to flee. The
very forces which the Social Democrats had place so much trust in had
turned against them. The Kapp Putsch, as it has become known as, was
challenged instead by the workers.
The German Revolution
The German Revolution, which began in
1918, brought the First World War to an end. The Revolution was the product of
all the class antagonisms that festered in German society, exacerbated by the hardships
of World War. At the outbreak of the Revolution Germany had the most modern
economy and the strongest working class in Europe, yet it was basically ruled
by the Kaiser and the junker landlord class.
The Revolution threw up Workers’ and
Soldiers’ Councils that guided the actions of the revolutionaries. These were
democratic rank and file bodies, which potentially were organs of workers’
power. The Russian Revolution of February 1917, which began as a Revolution
against the Tsar and the horrors of war, also involved the creation of Soviets,
democratic organisations of workers and soldiers, in the process of struggle.
Dual Power
What we saw in both cases was dual power,
where real power was in the hands of the revolution. The men and women who made
the revolution were not conscious of their power, and elements of reaction
lurked in the background, desperate to restore the old order. The two sides
measured one another up and clashed. In October 1917 the Russian Revolution
swept away all the elements of the old order of society and moved towards
workers’ power and socialism. It succeeded in this because of the rapid
crystallisation of the advanced elements of the working class around the
programme of the Bolsheviks, dragging the mass along with them.
In Germany the reaction engineered a
provocation in Berlin in January 1919, during the course of which they
succeeded in murdering Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the outstanding
Communist leaders of the German working class. The forces of revolutionary Marxism
were very weak at this time. The traditional mass party of the working class
was the Social Democrats, which was nominally Marxist, but the leadership had
betrayed the workers by throwing their support behind the imperialist War in
August 1914. Later the Independents split away from the majority Social
Democrats on an anti-War basis. In the course of the Revolution they became a
centrist current, vacillating between reform and revolution.
The Revolution of 1918 was essentially a
spontaneous rising. The Social Democrats retained the support of the majority
of workers in the Councils, and in parliamentary elections later on. They were
forced to declare a republic, but left the state machine essentially untouched.
For instance they put a price on Luxemburg and Liebknecht’s heads, and had them
murdered by the Free Corps (Freikorps), a proto-fascist bunch of thugs with swastikas
emblazoned on their helmets. The Social Democrats were the main prop of
capitalism at this stage of the Revolution. They were determined to introduce
bourgeois democracy and dissolve the Councils.
Versailles Treaty
In 1919 defeated German imperialism was
forced to sigh the predatory Versailles Treaty. Germany lost a tenth of its
population, an eighth of its territory and all its colonies. The German officer
caste knew they had been staring defeat in the face a year earlier, but it was
useful for them to let the Social Democrats collect the ignominy of signing the
treaty. After all, nationalism was the only ideology the reaction could
mobilise behind. Actually the Communists also denounced the Treaty as an
outcome of imperialist war, just as they had denounced the Brest-Litovsk Treaty
that German imperialism had imposed on the infant Soviet Republic in 1918 as
its price for dropping out of the War.
The Social Democrats became the
government of national humiliation. It was time for the reaction to try another
provocation in order to roll back the Revolution. The conspiracy was hardly
concealed. Noske, the Social Democrat who prided himself on the cosy relation
he had built up with the officer caste, pleaded with them to stop the
conspirators. The answer came: German soldier would not fight German soldier.
The state machine would not defend ‘democracy’ and the government of the Social
Democrats.
The coup leaders were Luttwitz, the
commanding officer in Berlin, and Kapp, the director of agriculture for
Prussia, who directly represented the junkers. The coup was apparently a
complete success. Berlin was taken on March 13th by the reactionary
Erhard Brigade without a shot being fired. The government fled ingloriously.
But the Revolution was not exhausted. The
workers were prepared to fight to defend what they had gained. Karl Legien, a
right wing Social Democrat and leader of the main trade union federation,
issued the call for a general strike. The Independents supported the call, but
began to organise separate strike committees. The German Communist Party (KPD),
which had a history of ultra-left sectarianism as a natural response to the
opportunism of the Social Democrats, at first refused to support the strike. It
was understandable that they should hate the murderers of Luxemburg and
Liebknecht, but this policy was fundamentally wrong. Fortunately the workers,
including the KPD workers, knew better. On March 15th the KPD
leadership reversed its position, but remained marginal to the movement because
of their initial hesitancy. Most of their rank and file, however, threw
themselves unhesitatingly into the struggle.
