The German Revolution

[Guardia Rossa]

You may jump this if you want:

From what I've read, the failure of the German Revolution was that the communists always acted (Strategically) too early, without the full support of the people, before they had any chance of winning the confrontation, and then either acted (Tactically) too late or couldn't really do anything (Other than die with honor)

And, of course, the believe that the people had in SPD (This is actually very interesting) and the SPD's ability in maintaining a equilibrium between the worker's and the conservative's forces (Using one against the other and giving both nothing)

The KPD, USPD and the Revolutionäre Obleute remaining separate, even when the left of the USPD became it's lead is also something.

The Communists, after losing so many of their good leaders fell into disarray, confuse and without a delineated strategy, this resulted first in it's inability to take advantage of the massive workers mobilizations at many times, and in the KPD-KAPD break. Then, the International gave it's share of contribution by throwing away some important people.

So, this is what I have read about TGR. I have three questions:

1 - Could the German Revolution have done a 1905-esque cenario (As of - the proletariat gaining conscience, but without too many good communists dying), and how?

2 - If the KPD remained inside the USPD, what would be the result? Could they have wrested the USPD from it's right-wing much earlier? Or would it make an earlier break (KPD/KAPD-esque) inevitable?

3 - Somewhat related, has anyone wrote books analyzing the previous revolutions in history, and pointed out things they could have possibly do better? I would have interest in reading those

[ComradeAllende]

I always thought the German Revolution failed because of the betrayal of the SPD, specifically Ebert's use of the Freikorps to crush the Spartacist League. I guess technically this was a strategic failure in the sense that they failed to gain enough support from the masses and disaffected soldiers to hold off the well-equipped Freikorps. Then again, the "stab-in-the-back" myth was so pervasive within conservative and middle-class German circles that it would have been difficult for any Communists to expand their political/social base beyond the proletariat into the peasantry and/or the lower middle classes.

[Guardia Rossa]

Until the almost total failure of the revolution most of the proletariat still believed in a "proletarian union" or an SPD-USPD-KPD union. The KPD never accepted such thing, while the USPD went back and forth.

It failed also because when the proletariat finally turned to the communists, there were no such communists capable of leading a revolution. They died in the battles that resulted in the proletariat gaining revolutionary consciousness. So the proletariat was without leadership, and after the International purged Levi, there was no way back, the revolution had failed. They lost a lot of militants to KAPD, lost momentum to the right, lost Rosa, Liebknecht, Levi, etc...

That's why I want to ask if there was some way for the proletariat to gain consciousness without the massacres that the Army did, with the allowance of the SPD gov.

[Blake's Baby]

No, if it was the anti-communist repression that allowed the working class to see that the 'socialist'-controlled state was no guarantor of the revolution, how could the working class see this without the state acting the way it did? The point is that we cannot rely on the 'socialists' or the state - that the working class must hold on to its own organs and not be distracted by parliamentary idiocy and the betrayers of the working class (no matter how many times we've voted for them before).

The important question is not, 'what could have been different last time?' but 'what are the lessons we must learn for next time?'

[Guardia Rossa]

These two questions are essentially the same.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Repression from the right certainly seems to have been a large factor, whether or not that involved the infamous participation of the SDP.

The Munich Putsch, for example, should have really led to the execution of Adolf Hitler for treason. However, it seems as though judicial forces in Bavaria were sympathetic to the nationalist right - including the new, extreme-right groupings like the NSDAP - and therefore Hitler was given a shorter sentence rather than the death sentence. German nationalism seems to have been a feature of German society going back deep into the 19th Century. I'm currently reading Richard Evans' book, 'The Coming of the Third Reich', and what I inferred from the earlier chapters is that the creation of the German state in 1871 seemed to entrench the racist, anti-semitic, anti-communist ideas of the nationalist right amongst the middle- and upper-classes. In short, racist right-wing ideology didn't appear suddenly with Hitler and the Nazi Party. Given that the communists' main strongholds (physical and ideological) were amongst the working class and the unemployed, and the Nazis seemed to have support from the politicians, the aristocrats, the military officers and the former supporters of the Kaiser and the ideas of German Empire, and certainly by the late 1920s had at least some tactic support from big business, it seems as though the main failings of the communists were simple strength - their power came from their support amongst the workers and the unemployed, but they were fighting against the German state - its de-commissioned WW1 soldiers, the judiciary, the politicians. They would have done well to take over or defeat the state IMO.