part I:

The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was the pride of the international socialist movement before the First World War. It was founded in 1875 in Gotha as a fusion between the Marxist Social Democratic Labor Party led by August Bebel and Willhelm Liebknecht, and the General German Workers' Association led by Ferdinand Lassalle, a critic of trade unions who looked to state-funded producer cooperatives as labor's panacea. Marx wrote a famous critique of the new party's program, which he believed made too many concessions to the Lassalleans. During its early years, the SPD faced harsh repression in the form of the Exceptional Laws (Bebel was twice imprisoned), and this pushed the party in a more radical and Marxist direction. Banned but not destroyed, the party managed to grow considerably in a period of boom accompanied by relatively little class struggle. From the 1880s right up to the war, strikes were uncommon and workers' living standards rose, even if they didn't keep pace with profits. The party's numbers grew steadily, reaching 1,085,905 members in 1914. Its vote increased from 311,900 in 1881 to 4 million in the 1912 elections, when it sent 110 deputies to the National Assembly (Reichstag), in addition to more than 3,000 other officials into lower bodies. The party maintained 90 daily newspapers, employed 267 full-time journalists and 3,000 manual and clerical workers, and led trade unions totaling 2 million members. In the absence of public institutions, the party created libraries, workers' schools, youth groups, women's groups, sports leagues, and entertainment venues. It was more than a political party-it was a way of life for many workers.
(...) [1905] From then on, Broué argues, the SPD leadership, both the Right and the Center, “categorically turned its back on the party's identification with revolution, and references to revolution in the ensuing debates were few and far between.” (19) This debate within the SPD was not simply a battle of ideas detached from social forces. The ideas of the Right were firmly rooted in the trade-union bureaucracy and the elected officials, whose jobs were most dependent on the political system that supervised German capitalism. The ideas of the Center tended to be strongest among the party officials, who were concerned primarily with holding the SPD together. The Left's positions tended to be championed by journalists or full-time party workers who were not directly responsible for any organizational questions. Of course, there were important exceptions to this description (such as Liebknecht), but Broué's discussion of the rise of the SPD bureaucracy is an important starting point to understand the outcome of the debate.
(...) [not enough Lenin, it seems] Why did it take four months for Leibknecht to break SPD discipline? Why was the Left so weak? According to Broué, despite their hostility to the growing bureaucracy within the SPD and the drift to the right, they never sought to systematically organize themselves as a coherent group to fight for leadership of the SPD. The theoretical basis of their passive attitude to the question of organization lay most clearly in Luxemburg's understanding of the relationship between the socialist party and the working class. She believed that the party bureaucracy was conservative and that it was an outgrowth of the excessive centralism of power in the hands of the full-time party apparatus. She argued that, while the Left should oppose this tendency toward bureaucracy, the spontaneous struggle of the working class would be the key factor in overcoming the bureaucracy's conservatism at the decisive moment. Her book about the 1905 Russian Revolution, The Mass Strike, argued that Russian workers had discovered that the merger of mass economic and political strikes were the means by which to fight capitalism and simultaneously overcome conservative or bureaucratic elements within their midst. Broué agrees with her emphasis on mass struggle. But he notes that her understanding of the Russian situation completely overestimated the role of mass action in overcoming reformism and underplayed the importance of organization, which, from her limited German experience, she assumed generally plays a retarding role in the struggle.
(...) Luxemburg consistently opposed Lenin's method of building up a principled and, crucially, organized group of revolutionaries, with its own press and system of communication that aimed to carry its positions into every party branch and every group of workers possible. She rejected as sectarian Lenin's practice of constructing a faction that had the common experience of working together over the course of years and submitting to a commonly agreed upon discipline. Broué believes that she incorrectly identified Lenin's insistence on limiting membership in the revolutionary group to those who agreed to work in a disciplined and centralized manner as the same tendency towards bureaucracy she was fighting against in the SPD. Paradoxically, her tenacious opposition to bureaucracy and centralism in general blinded her from taking any organizational measures to combat it in specific, as well as a fatalistic attitude towards new forms of organization.
