Witness to the German Revolution (5 page)

—Yes, but there is still socialism!

Socialism, alas, is also continuing down the same path that it took on August 2, 1914. There are hangings in the Rand, shootings in Ireland, massacres in India: the Labour Party keeps silent. M. Vandervelde, signatory of the Versailles Treaty, blusters against
the soviets. When fascism triumphs, Jules Destrée,
⁵¹
another former minister, and one of the king of Belgium's socialists, expresses his great pleasure at the fact. Paul Levi, formerly a Communist and one of the first rebels against the “tyranny of Moscow,” has completed his unplanned evolution by falling into the arms of Scheidemann and Noske. The Independent Social Democrats,
⁵²
unable to pay their full-timers, have fused with the SPD which is ready for anything—and old Ledebour has departed… After proletarian Italy has shed its blood every day for 18 months, defeated because it was divided and betrayed, Serrati has made due apology and is seeking readmission into the Communist International. Democratic socialism, for so long bound to the fortunes of bourgeois society, seems to be decaying along with it. In 1922 it waged only one major campaign, against the Russian Revolution, and in support of the counter-revolutionary Socialist Revolutionaries. It rejected the Communist proposal for a united front. Now, at the Hamburg conference, it is preparing to solemnly reconstruct the socialism of ministers and dilettantes, by uniting the internationals of London and Vienna.
⁵³

In all the social battles of the year, its complicity has secured victory for the employers' offensive. Over the railway workers and the miners in the USA—thanks to Mr. Gompers
⁵⁴
and the reformists who allowed the export of European coal—over the Rand
miners, the German railway workers and, very recently, over the Ludwigshafen strikers.

Thus goes the old world, thus goes “socialism,” a living insult to true socialism! This is the sphere of what is dying and rotting in a society whose decline, even if it has slowed down, is nonetheless still undeniable. Now we should look at what is being born, amid the pain, toil, effort and uncertainty that accompanies every birth.

Despite the immense sufferings caused by famine and the aftermath of civil war, despite the crushing ills of a period of transition to socialism in a backward country, which is bankrupt, decaying and encircled by the capitalist powers, nonetheless Soviet Russia ends the years with the following balance sheet:

Nationalized production, which in 1919-20 fell to 6 percent of normal production, has risen in 1921-22 to around 25 percent. During the same year, the real wages of Russian workers, although their privations are still great, more than doubled. The countryside is at peace, and the tax in kind has been collected in full. At the cost of admittedly heart rending sacrifices, the famine has been almost overcome. At Genoa, at the Hague, at Lausanne, the red republic has conceded nothing of its dignity or of its legitimate entitlements. In the face of the world powers, it has proclaimed the right to revolutionary expropriation. A striking victory, moral much more than military, enabled it to regain the whole of the Siberian far east, obliging Japanese imperialism to end its grip on Vladivostok. And the year's end found it still at work, with the Tenth Congress of Soviets completing its internal unification…

Let us turn our eyes towards that which is being born!

Correspondance internationale
, January 10, 1923

Since 1919, January 15 has become a day of mourning for revolutionaries all round the world.

On January 15, 1919, the young German revolution was beheaded and the fate of the European revolution was compromised by the double murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

Nothing of that day must be forgotten. The class war goes on. We must remember what the enemy did, what it is still capable of. Here are the proofs: a file of the SPD daily paper
Vorwärts
, official statements… We should reread this, comrades, at the time of the occupation of the Ruhr, while starvation is establishing itself in the homes of 30 million German workers.

On January 13 and 14, 1919, the Spartacists
⁵⁵
—the German Communists of the proud Spartacus group which, not long before, had been alone in its defiance of the Kaiser and of Ludendorff—were fighting in the streets of Berlin against the troops of a socialist
government. This government had provoked the rising by removing from office the red police chief of Berlin, our comrade Eichhorn.
⁵⁶
The working class were determined to keep power in the capital. They went over from the defensive to the offensive, and the struggle for power was engaged.

