Erfurt plus Councils: The Distinctive Relevance of the German Revolution of 1918-19 (original) (raw)
2019, Socialist History
This paper defends the idea that the only feasible and desirable alternative to bourgeois democracy in 1918 Germany was a parliamentary democracy supported by workers’ councils. This alternative, which I will call council Erfurtianism, blazed a trail of political possibility from late November 1918 to the summer of 1920 that was eminently desirable and politically accessible to the German revolutionary left. Council Erfurtianism was consistently undermined by the leadership of the majority social democrats, with some help from the far left. A mixture of sectarianism and mistrust made revolutionary compromise impossible and elevated the ‘parliament vs. councils’ polarity from a secondary strategic issue, into a supreme question of (putative) principle. That sectarianism also accounted for two failed attempts to rekindle the revolutionary fire: the pro-socialisation strikes of March 1919 and the strike that ended the Kapp putsch, one year later.
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In 1865, the International expanded in Europe and established its !rst important nuclei in Belgium and French-speaking Switzerland. The Prussian Combination Laws, which prevented German political associa- tions from having regular contacts with organizations in other countries, meant that the International was unable to open sections in what was then the German Confederation. The General Association of German Workers—the !rst workers’ party in history,1 founded in 1863 and led by Lassalle’s disciple Johann Baptist von Schweitzer—followed a line of ambivalent dialogue with Otto von Bismarck and showed little or no interest in the International during the early years of its existence. It was an indifference shared by Wilhelm Liebknecht, despite his political prox- imity to Marx. Johann Philipp Becker tried to !nd a way around these dif!culties through the Geneva-based “Group of German-speaking Sections”. While Liebknecht did not understand the centrality of the international dimension for the struggle of the workers’ movement, Marx also had deep theoretical and political differences with von Schweitzer. In February 1865 he wrote to the latter that “the aid of the Royal Prussian govern-ment for co-operative societies”, which the Lassalleans welcomed, was “worthless as an economic measure, whilst, at the same time, it serve[d] to extend the system of tutelage, corrupt part of the working class and emasculate the movement”. Marx went on to reject any possibility of an alliance between the workers and the monarchy...
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