Breaking the Mold of Socialism Left-Wing Communism, 19171923

Breaking the Mold of Socialism

Left-Wing Communism,

19171923

THE GEOGRAPHY OF REVOLUTION

Outwardly, Bolshevik predictions of general European revolution bore fruit. Signs of a potential revolutionary crisis came with the great

strikes of January 1918. Protesting the German handling of peace nego- tiations with the Bolsheviks at Brest-Litovsk and spreading outward from Vienna and Budapest, these snowballed into massive working-class actions against the war, embracing Berlin and much of Germany, the Czech lands, and Krakow before subsiding.³ Lack of coordination ultimately blunted the challenge, but the Bolshevik wager on Western antiwar sentiments clearly had some basis. Another dramatic turn of the wara worsening of popular hardships or military defeatmight bring a less manageable crisis.⁴

It came eight months later in October 1918, with the collapse of the Bulgarian front, the breakup of Austria-Hungary, and imperial Germanys demise. The first act was a sequence of national revolutions, erecting new republican sovereignties on the ruins of the Habsburg monarchy: first Czechoslovakia (proclaimed on 28 October 1918), followed by Yugoslavia

(29 October), German-Austria (30 October), Hungary (31 October), Poland (28 October14 November), and West Ukraine (Eastern Galicia), where the Peoples Republic was proclaimed on 31 October.⁵ These new states, except West Ukraine, which was annexed by Poland in July 1919, secured their constitutional legitimacy, not least via international recog- nition at the peace conference in Versailles. The chain of republican rev- olutions was concluded, moreover, with the toppling of the Hohenzollern monarchy and the proclamation of a German Republic on 9 November

1918. Overall, these events were hardly less imposing than the February rev-

olution in Russia. They carried revolution to the Rhine and the Alps and upturned the sociopolitical order across a massive central European swathe. Like Russian events, the German Revolution reverberated elsewhere. With- out evidence of working-class readiness, the Dutch Social Democratic leader Pieter Troelstra quixotically proclaimed the revolution in the Neth- erlands in two speeches on 1112 November, with some damage to the SDAPs morale and credibility. German events helped precipitate a crisis in Sweden (10 November6 December), where only Hjalmar Brantings and the SAPs skill kept the demand for a democratic constitution from spilling into more radical socialist desires. In Switzerland, a long-brewing confron- tation between government and the left-moving labor movement was sparked in a general strike on 1214 November.⁶ South of the Alps, Italian Socialists watched German events closely.

Six months of radicalization ensued. The German Revolution reached crisis point with a renewed SPD-USPD split in December 1918, the ill-fated Spartacist Rising in early January, and the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Though a bloody defeat, the Left read this as a sharp- ening of the contradictions, from which revolutionary apocalypse would result. The Third Internationals launching in a hastily convened congress in Moscow on 46 March 1919 dramatized this belief. The period opened by the central European national revolutions seemed one of continuously

rising opportunity, in which ever greater initiative devolved to the working class, just as dual power had worked for the Bolsheviks.

This dynamic came through in Hungary. Social Democratic unions were the solid core of Count Michael Karolyis coalition government of 31 Oc- tober 1918. With deteriorating economic conditionsdemobilization and reconversion of industry, materials shortages, chronic unemployment, and an escalating crisis of productionthey became increasingly drawn into managing industry, sowing thoughts of workers control. Over Christmas, as workers formed councils and red guards, the demand for democratizing industry coalesced. The systematic nationalization program of the new Communist-Socialist government taking office on 21 March 1919 grew logically from these developments. Karolyi had resigned in protest at Hun- garys losses at Versailles, but the dialectic of dyarchya situation of dual power resembling that in Russiahad given the new regime birth. Its leader, Bela Kun, saw himself as Lenin to Karolyis Kerensky.⁷

