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Create a Mass Party!

Cliff Connolly critiques CounterPower’s vision of the “party of autonomy” and offers an alternative vision of the mass party. 

In Praise of Communism by Ronald Paris, sourced from here.

The US left is at a critical juncture where the structure and focus of our organizations will soon be decided. On the one hand, we positively have ongoing processes of cohesion in play with DSA chapters collaborating on writing a national platform and far-flung sects coming together under the banner of Marxist Center. On the other hand, we have many comrades across ideological lines who still echo opposition to the idea of a tightly structured national organization. Central to this contradiction is the question of the party: should socialists strive to build an independent political party, and if so, what should that look like? CounterPower has put forth one possible answer in their article Create Two, Three, Many Parties of Autonomy! They are dedicated organizers and we should all be glad to have them in our midst. However, their strategy of eschewing the mass party model and encouraging the spontaneous formation of multiple “parties of autonomy”, and counting on these disparate groups to unite into an “area of the party”, is unworkable in the long term.

Their argument for the many parties strategy rests on a number of errors—historical misrepresentation (no, CPUSA was not a party of autonomy), uncritical acceptance of failed models (Autonomia Operaia gives us more negative lessons than positive ones), an over-reliance on spontaneity (movements have to be built intentionally), an aversion to leadership (no, it doesn’t automatically create unaccountable bureaucracy), and a confusion of terms (putting anarchist and Marxist vocab words together does not solve the contradictions between them). We will explore each of these points in greater detail. There is also an implicit assumption of false dichotomies built into the many parties line—either we build parties of autonomy or slip into sectarianism, either parties of autonomy or dogmatism, either parties of autonomy or top-down bureaucracy. There is a kernel of truth present here; we certainly don’t want a dictatorship of paid staffers. However, parties of autonomy are not a solution to this problem — in some ways, they would exacerbate the problem.

This was initially written in response to CounterPower’s original essay in 2019, but has since been amended to include dialogue with the updated version published in 2020. The differences between the two are significant and raise new concerns about the many parties model. The most interesting addition in the update concerns the role of cadre — highly trained organizers dedicated full-time to party activity. While we agree wholeheartedly on the necessity of these professional revolutionaries, there is a difference of emphasis that merits debate. This issue will be explored in greater detail below.

That CounterPower started this conversation on the party question is a gift to the whole of the US left—it must be addressed for our organizations to move forward. While many of us vehemently disagree with their conclusions, we should be grateful for their company. After examining each piece of their argument for the many parties model and taking note of its shortcomings, we will investigate a viable alternative—a mass party of organizers built on the principles of struggle, pluralism, and democratic discipline. 

Historical Clarification

There are a number of historical errors throughout CounterPower’s article. By this we are not referring to a difference of opinion about a certain historical figure’s thought process or the motivations behind a particular decision, but rather factual inaccuracies. This in itself does not mean the thesis of the article is automatically false, but it does betray a dependency on unfounded assumptions. First, there is the assertion that the Russian soviets arose organically without being built by socialists, at which point the Bolsheviks joined them and worked harmoniously with other autonomous parties in this “area of the party” to link the soviets to other sites of struggle. Second, there is the quotation from Mao Zedong’s 1957 Hundred Flowers speech, which CounterPower uses to bolster their argument for parties of autonomy. Finally, we are led to believe that both the FAI and the Alabama chapter of the Communist Party USA are exemplars of the many parties model. 

We will begin with the relationship between the Bolsheviks and the soviets. Here is CounterPower’s characterization:

“The organized interventions of a revolutionary party thus take place ‘in the middle,’ as mediations between the micropolitical and macropolitical. This has been a distinguishing feature of successful revolutionary parties, as in the example of the Russian Revolution of 1917, when clusters of Bolshevik party activists concentrated in workplaces, recognizing that the participatory councils (soviets) emerging from grassroots proletarian struggles embodied the nucleus of an alternative social system. Thus the party’s organization at the point of production enabled revolutionaries first to link workplace struggles against exploitation with the struggle against imperialism, and then to link the emergent councils with the insurrectionary struggle to establish a system of territorial counterpower”.

On the contrary, it is of utmost importance to recognize that the soviets, factory committees, and militias that formed the backbone of the Russian revolution were built intentionally by socialists. While different factions in the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party eventually split into separate organizations as the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, both groups were instrumental in the creation of these mass organizations. They did not emerge organically from economic struggles with bosses and feudal landlords like some of the trade unions and peasant associations, but instead were the product of a socialist intervention in economic struggles which emphasized the need for political organization. This strategy, commonly referred to as the “merger formula”, was theorized by Marx and Engels, popularized by the German socialist party leader Karl Kautsky, and accepted by Russian socialists of all stripes (most notably Lenin).1

The Bolsheviks did not merely help workers build their fighting organizations. They also competed with political rivals for leadership in them. Beyond their efforts that we would call “base-building” today, the Bolsheviks also invested significant resources into propaganda efforts and electoral contests. The struggle for elected majorities in the soviets in 1917 was pursued in tandem with a strategy of running campaigns for municipal offices and the Constituent Assembly (the bourgeois parliament of the Provisional Government), and it worked. The Bolshevik candidates for the assembly were able to publicly oppose the policies of the Provisional Government, while the elected deputies in the soviets were able to win over the working class to the task of seizing political power. These electoral efforts were instrumental in establishing a democratic mandate for the October Revolution.2 Consider these words from leading Bolshevik (and later leading opposition member purged by Stalin) Alexander Shliapnikov, in 1920:

The Russian Communist Party (RKP), as the history of the preceding years indicates, is the only revolutionary party of the Working Class, leading class war and civil war in the name of Communism. The R.K.P. unifying the more conscious and decisive part of the Proletariat around the Revolutionary Communist Program of action and drawing to the Communist banner the more leading elements of the rural poor, must concentrate all higher leadership of communist construction and the general direction of policy of the country.

Clearly, the Bolsheviks did not consider themselves a “party of autonomy” working side by side with the Menshevik reformists in a broad “area of the party”. Nor did they simply fuse with organic economic struggles in the trade unions. The reality couldn’t be further from CounterPower’s insinuations: the Bolsheviks were a party of political organizers who started as a minority and slowly won over sections of the working class through diligent mass work and bitter struggle with the other parties of the day. By engaging in this process, they eventually took on a mass character and became capable of leading social revolution. The lesson to learn from the Bolsheviks is this: we must win political hegemony in whatever independent organs of proletarian power that we help build, using every available means, including running opposition candidates in bourgeois elections to expose broader sections of the class to our ideas.

Now we will consider Mao’s echoing of the old Chinese proverb “Let a hundred flowers blossom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.” This line of poetry is used by CounterPower to demonstrate the need for dozens of independent communist grouplets to form and collaborate on the task of social revolution. They attribute the quote to Mao, but is this how he used it? The short answer is no. It comes from a speech he gave in March 1957 at the Chinese Communist Party’s National Conference on Propaganda Work. It is true that he called for a hundred schools of thought to contend, but this was in the context of winning unaligned intellectuals over to the party’s socialist ideals. He gave a thoughtful and nuanced analysis of how the party could accept criticism from the broader population without sacrificing their legitimacy as the ruling organization of the country:

Ours is a great Party, a glorious Party, a correct Party. This must be affirmed as a fact. But we still have shortcomings, and this, too, must be affirmed as a fact…Will it undermine our Party’s prestige if we criticize our own subjectivism, bureaucracy and sectarianism? I think not. On the contrary, it will serve to enhance the Party’s prestige. This was borne out by the rectification movement during the anti-Japanese war. It enhanced the prestige of our Party, of our Party comrades and our veteran cadres, and it also enabled the new cadres to make great progress. Which of the two was afraid of criticism, the Communist Party or the Kuomintang? The Kuomintang. It prohibited criticism, but that did not save it from final defeat. The Communist Party does not fear criticism because we are Marxists, the truth is on our side, and the basic masses, the workers and peasants, are on our side.

Clearly, in March 1957 Mao was concerned with building a mass party, not opening space for a loose collaboration between multiple parties aimed at building socialism. Unfortunately, the Chinese Communist Party was underprepared for the criticism they would soon face and reversed the Hundred Flowers Campaign. By July of that same year, the Anti-Rightist Campaign brought a series of purges underway, which got so out of control that Mao had to restrain his subordinates from excess killing. Perhaps Chinese conditions in 1957 were different enough from American conditions in 2020 that this was acceptable, or perhaps Mao the statesman should not be looked to for inspiration as much as Mao the general or Mao the revolutionary. It is beyond the purview of this article to answer that question. What is certain CounterPower draws the wrong lesson out of Mao’s 1957 speech.

Demonstration from the Hundred Flowers Movement

After quoting Mao, CounterPower moves on to claim that the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) is in practice a party of autonomy working within the “area of the party” of Spain’s National Confederation of Labour (CNT). Although the idea of “parties of autonomy” was not formulated until forty years after FAI’s founding, there may be a kernel of truth to this claim. For example, if FAI formed a loose coalition with CNT organizers and worked with them on shared projects, this argument could make sense. The reality, however, is that FAI is essentially a hard-line anarchist faction within CNT that has consistently fought for political hegemony within the broader organization and even purged ideological rivals like Ángel Pestaña. Perhaps they were right to do so; it is outside the scope of this article to pass judgment on the internal political conflicts of the CNT. 

Despite CounterPower’s framing of the FAI as an independent anarcho-communist organization with an “organic link” to the CNT, they are an explicitly anarchist faction struggling to dominate the politics of the Spanish labor movement. They act as a pressure group within the confederation to make CNT adhere to what they perceive as purely anarchist theory and praxis without deviation. This is not a “symbiotic relationship”, it is realpolitik under a black flag. Roberto Bordiga’s window dressing cannot give us a clear understanding of Spanish labor politics; historians like José Peirats and Paul Preston would be better suited to aid this investigation. 

In the updated version of their essay, CounterPower cites the Alabama chapter of CPUSA as a historical example that serves to “elucidate the role and function of a party of autonomy”. This could not be further from the truth. Similar to the FAI, the party of autonomy model would not even be theorized until fifty years after the Alabama chapter’s founding. CPUSA was a mass party with local chapters all over the country for at least the first half of the twentieth century. The Alabama chapter in particular was the result of discussions on “the Negro question” at the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International, after which the Central Committee of CPUSA chose Birmingham as a headquarters for its foothold in the South.3 Its success in organizing rural and urban communities in the deep south of the 1920s is proof that the mass party model can be adapted to regional conditions and accountable to local rank and file members. Describing this centralized party model as a “party of autonomy” is categorically false.

