For the last couple of years, Marxists in Germany have been discussing the possibilities of making a revolutionary break from the reformist party Die Linke. This reflects one of the oldest strategic debates among revolutionary socialists: How should the vanguard relate to the mass of the working class?

In late 1847, Marx and Engels offered their famous formula:

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.

But this formula has been incomplete ever since conservative, privileged bureaucracies took over the leadership of the workers’ movement at the end of the 19th century, serving as lieutenants of capital inside the working class. Since 1914 at the latest, it has been clear that revolutionaries need organizations in opposition to reformists. The formula of the Third Communist International, inspired by Lenin, was to build revolutionary parties based on a clear break from reformism and centrism. These parties would then fight to unite the working class in action, via the tactic of the united front, while splitting it politically.

Yet there are still enormous disagreements among Marxists and Leninists: How should revolutionaries break from reformism? What do we do when we are still too weak to found our own party? To think through these questions, it is useful to consider the founding congress of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), which opened in Berlin on December 30, 1918. This congress was preceded by several years of debates among radical leftists in Germany.

The November Revolution of 1918 offers history’s most striking illustration that a revolutionary party is necessary. All the objective conditions for a socialist revolution were present: highly developed productive forces, an enormous working class with socialist consciousness and powerful organizations, and a collapse of the existing bourgeois regime. Millions of workers wanted socialism — but they failed to win it, because they lacked a determined and recognized revolutionary leadership, so they were outmaneuvered by counterrevolutionary leaders at every turn.

Twenty years later, Trotsky explained the defeat of another revolution as follows: “What was lacking was a revolutionary party!” The founding of the KPD was a partial attempt to solve this task. Yet it was founded in the chaotic days of revolution. Trotsky again:

Such a party must be available prior to the revolution inasmuch as the process of educating the cadres requires a considerable period of time and the revolution does not afford this time.

The KPD’s founding was a chaotic mess. The established leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, lost several important votes to a majority of ultra-left delegates who had no strategic vision for winning over the majority of the working class. It took at least two more years to turn the KPD into a revolutionary party — and even then, it still had many birth pangs. For a party, as for a mammal, an overdue birth can end up killing the baby.

The Left during the War

Let’s set the scene. The old Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) was more or less the only political organization of the German workers’ movement. Various tendencies were represented inside it. A growing party bureaucracy, represented by Friedrich Ebert, sought to integrate itself into the imperialist state — this is basically the SPD we know today. But the revolutionary left wing was also a powerful force, controlling some of the largest local organizations and several daily papers. Between those two wings, the “Marxist center” around Karl Kautsky aimed to maintain party unity. The Center was revolutionary in words and reformist in deeds — expressing what Marxists now call “centrism.”

Decisively, the radical Left had no organization of its own. From its perspective at the time, it didn’t need one: Rosa Luxemburg could publish her views in some of the SPD’s biggest newspapers and speak at party events in front of thousands of comrades. By 1910, Luxemburg and Kautsky had ended their relationship. When spontaneous mass protests for equal voting rights broke out in Prussia, Luxemburg wanted to agitate for a general strike, whereas Kautsky called for the proletariat to hold back until the next election campaign. As a result, Kautsky barred Luxemburg from publishing in his theoretical magazine, Die Neue Zeit. There had been a split between the Center and the Left inside the SPD — yet since these were not clearly organized factions, it was barely known to the wider party membership, or to socialists internationally.

In response, we see the genesis of a separate organization of revolutionaries inside the SPD: in late 1913, Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, and Julian Marchlewski (Karski) began publishing the Sozialdemokratische Pressekorrespondenz. But this was only a bulletin sent to social democratic newspapers — just 150 hectographed copies published three times a week. There was still no clearly visible revolutionary opposition inside the SPD.

When the First World War broke out, the often-invoked party unity broke down. The party leadership came out in support of the imperialist war, while the Left tried to stick to its internationalist principles. The Center, as always, vacillated. On August 4, 1914, every SPD deputy in the Reichstag voted in favor of war credits.