The Hungarian Soviet Republic lasted only four months, from March to August 1919. But coming immediately after the Cominterns founda- tion and coinciding with Soviet Republics in Bavaria (7 April to 1 May) and Slovakia (16 June to 1 August), it preserved the revolutionary momen- tum. The main axis was now central European, with a strong leftward shift in Czechoslovakia and violent radicalization in Germany. Spurred by anti-Left repression, German workers were switching from SPD to USPD, whose membership grew from 300,000 to 750,000 between March and November 1919. Revolutionary ferment also spread further afield, through the Trienio Bolchevista of 191820 in Spain and the biennio rosso of 1919

20 in Italy. The most concentrated European revolutionary agitation was framed by

the First and Third Comintern congresses of March 1919 and June 1921. The Second Comintern Congress (July 1920) was the apex, reflecting the Red Armys advance on Warsaw in the Soviet-Polish War.⁸ But by August, the tide was running the other way. After the Polish counteroffensive of 16

August, the Red Army was in full flight till the armistice of 12 October, followed by the Peace of Riga in March 1921. This was matched by dra- matic turns elsewhere. In October 1920, the factory council movement in Milan and Turin brought Italy to the point of general revolution before subsiding into demoralization. In Germany, the Communist Partys March Action proved a fiasco. Finally, the same month, in a dangerously disinte- grating situation, the Bolsheviks relaxed the tempo in Russia itself with the New Economic Policy (NEP) and began normalizing their relations with the capitalist world through a trade agreement with Britain. This brought the most advanced Bolshevik radicalismand decisive revolutionary poli- tics west of the Vistulato a close.

THE RANGE OF REVOLUTIONARY EXPERIENCE

After Russia, there were no socialist revolutions in 191723, except the short-lived Hungarian Soviet. However, there were many revolutionary sit- uations: popular insurrections that toppled existing regimes; radicalizations tending toward dyarchy, where extreme Left confronted new constitu- tional governments, inspired by Bolshevik example; popular militancy pushing nonsocialist regimes into preemptive reform, which was common- est of all in 191723; isolated acts of revolutionary insurgency; and of course counterrevolution.

Extraordinary drama was concentrated into these years. The chain of central European revolutions creating the so-called successor states between

28 October and 14 November 1918 did so via demonstrations, strikes, riots, mutinies, and the forming of workers and soldiers councils. The new democratic constitutions in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Austria, Hungary, and Germany were founded in popular insurgencies, which also affected Bulgaria. Expansions of democracy occurred in Britain and France, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia. Only in Hungary did the Bolshevik example briefly inspire a revolutionary state. But in 191920, massive rad- icalizations occurred in Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Italy, with street- fighting, repeated challenges to authority, and regional uprisings, bringing those countries to the point of civil war. The defeat of these insurgencies brought their opposite: repression and police terror. After the Hungarian White Terror of 191920, during 192223 a resurgent Right destroyed the Lefts gains in Italy, Spain, and Bulgaria.

Reform responding to radical pressure was a common syndrome of these years. As revolutions elsewhere maximized governments anxieties about their own societies, even revolutionary minorities had disproportion- ate effect. This was true during 1919 in Belgium and France. The Dutch case was especially clear, as the revolutionary challenge was entirely rhe- torical. Troelstra proclaimed the Dutch revolution on 1112 November

1918 in response to events in Germany, thereby galvanizing his horrified party and trade union comrades into a major reform statement, which de- manded nationalization of suitable industries, repeal of the 1903 strike ban for public employment, the eight-hour day, old-age pensions, and abolition of the upper chamber. While the SDAP had managed only 22 percent in the first democratic elections in July 1918, a strong reform package re- sulted, including votes for women. Most of all, a new corporative deal was framed for organized labor, including the Ministry of Social Affairs and the consultative High Council of Labor in October 1919, which convened the four main employers associations, three trade union federations, gov- ernment agencies, and private expertise.⁹

Fear of Bolshevik contagion was vital in western Europe, but other fac- tors also favored reform. Social harmony and patriotic consensus were the watchwords: the impetus was not sectional class interest but the new dem- ocratic consciousness and the new social consciousness which have come to birth in the long agony of the present struggle (the war).¹⁰ The non- partisan appeal of this belief in social regeneration cant be underestimated. In Britain, the proposals of the Ministry of Reconstruction set up in July