Spontaneity vs. Base-Building

Now that the historical context of CounterPower’s narrative has been clarified, we should examine the contradiction between their ideological commitment to spontaneity theory on the one hand, and their practical commitment to base-building on the other. Does the working class organically form explicitly political fighting organizations, or is a socialist intervention required for this to occur? This is a never-ending debate between Marxists and anarchists, despite the pile of evidence pointing to the latter. Some would argue that this debate is pointless at the present moment, and these differences are best put aside until the workers’ movement has grown. We would reply: “First, comradely debate in no way hampers unity of action. We can continue base-building efforts while disagreeing on political questions, and it is only through debate that we might one day get on the same page. Second, simply by engaging in the act of base-building with us, you are agreeing with our point in practice while denying it in theory.” How is this possible?

Our comrades in CounterPower are the perfect example. They admit the masses will not come to accept communist ideas on their own:

From strike committees to workers’ councils, tenant unions to neighborhood assemblies, the disparate forms of organized autonomy that arise in the midst of a protracted revolutionary struggle will not automatically fuse with communist politics to create a cohesive system of counterpower.

Yet they don’t address where these councils and unions come from. The reader gets the sense that these organizations simply pop up during times of crisis, as workers get frustrated with bourgeois politics and independently come to the conclusion that they need to organize against their boss or landlord. This may be true in a minority of cases, but most proletarian fighting organizations come from the same source as the Russian soviets: dedicated socialist base-builders. Who built Amazonians United? Who built Autonomous Tenant Union Network? Who built UE, ILWU, and the original CIO? In every case, the answer is: workers and intellectuals who read Marx, became socialists, and decided to organize.

Our responsibilities go beyond just founding these mass organizations; we have to compete for hegemony within them as well. If we neglect this crucial aspect of organizing due to a fetishization of the autonomy of the masses, reformists and even reactionaries will gladly fill the gap. In the case of something like workers’ councils, we cannot have any illusions that they provide anything beyond a means of representation for political tendencies within the movement. This is precisely why the Bolsheviks competed so vigorously with the reformist Mensheviks and populist Social Revolutionaries for elected majorities in the soviets. In fact, the Bolsheviks only adopted their famous slogan “All Power to the Soviets” after they had secured elected majorities in them.4 We only need to look at the difference between the Soviet Republics established in Russia and the brutally crushed Soviet Republic of Bavaria to understand the limitations of the model. Without influence from committed revolutionaries, mass organizations can be rallied to the banner of class-collaboration (as the Russian soviets were before Bolshevik intervention) or adventurism (as in the case of Bavaria).5

CounterPower’s overestimation of proletarian spontaneity has practical consequences for its members. In his recent article In Defense of Revolution and the Insurrectionary Commune, Atlee McFellin analyzed the November 2020 election and drew parallels between it and the situation which produced the Paris Commune. Fearing that elections may never take place again, McFellin argued against any participation in electoral efforts (including, but not limited to the creation of a political party independent from the Democrats). What was proposed instead? “Self-defense forces, solidarity kitchens, and everything else that is required to repel fascist assaults”. In other words, anything but a class-independent party capable of coordinating the struggle for socialism across different political, economic, and social fronts. Rather than face the reality of the radical left’s current irrelevance in national politics and the labor movement, and chart a course to resolve this, comrade McFellin called for the construction of insurrectionary communes as a response to the consolidation of ruling class interests under Joe Biden. Whether the working class has the spontaneous energy necessary for this task remains to be seen;  if it does, we would be ill-advised to hold our breath in anticipation but should wince at the inevitable brutal consequences if such adventurism bears fruit.

While in theory, CounterPower glosses over the role of communists in building workers’ organizations, in practice they are engaged in precisely this work. Rather than relying on the spontaneous initiative of the masses, they actively build tenant and labor unions, political education circles, and other necessary vehicles of class struggle. In fact, they do it remarkably well. This is what makes the claim that communists must “fuse with grassroots organizations” after they appear rather than actively building them in the first place so bizarre. Ultimately, our task as communists is to build mass organizations of class struggle, and then rally the most active participants within them to a mass communist party. By uniting in one party, we can direct the efforts of thousands of organizers according to a commonly agreed upon plan, which is an absolute necessity for the workers’ movement to grow. 

The Role of Cadre

The discussion of cadre organizers is given new attention in CounterPower’s update to their original essay. It mostly focuses on the role these committed party members play in shaping revolutionary strategy and connecting it to active proletarian struggles. As seen in my Cosmonaut article Revolutionary Discipline and Sobriety, those of us who favor the mass party model are in complete agreement with CounterPower on the importance of cadre:

Any collective project, whether a revolutionary labor union or a church’s food pantry, will expect a higher degree of involvement from its core organizers than from its regular members. Not everyone has the time or the technical skills needed to bottom-line such endeavors, and those who do have a responsibility to step up to the plate. These small groups, or cadre, are the powerhouse of the class. Taking direction from the masses they live and labor with, cadre members should focus their lives on facilitating the self-emancipation of the proletariat.

CounterPower rightly points out that these dedicated full-timers are a prerequisite for the development of robust internal political education, external agitation, and consistent recruitment to mass work projects. Key to the every-day functioning of these cadre groups is the organizational center to which they are accountable (and preferably subject to democratic discipline by the whole membership of the organization). While the mass party shares the party of autonomy’s commitment to a common political platform and program, the main difference between the two models is one of scope. Whereas the “area of the party” is composed of diffuse autonomous organizations with separate and often contradictory programs, the local chapters of the mass party work together on a common, democratically agreed-upon plan. As the experience of the Alabama chapter of CPUSA shows, this does not mean the plan cannot be adapted to meet local concerns. 

CPUSA demo in the south

In fact, the mass party model historically proves more capable of achieving its aims than any other method of party organization, whether it is compared to the bourgeois fund-raising parties that dominate US politics or the Italian autonomist model revived by CounterPower. This will be elaborated below in our examination of the Autonomia Operaia movement. For now, suffice it to say that while we agree with our autonomist comrades on the importance of cadre, the mass party model is best suited to coordinate their efforts.

Precision of Terms

Further complicating the problems of CounterPower’s revolutionary strategy is an incoherent collection of opaque and often contradictory terms. Few throughout history have tried to synthesize the theories of the Bolsheviks, Rosa Luxemburg, Bordiga, and Malatesta, mostly because it makes no sense to do so. This blend of anarchist shibboleths (affinity groups, autonomy fetishism, Bookchin references) and communist vocabulary (party cadre, collective discipline, professional revolutionaries) is neither an oversight nor the product of genuine cross-ideological left unity. CounterPower is a Marxist organization with a niche ideology informed mainly by the experience of the Italian Autonomia Operaia movement. The fact that they mask this behind an appeal to every possible leftist tendency is frankly dishonest, and makes their writing difficult to follow. Since all these ideas have been presented to us as complementary and harmonious, we must investigate the contradictions between them in order to get a clearer picture. 

First, we should consider their framing of the ideas of Luxemburg:

In contrast to a bourgeois party, Rosa Luxemburg identified that a revolutionary party of autonomy ‘is not a party that wants to rise to power over the mass of workers or through them.’ Rather, it ‘is only the most conscious, purposeful part of the proletariat, which points the entire broad mass of the working class toward its historical tasks at every step”

The primary issue with this framing is that Rosa Luxemburg did not write or speak about “a revolutionary party of autonomy” at any point in her political career. She was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) for most of her life before its left-wing split into the USPD and then Spartacist League (later renamed the Communist Party of Germany, or KPD). Both organizations were mass parties who explicitly intended to lead the working class to overthrow the existing political order and form a new proletarian government in Germany, headed by elected party officials. Her point about the party being an instrument that puts the working class in power was perfectly in line with the existing Marxist orthodoxy. Consider this quote from the SPD’s leading theorist Karl Kautsky for comparison:

The socialists no longer have the task of freely inventing a new society but rather uncovering its elements in existing society. No more do they have to bring salvation from its misery to the proletariat from above, but rather they have to support its class struggle through increasing its insight and promoting its economic and political organizations and in so doing bring about as quickly as possible the day when the proletariat will be able to save itself. The task of Social Democracy is to make the class struggle of the proletariat aware of its aim and capable of choosing the best means to attain this aim.6

Luxemburg and Kautsky both demonstrate the function of the mass party: cohering the most militant and forward-thinking section of the working class into one organization and giving it the tools to win political power. If the party is not “outside or above the revolutionary process”, as CounterPower puts it, then it is coming to power through class leadership. “Providing the boldest elements in decision-making organs” is just a milder way of phrasing “winning political hegemony in the movement.” While it is right to be skeptical of potential opportunists and wary of inadvertently creating an unaccountable bureaucracy, CounterPower overcorrects by trying to avoid the question of leadership altogether. No amount of out-of-context quotes from historical revolutionaries can paper over that deficiency. 

After painting an anarchist portrait of Rosa Luxemburg, CounterPower then calls upon the theoretical authority of actual anarchist Errico Malatesta:

We anarchists can all say that we are of the same party, if by the word ‘party’ we mean all who are on the same side, that is, who share the same general aspirations and who, in one way or another, struggle for the same ends against common adversaries and enemies. But this does not mean it is possible—or even desirable—for all of us to be gathered into one specific association. There are too many differences of environment and conditions of struggle; too many possible ways of action to choose among, and also too many differences of temperament and personal incompatibilities for a General Union, if taken seriously, not to become, instead of a means for coordinating and reviewing the efforts of all, an obstacle to individual activity and perhaps also a cause of more bitter internal strife.7

This is a markedly different approach to organization from the mass party model of Kautsky, Luxemburg, Lenin, et al. It is certainly more in line with the autonomists’ “area of the party” theory, but are the assumptions it is based on sound? The experience of the Bolshevik party securing state power and defending the proletariat from white terror, the Communist Party of Vietnam’s triumph over colonialism, the continued resistance to neoliberal imperialism in Cuba, and other achievements of the mass party model seem to indicate otherwise. Petty personal disputes and geographic distance are no excuse to abandon unified efforts to build socialism. If we take a scientific approach and compare the results of party-building trials throughout history to the results of those like Malatesta who deny the party’s role, the pattern is self-evident. 

