Revolutionary chairmen
The Revolutionary Stewards were of the trade unions independent, freely elected by workers of various German industrial companies stewards at the time of the First World War (1914-1918). They turned against the war policy of the German Empire and its support by most of the members of the Social Democratic Party .
The SPD, until then the largest workers' party in Europe, had voted in the Reichstag in 1914 for the war loans from the Reich government. Initially the only SPD MP who, after bowing to parliamentary group discipline in the August vote, voted against it in December 1914, was Karl Liebknecht . When the USPD split off from the SPD in 1917, a politically relevant opposition to the so-called truce policy of those forces that approved the war also formed in the Reichstag . The stewards support the USPD's anti-war course.
During the November Revolution of 1918, they increasingly advocated the idea of councils and after the fall of the emperor and the end of the war, the majority of them were among the supporters of a German soviet republic . After the USPD representatives had left the provisional government, the Council of People's Representatives , in protest against the anti-revolutionary policies of Friedrich Ebert (SPD), who had recently been appointed Chancellor , the chairmen were among the initiators of the so-called Spartacus uprising from January 5th to 12th 1919.
January 1918: Strike against the war
Since most of the union officials also supported the truce policy, the stewards formed a factory-organized workers' opposition to the First World War in Germany. In doing so, they reacted to the increasing number of deaths on the front lines and to the increasing social hardship at home. Your most important speakers were Richard Müller and Emil Barth . The revolutionary stewards were particularly well represented in the Berlin armaments factories. They had already gained some strike experience, for example during the protest strikes against the arrest of Karl Liebknecht in the summer of 1916 and the wave of strikes that focused on Braunschweig and Leipzig in January 1917.
The nationwide January strikes of 1918, in which the end of the war was demanded through a mutual agreement and the democratization of the Reich, were essentially organized and directed by the stewards. They were inspired in part by the success that the communist Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky had achieved just a few months earlier with the October Revolution in Russia . The strikes were therefore also directed against the annexionist plans that the Central Powers Germany and Austria-Hungary were pursuing in the ongoing peace negotiations with Soviet Russia in Brest-Litovsk . In addition to fundamental domestic political changes in Germany, the strikers also called for a just peace with Russia without territorial claims on the part of the German Reich against the “new Russia”. The Supreme Army Command and the Reich Government did not meet these demands . The territories that Soviet Russia had to cede were far more extensive than the territorial losses that Germany had to accept a year later in the peace negotiations in Versailles .
November Revolution and Council Movement
During the November Revolution of 1918/19, the revolutionary stewards played a key role in the council movement and accordingly represented in a decisive position in many workers 'and soldiers' councils formed all over Germany . They played as representatives of the council movement in the measures and decisions of the provisional Reich government after the proclamation of the republic, through their mandate in the " Council of People's Representatives ", in which Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann from the majority SPD did not join despite their at that time publicly expressed opposition to the revolution, played an important role.
The representative of the Revolutionary Obleute, Emil Barth (also a member of the USPD) and two other representatives of the USPD left the Council of People's Representatives in protest against the events of " Ebert's Blood Christmas ", the deployment of government troops against the People's Navy Division , one on November 11, 1918 established an important unit of revolutionary soldiers in Berlin. This action by the military, who was still loyal to the emperor - now after the secret pact between Ebert and the head of the Supreme Army Command , General Wilhelm Groener , in the service of the SPD leadership around Ebert, Scheidemann and Noske - against the insurgent soldiers and workers had been bloodless until then The ongoing revolution that had led to the proclamation of the German republic triggered a violent escalation. Many representatives of the left accused the SPD leadership of betraying the revolution.
Although the revolutionary chairmen supported the idea of councils in the controversy over the establishment of a parliamentary democracy or a soviet republic with a strong parliamentary group, as a council-democratic group they refused to join the KPD , which was newly founded on January 1, 1919 . This originally championed the same goal, but was not prepared to accept the five conditions set by Richard Müller in the name of the Revolutionary Obleute (withdrawal of the anti-election resolution, parity program commission, condemnation of "putschism", participation in party journalism and renouncing the addition of the Spartakusbund ) fulfill. Nevertheless, with the signature of their representative Paul Scholze, along with Karl Liebknecht (KPD) and Georg Ledebour (USPD), they were among the signatories of the appeal that called for the overthrow of the Ebert government on the evening of January 4, 1919 after the Berlin police chief Emil Eichhorn , a member of the USPD who had been deposed by the government.