1917, plus the Ministry of Pensions (1917), the reports of the Board of Education (191718), plans for the Ministry of Health (formed 1919), and a more democratic franchise offered a grand vision of the social contract. The corporative arrangements of the Ministry of Labour formed the polit- ical cornerstone. As King George V said in his address to Parliament in February 1919: We must stop at no sacrifice of interest or prejudice to stamp out unmerited poverty, to diminish unemployment, to provide decent homes, to improve the nations health, and to raise the standard of well- being throughout the country.¹¹

These reformist opportunities were inconceivable without the staggering growth of trade unions in 191820.

The trade-union density in Britain, Germany, Denmark and Norway at the end of World War I was between twice and three times the per- centage of 1913, in Sweden and the Netherlands more than three times, in Belgium almost five times as high. . . . [I]n some casesnota- bly Britain and Germanythe strength of trade unions as a percentage of the labor force was higher than it has ever been since, in others France, Denmark, perhaps Norwayit was not reached again before the middle or late 1930s.¹²

These phenomenal figures came from the short-lived boom as industry re- converted for peacetime. With pent-up demand for goods, a lag in produc- tive capacity, availability of investment capital, relaxed government con- trols, and inflationary fiscal policies, a remarkable upswing occurred in spring 1919summer 1920 (lasting somewhat longer in central Europe), ending in an equally sharp contraction. After a flash flood of unemploy- ment in winter 191819, therefore, returning troops were rapidly absorbed into an expanding labor market. Neither the reform-proneness of govern- ments, the scale of militancy, nor the massive union expansion were pos- sible without this boom. When it abruptly passed, unemployment rose alarmingly high, and workers were cast unceremoniously onto the defen- sive.

Postwar circumstances briefly gave union leaders enormous leverage an opening for which wartime corporatism had prepared them. Under con- ditions of nearly revolutionary turbulence, as workers practised flexing their industrial muscle, responsible union leaders became the best hope

for holding disorder at bay.¹³ With British labor unrest approaching its peak in early 1919, Winston Churchill elaborated: The curse of trade unionism was that there was not enough of it, and it was not highly enough developed to make its branch secretaries fall into line with the head of- fice.¹⁴ That was precisely the point. Union leaders faced their own loss of control. The revolutionary climate after 191718 raised the entire temper of working-class hopes, such that workplace militancy could already be passing the leaders by.¹⁵

In eastern Europe, the revolutionary upheavals of 191723 had pow- erful nationalist dimensions too, because the post-1918 political settlement involved not only social changes and political reform but also territorial revision and new relations among states. The Treaty of Versailles (June

1919) was followed by the east European supplements, most of which were preceded by wars. Not accidentally, most involved the great power absent from Versailles, Soviet Russia. Most also had the dimensions of civil war. In November 1918, when the war in the West was lost, the German army still occupied a line from Finland to the Caucasus. This German im- pact on eastern Europe severely complicated the building of stable govern- ing orders after the Bolsheviks seized power, with big implications for the non-Russian nationalities of the old Russian Empire. In western Europe, the weakening of some states (Germany) and aggrandizement of others

(Britain and France) via the First World War was momentous for the Left as nationalism favored the Right, but territorial revisions were qualitatively different in the east, where they accompanied the collapse of existing states. These revisions involved less the adjustment of older boundaries than the creation of entirely new countries, whose political systems had to be in- vented from scratch. This was clearest in German-occupied Russia in 1917

18, where the German military sledgehammer smashed whatever was left of the old social fabric in much of the Baltic, Belorussia, and Ukraine. As the rapacious German administration receded at the wars end, it left a calamitously anarchic situation, compounded by the death of tsarism.¹⁶