On January 14, the SPD government, obviously alarmed, issued an appeal to the population… “We must defend our frontiers against the new military despotism in Russia”—this was written in 1919, at a time when several historical miracles seemed necessary to save Communist Russia, encircled and starving, under attack from Kolchak, Denikin and Yudenich!
⁵⁷
—“Bolshevism means death to peace, death to freedom, death to socialism…” wrote the very people who, two days later, would make holes in the skulls of Karl and Rosa! “The present government is composed of social democrats […] representatives of the working class […] The present government is defending the cause of democracy and socialism…” The appeal was signed: Ebert, Scheidemann, Landsberg, Noske, Wissell.
⁵⁸

On January 15, the victory of socialist order was confirmed. Liebknecht, recognized and informed on, was taken prisoner in a suburb of Berlin, Mannheimerstrasse 43, in Wilmersdorf.
Vorwärts
rejoiced: on this very day the paper had returned to its old
premises, from which Noske's police had driven out the Spartacist “bandits.” Then, a day of silence. That's order.

On January 17 at dawn, the workers of Berlin learned from their newspapers the abominable tragedy which had been kept from them for 48 hours. For 48 hours Karl and Rosa had been dead, “victims of the civil war which they themselves sparked off,” wrote the anonymous member of the
Vorwärt
s staff detailed to clean the pavement after the murder.

An official statement from the police headquarters—they call it the
Polizeipräsidium
—described the crime in terms of such administrative lunacy that you feel ashamed for the murderers. Just listen.

“Having been arrested during the evening at Wilmersdorf, Dr. Karl Liebknecht was taken to the Eden Hotel, where the headquarters of the Horse Guards division had been set up. From there, he was due to be transferred to the Moabit prison.

“At 9pm a large crowd was blocking the exits to the hotel. Dr. Liebknecht was got out through a back door and made to get into a car; he was warned that if he made any attempt to escape, the guards would use their weapons.” (This clumsy confession of premeditation is emphasized in the text.) “The crowd surrounded the car. An unknown person gave Dr. Liebknecht a violent blow on the back of the head. He began bleeding copiously. The driver accelerated. To avoid the mob, it was decided to make a detour by way of the zoo. Near the New Lake the car stopped; the engine was out of order because of the excessive speed, and needed to be fixed. Dr. Liebknecht was asked if he felt well enough to walk to the Charlottenburger Chaussée, where it was hoped they could find a taxi. The prisoner replied in the affirmative. But they were scarcely 50 yards from the car when Dr Liebknecht broke free of his escort and began to run straight ahead. A man who tried to stop him got a knife wound on the right hand.” (Again, this is emphasized in the original text.) “As Liebknecht did not stop running,
despite repeated warnings, several shots were fired at him. He fell, killed on the spot.”

The Berlin zoo is a huge park situated in the middle of the city, and deserted in the evening. Liebknecht was taken there “to avoid the mob.” Liebknecht didn't have the presence of mind to throw himself into the thickets which run along both sides of all the paths. He “ran straight ahead,” knowing very well that he would be shot at. This prisoner had been warned he would be killed, but he was not handcuffed. At the guards' headquarters, they had even left him with a knife. Scrupulously, Noske's soldiers repeated their warnings before shooting him and killing him on the spot, a man running through a darkened wood at 11pm!

To cobble together this inept account the authorities needed no less than 48 hours. They had to find some explanation of why, having been arrested without offering the slightest resistance at 9:30pm, Liebknecht was killed in a deserted place two hours later!

At the same time Rosa Luxemburg was also dying.

“The threatening crowd surrounding the Eden Hotel had several times tried to seize Frau Rosa Luxemburg. Her guards succeeded in taking her as far as the running-board of the car which had been prepared for her. At this moment there was a scuffle. Frau Rosa Luxemburg became separated from her escort, and when they snatched her back from the crowd she was unconscious. They stretched her out on the front seat of the car. As the car was moving off, an unknown man leaped onto the running-board and fired a pistol shot at point blank range into the unconscious Frau Rosa Luxemburg.