So what would the Left do? That evening, half a dozen comrades gathered in Luxemburg’s apartment in Berlin-Südende. They sent out 300 telegrams asking SPD members if they would sign a protest declaration against the SPD’s pro-war policy. They got one single response: from Clara Zetkin in Stuttgart.¹Florian Wilde, Revolution als Realpolitik. Ernst Meyer (1887–1930) — Biographie eines KPD-Vorsitzenden (Hamburg: UVK, 2018), 40–42.

It took seven months, until March 1915, before the radical Left could put out its own newspaper, Die Internationale. It was immediately banned and confiscated by the police. It was 10 more months before the Left started publishing an illegal bulletin, the Spartacus Letters. They finally founded a group on January 1, 1916 — colloquially known as the Spartacus Group. As a clear example of their lack of experience with conspiratorial work, this extremely dangerous meeting took place at Liebknecht’s law office, with his name hanging on a sign outside the door.

How would these revolutionaries relate to their old party, the SPD? Luxemburg’s attitude is probably best represented in a letter she wrote to her lover, Kostja Zetkin, two days before the great betrayal of August 4, 1914. He wondered if he should resign from the party. She responded,

I laughed about your “resignation from the party.” You big child, do you also want to “resign” from humanity? … In a few months, when hunger arrives, the tide will begin to turn.²Rosa Luxemburg, Letter to Kostja Zetkin, August 2, 1914, in Gesammelte Briefe, vol. 5 (Berlin: Dietz, 1987), 7–8; my translation.

Luxemburg had a long tradition of “nearly [making] a fetish out of the principle of a unified party,” in the words of Raya Dunayevskaya. In 1908, Luxemburg wrote to her Dutch friend Henriette Roland-Holst, who was considering resigning from the SDAP due to its bureaucratization:

We cannot stand outside the organization, outside contact with the masses. The worst working-class party is better than none!!³Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1982), 61.

Let’s contrast Luxemburg’s powerlessness to what Lenin was able to do in exile in Switzerland. When he first saw the newspaper announcing the SPD’s betrayal, he was shocked — he originally believed it must be a forgery by German military intelligence. Compared to Luxemburg, Lenin was far less aware of the rot at the SPD’s core, yet he had a party that had broken with reformism and could quickly respond to the new situation:

The Second International is dead, overcome by opportunism. Down with opportunism, and long live the Third International!

Throughout the war, Lenin emphasized the particular danger posed by the centrists, who preached unity with the social patriots aggressively supporting the war. Luxemburg and her comrades, in contrast, vacillated for years on the need for a clean break. This difference was not about an organizational question.

Luxemburg and the leaders of the Spartacus Group believed that they had to stay in the SPD in order to remain in close contact with the masses. This was a result of their understanding of a socialist party as a kind of elemental movement of the working class. Luxemburg wrote the Junius Pamphlet as a fiery denunciation of the SPD’s betrayal — but she refused to call for a new organization freed from the control of traitors.

As a result, in Germany there was no organized expression of opposition to the war — no banner that was known for a clear anti-war stance. Liebknecht became so popular because he partly fulfilled the role of the missing organization. During the war, discontent nonetheless grew from above and from below. Liebknecht and then additional socialist leaders voted against further war credits, while working-class women took part in butter riots and anti-war protests.

For a Party of the Left

So should workers remain in the SPD? In summer of 1916, a former school teacher from Bremen named Johann Knief began publishing a new weekly newspaper: Arbeiterpolitik (Workers’ Politics). The two leading figures of the Bremen Left Radicals were Knief and Paul Frölich. The two most important contributors to Arbeiterpolitik were foreigners living in Germany: Anton Pannekoek from the Netherlands and Karl Radek from Poland (the latter had been expelled from Luxemburg’s Polish party in 1912).

The radical Left had controlled the SPD party organization in Bremen, but in 1916 the right wing took over the daily paper Bremer Bürger-Zeitung with the help of the state. Now there were at least two different revolutionary Marxist tendencies in Germany: Luxemburg’s Spartacus Group, which remained part of the SPD, and Arbeiterpolitik, which campaigned for the radical Left to resign and found its own party.