By intruding itself between the peoples of the Empire and their self- determination in the very moment of revolutionary changeafter the old order had gone but while the new was struggling to be bornthe German army suspended democracy before it had barely begun. Bolsheviks, auton- omists, left-nationalists, separatists, and counterrevolutionaries found themselves in confused relationships to local populations, but in most cases nationalisms practical logic worked against Moscows need for consoli- dation. Bolsheviks might endorse national self-determination theoretically, but movements for independence invariably aligned themselves with Bol- shevisms foes, first with the Germans (until late 1918) and then with the British and French (191921), who also backed the Whites in the Russian Civil War. In this way regional eventsin Finland, the Baltic, Ukraine, Caucasus, even Belorussiadevolved into separate revolutionary processes

with an integrity of their own. In strategic vision, popular experience, and practical delimitation, these were national revolutions, in ways that con- fused conventional political or social labels.¹⁷

Competing claims of nationality and class shaped these revolutionary dynamics in the former tsarist territories during 191723.¹⁸ This was no simple dichotomy in which one identity precluded the other. Appealing to national solidarity could suppress or deemphasize class hostilities, harness- ing working-class politics to larger patriotic coalitions led by conservatives or liberals, where socialist departures were practically ruled out. But the Left might also claim leadership of national coalitions for itself, by offering distinctive programs inside the developing nationalist framework. At least, it could advance specifically working-class or other popular interests in more modest and defensive ways. Assumptions about the national bases of political identity could enable socialist strategy rather than undermining it. The creation of the new eastern European nation-states in 1918 shaped politics into this framework of national revolution, and socialists found few prospects outside the heterogeneous founding coalitions of the new republics, with temporary exceptions in Bulgaria and Hungary. The small Romanian Social Democratic Party was entirely marginal to this process, as was the breakaway Communist Party of 1921, which had no impact before being banned in 1924. In Poland, the Communist Workers Party formed from various Zimmerwaldians in December 1918 had stronger na- tive roots but lost all influence on the new states founding coalition because of its antiparliamentary revolutionism and dogmatic internationalism. Its self-marginalizing was sealed in the summer of 1920 by its identification with the invading Red Army. In the new Yugoslav polity, where party formation was badly fragmented along national lines, the unified Com- munist Party of 1919 showed more potential: but if the 1920 Constituent Assembly elections brought much success, in 1921 it too was banned.¹⁹

In these countries, the dominant nationalist framework militated against the Social Democratic and Communist Left. But one case of socialists win- ning space inside the new nationalist framework was Czechoslovakia, where Social Democrats formed a new government with Czech Socialists and Agrarians after the local elections of June 1919, and the left began enlarging its strength in the party. This Social Democratic left stayed avow- edly within the parent party rather than splitting it, giving critical support to the government and party right for the April 1920 elections. When the split eventually arrived, this strategy of consolidation allowed a sizeable majority of the CSDSD to follow the left into the Communist Party, which retained strong continuities with the national labor movements earlier traditions, unlike other Communist parties of 191821. Czech Communist strength grew from organic radicalization inside the framework of na- tional revolution, whose legitimacy the left leaders had carefully accepted and whose constitutional conditions allowed a strong CSDSD left to flour-

ish. Moreover, the Czech Community Partylike the Yugoslavwas the only party in its nationally fragmented state that was proving genuinely national in structure, basing itself deliberately on all national territories rather than on single constituent nationalities.²⁰

COUNCIL COMMUNISM AND THE REVOLT OF THE RANK AND FILE

The distinctiveness of revolutionary activity in 191723 lay in the workers councils, though militancy varied greatly in exact forms. These ranged from unofficial strike committees developing larger political aims, like the shop stewards movements of Clydeside, Sheffield, or Berlin, to sophisticated rev- olutionary innovation, like the factory councils in Turin.²¹ In between came a rich assortment: the Rate in Germany and Austria, claiming functions of class representation in a locality; councils based in factories, firms, or other economic units; and local action committees for specific ends, like the Councils of Action opposing British military intervention against Soviet Russia in summer 1920 or the revival of councils in Germany to oppose the Kapp Putsch in March 1920.²²

Anew medium of working-class activity, councils differed from both socialist parties, which acted through parliamentary and state institutions, and unions, which worked on the capitalist economys given assumptions via the wage relation. Their supporters departed from the mainstream of European labor movements between 186475 and the First World War, sharing some affinities with prewar syndicalists, particularly in their enmity toward union officialdom and party machines. But the militantly distinctive council communist vision materialized only during the radicalizations of

191821. Few council activists originally saw them as a permanent alter- native to parliamentary institutions, rather than transitional bodies during the initial breakthrough to democracy, possibly with lasting watchdog func- tions in the future republican constitution.