“The car went along the Kurfürstendamm towards the center of Berlin. When it reached the canal, unknown persons shouted, ‘Halt!' The driver, believing this was a patrol, obeyed. The crowd surrounded the car, shouting: ‘It's Rosa!' The body of Frau Rosa Luxemburg was snatched and dragged off into the dark.”

The murdered woman's remains were thrown in the canal.

In all of contemporary history, which is not short of assorted horrors, there are few scenes so revolting as that of this bourgeois crowd, bent on lynching a prisoner, a white haired woman who had fainted, and who was one of the most powerful minds of world socialism. You would have to go back to the Paris Commune to find anything comparable. The women of Versailles
⁵⁹
used the tips of their parasols—doubtless with a little pout of disgust—to touch the bodies of those atrocious
Communards
. The Berliners of 1919 dragged Rosa Luxemburg's body, still twitching with life, along the pavement to the canal.

And the next day
Vorwärts
wrote: “Social democracy, despite all the aberrations of left and of right, is defending order, human life, the rule of law against force. That is what it is fighting for! No one should believe it can be disarmed!” In the very same issue we can pick out the following headlines and subheadings: “The end of Bolshevism”—“Petrograd at death's door”—“Counter-revolution in Russia”—“Gorky reported to have fled to London.”

Four years have gone by since then. Liebknecht's chief assassin died accidentally. Rosa Luxemburg's murderers are known but have not been prosecuted. One of them, Runge, confessed; he got six months in jail for being indiscreet. The gaoler Tamschick from the Moabit prison who killed Leo Tychko and then Dorrenbach
⁶⁰
was promoted.

Four years have gone by. Now we have tasted the fruits of victory, won at this price by the German social democracy.

Thanks to it, the proletarian revolution, which could have succeeded in central Germany, did not triumph. The likes of Stinnes,
Thyssen, the aniline millionaires
⁶¹
and those of many other industries enjoyed prosperity. Herr Cuno of the Hamburg-America Line is in power.

The Germany of the workers, which the SPD threatened with famine and blockade in 1919 if it dared to make its revolution, did not make its revolution and it is starving nonetheless. Germany of the workers, which Scheidemann and friends threatened with Allied intervention, is perhaps at this very moment seeing the Senegalese
⁶²
invade the Ruhr. Fascism is looming. Erzberger and Rathenau,
⁶³
leading bourgeois with mildly radical views, have been killed; Ludendorff is left in peace and Colonel Hitler is peacefully organizing his counter-revolutionary assault troops in Bavaria.

“Order, respect for human life, rule of law, socialism” were the key themes of the social democrats during the days when Karl and Rosa died—a peculiar cynicism. Reality has other names: famine, colonization of Germany by foreign capital, triumph of large scale speculation, the rule of profiteers, the employers' offensive, the arming of reactionary forces.

As Communists, we do not look at history fatalistically. In the class struggle, there are no inevitable defeats or victories. Material, intellectual and moral forces come into conflict, and the stronger
breaks the weaker. In January 1919, although in mortal danger, the Russian Revolution in its struggle with reaction reached the peak of its potential to expand and create. Hungary was progressing towards soviet rule. The revolutionary wave was rising in Italy. In the victorious states, demobilization had not been carried out: armed workers were returning from the trenches, scarcely restraining their powerful anger; everywhere the fearful, cowardly bourgeoisie which had stayed in the rear retreated before them. Proletarian Germany wanted to carry through its program of public ownership, to follow the great Russian example. It still had those four remarkable minds: Franz Mehring,
⁶⁴
a scholar and a bold thinker, the very heart of the Spartacus group; Leo Tychko (Jogisches), the best of organizers, the most skillful of conspirators; Karl and Rosa. Proletarian Germany could have won.