This campaign began to have effects on young Spartacists. In June 1916, Luxemburg took part in a meeting in Frankfurt with comrades from the socialist youth of Duisburg under the leadership of Rosi Wolfstein. They believed they needed to prepare for a split from the SPD, but as Wolfstein recalled many decades later, Luxemburg “sharply reprimanded” her. “She saw this view as youthful immaturity.”⁴Riccardo Altieri, “Antifaschisten, das waren wir….” Rosi Wolfstein und Paul Frölich. Eine Doppelbiografie (Marburg: Büchner, 2022), 101; my translation.

After that meeting, Luxemburg wrote to Zetkin:

The Duisburgers seem to have lost their way. They want to proclaim a general resignation from the party at all costs. I strongly objected to this and want to publicly oppose it soon.⁵Rosa Luxemburg, Letter to Clara Zetkin, June 12, 1916, in Gesammelte Briefe, vol. 5 (Berlin: Dietz, 1987), 124; my translation.

Luxemburg laid out her strategic views in an article published in an oppositional social democratic newspaper from Duisburg on January 6, 1917:

The impatience and the bitter resentment that have led many of the best elements to desert the party are laudable and comprehensible. Yet desertion remains desertion; for us, it is a betrayal of the masses, who remain in the choking noose of Scheidemann and Legien, at the mercy of the bourgeoisie, floundering and suffocating. You can “resign” from sects and convents when they no longer suit you, in order to found new sects and convents. It is nothing but immature fantasy to want to liberate the entire mass of the proletariat from this heaviest and most dangerous yoke of the bourgeoisie by a simple “resignation” and setting a brave example in this way.⁶Rosa Luxemburg, “Offener Brief an Gesinnungsfreunde,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4 (Berlin: Dietz, 2000), 232–36; my translation.

These same debates were taking place inside socialist parties all over the world. The imperialist war was reducing the most complex theoretical questions to “for” or “against,” and thus forcing a long-overdue reckoning between reformists and revolutionaries.

The Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915 brought together internationalists from different countries, from both the Center and the Left of the social democratic parties. This and further meetings, including gatherings of socialist youth and women, allowed Lenin and his cothinkers to advocate for an international break from opportunism — Zimmerwald represented the starting point of the Communist International. These political struggles had an ongoing effect on Marxists in Germany.

USPD

This question became more pressing as opposition to the war grew. Liebknecht had voted against war credits in December 1914, as the only SPD deputy in parliament. One year later, 20 deputies from the Center came out against new war credits — the Left referred to them derisively as “December men” for their late and lukewarm opposition to the imperialist slaughter. They were expelled by the SPD party leadership in March 1916.

These expelled social democratic MPs held a national conference of the opposition in January 1917. In response, the party leadership expelled everyone — over the course of the war, the SPD likely expelled the majority of its members. This forced the opposition to found its own party, which it did at a congress in Gotha on Easter weekend 1917: the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD).

How would the radical Left relate to this new party? In February 1917, a secret meeting took place in Berlin between Leo Jogiches, the operational head of the Spartacus Group, while Luxemburg was in prison, and Johann Knief of Arbeiterpolitik. The discussion was heated: as Käte Duncker later reported, the former was for “two” and the latter for “three.” In other words, as the SPD split, should there be two parties, with the Left joining the Center in the USPD? Or should there be three, with the Left forming its own party separate from the USPD?⁷Gerhard Engel, Johann Knief. Ein unvollendetes Leben (Berlin: Dietz, 2011), 297.

Luxemburg continued to develop this polemic. She wrote, in an oppositional Duisburg paper on March 2, 1917,

The resolute Left [i.e., the Spartacus Group] does not counterpose a different programme and fundamentally different tactics to the opposition of the Working Group [i.e., the independent Social Democracy], which could provide the basis for a separate party existence at any time and as a permanent institution; rather, it is only a different historical tendency in the entire movement of the German proletariat, which, however, gives rise to a different attitude on almost all questions of tactics and organisation. But the view that therefore it is necessary or even objectively possible to separate the workers into carefully divided party cages, corresponding to these two tendencies of the opposition [Spartacists and Independents] rests on a conception of the party as a conventicle.⁸Rosa Luxemburg, “Die Schicksalstunde der Partei,” Der Kampf, no. 43, March 31, 1917. This article is not included in Luxemburg’s collected works, as it appeared without a byline, but a note on page 4 of the paper attributes it to Gracchus, which was a pseudonym used by Luxemburg in this publication.