(...) The 1917 February Russian Revolution overthrew the Tsar and raised the confidence of the working class and the Left in Germany. The Bolshevik Revolution in October ended the war with Germany in short order (although at great expense to Russia) and convinced millions of workers that socialist revolution was on the order of the day. 1918 was a year of devastating economic hardship for German workers and catastrophic killing of soldiers. The USPD grew by leaps and bounds at the expense of the SPD and the left wing of the USPD became radicalized under the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution. The idea of a Russian-type socialist revolution based on workers' councils became very popular among millions of workers and soldiers. In November 1918, sailors mutinied in Kiel and set into motion a rebellion in the army. Workers launched a general strike, quickly leading to the overthrow of the Kaiser, the collapse of the German government, and the proclamation of the German Republic. Workers' councils were formed in dozens of cities in imitation of the Russian soviets. The Spartacus leaders felt vindicated by the rush of events. “Yet the building of the revolutionary organization lagged behind the audacious political analyses and perspectives of the revolutionaries, and they were unable to take advantage…of the revolutionary ferment that was rising throughout 1918,” writes Broué.
(...) The chaos of revolutionary events allowed the disciplined apparatus of the SPD to gain positions of power all out of proportion to the political mood of the working class.
(...) Meanwhile, a sharp debate broke out within the USPD. The Right of the party favored throwing its weight behind the SPD-USPD government and pushing for new elections to the Reichstag, essentially an attempt to return to the prewar focus on parliamentary elections as the main socialist tactic. Luxemburg spoke for the Spartacus League and in favor of building up the power of the workers' councils as a dual power, aiming to eventually replace the Reichstag and the capitalist state bureaucracy with a Russian-type system based directly on the workers' councils alone. A vote of 485 to 185 at a mid-December conference in favor of the Right's perspective showed that with the war ending, the majority of the USPD leadership were opposed to a renewed wave of workers' struggle to usher in socialism.
(...) During the years 1914 to 1918, the Spartacus leaders never fully clarified the purpose of their work among themselves. Was it to prepare for the founding of a separate revolutionary party or simply to try to push the USPD to the left? At each crucial stage, they were left wondering who was with them and who was against them. Rather than setting the pace, they could only react to events-in August 1914, in January 1917, and again in November 1918. The USPD majority decision to turn away from the workers' councils finally forced the Spartacus leaders to found their own party, but not until after the first phase of the revolution was coming to a close. Broué draws the painful lesson that the Spartacus League's revolutionary ideas and ability to inspire outbursts of struggle proved to be no match for the organized parties of the SPD and USPD. The revolutionaries were pitifully unprepared for the revolution. By way of comparison, in January 1917, the Bolsheviks had roughly 25,000 members with a fifteen-year tradition of common party activity, the experiences of 1905 under their belts, and an impressive underground and legal press that was distributed to tens of thousands of workers. The Spartacus League had a few hundred members, did not have its own regular publication, and possessed very little experience of organized, common struggle against the other factions and parties, or in leading the day-to-day class struggle.But the KPD had no substantial organized base, with only around 3,000 members who had any notion of acting as an organized party. Compared to the national apparatus and mass membership of both the SPD and USPD (both had more than 100,000 members), the KPD was virtually powerless. Its forces were so meager that they struggled simply to communicate between cities and even between sections of Berlin. Compounding this problem was the party's infusion with the ultra-left enthusiasm that Levi described and the lack of an experienced leadership team that commanded the allegiance and respect of the party's rank and file. While Lenin hailed the party's founding, it was a party that could not yet coordinate events regionally or nationally.
(...) Despite their losses, the KPD and the revolutionary vanguard of the working class were not finished. They spent the next four-and-a-half years waging a bitter struggle to solve the riddles left unanswered by the martyrs of 1919. This period will be the subject of Part II of this review.