Stronger versions of the council idea were hostile to orthodox trade unionism and socialist electoralism, recoiling from the accepted model of separately organized, centralized, nationally focused political and economic movements. Instead, councils were based within production: inside the unit of production itself, in the factory, the plant, or the shop. Councils raised issues of industrial democracy, workers self-management, and workers control. They transcended the fractured pursuit of political and eco- nomic goals typical of the pre-1914 labor movements, joining industrial direct action to the political project of a workers government. Measured against the socialist mainstream since the Paris Commune, this interest in workers democracy, as against the parliamentary representation of the people, was new.²³

One model of council activity was community based but linked to fac- tories via shop stewards or similar workplace networks. Another was pro- duction based but connected to broader social arenas. In national emer- gencies like the Kapp Putsch, the socialization campaign in the Ruhr and central Germany in spring 1919, or the northern Italian factory occupa- tions, the two converged. In Germany, for example, it was only after the demise of the original Rate, in the radicalization after the Spartacist Rising and the January 1919 elections to the National Assembly, that a more radical council movement developed. Earlier, constitutional respect and loyalty to the parliamentarist SPD kept Rate from expanding their com- petence. Once radicalized, councils articulated extraparliamentary, direct- democratic, self-consciously class-based alternatives to the labor move- ments existing strategies and institutions. The strongest version was the Russian system of dual power around the Petrograd Soviet.

For the most part, local councils coexisted in parallel with legal govern- ment and local state representatives. The key was how far workers councils overturned existing legality. In moderate versions, councils confined them- selves to general supervisory roles, leaving local administration practically intact. But supervision could also be highly intrusive, with purging and replacement of local government personnel and strict accountability for implementing new left-wing policies. In 191821, Germany provides the richest evidence of this variation, especially in the distinctive council com- munist movement.²⁴

German council communism crystallized around demands for sociali- zationa strong combination of public ownership and workers control.²⁵

On 18 November 1918, government appointed a commission of inquiry on the subject, but the real impetus was the militancy of the miners in the western Ruhr, escalating on 15 December into strikes over wages and hours. After a partial settlement on 28 December, actions resumed in Jan- uary, incited by the Spartacist Rising in Berlin. The Essen Workers and Soldiers Council formed a nine-person commission for socializing the coal industry, occupied the mineowners headquarters, and confirmed these steps in a regional conference. The SPD government dissembled, while launching a military pacification of the Ruhr. Miners responded with a general strike (1823 February), which was bloodily suppressed. By now the socialization campaign had spread to Halle, Anhalt, Thuringia, and Saxony (23 February10 March); Berlin (38 March); and Upper Silesia

(515 March). Actions repeated the cycle of impressive mobilization, brutal suppression, and embittering defeat. The workers exasperated militancy produced one further round of conflict: another general strike in the Ruhr

(130 April), involving 73 percent of all Ruhr miners at its peak; a Braun- schweig sympathy strike (916 April); a Wu rttemberg general strike (31

March7 April); and the events of the Munich Soviet Republic (730 April). An immense gulf separated militants from official leaders. The local SPD met actions with contempt, denouncing miners as criminals and ruffians,

whose violence undermined the unions policy. Such attacks were hugely resented, sowing the very violence they alleged. But if the movement was driven by anti-SPD bitterness, it was steered by neither USPD nor KPD. Militancy was spontaneous, though not unorganized. It proceeded beyond the framework of any parties and against the official union from a pithead democracy of delegates and mass meetings. In its local base in production, its informal agitational methods and mine-to-mine coordination, its pref- erence for decentralized nationalization via mine-based workers control, and its suspicion of national bureaucracies, the movement echoed the themes of syndicalismand indeed, a local syndicalist, Heinrich Heiling, a leader of the small syndicalist miners union formed in 1908, was promi- nent in the Hamborn agitation.²⁶ In the volatile circumstances of early