The opposing view was formulated by Radek in a three-part article in Arbeiterpolitik:

The idea of constructing a party jointly with the centrists is a dangerous utopia. Whether the circumstances are favourable or not, the radical leftists must construct their own party if they wish to fulfill their historic mission.⁹Karl Radek, “Unterm eigenen Banner,” Arbeiterpolitik, vol. 2, no. 7, February 17, 1917; my translation.

An editorial in Arbeiterpolitik, likely written by Knief, summarizes the problem:

The racist leftists face a big decision. The biggest responsibility rests in the hands of the Internationale group, the most active and the largest group, which we see as the nucleus of the future radical party of the Left, despite the criticisms which we have had to make of it. We frankly admit that without it, we and the ISD [the International Socialists of Germany, the formal name of the Bremen Left Radicals] will not be able for the foreseeable future to construct a party capable of acting. The radical Left depends on the Internationale group in order for the struggle to be carried on in an orderly manner, under its own banner if not, as yet, as a small army. Otherwise, the struggle for clarification amongst the various left oppositions within the workers’ movement will be delayed even longer.¹⁰“Vor der Entscheidung,” Arbeiterpolitik, vol. 2, no. 10, March 10, 1917; my translation.

The Bremen Left Radicals were saying that the SPD had already split into three different parties. But organizational unity with the Center would prevent the Left from becoming visible as a separate tendency. The Spartacus Group countered that the mass of workers would be joining the new USPD, and an additional split would only cause confusion. For them, the USPD was a forum to fight the Center while “maintaining freedom of criticism and independent action.” As Jogiches wrote at the time,

Should it come to a clean break between us and the WG [Working Group, i.e., the Center], then it is in our interest to delay this moment as long as possible, so that in such a break we can win over a big part of the army into the camp of the resolute opposition.¹¹Leo Jogiches, Letter to the Württemberg comrades, quoted in Illustrierte Geschichte der deutschen Revolution (Berlin: Internationaler Arbeiter-Verlag, 1929; Reprint: Frankfurt: Neue Kritik, 1970), 147–48; my translation.

The leftists held a preconference in Gotha one day before the USPD congress, on April 5. Knief was there as a representative from Bremen, and he argued against joining the USPD, instead calling the formation of a separate party of the radical Left. Knief had reason to hope that a majority of Spartacists would reject the USPD — most of the delegates agreed with his position, including the big opposition groups in Dresden (Otto Rühle), Chemnitz (Franz Heckert and Heinrich Brandler), Stuttgart, Duisburg, etc. But Jogiches, together with Ernst Meyer, was able to rely on Luxemburg’s enormous authority to get a majority to vote for joining the USPD.¹²Engel, Johann Knief, 301.

(There is a certain irony in the fact that Lenin is often presented as a dictator, while Luxemburg was supposedly a democrat. Luxemburg and Jogiches were the team leading their Polish party, the SDKPiL, and the Spartacus Group. Their organizational methods were far less democratic than Lenin’s inside the Bolshevik Party.)

Thus the Spartacus Group joined the USPD in April 1917, and they remained part of it until they left to form the KPD in late December 1918. At the USPD’s founding congress, some of the most critical Spartacists gave speeches. Rosi Wolfstein, who hadn’t wanted to be there in the first place, said,

In my opinion, the split [of the USPD from the SPD] should have been carried out much earlier.¹³Altieri, Antifaschisten, 104; my translation.

She criticized the Center for “staying in the old party until they were driven out with kicks.”

Fritz Globig, a leader of the oppositional youth movement during the war, pointed out the contradictions of the Spartacists’ policy: “The SPD leadership did not fear a split, but the Left did.” The socialist youth of Berlin and other big cities had already broken with the party bureaucracy in 1915 over their support for the war. In his autobiography published 40 years later, Globig recalled that the “weakness of and half-heartedness of the Spartacus leaders” had not impressed the young people risking their lives in the struggle against the war.¹⁴Fritz Globig, Aber verbunden sind wir mächtig: Aus der Geschichte der Arbeiterjugendbewegung (Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben, 1958), 146; my translation.