Lessons of History

CounterPower’s essay does an excellent job of considering the experiences of a vast number of different historical communist groups. Unfortunately, they do so without an ounce of reflection or criticism. They ask us to look at rival groups with opposing political strategies and conclude that both were right, regardless of whether either group actually achieved its aims. They mention the experience of many parties and movements—the KAPD in Germany, Autonomia Operaia in Italy, the MIR in Chile, the FMLN-FDR in El Salvador, the URNG in Guatemala, the HBDH in Turkey and Kurdistan, and more. We’re given the impression that each of these groups consciously agreed with the autonomists’ many parties model, and that each of these groups were successful enough to teach us mainly positive lessons to emulate. Upon closer inspection, it turns out this is not at all the case. For the sake of brevity, we will look at three examples.

Let us begin with the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (KAPD). This party could be accurately described as a sect based on its low membership, extreme sectarianism, and history of splits. Its complicated lineage is as follows—its members began in the SPD, then split into the ISD, which then joined the USPD, which then split into the KPD, and then finally split from there into the left-communist KAPD. It functionally existed for about two years before splitting again into separate factions. It was quite literally a split of a split of a split that ended up splitting. It had around 43,000 members at its height in 1921, which was minuscule compared to the hundreds of thousands of workers in the mass parties (and that number immediately declined after the factional split in 1922). 

The roots of the KAPD’s separation from the KPD lie in the events of the Ruhr Uprising. In 1920, a right-wing coalition of military officers and monarchists attempted to overthrow the bourgeois-democratic government of Germany. In response, the government called for a general strike, which the workers’ parties heeded. In the Ruhr valley, these parties took the strike a step further by forming Red Army units and engaging right-wing forces in open combat. However, these socialist militias were divided between three different parties and could not coordinate their efforts as well as their enemies who had the benefit of a clear leadership structure. The uprising was ultimately crushed when the bourgeois government made a deal with the right-wing putsch leaders and sent their forces to slaughter the workers of the Ruhr. 

What lessons did the left-communists learn from this? From their perspective, KPD leaders had given up on the struggle by agreeing to disband Red Army units after the fighting looked to be in the enemy’s favor. Because of this, a split was necessary so the workers could be led by the true communist militants that would see things through to the end. In other words, the already divided proletariat needed a fourth party to further complicate the coordination of future actions. Two years later, this fourth party would then split into two factions. Lenin had this to say about the KAPD:

Let the ‘Lefts’ put themselves to a practical test on a national and international scale. Let them try to prepare for (and then implement) the dictatorship of the proletariat, without a rigorously centralised party with iron discipline, without the ability to become masters of every sphere, every branch, and every variety of political and cultural work. Practical experience will soon teach them.8

Unfortunately, Lenin was overly optimistic. Rather than having time to learn from their mistakes, the divided forces of the working class were brutally crushed by the united forces of the right. The Nazis rose to power, and fascism reigned until the Soviets took Berlin in 1945. This does not mean there is nothing we can learn from the KAPD—quite the opposite is true. There may be some diamonds in the rough, but most of the lessons we can learn from the left-communists of Germany are examples of what not to do. Fortunately, in the updated version of their essay, CounterPower scrubbed any mention of the KAPD. Whether this was due to a genuine reassessment of their example or simple editorial limitations, the new version is much stronger without the ill-fated German sectarians. 

Despite their positive appraisal of the KAPD, CounterPower is not a left-communist sect. They are autonomists, and in order to understand their answer to the party question we must take stock of their movement forebears. Autonomia Operaia was a workers’ movement in Italy during the period known as the “Years of Lead”. This period lasted from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and was marked by violent clashes between right and left-wing paramilitary forces. It is worth noting that much of this violence was either planned, supplied, or encouraged by the CIA and its “Operation Gladio”, although that is not relevant to our discussion here. Autonomia Operaia was mainly active from ‘76 to ‘78, and was made up of many smaller socialist groups including Potere Operaio, Gruppo Gramsci, and Lotta Continua. Each group was strongly opposed to unifying into one party, preferring instead to maintain their autonomy and pursue different tactics to work towards their shared goal of social revolution. 

Autonomia Operaia demo

In the end, this worked out in much the same way as it did for the sectarians in Germany decades earlier. Thousands of militants were arrested, hundreds fled the country, many were killed, and most of those who remained dissolved into terrorist groups like the Red Brigades and parliamentary parties like Democrazia Proletaria. Neither the autonomist terrorists nor the autonomist politicians were able to move beyond the failures of the earlier autonomist movement. In retrospect, the autonomists ended up replicating the sect form (albeit with some anarchist-influenced language) and suffered the familiar consequences of this organizing technique. It is worth noting that after misappropriating numerous mass parties (the Alabama chapter of CPUSA, the Bolsheviks, Rosa Luxemburg’s KPD) as successful examples of the “parties of autonomy” model, CounterPower leaves out any mention of Autonomia Operaia in the updated version of its essay. This is somewhat understandable as the movement collapsed within two years and failed to achieve its aims, but it is still dishonest. If failures are glossed over rather than rigorously examined, we are doomed to walk blindly into past mistakes. In this regard, CounterPower’s update to their essay does more to obfuscate the party question than answer it.

That said, Autonomia Operaia activists had valid criticisms of the Communist Party of Italy and could have created an alternative to lead the proletariat to victory. This is the positive lesson we can learn from them: when the “official” communist party of the nation abandons its principles, it can sometimes be worthwhile to build an alternative organization. However, they chose instead to create a loose collective of semi-aligned communist clusters which failed to coordinate their actions and create meaningful change. Had they taken on the arduous task of debating long-term strategy and forging programmatic unity, things may have turned out differently. This is the primary lesson we should learn from the Italian autonomists: a proletarian victory requires structure, democratic discipline, and unity of action. 

Although not directly influenced by Autonomia’s answer to the party question, the FMLN-FDR of El Salvador could be theorized as an example of an “area of the party”. As CounterPower pointed out in their essay, this network was composed of five revolutionary parties and a number of mass organizations and civil society institutions who worked together in loose cooperation towards revolution. It ultimately failed, and CounterPower makes two interesting claims about its dissolution: that the failure was due primarily to the popular front reformism of the PCS (one of the five member parties) and that its downfall does not tarnish its status as a positive example of the area of the party in action. These claims do not fare well under the spotlight of historical scrutiny, particularly when shined on the brutal internecine violence that destroyed any semblance of unity within the movement by 1983. 

CounterPower’s assessment of the FMLN identifies the PCS (Communist Party of El Salvador) as the weakest link in the chain, and the FPL (Farabundo Martí Liberation People’s Forces) as the strongest. In many ways, this is true, as the popular front strategy of the official communist parties has consistently ended in disaster the world over and the FPL was the most powerful and trusted party in El Salvador for a time. However, this is not the whole picture. Genuine political disagreements were often buried or papered over to maintain an artificial unity, and the ensuing tension was bound to boil over. While our autonomist comrades say the FMLN established a harmonious “mechanism of communication, coordination, and cooperation among the various politico-military organizations”, the reality is far grimmer. In its disagreement with other parties advocating negotiations with the Salvadoran government, the FPL resorted to gruesome assassinations to enforce its will on the rest of the FMLN. In April of 1983, FPL cadre Rogelio Bazzaglia murdered pro-negotiation leader Ana Maria with an ice pick, stabbing her 83 times. Although there was an attempt to blame the CIA or another party within FMLN, when presented concrete evidence of Bazzaglia’s guilt, FPL leader Salvador Cayetano Carpio promptly wrote a suicide note and shot himself in the head. With its most trusted leaders either disgraced, dead, or both, the FMLN lost steam after many members left the network in disgust. Along with this exodus of valuable cadre went all the legitimacy of the anti-negotiation faction, and so by 1989 even successful military offensives could do nothing more than bring the Salvadoran government to the negotiation table.9 The revolutionary potential of the FMLN died with Ana Maria, and her murder demonstrates how the “area of the party” approach only ends up recreating the problems of the sect form.

The Marxist Center

The US communist movement is essentially home to three different camps regarding the party question. Those who wish to see the movement divided into bureaucratic sects (with the belief that their particular sect is the One True Party) are on the right. Those who wish to see the movement divided into loosely aligned autonomist sects (with the beliefs outlined in CounterPower’s writing) are on the left. Those of us in the center are advocating a qualitative break with the sect form: the foundation of a mass party of organizers. This idea is often associated with a number of inaccurate claims—for instance, we are frequently lumped in with those who wish to replicate the worst aspects of the DSA model, where anyone can join the organization at any time for any reason without even committing to Marxist politics. We are also often accused of wanting to create a dogmatic bureaucracy of staunch Marxist-Leninists who will run the party as they see fit without input from membership. Neither of these claims are true.

In fact, what we desire is a party made and run by the masses themselves. Years of labor-intensive organizing will be necessary to make this happen, as the masses cannot be reached and welcomed into the socialist movement any other way. Tenant and workplace unions, unemployed councils, harm reduction efforts, solidarity networks, and other forms of “mass organizations” (in addition to independent electoral efforts) must be formed and rallied around a common political pole. In order for this pole to exist in the first place, the organizers engaged in mass work must debate and discuss until they articulate and agree on a comprehensive political program. In order for these debates and discussions to produce a clear program, the organizers have to see themselves as part of a common organization aimed at a shared goal. When each of these elements fall into place, something completely unique to the US left will be born: a mass party committed to praxis, programmatic unity, and democratic discipline.

By praxis, we understand a long-term commitment to building, growing, and maintaining the kinds of mass organizations detailed above. By programmatic unity, we mean collective acceptance of a comprehensive set of answers to long-term strategic questions, forged in an extended process of comradely debate and compromise. Ideally, this would take the form of a minimum-maximum program like those laid out and critiqued by Marx, Engels, and others in the first two Internationals.10 The minimum demands are structural reforms that communicate to the working class exactly how our efforts will improve their lives and empower them at the political level. Demands like guaranteed healthcare and housing, eliminating the Electoral College, Senate, and Supreme Court, disbanding the police and forming workers’ militias, ensuring union representation, and more would bring supporters into the fold and give us access to valuable comrades and organizers. They are chosen in such a way that when every demand is met, the proletariat has seized political power from the bourgeoisie and becomes the governing class of society. 