On January 5, 1919, around half a million people responded to this call at a mass demonstration in Berlin against the government's measures. The appeal and the demonstration culminated in the armed Spartacus uprising , in which revolutionary demonstrators stormed the Berlin newspaper district , where they occupied the editorial office of the SPD central organ Vorwärts and other buildings. The Spartacus uprising was suppressed by government troops under the command of what would later become the first Reichswehr Minister of the Weimar Republic, Gustav Noske , until January 12, 1919 , after fierce fighting, particularly over the Berlin police headquarters and the Vorwärts publishing house . 165 people were killed.
Decline of the Revolutionary Stewards
During the civil war-like battles of the following months in some regions of the German Reich, the council movement increasingly fell on the defensive. Regional council republics that were proclaimed differently, such as the Bremen council republics and, as a better known example, the Munich council republic were ultimately suppressed by military force by the Reichswehr and right-wing nationalist free corps units by mid-1919.
With the Weimar Republic , a democracy on a parliamentary basis prevailed , albeit one that was unstable and crisis-ridden in the long term . The stewards took part in the Berlin council movement from 1919 to 1920, while they still had influence in the implementation of the general strike in the context of the Berlin March fights in 1919. In addition, important actors such as Richard Müller were then active in the Berlin works council headquarters. In June 1919, Müller spoke alongside Theodor Leipart at the congress of the free trade unions about the future tasks of the workers' councils. In doing so, he developed a council-democratic concept that went beyond the company level. Müller developed the model of a regionally and professionally structured council organization, headed by a central council and a Reich economic council . However, this concept was rejected by the majority of the congress, instead the works council concept, which was formally differentiated in the Works Council Act in 1920, prevailed instead . After 1920 the chairman movement no longer played a relevant role in the German labor movement .
Former activists of the Revolutionary Obleute were active in the KPD, where a significant part of the former Obleute was organized, especially after its merger with the left USPD majority at the end of 1920 to form the party that was temporarily known as the United Communist Party of Germany (VKPD) . Another part of them remained in the USPD and its successor organizations or rejoined the SPD from 1922 after another part of the rest of the USPD had returned to the SPD in 1922. From the end of 1922 in Berlin, a group that was essentially recruited from the Revolutionary Obleuten formed the core of the local structures of the USPD, which continued to exist as a small party, or its split off from the Socialist League initiated by Georg Ledebour in 1923/24 .
Some chairmen, who adhered to a non-party "anti-authoritarian" council model, joined the anarcho-syndicalist Free Workers' Union of Germany (FAUD).
Literature (arranged alphabetically by author)
- Hans Manfred Bock : Syndicalism and Left Communism from 1918 to 1923 - a contribution to the social and intellectual history of the early Weimar Republic ; First edition 1969, updated new edition 1993, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, ISBN 3-534-12005-1
- Sebastian Haffner : The German Revolution 1918/19. Rowohlt-Verlag, Reinbek 2004, ISBN 3-499-61622-X (new edition of the book originally published in 1969 under the title The betrayed revolution )
- Ralf Hoffrogge : Council activists in the USPD: Richard Müller and the Revolutionary Obleute in Berlin factories in Ulla Plener (ed.): The November Revolution 1918/1919 in Germany - Contributions to the 90th Anniversary of the Revolution (pp. 189-200), Karl Dietz Verlag Berlin GmbH 2009, ISBN 978-3-320-02205-1 (The entire book online as a PDF file on the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation website)
-
Richard Müller : From the Empire to the Republic. 2 volumes, Malik, Vienna 1924–1925 (Science and Society, Volume 3/4).
- Volume 1: A Contribution to the History of the Revolutionary Labor Movement during the World War.
- Volume 2: The November Revolution. Vienna (Malik-Verlag) 1924 Cover design by John Heartfield . With some pictures.
- Richard Müller : The Civil War in Germany. Birth pangs of the republic. Phöbus-Verlag, Berlin 1925
- The latter three works were reprinted: Olle & Wolter, Berlin 1979 (Critical Library of the Labor Movement, Texts No. 3, 4 and 5)
- Peter von Oertzen : Works Councils in the November Revolution. A political-scientific study of the ideas and structure of the industrial and economic workers' councils in the German revolution 1918/19 , 2nd, expanded edition, Berlin / Bonn-Bad Godesberg 1976 (first edition Düsseldorf 1963).
- Axel Weipert: The Second Revolution. Council movement in Berlin 1919/1920. Berlin 2015.
Single receipts
- ↑ Axel Weipert: The Second Revolution. Council movement in Berlin 1919/1920. Berlin 2015.
- ↑ Michael Schneider : ups, downs and crises. The unions in the Weimar Republic . In: Ulrich Borsdorf (Hrsg.): History of the German trade unions. From the beginning until 1945 . Cologne 1987, p. 297.