Writing 20 years later, the German Trotskyist Walter Held criticized this view:

Rosa Luxemburg and her friends consoled themselves with this, that in the great historical crisis the masses would correct the party and sweep it along, Now they had to witness the fact that there was nothing for the masses to do in this situation except to follow — even perhaps while gritting their teeth — the instructions of the party.

For Luxemburg, this represented her strategic vision of a revolutionary party. As Held wrote, “She combated centralism as such, instead of counterposing the centralism of the revolutionary Marxists to that of the opportunists.”

ISPD

This brings us to a little-known episode in the prehistory of the KPD. Several months after the Spartacus Group joined the USPD, in late July 1917, Arbeiterpolitik published a call to found a new party of the radical Left. They had hoped that Spartacus would take the lead, but Spartacus had refused. So on August 26, 1917, 13 delegates from different parts of Germany met in the tavern of Paul Tietze at Barfusstraße 9 in Berlin-Wedding (the building is still standing).

They planed to found the International Socialist Party of Germany (ISPD), which would be a “member of the developing Third International.” It’s easy to imagine their plan: they wanted to present Spartacus with a fait accompli. With a new party in existence, the Spartacists who opposed working in the USPD could win over their group for a split. That didn’t happen, unfortunately. The police raided the gathering and prevented the ISPD from being founded. By then, Arbeiterpolitik had been seriously weakened: Knief had gone underground to avoid arrest, Frölich had been sent to the front, Pannekoek was in the Netherlands, and Radek had gone into exile.¹⁵Engel, Johann Knief, 297.

In most historiography, the International Communists of Germany (IKD), as the Bremen Left Radicals eventually called themselves, are seen as ultra-lefts. During the war, they did come under a certain anarcho-syndicalist or left-communist influence. Some of their documents called for “leader-less organizations” or “unity organizations” intended to supersede the division between parties and unions. Yet the Bremen Left Radicals were the most Leninist group in Germany. Knief especially pushed back against ultra-left ideas, defending the idea of a revolutionary party against fantasies of organizations without leaders. In late 1918, when a majority of the IKD called for boycotting the upcoming elections, Knief fought for the Leninist position of using elections to spread communist ideas.

What role did the Bolsheviks play in all this? It’s hard to say. Lenin was campaigning for a break from the social patriots and the Center, in all countries, and explicitly criticizing Luxemburg for her belief that unity was still possible or desirable. But what did Lenin think specifically about how the Left in Germany should organize? I have found only some indirect clues.

In early 1917, Käte Duncker referred to the Arbeiterpolitik and its “backers from Bern.” This seems like a reference to the Russian emigrés in Switzerland. Radek was certainly close to the Bolsheviks, and he was pushing for a split from the USPD — but he would become a member of the Bolshevik Party only after leaving Bern.

In his autobiography, Paul Frölich recalled that

early in 1917 Jan Knief received a warning from Lenin that in no case should we force a split. We should rather remain with the Social Democrats so long as we could unrestrictedly propagate our own ideas. Any possibility of remaining in close contact with the masses should be exhausted.¹⁶Paul Frölich, In the Radical Camp: A Political Autobiography 1890–1921 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 191.

But I haven’t seen any evidence of this. It’s important to remember that Frölich was writing in exile, 20 years later, without his papers, and at a time when he was turning away from revolutionary socialist politics. And he was writing about a time when he was at the front. He might have been misinformed, or had misremembered, or seen the question differently looking backward. It seems likely that Lenin, behind the scenes, was encouraging a split from the USPD, but more research is necessary.

KPD

This brings us to the KPD’s founding, on December 30, 1918. This was a historical step for the German working class — and it was also a fiasco. Since Luxemburg had been released from prison on November 10, 1918, she had been ruthlessly criticizing the leaders of the USPD and campaigning for a party congress where the membership could change the party’s course. A low point was certainly the National Congress of Workers and Soldiers Councils in mid-December in Berlin. Here, the SPD had a clear perspective: they supported a National Assembly as the political form of the continued dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The Spartacists were no less clear: “All power to the workers’ and soldiers’ councils!” The USPD, however, vacillated, fantasizing about some kind of amalgam of bourgeois parliament and workers’ government.