With this done, the new workers’ government can focus on fulfilling the maximum demands, epitomized as communism, which would eradicate the last vestiges of capitalism and transition to a socialist mode of production. Establishing unity on long-term questions of strategy is far superior to enforcing a “party-line” on day-to-day issues and theoretical minutiae. It allows us to collaborate and exert the greatest possible combined strength of the working class in its diverse struggles without splitting over short-term tactical disagreements like “should we partner with this NGO on this tenant organizing project?” or subcultural arguments like “who was in the wrong at Kronstadt?” It also does not require agreement on “tendency” labels (such as Marxist-Leninist, anarchist, left-communist, etc). As our organizations grow, the need for a commonly accepted program will only increase. Finally, by democratic discipline, we refer to the old axiom “diversity of opinion, unity of action”.

These three principles are absolutely essential for the functioning of an effective and battle-ready proletarian party. As we have seen, the organizational forms of sectarians and autonomists (like the KAPD and Autonomia Operaia respectively) crumble under pressure whereas mass parties regularly weather brutal repression. No better example of this can be found in US history than that of the Alabama chapter of the CPUSA:

The fact is, the CP and its auxiliaries in Alabama did have a considerable following, some of whom devoured Marxist literature and dreamed of a socialist world. But to be a Communist, an ILD member, or an SCU militant was to face the possibility of imprisonment, beatings, kidnapping, and even death. And yet the Party survived, and at times thrived, in this thoroughly racist, racially divided, and repressive social world.11

While other cases of this phenomenon (the Russian Communist Party, the Chinese Communist Party, and others) have been historically prone to corruption, preventative measures can be taken to ensure the party retains its mass character even after smashing the state and beginning socialist reconstruction. The most immediate step in this process is the collaborative drafting of and universal agreement on a party-wide Code of Conduct. This will facilitate the development of a comradely culture that balances rigorous critique and debate with an environment of pluralism and interpersonal care. In addition to understanding how to have a one-on-one organizing conversation, we should also strive to be well-versed in skills like listening, openly sharing feelings, assuming good faith in arguments, making sincere apologies, and offering support to comrades struggling with personal issues. None of these can be learned by accident in the alienated social spaces created by capitalism, so we must make a deliberate effort to establish these norms in our organization. 

Another would be taking seriously the moral dimensions of Fidelismo’s contribution to Marxism. In stark contrast with both Stalin’s iron fist and Allende’s naive pacifism, Fidel Castro’s leadership of the Cuban revolution combined violent insurrection against the state with peaceful political maneuvering in the revolutionary movement. Over the course of protracted struggle on both fronts, the July 26th Movement was able to defeat the state militarily and construct a democratic mandate for political hegemony. Because Fidel and his comrades took the ethical implications of revolutionary struggle seriously, they were able to achieve victory without recourse to war crimes against the enemy or lethal violence against political competitors within the movement.12 This commitment to moral conduct during violent struggle did not stop them from winning the war. In fact, it allowed them to win the peace. This strategy allowed Cuba to begin building socialism after national liberation without the deadly internecine conflicts that plagued other revolutionary movements (notably including the FMLN). It is crucial that we embrace this legacy by constructing an ethic of revolution for our time. More steps beyond these will of course be necessary, and their exact nature will become clear as we work towards the realization of a comradely culture together.

Perhaps the strongest indicator of the need for a mass party is the fact that the most advanced sections of the US labor movement are already calling for the establishment of a workers’ party. In its recent pamphlet Them and Us Unionism, United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) wrote:

Throughout our history, UE has held that workers need our own political party. In the 1990s, UE worked with a number of other unions to found the Labor Party, under the slogan ‘The Bosses Have Two Parties, We Need One of Our Own.’ Although the Labor Party experiment was ultimately unsuccessful, UE members and locals have been active in numerous other efforts to promote independent, pro-worker alternatives to the two major parties.13

Other labor unions like ILWU and the Teamsters have produced leading organizers who share UE’s commitment to independent worker politics. People like Clarence Thomas, who helped organize the Juneteenth port shutdown on the West Coast earlier this year in solidarity with the George Floyd uprising, Chris Silvera, who chairs the National Black Caucus in the Teamsters, and many more can be found among them. These influential voices of the labor movement have united in Labor and Community for an Independent Party, stating:

We must build democratically run coalitions that bring together the stakeholders in labor and the communities of the oppressed, so that they have a decisive say in formulating their demands and mapping out a strategy. Most important, we need to put an end to the monopoly of political power by the Democrats and Republicans. The labor movement and the leaders of the Latino and Black struggles need to break with their reliance on the Democratic Party and build their own mass-based independent working-class political party.

While it is certainly possible that these efforts could lead to the establishment of a reformist labor party, it is precisely this possibility that behooves us to get involved. Any union that recognizes the need for independent proletarian political action outside the shop floor can be considered “advanced” compared to business unions aligned with the Democratic Party, and relationships with them should be built as part of a communist intervention in the labor movement. As Marxists, we have a duty not only to organize our class but to bring theoretical clarity to its most active champions. If we continue building strong proletarian fighting organizations and elaborate our vision in a comprehensive program, we will be positioned to guide labor and community leaders of all stripes to the creation of a truly communist political party.

Ultimately, the disparate sects within Marxist Center and the local chapters of the DSA must form tighter bonds and consider internal reforms that would allow us to build the party our class requires. In doing so, we should seek to unite as many far-flung collectives and mass work projects as we can in order to become a true threat to bourgeois hegemony. While staying divided in a loose federation may seem like a viable model to some, history shows that it is not. The autonomists and anarchists in our ranks are dedicated organizers doing valuable work, and we should be grateful for that. However, we would be doing ourselves and them a disservice if we did not offer a comradely critique of their organizational models. 

Communists will always find strength in unity.

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Insurrection and Defeat in Bavaria, 1918–19 (Part 2)

Alexander Gallus concludes his saga on the Bavarian Soviet Republic and tries to draw political lessons from its failures. 

The leader of the Bavarian November Revolution lay on the street in his own blood. As the shocked adjutants gathered around the lifeless body of Kurt Eisner, three soldiers with rifles and hand grenades ran towards them, shouting, “And now we shall pay a visit to Parliament! Time to clean up.” Appalled at this call to revenge, one of Eisner’s associates—Benno Merkle—grabbed one of the soldiers. He pointed at the corpse, crying “Look at the one you want to avenge! If he could say any last words he would say: don’t avenge me!” 1

Renouncing violence and striving for a peaceful revolution, the pacifist followers of Eisner were outdone by the reality they had gotten themselves into. Getting a hold of the nationalist assassin Count Arco von Valley, a crowd pummeled him, shooting his throat and lodging a bullet in his skull. After being brought to the hospital unconscious, at the order of Merkle, von Arco did not stabilize to stand trial for another few months, until August of 1919. With the assassination of Eisner, revolutionary calls overflowed the streets of Munich. During a meeting of Parliament that same day, Erhard Auer—the SPD rival of Eisner—was wounded and two other members of parliament shot from the revolver of a council leader. With the remaining parliamentarians escaping from the city to northern Bavaria, it was clear that the floodgates which were opened would not be closed again any time soon.

As the local poet Oskar Maria Graf described the events following Eisner’s assassination:

The bells started ringing from all church towers, the trams stopped at once, here and there a red flag was being hung out a window with a black ribbon, and a heavy, uncertain silence came down. All people walked downtown, with grimaced faces. . . suddenly a fully laden truck with red flags and machine guns drove by, and from it loudly came calls: ‘Revenge! Revenge for Eisner!’. . . The masses started streaming through the city. This was different than the 7th of November. . . The thousand little storms became one, and a single, dull, dark and uncertain eruption started.” 2

‘Munich’s Awakening’

By all estimates, more than 100,000 of the 600,000 inhabitants of Munich marched at the funeral procession for Eisner. All those vaguely sympathetic to revolution showed up, even those who, in due time, through the extended failure of the revolution, were to be drawn into the fascist reaction around the Thule society and bribed by the German military. Many later SA members and leaders showed their support for the revolution and attended Kurt Eisner’s funeral march alongside Russian prisoners of War. As his authoritative biographer Volker Ullrich shows, Adolf Hitler was a part of the leading procession carrying Eisner’s coffin. 3 Workers and soldiers discussed emotionally how to carry forth the revolution. As it were, however, confusion, phrase-mongering, and anarchistic idealism were on the order of the day in the councils and no effective government came about from the escalation.

Late February negotiations between SPD and USPD in the northern German city of Nürnberg, came to a conclusion, after a week of intense discussion, to form a temporary coalition that was to last a mere three weeks. Feeling safe to recommence a meeting of Parliament for the first time since the tumultuous day (February 21st) of the assassination, the congregation on March 18th voted SPD’s Johannes Hoffmann as Bavaria’s Prime Minister. Within the ruling system of “dual power”, however, this government had little substantial claim to do things as it saw fit, and set its headquarters in the northern Bavarian city of Bamberg.

The eyewitness Ernst Müller-Meiningen says of those tumultuous days, “only those who were in the middle of things back then knew that the government was without real power, that the councils had all the guns, and hence the power”. 4 As mentioned in the first article, councils, despite their harboring of radical sentiment, were tolerated as a safety valve by the bourgeois, through social-democratic politicians and their military friends manipulating and fighting for their politics within them. Indeed, many social-democrats and independent social-democrats were later successful in adding workplace councils to the constitution of Germany, lasting until today.

Many prominent members of the Independent Socialists were strongly in favor of and involved in the struggle for councils, such as Däumig and Koenen nationally or Sauber, Maenner, Hagemeister in Bavaria. This was not meaningfully discouraged by those in the party who in fact feared revolution. It could actually be argued that a naive belief in councils within the party was cleverly utilized by such figures as Haase and Kautsky, who presumably never desired them at all. The belief in councils as bringing about socialism was naive precisely because the mere propagation of and even organizational work for councils (for whose creation there was much effort expended by the Bavarian revolutionaries and Communists) did little to solve the problem of the political leadership of workers. Often, throughout the Bavarian councils, their creation did nothing to further the actual political program needed to get to a system run by workers but saw opportunist demagogues like Hitler (who was as of yet still a politically unknown and awkward figure) get elected as council leaders.