1919, the boundaries separating an older syndicalist tradition, a newer brand of industrial unionism, the infant KPD, and unaffiliated grassroots militancy were blurred. The key was the alienation of militants from the SPD and its unions.²⁷

This was the conjuncture that produced council communism. Council communismand the rank-and-file militancy it sought to theorizedis- missed the political complexities of revolution. There were huge areas coun- cil communists ignored. Questions of women, the family, and the sexual division of labor were one. Coalition building was another, for the council movement refused to worry about peasants, petty bourgeoisie, and other nonproletarian social groups. Council militants were untroubled by the ad- ministrative consequences of organizing revolutionary government around the point of production. If the councils had a factory rather than a terri- torial basis, training workers for running production rather than society in general, then how would the noneconomic functions of government be ad- dressed? How would the councils deal with social welfare and education? How successfully could they represent the interests of nonworkers?

Council communisms productivismthe conviction that true revo- lution began from the workplacewas so axiomatic that such questions were never posed. This was exacerbated by the movements towering vol- untarism. If 1917 was a Revolution against Capital, in Gramscis phraseagainst the Second Internationals economic determinismcouncil communists carried this to its sublime extreme.²⁸ Their approach presup- posed western Europes ripeness for revolutionary transformation. If so, politics became necessarily confrontationist. Astrategy was needed in which absolute opposition to all non-revolutionary forces and the greatest possible purity of revolutionary principles . . . would empower the working class to construct the dictatorship of the proletariat.²⁹ Consciousness came exuberantly to the fore. Minds were to be revolutionized: In the German Revolution the subjective elements play a decisive role. The problem of the German Revolution is the problem of the development of the self- consciousness of the German proletariat.³⁰

Relations between the councils and trade unions were chronic, reflecting opposed ideals of organization. It was hard even for unions with a strong left, like the metalworkers in Germany (DMV) and Italy (FIOM), to assim- ilate factory or plant-based systems of council representation. Councils un- dermined union ability to negotiate national agreements and more generally to provide leadership in national affairs. Collective contracts were trade unionisms centerpiece before 1914, and devolving decisions back onto lo- cals would delight employers, who wanted nothing better than to deal ex- clusively with their own workforce. Union resources would no longer be mobilized to benefit weaker, less organized parts of the membership. Un- ions ability to influence national policy would be undercut, whether from reformist or revolutionary perspectives. Moreover, demands for local con- trol came at the worst possible time: just as unions acquired corporative leverage through the war economy, a disorderly shopfloor militancy threat- ened from the rear. Unions devoted great efforts in 191920 to neutralizing the councils challenge, not just from bureaucratic self-interest or resistance to democratization but from legitimate disquiet that workers collective in- terests were being undone.

In Italy, trade union leaders moved to contain the councils demands. The FIOM national agreement of February 1919 included the Internal Commissions as grievance committees, but conflicts over prerogatives only radicalized the council ideal. As workshop commissars were elected in No- vemberDecember 1919 and council supporters won control of the Turin PSI, the unions proposed their own ideas for institutionalizing them. These included the workers Centurians adopted by the Chemical Workers Union in October 1919 (one delegate for every hundred workers, with no nonunion voters); the Rome Gas Workers system, which allowed votes to nonunion members (November 1919); and the Baldesi Project (named after the CGLs Gino Baldesi), which crafted an agreement between unions and the Turin council movement in May 1920. The Baldesi Project typified union tactics: conceding limited factory functions to councils and giving nonunion workers the vote but reserving key policies for the unions, mak- ing councils ancillary to union structures, and preserving union primacy in national affairs.³¹ Though the Italian ferment lasted another six months and the Turin council movement briefly imposed itself via the factory oc- cupations of September 1920, jockeying between unions and councils was abruptly ended by Fascism.

