The forces of counter-revolution had prepared for a bloody confrontation with the workers of Berlin. On 10 January an attack was opened up by the Potsdam Freikorps regiment. On 11 January Noske moved in with a further contingent of troops led by monarchist officers. The government was determined to take back the Vorwaerts building by force. In the early hours, heavy artillery and mortar attack created enormous damage and many injuries. For the rebels, the situation became hopeless and the 300 workers remaining in the building were forced to surrender. Within a week, 156 people officially had been killed and hundreds wounded. In the words of Paul Froelich, “the White Terror had begun.”
The counter-revolution acted quickly. In a short space of time, two leading KPD members, Leo Jogiches and Hugo Eberlein, were arrested. The government minister Philipp Scheidemann had put an unofficial price of 100,000 German marks on the heads of Liebknecht and Luxemburg. A frenzy was whipped up by the bourgeois press to deal with these Bolsheviks once and for all. Even the SPD paper Vorwaerts joined in the hue and cry. On 13 January they published a poem which ended with a verse:
Many hundred corpses in a row – Proletarians!
Karl, Radek, Rosa and Co. –
Not one of them is there, not one of them is there!
Proletarians!
On 15 January Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were arrested by reactionary Freikorps officers. Both were taken to the headquarters of the Cavalry Guards Division for “investigation”. Liebknecht was the first to be escorted out and shot, allegedly trying to escape. Then Rosa Luxemburg was led out. As she left the building an officer used his rifle butt to smash her skull. Her corpse was then thrown into the Landwehr Canal, where it was not discovered until 31 May. The officers responsible for the murders, apart from two short sentences, got away virtually scot free. The German proletariat had lost two of its most outstanding leaders.
Sectarians have drawn completely erroneous conclusions from the so-called Spartacist Uprising. Of course, the existence of a mass revolutionary party on the lines of the Bolsheviks in 1918-19 could have transformed the situation completely. But the question arises of how such a party can be built. Chris Harman in his book, The Lost Revolution, takes Rosa Luxemburg to task:
Her tactical error is not to be explained by anything that happened in December or January, but by a much earlier error – when in 1912 and 1916 she underrated the importance of building an independent revolutionary socialist Party…[in] contrast with Lenin’s repeated insistence on the political and organizational independence of revolutionaries from ‘centrists’…
This is fundamentally false, stands Lenin on his head and repudiates the whole experience of Bolshevism. Rosa Luxemburg’s failure to build a mass revolutionary party was not due to the fact that she had not broken earlier with social democracy to form an independent sect, but to her failure to create a well-organized and homogenous tendency within the SPD at a much earlier time. The Internationale Group was not established until early 1916, and was a loose federation of groupings. In that sense she underestimated the importance of organization.
Harman fails to recognize that Bolshevism evolved within the framework of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Lenin’s Bolsheviks formed the revolutionary wing of social democracy and carried out a theoretical struggle, a political struggle, with the Mensheviks within the same organization. It was not until 1912 that the Bolshevik faction constituted itself as an independent party. On the international arena Lenin considered himself a supporter of Karl Kautsky, right up until 1914. At that time, Rosa Luxemburg was far more correct in her criticisms of Kautsky than Lenin was, as she had the experience of Kautsky’s day-to-day activities. Until 1914, Lenin regarded the German SPD under the Bebel-Kautsky leadership as the model for every party of the Second International. The Bolshevik criticism of the Mensheviks was seen in the same light as Kautsky’s attacks on the revisionists around Bernstein.
When mass communist parties were formed in Germany, France, and Italy, they did not arise from small groupings or sects, isolated from the mass organizations, but emerged from enormous splits within the old social democracy – the traditional parties of the working class. Precisely the reason why the British Communist Party remained a sect was because of its failure to win over the workers in the mass organizations, particularly in the Labour Party. Even after its formation as an independent party in 1920, Lenin forcefully argued that the new British Communist Party should affiliate to the Labour Party. This, too, was the position adopted at the Second Congress of the Comintern. Why was this? It is in complete contradiction to Harman’s interpretation of Lenin. It was an attempt to create a mass British Communist Party out of the Labour Party by winning over its rank and file on the basis of events. Lenin’s approach was to combat the ideas of reformism and revisionism, but never allow the forces of Marxism to be isolated from the ranks of the working class. That would mean falling into the sterile mistakes of sectarianism.
Following the bloodletting in Berlin, new elections for the National Assembly (the Reichstag) took place on 19 January. The KPD wrongly boycotted the elections. The SPD, however, polled 11.5 million votes, whereas the USPD got just under 2.5 million. Thus, the two workers’ parties, which formally stood for Marxism and socialism, polled around 45 percent of all the votes cast. The right wing bourgeois parties managed to scrape together a mere 15 percent of the vote.
The first action of the SPD was to approach the Independents to enter the new government. But when they refused, approaches were made to the bourgeois parties: the Democrats and the Centre Party, which agreed not only to participate but even accepted the programme of socialization!
After the defeat of the “Spartacist Uprising”, counter-revolutionary forces, of the Freikorps and other “loyal” divisions, took the initiative in a number of provinces to restore law and order. In February their troops had occupied Bremen and forcibly removed the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council. Other military actions followed in Bremerhaven and Cuxhaven. In central Germany government-backed troops ousted the councils in one town after another. The workers, however, did not give up their gains without a fierce struggle in which thousands were killed during prolonged street battles.
The Freikorps – semi-fascist military formations – were set up in December 1918, led by reactionary upper-class officers. These attracted the most degenerate mercenary elements who began their postwar military careers fighting Bolshevism in the Baltic States. On their return to Germany, much of this scum, from General Ruediger von der Goltz’s “Iron Division”, still wore the swastika emblems of the Baltic Freikorps on their steel helmets. Noske was to rely heavily on this reactionary rabble in his attempts to restore “law and order”.
At the end of February 1500 delegates gathered at the general assembly of the Berlin councils to discuss solidarity action with the workers of Central Germany. The composition of these councils reflected a changed balance of forces within the working class, with supporters of the SPD now outnumbered by the Independents and KPD representatives. Further demands were put to a reconvened assembly which included the organization of a workers’ militia, the dissolution of the Freikorps and the freeing of political prisoners. To obtain their demands, 90 percent favoured the calling of a general strike. Within 24 hours a massive strike gripped Berlin.
Barricades were erected and fighting broke out as the Freikorps attempted to restore normality. The government acted swiftly, giving Noske dictatorial powers over all Berlin. He immediately gave orders for 30,000 Freikorps troops to enter the city. On 9 March the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council decided to call an end to the strike, but this failed to placate Noske and the Freikorps. On the contrary, he announced “any person who bears arms against the government troops will be shot on the spot.” By the time the fighting ended some 2-3000 workers were dead and at least 10,000 were wounded. On 10 March, Leo Jogiches, the chairman of the Communist Party, was murdered in a police station, “while trying to escape”.