In his article “Driving the Revolution Forward”, Kautsky harshly denounced the Spartacists because of their ‘street actions’ and their calls for ‘total control to the councils’; yet, not a harsh word is dealt to those leftists of his own party, who, according to historians like Morgan and Beyer, were equally or perhaps even more dedicated to the council idea and involved in its implementation than many Communists. With mass strikes in early 1919 shutting down large swaths of the country’s train system, it was the USPD’s most radical party branches which suffered and failed to send delegates to the Berlin Party Conference of March 2 to 6. Comprising roughly 20% of the party’s membership, the USPD’s largest party branch in the town of Halle (a local stronghold of the latter communist party), sent a mere 2 out of 176 delegates. Bavaria, another radical stronghold with almost 10% of the party’s members nationally, sent a meager 4 delegates. 5 The believability to which this was just mere coincidence, without foul play or party machinations, must be left to the reader’s imagination.

At the Party Congress, it was the party left’s most well-known figure, Däumig, who was elected as party chair, next to Hugo Haase. As a reminder, it was Haase who had (although, begrudgingly) stood before the Reichstag to read the Social-Democratic Party’s statement in favor of the Kaiser’s war credits… Causing an unprecedented scandal at the Berlin Congress, Haase refused to serve as party co-chair with Däumig. Morgan states, “Däumig, never one to push himself forward, then withdrew his candidacy” 6. Largely dominated by empty compromises, the party’s meetings between the 2nd and 6th of March provided no clear plan to approach the German proletariat with, nor one for the future of the party.

The fact that perhaps as many as 50% of its members were not proportionally represented at the congress, was unfortunately not exploited by Däumig and the left, who would have had great cause to stall and explode operations to win members’ sympathy for a fight against the right and ‘moderates’, and for their programmatic aspirations towards a dictatorship of the proletariat. Alas, Däumig, who had wisely called the rebelling Spartacus League a ‘suicide club’, proved himself no grander socialist and revolutionary, failing to transcend the blinding bureaucratic morass of German social-democratic tradition inherent in the USPD. Incapable of translating the urgent needs of workers into clear party program and direction, this party which was to win over a third of the SPD’s branches, failed the people at a crucial moment, when the lives of countless socialists and workers hung in the balance in the face of a militarist repression which sought to violently destroy the popular desire for socialism.

Back in revolutionary Bavaria, Eisner’s USPD successor and delegate Ernst Toller (who had foiled an early assassination attempt on the Prime Minister), scrounged a fighter plane and WWI ace fighter pilot in a last-ditch attempt to reach the Berlin conference. Recounting what was then a novel human experience, Toller wrote:

“Under southern blue skies we start. I sit behind the pilot in a small space. Through a small square hole on the floor bombs had been thrown on human beings and houses during the war, now it serves as my window to the disappearing earth. It’s my first flight. The black forest, the green fields, the tan mountains and valleys become flat, colorful, fenced in squares from a kids toybox, bought in a store, put together from kids hands. Suddenly clouds tower over us, the earth is covered in fog, strangely pulling me to it. The desire to fall, to sink comfortably, confuses my senses. […] Suddenly the airplane swoops down, sinking, and before I can put on my safety belt the machine whizzes down vertically towards the earth and drills its nose into the field.” 7

Surviving the crash landing in rural Bavaria with mere bruises and bloody noses, Toller and his pilot stumbled through the field to take shelter at a restaurant, ominously filled with conservative peasants, before hijacking a train and returning to Munich. Returning for the all-council congress, Toller reacted harshly to his party colleague Felix Fechenbach’s speech, which warned of an impending civil war and urged them to further negotiate with the bourgeois government of Parliament. Two days later Ernst Toller was elected head of the USPD in Bavaria. Splitting the party from the national USPD, he promised in a lofty speech to abandon its prior cooperation with the SPD, to not participate in Parliament, intending instead to work towards establishing a dictatorship of the Proletariat and cooperating with the Communist Party, (KPD), which began to have a local presence with the opening of their Münchner Rote Fahne on February 28th. It, in turn, had no intention of cooperating with the soft-hearted successors of Eisner.

Eugen Leviné

At the beginning of March, the Berlin Central Committee of the KPD sent, among others, the Russian born revolutionary Eugen Leviné to Bavaria (not to be confused with the ‘idol’ of Bavarian communists, Max Levien). Upon his arrival in Munich, Levine commented in a letter to his wife that “my friends here are most childish.” Against their “naive” support for the anarchists and idealistic council leaders, he strove to tactfully educate the local KPD members. Valuing the importance of making clear to workers certain necessary goals of struggle through speeches and articles, introducing cadre building to the KPD local – and setting a strong contrast to the vague prophetic moralism of Eisner and his successor – he, not unlike many of his party comrades, neglected the importance of other matters of politics. Before being sent to take over the Münchner Rote Fahne, Leviné had tremendous success agitating for the KPD in the Rhineland at the onset of the November revolution, but was of the minority KPD delegates at its founding congress which voted to boycott working for the advancement of communist views within both parliament and the reformist trade unions

Beside the eternal debates within Munich’s councils, the SPD government of Hoffman was busily consolidating its power in northern Bavaria with the Army, reneging on its pledge to keep various USPD members on its cabinet. The independent organization of right-wing death squads, such as the Knight von Epp’s Freikorps division, meanwhile accelerated. Incidentally, one of von Epp’s local Munich recruits was the rapist Josef Meisinger, later executed Second World War criminal and “Butcher of Warsaw” as he was to be known in his employ as Commander for the Nazis. The declaration of a Soviet Republic in Hungary on March 21st of 1919, with the communist Bela Kun at its head, only accelerated the revolutionary ambitions of the mass of workers and soldiers, and also the activity of this reaction.

Communist poster from revolutionary Bavaria: ‘For 8 hour work day, higher wages and development of social laws’

With the victory of the communist-led council revolution of Hungary, revolutionary dreams became very widespread in Bavaria. Just six days before Hungary’s new declaration, the Soviet government of Ukraine sat in Kiev after the Bolshevik’s successful military offensive against the German puppet regime there. That meant that only Austria – where the tremendous level of working-class organizing in Red Vienna saw solidarity calls for a Soviet government, and massive socialist demonstrations grew larger daily – stood in the way of the Bavarian Soviets having a land connection to Soviet Russia. Lenin promised to send three million Russian soldiers to secure the European revolution.

While the Munich KPD was busily responding with an excited and optimistic communique to the Hungarian revolutionaries, Eugen Leviné was not unaware of the leviathan and consuming struggle in Russia as well as the danger of the Bavarian situation:

“It seems to me that in Munich far too much importance is placed on high politics and that an excessive preoccupation with the problems of a great future results in neglecting the essential tasks of the moment, vital for establishing that future. True, we defend the principles of the Soviet system but we have yet to create the prerequisites to guarantee the establishment of that system. These prerequisites do not exist, and, while at the Bavarian Soviet Congress, Comrade [Max] Levien advocated and defended on principle the Soviet system, he will surely share my opinion that the proclamation of a Bavarian Soviet Republic under the prevailing conditions of the country, would be disastrous and would have disastrous consequences.” 8

These “prerequisites” to him were not just the consolidation of the Communist Party to win a stated majority in Soviets, but for communists to actually enhance their activity in, and themselves further the building of councils. His belief was that Communists ought to “speed up the building of revolutionary workers’ organizations[!]. . . We must create workers’ councils out of the factory committees and the vast army of the unemployed.” The indecisiveness of such vague terminology by Levine was unfortunately not restricted to mere rhetoric. It was more so the highest expression of communist politics in revolutionary Bavaria.

The reality and actual situation of “high politics” in Germany and Bavaria were, however, that overall a third of all parliamentary votes went to the SPD and another two-thirds to liberal and conservative parties, with marginal (yet not insignificant) votes for the USPD. The Munich KPD and Levine’s approach – of on the one hand attempting to criticize left illusions, while on the other encouraging it in its active delusions, ordering workers and party members in Munich to organize councils – was contradictory and, indeed, dangerous and reckless; This is simply because of the immense size and domineering strength of that camp in Germany which infamously advertised themselves making “Sausages out of Spartacists”.

Calls by the 1st Bavarian infantry regiment and worker demonstrations for a pronouncement of a Soviet Republic of Bavaria rose to a fever pitch in the first week of April. SPD delegates from nearby Augsburg, compelled by the general mood and at their members’ forceful insistence, were sent to Munich with the demand to proclaim a Soviet republic. Emerging coalition talks in Munich by representatives of the USPD, SPD, Farmers’ Union, and anarchists were all joyously unified in their desire to fulfill the goal of creating a Soviet Republic after the model of Hungary. Dreading the growing influence of the KPD, military leader Schneppenhorst, the ‘Noske of Nürnberg’, and the SPD, participated in this ‘council republic’ from above in order to manipulate proceedings, stall and buy time for their military consolidations.

Asserting that this premature “seizure of power” by the Soviets would play directly into the hands of their more nefarious enemies and drown the councils in blood, Levine unpopularly interrupted the second coalition meeting with a speech denouncing the proclamation of this ‘pretend Soviet Republic’, refusing any cooperation in the government. Spending the last of Rosa Levine’s savings on taxi fares, the KPD sent speakers throughout the city for two days, trying to warn the people of the inevitable and dangerous failure of this proposed republic. Regardless, two days later, on April 7th, the people of Munich woke up to the news that they were, as of midnight, now living in a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. On the same day, most large cities and provinces of the state of Bavaria proclaimed their allegiance to this new “era of the end of Capitalism” as well.

It did not take long for this sham Soviet republic to be exposed as such, and the Rote Fahne fervently expressing the Communists’ desire to build a ‘real soviet republic’. Nürnberg’s central council had voted to oppose joining the Soviet Republic, hence giving the SPD government of Hoffman a last refuge in the state, and a base to organize against the frivolous revolution. Quickly, within just two days, the central councils in city after city were being overrun and rendered useless by counter-revolutionary students and soldiers. In Munich the SPD was split in half on a vote whether to support or abstain from the ‘Revolutionary Central Council’ government it had two days earlier encouraged the creation of, at the cynical initiative of Schneppenhorst.