In Germany, counterrevolution was hardly less violent in 191921 but unfolded within the parliamentary framework rather than overturning it. The pact of unions and big employers in the throes of the 1918 revolution, the Central Working Agreement, already envisaged workers committees as part of trade unions own local machinery, and as SPD and unions labored in 1919 to produce legislation, this was the bureaucratic model they fa- vored. The Works Councils Law of 4 February 1920 carefully protected

union primacy. All radical aspects of industrial democracy and workers control were gonesovereignty of the mass meeting; direct democracy and power of recall; access to the books; control of hiring, firing, and the labor process; rights of negotiating with management; and independence from union bureaucracy. Employer sovereignty was intact. All key issues were reserved for the unions collective bargaining machinery. Councils were re- duced to the latters adjunct, with merely consultative status.³²

In a moderate trade union perspective of reform under capitalism, these measures were a solid gain. Centralized, national organization was de- fended unbudgingly, just as in Italy. As the guidelines agreed by a confer- ence of union chairmen put it: The basis of industrial democracy is the collective agreement with legal force.³³ But the reform cant be divorced from surrounding events. It was meant to defuse the council movements more radical demands, and this badly compromised the progressive value. The point was brought tragically home at the climax of the German law. Amass demonstration called by the USPD to the Reichstag steps was mas- sacred by troops, leaving 42 dead and 105 wounded. Ultimately, an un- precedented rank-and-file movements hopes for workplace democracy, public ownership, and workers control, based on autonomous councils, had shrunk to a limited union gain. Implementing it required the bloody policing of the original movement.

The workers council movement was destined for failure once a national revolutionary breakthrough didnt occur. In Italy, that moment passed with the factory occupations in September 1920. In Germany, the USPD and other left groupings still pursued permanent government by councils, whether linked to a parliamentary constitution or not, until the Weimar Constitution and accompanying legislation, like the Works Councils Law, laid these ideas to rest. But the real hub was the socialization issue. The strongest drive for socialization came only in early 1919, mainly locally, in the Ruhr and parts of central Germany, recalling the national movement to the united socialist action of November 1918. The suppression of that movement, and of the local soviets that flickered across the spring of 1919, changed the character of the later conciliar actions. Henceforth, the coun- cils were forced back to the local level, either as vehicles of revolutionary agitation no longer linked to serious prospects of local administrative power or as the committees of action in a political emergency, like the Kapp Putsch of March 1920. As a movement, with national political hopes, coun- cil communism was gone.

GERMANY, 19181923: THE

SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC

the most striking thing about the German revolution was the unrelenting in- transigence of the SPDs moderation. Rather than harnessing working-class militancy, the leaders did their best to suppress it. The SPD upheld the constitutional reforms of late Sep- tember 1918 in the hour of Germanys mili- tarydefeat, as the old regime tried to legiti- mize itself for negotiating with the Western Allies. For the SPD Right, this constitutional transition completed the policies of August

1914. It vindicated their patriotism. The mea- sures making Germanya constitutional mon- archy, reached after the SPD joined the coali- tion government on 3 October, already satisfied the partys cochairmen, Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann. The partys impending parliamentarydominance seemed sufficient guarantee of further reforms.

The situation was transformed between 27

October and 5 November 1918, when naval mutinies in Kiel escalated via election of sail- ors councils, a garrison revolt, and a general strike into a local seizure of power bywork- ers and soldiers councils.¹ During the previ- ous month the removal of censorship and re- lease of political detainees had stoked popular expectations, while recognition of the lost war brought troops to the point of mutiny.² Pop- ular insurgencyspread across Germany, until a Bavarian revolutionarygovernment was formed in Munich on 78 November, fol- lowed the next daybythe kaisers abdication in Berlin. Although government now passed to Ebert and the SPD, theymade no conces-

sions to these profound changes. Theycalled the constituent assembly, while managing an orderlytransition. Theyfocused on bringing the troops home without disorders, maintaining the food supply, and at all costs avoiding Allied militaryintervention.³ This replicated the political logic of the civil truce: patriotic discipline and public order; exaggerated fears of mass action; angrycontempt for the irresponsible left; practical compro- mise with the old order.