Workers’ Demonstration Fired Upon
In Leipzig the Free Corps fired on a
workers’ demonstration. The workers responded by arming themselves up and down
Germany. The strike was virtually invisible, but it was strangling the
plotters’ government. They couldn’t find a single worker in Berlin to print their
posters. The sailors in Wilhelmshaven mutinied and arrested their officers. The
city of Chemnitz was in the hands of an Executive Council of the workers. In
Erzegebirge-Vogtland Max Holz, a maverick Communist described as a modern-day
Robin Hood, robbed banks and looted shops to feed the workers. A Red Army was
formed in the Ruhr, the industrial region then occupied by French imperialism,
The Red Army began to march on Dortmund.
A general strike poses the question of
power. Who would feed and water the working class? How would the strike be
organised? How could the workers overcome the coup?
Berlin, capital of the plotters, was on
the verge of starvation. So Kapp lashed out. He ordered the troops to shoot
down the ‘agitators’. He was prepared to unleash civil war. But this was a
civil war the capitalist class realised it could not win at this stage. A
delegation of big employers explained, “The 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.”
In any case the soldiers themselves were
becoming unreliable. There were mutinies in Berlin. The workers took Dortmund.
The police, under the influence of the Social Democrats, went over to the side
of the Red Army against the Free Corps. Barricades appeared in Berlin itself.
Nuremburg faced insurrection. After just 100 hours in power, Kapp was forced to
flee, a ridiculous figure. The general strike continued. The whole of Germany
was effectively being run by strikers’ executive committees or action
committees. The working class was determined to press home its advantage.
Kornilov
Trials of strength are a basic feature of
dual power. In August 1917 the Russian Revolution was threatened by the coup
attempt of Kornilov, a strikingly similar movement to that of Kapp and
Luttwitz. The Bolsheviks did not hesitate. They proposed a united front with
the reformist workers to defend the gains of the Revolution from
counter-revolution.
The watchword of the Bolsheviks was,
“march separately, strike together.” They did not conceal their differences or
stop criticising the reformist leaders such as Kerensky, whose behind the
scenes manoeuvring had actually made the Kornilov coup attempt possible. But
they gladly stretched out the hand of friendship to the reformist workers who
were prepared to stand and fight the counter-revolution. And the fact that they
were the best fighters for their class did not go unnoticed among workers and
peasants who were still weighing up the political situation. Contrast this to
the initial reaction of the KPD, that the workers “will not move a finger for
the democratic republic.”
Kornilov’s troops melted away, just like
the ‘invincible’ forces behind Kapp. This shows that not a wheel turns, not a
light shines without the support of the working class. It shows that, if we are
united, we are invincible. This is how the working class could have stopped
Hitler.
Evelyn Anderson comments (Hammer or
Anvil, Left Book Club, 1945), “Never before and never after was the solidarity
of the common people of Germany as great as it was during the Kapp days. Never
before and never after had they so great a chance to rid themselves, once and
for all, of the powers of reaction and aggression and to lay the foundations
for a living democracy. This chance they forfeited.”
The Central Strike Committee in victory
demanded a real workers’ government, a purge of the state machine and
socialisation.” At that time they had the power to make of this a reality. It
never happened, because of splits in the labour movement. Later Hitler took
power on account of divisions in the organised working class. Positively and
negatively, the fundamental lesson of the German Revolution is the need for a
workers’ united front against capitalist reaction.
Lenin wrote a letter to the Central
Committee at the beginning of September 1917:
“We shall fight, we are fighting against
Kornilov, but we do not support Kerensky; we are uncovering his weaknesses. The
distinction is rather delicate, but highly important and must not be forgotten.
“What does the change of our tactics
consist of after the Kornilov insurrection? In this, that we are varying the
forms of struggle against Kerensky. Without diminishing our hostility to him
even by one single note, without taking back one word from what we have said
against him, without giving up the task of overthrowing Kerensky, we say: we
must calculate the moment. We will not overthrow Kerensky at present. We
approach the question of the struggle against him differently: by explaining
the weaknesses and vacillations of Kerensky to the people (who are fighting
against Kornilov).”
How
to characterize a revolution? By the class which achieves it or by the social
content lodged in it? There is a theoretical trap lodged in counterposing the
former to the latter in such a general form….The November revolution in
Germany was the beginning of the proletarian revolution but it was checked at
its very first steps by the petty-bourgeois leadership, and succeeded only in
achieving a few things unfulfilled by the bourgeois revolution. What are we to
call the November revolution – bourgeois or proletarian? Both the former and
the latter would be incorrect.