Nonetheless, the new Soviet government, with Toller and his isolated Bavarian Independents at the helm, went about holding erratic meetings and signing declarations. With lots of discussions and ‘little positive constructive work’ as anarchist leader Mühsam later honestly reflected, discontent and confusion widespread among workers and soldiers. Levine’s biting critiques of the sham soviet republic very well held back little in his articles. Moreso, however, his articles heated up the Bavarian situation – a situation that was politically hopeless. Perfectly aware of the Freikorps organizing, the German Army’s rustling, and the SPD’s brutal consolidation of power throughout the country with Noske’s martial law over Germany, he agitated for a day where, “soon”, the actual Soviet Republic was to come.

One of the ‘sham’ Soviet Republic’s ministers sent a message to Lenin in Moscow, describing an almost magical unity of social-democrats, independents and communists. While this was not untrue for some of the parties’ members, it ignored the fact that this utilitarian unity of circumstance had in fact not been a long fought out, sober, and principled unity en masse, but a hair-brained and dysfunctional unity achieved among an absolute minority facing dire odds. The arming of the working class, it was concluded, was to not be pursued on a systematic level. Implicitly, though not explicitly, this was the case because people like Toller were aware of their weak situation, that the German political majority of Social-Democrats and conservatives held sway in Bavaria, even if it could not show its strength openly at the moment.

The aggregate of relentless school-boy communist agitation and speechifying for a ‘real’ council republic resulted in a peculiar situation during a worker council meeting at the Mathaeser Brau beer hall; being allotted the council meeting opening speech, Levine’s words against the sham council republic and Ernst Toller were very heated. Things escalated to such an extent, that, by the end of the evening, the Communists declared the central council to be deposed, arrested Toller in the beer hall and declared yet another “revolutionary” general strike. Attempting to disarm the revolutionary guard by the next morning, the Communists are then faced with a strong will by these decried “petty-bourgeois” revolutionaries. Fist fights break out between the communist, USPD/SPD, and other workers. A warning shot is fired into the ceiling of the Mathäser by the government’s revolutionary guard. The general tumult and threats of the revolutionary guard to arrest the communists, in turn, are only pacified by the released Toller, whose futile attempts the next day to agitate against the communist general strike cannot stop the inevitable dynamics.

Meanwhile, Levine, in a private conversation with Mühsam, stated that the council republic was thoroughly stuck in the mud. As a matter of course, he said, one should not let Hoffmann take over or negotiate, but should work to get the council government out of the mud. Instead of acknowledging the utter hopelessness of the situation, communicating it emphatically to the people and entering into negotiations for the survival of the revolutionary movement, the Communists and left Independent Socialists continued to sow illusions in the working class by agitating and organizing for a better, more “communist” council system.

On the night of April 12th, Palm Sunday, the government of Hoffmann staged a Putsch against the Soviet republic. This was the instigator for a mass of outrage among workers. Mostly led by the KPD, workers took to themselves arms and ammunition. Spontaneously mixed together in action, workers from SPD, USPD and the KPD successfully disarmed a larger troop of counter-revolutionaries in a restaurant by noon of the next day. 9 After heavy fighting for the rest of the 13th, the revolutionary workers of Munich, led by the communist sailor Egelhofer, were the uncontested, and now armed, power in the capital city.

Thereafter, the revolutionaries disbanded the previously elected council leadership and formed a council’s Revolutionary Action Committee, with Levine at its head and two of its five seats handed to left Independents. Simultaneously, an advance of counter-revolutionary white troops marched towards Munich from the north, quickly cutting through scattered resistance. Ernst Toller caught word of the attack and, grabbing some comrades and supplies, headed towards the front in the nearest automobile. Reaching the suburb of Allach they encountered their men fleeing and a few isolated reds fighting back. Returning with heavy machine gun fire of their own and giving chase on horses, the red soldiers won back the main street and town of Allach. Roughly 10 kilometers and two towns had been won in two days of fighting before successfully driving back the white soldiers, beyond a creek and swamps by Dachau and the people disarming them in the town.

Declaring a six-day long strike for the workers to organize into a Red Army, the new central council, or Revolutionary Action Committee, was aware that, at this point, there was little way out except war. They had drawn blood, embarrassed the enemy (prideful German soldiers) by winning the battle of Dachau and formally organized a formidable Red Army, outnumbering all reactionary Bavarian military and paramilitary forces. Yet not even the seizure of power by the reds could change the ruling political balances in the land or the country; nor could the Soviet Republic of Bavaria convey the certainty of scientific socialism to the hearts and minds of Germans generally overnight through leaflets and propaganda, had they even had the organization or resources to carry out such campaigns. Bavaria was, in the overly-optimistic minds of a few (looking to its neighbor Austria and Red Vienna), to become the center for ‘carrying Bolshevism to Europe’. But as Levine had accurately described and predicted earlier, a truly revolutionary and communist Bavaria would be isolated. With none of its bordering states or nations continuing trade with the state, the economy would wither and its people starve.

In contrast to its two predecessors, the new government was at least able to introduce some routine under Levine’s leadership. However, this “routine” was strained to maintain a serious and confident character, given that there had been no preparations by the KPD to rule. Essential operations like telephone services were out of order after employees joined the bourgeoisie, with red soldiers wasting valuable days attempting to scrounge capable personnel, not just in idle telephone operations. At its headquarters in the former royal family’s Wittelsbach Palace, the Communist government was overrun by and felt compelled to listen to the fantastic plans of countless ‘dreamers and cranks’, in the hopes of winning administrative support and technical knowledge from the people. A task that apparently had been considered or planned for by the Communists as little as it had by the Independent Socialists.

Since March the miniscule KPD had refused cooperation with the USPD, on the grounds that that party was unsure of what it wanted and deluded by idealism. While this characterization by Levine was not inaccurate, the Communists themselves were just as deluded about the prospects of the revolution. In a speech to Berlin workers in 1917, Levine stated:

“The USPD hung around our necks like a millstone. . . We must put an end to this unnatural alliance, this marriage of fishes and young lions. We cannot possibly act the part of the whip that drives the independents to the ‘left’. How can there be an alliance between a whip and a donkey which digs in its heels and declares: ‘You can go on whipping, but I won’t budge.’ If we continue to ally ourselves with the USPD we shall be the donkeys!” 10

In reality, the Communists were just as much cripplingly dragged towards the earth by the USPD’s adventurist or conciliatory millstones on their own as they would have been if they were working side by side. It is clearly more effective to challenge someone’s views within institutions that purport to have a democratic culture when standing close to them,  being able to reference commonly known principles and norms. The fact is that Levine failed to understand that while one may not be able to move a set Party anyway one wishes, one can influence its members and win influence over certain elements in a party’s leadership if that party is not yet clearly delineated for or against socialist revolution.

Long awaited, the final crackdown of the German reaction came upon Bavaria in the last week of April and the first week of May. Closing in around the capital, White Army forces, commanded by SPD military leader Noske from Berlin, committed many indiscriminate massacres with impunity. Executions of 30 Red prisoners in Starnberg on April 29th, a suburb 25 kilometers southwest of Munich, sparked outrage and tough fighting for the next few days on Munich’s western suburbs. While many of the most violent massacres were in fact perpetrated by the Freikorps groups, such as that of von Epp, it was the SPD leaders’ Army directives and ‘Execution Orders’ which provided the legal framework and policy for the ensuing slaughter. Lenin’s speech in Moscow on the 1st of May, proclaiming that the international day of Labor was being celebrated not just in Soviet Russia but also Soviet Bavaria, was not entirely up-to-date with developments.

A week-long civil and armed resistance by the Augsburg workers 60 kilometers west of Munich had been put down by the German Army on April 23rd. As a result of these experiences, White Army soldiers became increasingly frustrated at the guerrilla tactics of their enemies. In response to the grisly murders in the town of Starnberg, Munich city and Red Army commander Rudolf Egelhofer executed ten hostages from royal families and the Thule society, being held at the Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich. Used unanimously, by virtually all newspapers except the communist papers, as the only verifiable propaganda piece against the ‘bestial’ Soviet Republic, the unfortunate executions proved further fervor for the hatred of German Army soldiers against the ‘Bolshevik hordes’, leading to, among many others, 53 Russian POWs being murdered in the tiny suburb of Gräfelfing. It had been the German Army which introduced the execution of hostages and prisoners of war in the course of WW1. If anything, the Luitpold executions showed the weakness and lack of authority which the Red Army command had. For 30 Reds murdered in Starnberg by the whites (among many others), only 10 Thule Society reactionaries were executed. Hardly a punishing response.

Nevertheless, resistance against the whites was fierce, especially in Dachau, where the Red Army had proven itself capable of winning in battle. By April 30th, however, Egelhofer had reversed the ordered offensive from Dachau to take the adjacent northern German airport of Schleissheim and ordered a complete retreat to the city. More and more red officers at this point had defected, discipline within the Republic’s forces weakened by the failing course of events. Many returning soldiers from Dachau simply abandoned their post and duty due to demoralization at the ongoing political disputes between the USPD and KPD.

With the entrance of the Army into the city, pockets of armed resistance within the small area of Munich’s city’s limits lasted for three days, seeing bomber planes, artillery, flamethrowers, and conventional military and machine gun weaponry unloaded on the last fighters in the city. For weeks, public opinion was ruthless towards the ‘Spartacists’, with Army soldiers beating and killing many thousands, many victims completely unrelated to the Soviet Republic’s organization or its defense – Red soldiers, Catholics, Jews, Russians, older women, younger women, and older men, it did not matter to the German soldier. Once the rules of war were unleashed by the nation and turned inward, it proved hard to stop the killing, for another generation.