(...) [I.] First, the First World War confirmed that political ideas matter; indeed, they can lead people to different sides of the barricades. The debate between Bernstein and Luxemburg had real life consequences, even if it was not completely obvious at the time. Kautsky's attempt to paper over these fights, merely served to disorient the Left and gain time for the Right to consolidate its control of the party apparatus.
(...) [II.] Second, the capitalists are ingenious when it comes to patching up their system and passing on the costs of the crisis to the working class. Yet, the ruthless economic competition that lies at the heart of the capitalist system forces the capitalists, and the governments they control, to confront one another in the hopes that they will be the last man standing, even if it threatens their common ruin. Kautsky could not believe European capitalism would plunge into full-scale war. In fact, it did so twice between 1914 and 1945. Capitalism breeds war and that danger will only pass when it is replaced with socialism-a lesson with obvious lasting value in today's world.
(...) [III.] Finally, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were political giants Yet, lacking a powerful political party with clear Marxist ideas based in the working class they could not put their revolutionary principles into practice. Broué's book will help a new generation of revolutionaries learn these truths.

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part II:

The futility of isolated uprisings, not coordinated by a centralized, revolutionary party was a lesson learned very dearly. This explains why anarchism never played an important role in the German workers’ movement during the height of the revolution. Paul Levi, who emerged as the principal KPD leader after the murders of Luxemburg and other KPD leaders in 1919, stated:

There is not a single Communist in Germany today who does not regret that the foundation of a Communist Party did not take place long ago, before the war…(453)

(...) The question then became how to build this party. At its founding convention in December of 1918, the KPD had only several thousand members. Although it did grow rapidly during the bloody repression of early 1919 to upwards of 90,000 members, it was shot through with ultra-leftism—recall at its founding conference that the majority opposed running candidates in parliament and refused to work inside existing trade unions—and hardly functioned at all as a coordinated national party. For the young, impatient activists inside the KPD, the question of how to reach the big battalions of the working class that still held illusions in the reformist SPD or the centrist Independent SPD (USPD), was not an issue. Most of the young party’s members refused to recognize the impact of the defeat of early 1919 on the working class. The dismantling of the workers’ councils in December 1918 led most workers to accept that the best way to defend their class interests was to vote for socialist candidates in the parliamentary elections. The SPD gained 11.5 million votes on January 19 and the USPD won another 2 million, together totaling 46 percent of the national vote, and constituting the overwhelming majority of the working-class vote. The KPD’s call for a boycott of the election was entirely ignored. Yet most young communists refused to recognize this reality, instead calling for the immediate overthrow of the newly formed SDP government, including SPD leader Friedrich Ebert, who was elected president of the republic by the new Reichstag in January 1919.
(...) By the fall of 1919, Levi had become convinced that the ultra-lefts had to be expelled at all costs in order to achieve unity with the revolutionary workers who remained in the left wing of the USPD. He reorganized the party from top to bottom and insisted that all members who did not agree to participate in the parliamentary elections and who refused to recognize the authority of the KPD’s central committee be expelled. Levi’s tactics lost the KPD well over half of its membership. Lenin and Radek agreed with Levi’s desire to transform the KPD, but they opposed the split. Lenin even publicly offered to mediate between Levi and some factions of the ultra-lefts.
(...) Levi, Lenin, and Radek, as well as all the principal leaders of Bolsheviks and the KPD, agreed that the only way to transform the KPD into a mass, revolutionary party, was to find a way to win over the hundreds of thousands of militant workers who had refused to join the KPD until then and remained inside the left wing of the USPD...
(...) But this political schizophrenia did not prevent the party from growing rapidly, from 100,000 in November 1918 to 300,000 in March 1919, and to 800,000 by the fall of 1920. The USPD had fifty-seven newspapers and could count on millions voting for it at the polls. It was perceived by millions of workers as the radical alternative to the SPD, while the KPD remained in the shadows.
(...) The radicalization of the USPD and the ongoing debate between Levi and Lenin received a jolt when right-wing army officers and a politician named Wolfgang Kapp launched a coup against the SPD government in March 1919. The coup threatened to install a military dictatorship, wiping out not only the KPD, but the SPD and the USPD as well. While Ebert and all his government ministers fled Berlin to find the safety of a loyal general, the workers of Berlin rose up in a general strike. They were led by left-wing members of the USPD and Carl Legien, who was the main leader of the SPD trade unions in Berlin. Legien was not himself a left-winger, but, unlike Ebert whose main power base was in the electoral apparatus, Legien’s power rested on his strength in the unions and he realized that Kapp and the coup makers intended to smash not only the extreme left wing, but also all workers’ organizations, so he threw his considerable authority into the struggle. On March 15, the coup makers’ government was paralyzed. “The general strike now grips them with its terrible, silent power,” described a Belgian socialist.
(...) The October 1920 USPD convention in Halle, Germany, was a showdown between the Right and the Left. Russian Bolshevik leader, Gregori Zinoviev, in his capacity as leader of the Communist International (Comintern) spoke at the convention, arguing for the USPD to join the Comintern. Broué describes the scene,