The Left could not present its perspective to the masses because it was acting as the left wing of a centrist party. This reflected something that Radek had written almost two years earlier:

Two tendencies separated by fundamental differences can only remain in the same party if one of them renounces its independent position in public.¹⁷Karl Radek, “Unterm eigenen Banner,” [Part II] Arbeiterpolitik, vol. 2, no. 8, February 24, 1917; my translation.

After the council congress, dominated by the SPD, had voted to hand over power to the bourgeoisie, it was no longer possible for the Spartacists to remain in the USPD. In late 1918, Radek returned to Germany, now as a representative of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet government. With a mandate from Lenin, he was actively coordinating efforts to found a new communist party. Luxemburg wanted to stay in the USPD until the next party congress, scheduled for March 1919, but Radek presented her with an ultimatum: if she did not take the lead in forming a new party, it would be founded without her. Luxemburg relented and took over the leadership. Jogiches was opposed until the very end: at the Spartacists’ preconference, he was one of three delegates to vote against leaving the USPD.

In other words, Luxemburg, Jogiches, and the Spartacus Group had opposed a split from reformism throughout the war. Now, at the very end, the development of the revolution compelled them to found their own party — when it was already far too late.

At its founding congress, the new KPD secured some important victories, such as winning the allegiance of a big majority of the USPD in the working-class stronghold of Berlin-Neukölln. Yet in many ways, the congress was a failure. A majority of the delegates opposed Luxemburg and Liebknecht, and supported ultra-left policies like boycotting the upcoming elections and leaving the trade unions (Luxemburg was able to prevent a decision on the latter question by calling for further discussion at a later date). Mostly freshly awakened to politics, these ultra-leftists believed that the victory of a socialist revolution was only weeks away, and they did not see the need for a patient strategy to win the majority of the working class. The Revolutionary Stewards, the union militants who had organized massive strikes against the war, were supposed to join the new party, but refused to do so because of its ultra-left tendencies.

In total, the new KPD won over 10,000 to 50,000 members — a tiny fraction of the half a million or so in the USPD. A revolutionary party to lead the German revolution would have needed years to hammer out its program, select its leadership, test its tactics, and build its organization. Instead, the KPD was trying to improvise a political line in the heat of revolutionary struggle. Within a week, an untested leadership allowed itself to be drawn in to a premature insurrection. The counterrevolution set a trap for Luxemburg and Liebknecht, and they walked right into it.

Conclusion, 1918–19

The failure of the German revolution was not the result of some inevitable historical process. Lenin made clear that the proletarian revolution in the West would be far more difficult than in backward Russia. Yet this is no excuse for the historic mistakes by Luxemburg and her comrades. These weren’t just organizational failures — no, the refusal to build an independent revolutionary party reflected Luxemburg’s entire theory of revolution. She thought that the working class, through an escalating series of mass strikes, could topple capitalism.

Even as the first big revolutionary offensive was crashing against a wall in January 1919, and a horrible defeat was approaching, Luxemburg remained convinced that a revolutionary leadership was at most a secondary question:

The leadership failed. But a new leadership can and must be created by the masses and from the masses. The masses are the crucial factor. They are the rock on which the ultimate victory of the revolution will be built.

As many revolutions have shown, such as in February 1917 in Petrograd or November 1918 in Berlin, a spontaneous insurrection can indeed tear down the old regime. But establishing a workers’ government — installing the dictatorship of the proletariat — can only be the product of conscious action, and millions of workers can only act as a conscious factor of history in the form of a party. To quote Walter Held again,

Luxemburg had an entirely inadequate picture of the course of the proletarian revolution. She conceived of the proletarian revolution as a sort of new November revolution, as a chain of strikes and uprisings which finally merge into a general strike or even a popular uprising. With her the role of the party was confined to summoning the masses to action, until fully the power will fall into the lap of the party as a ripe fruit, something like the social democracy reaped the fruits of the first revolution. She did not recognise that it is the task of the party to assemble the masses and to discipline them like troops for a battle, and that the leadership of the party, like a gifted field commander or general staff, must have the strategic plan of battle in its head and convert it into a reality.