“Everywhere there were long moving rows of arrested workers, beaten bloody and bruised, with their hands in the air. To their sides, behind and in front of them, soldiers marched, yelling when a tired arm wanted to fall, rifle butting their ribs, thrusting blows with their fists on those trembling.  […] They are all my brothers, I thought contritely. […] They had all been dogs like myself, had to submit and cower their wholes lives, and now, because they wanted to bite, they are beaten to death.  […] For days, all one heard were the arrests and executions. […] The Soviet Republic had ended. The Revolution was defeated, the firing squads at work industrially…” 11

The German November and Bavarian revolutions had drawn to it large segments of the population which had been pushed to their brink physically and mentally through the experiences and consequences of the war, returning to an incredibly unequal and corrupt capitalist society. Many participants had little theoretical education on or understanding of socialism. With the dragged out failure of the revolution, its eventual bitter defeat and the physical destruction of its strongest leaders, many of its followers sought promise and leadership elsewhere. Enlisting as a Red Army soldier in April for the communist Bavarian Soviet Republic, and fighting for it, Julius Schreck became a close confidant of Adolf Hitler as well as the founding leader of the SS. Schreck went on to practice his revolutionary experience as an organizer for the Nazi’s infamous 1923 ‘Beerhall Putsch’ in Munich. 12

Red Army commander Rudolf Egelhofer’s execution

The cooption of the German worker movement’s aesthetic and socialist rhetoric for Fascism was not an invention of Hitler’s. Rather, it came from the cynical businessmen of the Thule Society and other bourgeois in the form of the DAP (German Worker’s Party) and was a clear tool used by these terrified gentlemen to reign in the mass discontent among the people. In fact, instead of joining the Thule Society inspired Freikorps groups which were mobilizing and attacking the Soviet Republic and Communists (such as Röhm, Wessel or even Strasser), the little clues left of Adolf Hitler’s activity point to an undecided man; one who participated in the revolution and who in July of 1919 was told to infiltrate the DAP for the German military who kept him employed. The rest of that story is well known.

Eugen Levine’s comment that there was too much focus on “high politics” (a reference to prolonged USPD/anarchist negotiations with the majority SPD and bourgeois representatives) was a curious comment in retrospect and one which, among other actions, shows his sectarianism and leftist deviation. The Munich Communists had a deep-seated tradition of tailing party-advertent anarchists who, as Hans Beyer says, might have been subjectively ‘real’ revolutionaries, but whose actions objectively thwarted the survival and success of the revolution. It was, in fact, the culturally dominant political trend of socialist idealism within the Munich left which was responsible for many of the aggressive and fatal delusions so deeply entrenched in the minds of the Bavarian militant minority, not the realistic “high politics” of “moderate” Independent Socialists like Felix Fechenbach.  

An unfortunate comment by Munich’s later Communist Party chief, Hans Beimler, addressed to the Nazis, that ‘We will see you again in Dachau!’, was sneeringly pounced upon and paraded by the Bavarian bourgeois press when their Heinrich, Heinrich Himmler, founded Nazi Germany’s first concentration camp in the bastion of Bavarian socialism, Dachau. In 1933, on his way to being detained to the concentration camp, Felix Fechenbach was shot by the SS for ‘attempting to escape’. Thankfully history is not static, however, and the final words at the camp were spoken from behind an assembly of Springfield and M1 Garand rifles. Yet, the real story and significance of Dachau have, as a consequence, yet to be told.

The tragic destiny of all the promising revolutionary leaders – from Levine, Egelhofer, Fechenbach to even the young Toller, but especially the thousands of nameless Republican defenders who paid the ultimate price, as well as innocent bystanders – should not be ours to embrace and elevate, but one to mourn, remember and learn from. Revolutionary adventurism and immature politics, both outside, but especially within its ranks, was not thoroughly confronted by the KPD, making the consequences of failing to circumvent and warn of the pompous and sardonic schemes of the willing and unwitting agents of capital long lasting and painful. Unlike few other places and moments in the chronology of the worker’s movement, the revolution of Bavaria displays clearly the importance of an intelligent socialist politics, and ought to be heeded as an ominous warning and lesson of history.

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Conciliation and Insurrection in Bavaria 1918–19 (Part 1)

What political lessons can be learned from the failed Bavarian Soviet Republic? Alexander Gallus takes a deep dive into the history of this famous moment from the German workers’ movement and aims to draw contemporary lessons for revolutionary Marxist politics.  

As World War I came to an end, it became clear, contrary to the Kaiser’s war propaganda, that Germany was losing and would concede losses to the Allies. Changes would come and were already coming to Germany. However, the Social-Democratic Party of Germany, which had irresponsibly betrayed its foundational principles to overthrow capitalism and its state order, by supporting the Kaiser’s war, became the main political benefactor of the eventual German Revolution. Discontent and horror at the practical dictatorship of the wartime Army were widespread, and a multiplicitous opposition within the SPD split into an Independent Socialist Party, or USPD. While still small in 1917 at its inception, it was to gain a third of all branches from the SPD within three years. In Bavaria, the Independent Socialists became famous for agitating the January Munitions strike in which 8,000 workers organized in an attempt to thwart military production.

While the USPD had many tendencies and was not certain in its political mission, it became a politically relevant party that genuinely threatened the SPD from the left. While the senseless war which had already been lost continued, zealous Generals still demanded soldiers to fight and give their lives for the pride of the nation. In response to the Navy’s order on October 24th to take to high seas once more, the rebellion of sailors in northern Germany to take over the Kiel navy base instigated what was to become the German ‘November Revolution’. Counterintuitively, it was in conservative Bavaria where, with the SPD dominating the USPD’s smallest local, Germany’s first monarchy was overthrown. Beginning at the expansive Theresienwiese and site of the yearly Oktoberfest, the revolutionary procession of November 7th was planned and instigated by the local offshoot of the SPD, the Independent Socialists, and radicals around Eisner. Having been a powerful leader of the Social-Democratic Party before and at the outset of the war, Eisner fell out with the right-wing leadership of the party over his war-opposition and was labeled a left-wing detractor, later to join the founding congress of the USPD.

The Bavarian revolution spanned from November 1918 to May 1919.

USPD election poster

Kurt Eisner had just been released from Stadelheim prison a few days ago. It had been half a year that he had endured in the Bavarian King’s jails for supporting the January Munitions strike. Many of his incarcerated comrades had not. Clara Zetkin and Eisner had mourned deeply over their friend Sonja Lerch’s suicide inside the prison, that fiery woman whom the bourgeois press called the Russian ‘steppe fury’ and understood that “she roused the workers stronger than Eisner”. (Gerstenberger, pg. 295) Every day since the sailor’s mutiny a week before, the tension and excitement among Munich’s people and socialists rose as the size of the demonstrations grew. Two nights ago Eisner felt compelled to send the crowd home, promising more within ’48 hours’. Now here he was, standing in the sunlight under the towering Bavaria statue, looking over the gathering on the Theresienwiese. There were significantly more people assembled here today, by all estimates 10%-20% of Munich’s population.

Auer, the local SPD leader, had been compelled by his members to organize and attend this anti-war and hunger protest on November 7th, assuring the Imperial Minister of the Interior that he would maintain control of the situation. As ever more people came to listen to the speakers it quickly became clear that most had no time to spare for Auer’s empty promises of a future peace and distant socialism, and that the SPD orderlies had no control over the free movement of the crowds. Sailors, soldiers on leave, as well as soldiers who simply left their garrisons, came armed and mixed with the workers. It was Eisner who felt the mood of the crowd and followed it. A soldier’s call to his peers of “All soldiers to Eisner!” is dutifully followed as Eisner’s speaker section fills up. (Schmolze, pg. 89) Discussions about the seriousness of the situation are conducted among the crowd. As the revolutionary conviction and excitement grew, the growing calls of “Peace!” and “Up With the World Revolution” are met with heckles and jeers from the SPD section. There is a moment of silence. The tension is great and only interrupted by Felix Fechenbach’s (Eisner’s USPD associate) decisive call to march on the barracks as had been planned two days prior by the local USPD leadership.

How much longer were they expected to suffer kill and die for the luxuries of the royal families? The winter of 16/17 had starved tens of thousands of Bavarians to death, mostly the vulnerable, young and old. And now with the Spanish flu raging at the start of the next winter the nation was still sending all its resources to the front. They had enough. Today they were not going home. Following Fechenbach’s call and the lead of the group around Eisner, the procession marches northwest. Barracks after barracks sees the soldiers join the revolutionary march and the police pressed against the wall. Knocking on the doors of the ‘Türken barrack’ no one opens and the revolutionaries expect resistance when suddenly a young conscript’s head pops out of an upstairs window and asks “What’s up?”. “What do you think is up? Revolution!” (pg.91)

In response, the Imperial Bavarian military was trying not to lose total control over their Bavarian regiments. After tens of thousands of Munich and surrounding Army forces proved rebellious they had only two reliable divisions left to send to Munich, one being Prussian. A Bavarian division en route to the Alps of the Tyrolean war front was turned around midway and sent back towards Munich. On its way back to mute the burgeoning worker-peasant and soldier councils, this Bavarian division’s shock troops were met not by one but two whole revolutionary automobiles which successfully disarmed them. The incoming Prussian division was similarly met with red guards laced with belts full of hand grenades and rifles slung over their backs, on the outskirts of Munich, informing them not entirely soberly that “Brothers, Comrades, it’s over with the Slavery – don’t raise your weapons against your brothers, throw them away!” (pg. 120) And in unison they did.

Of all states, the Bavarians were the most conservative of Germans, yet they were the first to overthrow the dynasty and proclaim the Republic, in which the revolutionary councils were to take a leading role. While the Munich Independent Socialists (USPD) indeed had very few members in October of 1918 (Morgan, pg. 156) there is reason to believe that the release from prison of the popular January strike organizers, including Eisner and his colleagues (as well as the USPD left around Fritz Sauber and August Hagemeister), led to a rapid increase in worker membership, numbering in the multiple thousands by the time of the revolution. The party local had numbered in the thousands earlier that year, and now the size of the demonstrations and participation of workers, and especially soldiers, grew exponentially every other day in the week since the prisoners’ release.

After the idealistic intellectual leaders successfully took power, the Bavarian November revolution had the historic fortune of firstly being underestimated, and secondly evading immediate military repression. Having been mostly composed of bohemian intellectuals and poets which gathered at pubs and cafes, the group around Eisner and himself (which included a popular blind peasant leader) were apparently significantly out of touch with the realities of politics. Being hopelessly outnumbered by the size of the SPD, the USPD had an ill-fated future if it was to rely on the working class to successfully wield power. The strength of Eisner’s personality, however, dedication to pacifism, intellectual ability, and radical turn to the revolutionary mood of the time all resulted in his popularity; his relatively uncontested stature among revolutionary socialists and rebellious workers in Munich resulted in a situation where there was no serious socialist rival to decide the course of the November revolution. This is, at least, so far as existing historical record is concerned.

Invited to Berlin in 1898 by Wilhelm Liebknecht to improve qualitative content, Eisner’s chief editorial position at the SPD party newspaper Vorwärts ended after 5 productive years when he refused to publish two polemical statements by then party chair August Bebel, who reacted with a healthy temper. (Gerstenberger) Refusing to accept the reality of the harshness and skullduggery of party politics, Eisner moved back to Bavaria to write about the virtues of a libertarian socialism and poetry, as well as warning against a coming war in the Bavarian Social-democratic newspaper. While not being unjustly labeled as a revisionist by the Orthodox Marxists of the SPD, Eisner’s views fit no existing mold. Alongside his colleague Karl Kautsky, Eisner energetically countered Bernstein’s views that socialism could not be scientific and that the party ought to focus on the betterment of workers’ lives in the present instead of distant social goals.

Retaining that a scientific socialism was vital to the worker movement, Eisner’s personal philosophy was however influenced by the “ethical” ideas of Kant and hence differed with Kautsky’s principally causal moral, implicit in the philosophy of historical materialism. After taking the city of Munich by storm and holding a vote in the Mathäserbräu Beerhall on the night of November 7th, the revolutionaries elected Eisner to head the new government. His signed public proclamation was printed on the 8th, including, amid phraseology, that “order will be maintained by the worker and soldier councils”, and, “that the security of persons and property is guaranteed”. (Weidermann, pg. 23)

While the national USPD in its majority at the time of the November revolution certainly rejected capitalism and aimed to replace it with “socialist construction” (Morgan), Eisner’s group thought it better under the circumstances not to verbalize this traditional principle of the workers’ movement once in power. The egregious logic of this example points towards a strategy of appeasement to the authority of the SPD and in this case the actual owners of property. The SPD, as a matter of course, had a dedication to the governance of a capitalist constitution. Instead of denying legitimacy to the wishes of the bourgeois ruling class and SPD leaders, on the basis of their murderous betrayal of principle and irresponsibility, no thorough challenge to the authority of the social-democratic leaders was posed. This meant that when it actually came time for the USPD to govern (if one can call it that, as it was so without plan or routine) the Bavarian council republic ended up asking the SPD to occupy half the government’s ministries.

Although Eisner genuinely strived towards an international rule of councils, he saw no alternative to inviting the SPD if peace was to prevail. Peace at any price, that was Eisner’s mission, even if it meant more workers had to endure being ruled by those who had destructively sold them out. Consequently, the Independent government let itself be dominated by the majority Social-Democratic ministers, who turned to the existing bourgeois-monarchical bureaucratic apparatus for help. (Beyer, pg. 21) The Eisner government thereby threw itself into political paralysis, with hopes that the heterogeneous array of over 600 councils would spontaneously act to help or that the “struggle for the souls” would bear fruit and (almost divinely) intervene. What resulted was a dysfunctional and powerless government, where no one party (neither the alliance of the SPD with the bourgeois-monarchy, nor the USPD and councils) was able to exercise power. The USPD’s hope in councils acting to successfully challenge the dominance of the SPD had failed.

Even dominant soviets or councils, however, in and of themselves clearly don’t lead to successful worker government. First, one should be aware that worker councils initially appeared mostly at workplaces with very large workforces like factories, where large strikes led to sit ins, sit ins to committees for workplace occupation and their interconnection. While frequently effective at the management of workplace production, the efficacy of a system of councils for regional, or even nationwide governance, hinges not on the abstract desirability of workers having more direct involvement in deciding production and their representation, but technical knowledge and the political question. Simply being involved in the act of producing a commodity in return for a wage does not indicate one’s level of education or understanding for what is necessary and beneficial for the working class programmatically. There is also the problem that councils of large and smaller industry, where unionization is high and militant tradition strong, leaves a large part of the population outside the realm of the decision-making process and representation.

The downward trending growth of capitalist production, its tendency to be more and more artificially upheld and the developing “fourth industrial revolution” have seen through western “deindustrialization”, making the vision of soviets universally liberating us from capitalism thoroughly blurred. Naturally, pursuing a hopeful policy of creating councils and pushing it on the mass of people (or rather, pushing the mass of people on to councils…) could result in their more widespread creation beyond large industry etc. If these soviets were more widespread, it would however already imply a significant influence of proletarian ideas on the mass of people and yet still leave the flaws of councils unaddressed. Romanticizing “direct democratic” worker councils as a vehicle for revolution not only is a cheap attempt to tackle the task of representation, it is a dangerous ideal and a potentially fatal mistake for Socialists to engage.

National Assembly elections of late January 1919, although a disastrous humiliation for the USPD, showed that almost 40,000 of the Munich population voted for the party. (Beyer, pg. 42) By this point, while the local USPD right pressured Eisner to step down, the left removed themselves from more party activity. Instead of utilizing the newly won unprecedented freedoms like those of the press and challenging the party’s failed Eisner-leadership from the left, Sauber and others chose to abort the struggle for leadership of members and dived into the councils, later to join the KPD’s adventurism. The experience of many socialists within councils enthralled them at the perception of having found a mass organization of direct democratic control. But in reality, these councils, which were bestowed with so much hope, were nothing more than impotent theaters of mere congregation absent an actual political struggle for authority. The Bavarian Imperial Army officers understood this docile and manipulatable vulnerability of the popular councils, calling on the help of SPD men and soldiers in attempts to control and project their power through them. (Schmolze; Beyer) The diminutive KPD’s founding congress cry of “All Power to the Councils!”, in this light, appears perhaps as delusional as the politics of Eisner’s government.

Leading up to the January electoral defeat, Eisner was increasingly pushed into insignificance by the reality of class struggle. The SPD’s open trend to the right was “countered by a trend to the left among the militants of all the socialist parties, especially in Munich. The Independents, pulling away from Eisner’s moderating influence, consolidated their alliance with the groups to their left, especially after the Berlin disturbances of early January, and the activity of all these groups increased” (Morgan, pg. 161) As Bavaria did not yet have a Communist organization until December 11th with the local emergence of a few inexperienced Spartacists, most of the working class discontent either ran into the befuddled hands of anarchists like Mühsam, politically disinterested syndicalists or isolated communists.

For up to four months Bavaria was in this particular state of paralysis. Whereas Munich was to become the hotbed of right-wing extremism over the next twenty years and the birthplace of Nazism, Bavaria, unlike the rest of Germany, did not yet have an organized Freikorps (mercenary paramilitary group). The bourgeois had failed to organize a counter-revolutionary force in Bavaria for months, turning to the SPD for help in building a “citizens” militia forming as late as December 27th. This maneuver was struck down, and dozens of its members arrested, after USPD delegate Ernst Toller reported on its plans to machine gun the ministry building of Eisner.

Suspended in this fluid and economically unresolved situation, where the Proletariat were tied by the hip to class collaborationists (as in the rest of Germany), little record of an organized public opposition to Eisner from the left exists within this period, although spontaneous actions such as the December occupation of half-a-dozen slanderous bourgeois newspapers did occur (Schmolze pg. 189, organized by soldier council head Sauber [USPD] and others who began a loose, council communist movement). Kautsky himself (perhaps not surprisingly) did not challenge the illusory zeal for and hope in councils of his party’s left, saying in the same breath as defending the genuineness of the SPD’s revolutionary posturing, “…their [the councils’] control made it possible for the old state apparatus to continue to function without bringing about the counter-revolution.” (Kautsky pg. 3)

Systems of communication among the local USPD and communists were unfortunately extremely poor. While numbering at half a dozen Bavarian newspapers later in the year of 1919, the USPD’s own newspaper in Munich, “Die Neue Zeitung”, was founded on December 20th of 1918. (Beyer pg. 35) As a tool of Eisner and those nationally regarded as the party center, it refused to follow the dominant social-democratic agitation against the Spartacists. Proclaiming their paper’s mission to ‘fight against the press’, against bourgeois defamations and prejudices, the Bavarian Independents’ efforts were the most successful of all the country, numbering only a few hundred members for most of 1918, to 40,000 by September of 1919. The success of USPD locals in winning over SPD members was seen principally there where daily papers were established, as the researcher Hartfried Krause shows.

Using Marx to justify the view that capitalist industry had to be rebuilt before socializing it, to then “grow into socialism”, Eisner’s revisionism was never deconstructed before the Bavarian public. To his credit, however, as the political situation in Berlin became more desperate and the Bavarian left radicalized, Eisner’s later statement in support of the workers’ growing frustration and council movement’s desire for power, was, “We have no more patience to push our dreams of Socialism into the distant future; today we live and today we want to act” (Schmolze pg.201) Within this environment of the absolute freedom of the press, a lack of clear proletarian leadership, nor an armed working class, the bourgeois inciters were the benefactors. The Thule society and other splintered anti-semite and nationalist groups flourished in Munich, preying on the ignorant and fearful. One of these pre-fascist types was Count Arco von Valley who wrote in his journal “I hate Bolshevism, I love my Bavarian Volk […]  he [Eisner] is a Bolshevik. He is a Jew, not a German. He betrays the fatherland — so…” (Schmolze, pg. 228) On his way to declare his official resignation, after being forewarned by his associates not to walk from the Ministry over the public street, Eisner was shot twice from behind and immediately dead. It was to be the first shots of the reaction, instigating the second stage and radicalization of the revolution of Bavaria. For now, however, it was the Social-Democratic party which was preparing counter-revolution.

[… to be continued]

References:

Gerstenberger, Günther. Der Kurze Traum vom Frieden. Germany, Hessen: Verlag Edition AV, 2018

Schmolze, Gerhard. Revolution und Räterepublik in München 1918/19 in Augenzeugenberichten. Germany, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1978

Morgan, David W. The Socialist Left and the German Revolution. UK, London: Cornell University Press, 1975

Weidermann, Volker. Träumer. Germany, Cologne: Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2017

Beyer, Hans. Die Revolution in Bayern 1918-1919. East Germany, Berlin: VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1988

Karl Kautsky, Das Weitertreiben der Revolution, Berlin, Freiheit, No. 79, 29th of December 1918