Luxemburg refused to build a general staff of the revolution because she did not think one was necessary. Her comrades — the ones who survived the counterrevolution — acknowledged openly that this was a mistake. Mehring wrote about the Spartacus Group shortly before his death:

We were only wrong about one thing: namely when we organizationally joined the independent party after its founding … in the hope of driving them forward. We had to abandon that hope.¹⁸Quoted in Illustrierte Geschichte der deutschen Revolution, 163–64; my translation.

Two years later, Luxemburg’s successor at the head of the KPD, Paul Levi, wrote,

There is not a single communist in Germany today who does not regret that the foundation of a Communist Party did not take place long ago, before the war, and that the Communists did not come together in 1903, even in the form of a small sect, and that they did not form a group, even a small one, which could at least have expressed clarity.¹⁹Paul Levi, “Der Parteitag der Kommunistischen Partei,” Die Internationale, no. 26, December 1, 1920, 41; quoted in Pierre Broué, The German Revolution 1917–1923 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 453.

A party, even a very small party, would have allowed revolutionaries to figure out the strategic framework and, crucially, to raise their own banner.

The defeat of the German revolution of 1918–19 represented a historical defeat — the red wave that started in St. Petersburg broke in Berlin and turned back. What Hunter S. Thompson wrote of the defeat of the 1968 rebellion (if from a countercultural, decidedly apolitical perspective), could apply with tiny changes:

[We had] that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. … We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. … Now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.²⁰Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

That, but in Berlin looking east …

Conclusion, 2024

This brings us, after a long historical detour, to debates among revolutionary Marxists in Germany today, 105 years later. For the last 15 years, most groups identifying with revolutionary Marxism have been part of a reformist party, Die Linke. Even though the party is now likely facing a terminal crisis, so far only one group — Revolutionäre Linke — has proclaimed the need for a clean break.

The arguments for joining Die Linke have been more or less identical to those advanced by Luxemburg and Jogiches for joining the USPD back in 1917: revolutionaries need to stay with the masses, not abandon them to the leadership of reformist bureaucrats. The Spartacists’ calculation was that the inherent contradictions of reformism would drive USPD members into the arms of a revolutionary opposition.

Yet reformism’s contradictions lead, first and foremost, to confusion and demoralization. There is no automatic process that leads the masses to revolutionary conclusions. Revolutionaries have a far more difficult time helping the masses to draw the correct conclusions from reformists’ betrayals if the revolutionaries are presenting themselves as the left wing of reformism.

The position of Luxemburg, Jogiches, and their comrades on the party question is fundamentally centrist. It’s the same centrist position we see from German Trotskyism in 1968, which was fatally hidden inside the SPD (again!). It’s the same centrist habit that led many Trotskyists into Die Linke for 15 years — many even today. Centrists fear isolating themselves from the masses. But as soon as an upheaval happens — and especially in a revolutionary situation — these groups end up isolating themselves from the radicalizing masses.

Die Linke has always been far to the right of the USPD. Hundreds of thousands of workers flocked to the independent Social Democracy to fight for a socialist revolution. As early as 1920, a clear majority of USPD members spoke out in favor of communism and merged with the KPD. Today’s Die Linke, on the other hand, has long stagnated with fewer than 60,000 members, including many pensioners and bureaucrats who help administer the capitalist state. The party never had mass influence, especially not among the working class. Since Sahra Wagenknecht’s split, this influence has been even smaller. Luxemburg’s mistake was not inevitable, but it was understandable in the historically new, chaotic situation. Modern communists who hope to expand their influence by supporting the Left Party cannot use this excuse — they should really know better based on Luxemburg’s experience.

It’s no betrayal of principle to join a reformist party for a short time, in order to break people from reformism. But as Radek wrote more than a century ago, two incompatible tendencies presenting themselves as the same party means that one of these tendencies is not presenting its program in public.

Luxemburg had famously explained that reform and revolution were not two paths to the same goal, but rather two completely different goals. Yet in her masterful pamphlet, she did not draw the necessary conclusion: these two different goals require two separate parties.

First published in German in KGK Magazin on December 28, 2024.