The battle really was to begin when Zinoviev mounted the platform. He was to speak for more than four hours, in German, with much difficulty and a certain apprehension at the beginning, and then with an authority which enabled him to win his greatest oratorical triumph in an already distinguished career. (439)

As if to highlight the interwoven nature of the Russian and German Revolutions, Julius Martov, the main leader of the Mensheviks, replied to Zinoviev’s speech, beseeching the USPD militants not to join with the KPD. In the end, Kautsky, Bernstein, and Rudolph Hilferding could not prevent the majority of the USPD delegates from voting in favor of Zinoviev’s proposition, and the right-wingers walked out of the convention. They exacted their revenge on Zinoviev by having him expelled from Germany twelve days later.
(...) Having achieved the prerequisites of mass size, clear principles, and organizational independence, and operating in a field of acute capitalist crisis, it seemed that the KPD and the German working class were finally on the road to revolution. However, very quickly, two closely related problems emerged. First, could the leadership of this new party function effectively as a guiding force for the hundreds of thousands of party members; and, second, what strategy and tactics would help the party win the decisive section of the working class over to revolution?
(...) The most remarkable thing about the Bolshevik leadership is that, despite the immense pressure that was brought down upon it in 1917, it did not split, but expanded. Even Zinoviev and Kamenev’s leaking of the plans for the October insurrection did not lead to its fragmentation. This is not the place to enter into a discussion of why this was the case, but some factors that account for the Bolshevik success were: the shared experience of revolution and repression in 1905; Lenin’s appreciation of the role of leading cadre; and the existence of a long-standing leadership team that was accustomed to carrying out sharp debates but then acting in unison. The united KPD Zentrale certainly had shared the experience of revolution and repression, but they had not done so in a common party. Even within the core of the historic Spartacus leadership, Heinrich Brandler and Wilhelm Pieck did not have much experience working with Levi, and even less so with Clara Zetkin. Worse, within three months of the party’s formation, Levi, Däumig, Brass, and Hoffman all resigned from the party and Geyer left shortly thereafter. Zetkin did not quit the party, but she resigned from the Zentrale along with Levi. In other words, six of twelve of its elected leaders, including its two co-chairmen were gone entirely from the party or its leadership soon after its founding.
(...) Broué goes to great lengths to trace the impact of the Comintern on the KPD, which he gives as the third reason for the KPD leadership’s split.
(...) During this crisis, Lenin and Trotsky were absorbed with the work of keeping the revolution afloat and the leadership of the Comintern fell more and more exclusively on Zinoviev and a small group of doubtful international “commissars” whom he dispatched to carry out his orders. Increasingly, the International retreated from the ideal of democratic debate into bureaucratic fiat. In the context of the KPD, this meant that Zinoviev’s agent in Germany pounded away at Levi’s supposed opportunism, insisting on driving him out of the Zentrale. Broué points out that it is certainly possible that at least part of Zinoviev and Radek’s attacks on Levi had to do with a desperate attempt at “artificially accelerating the speed of the revolution” in order to break Russia out of its isolation. (532) However, even if this is entirely true, it only goes to point out that the KPD leadership was not strong enough to stand up to this type of intervention, and was easily picked apart.
(...) The KPD Zentrale launched an irresponsible attempt to “provoke” a strike and armed insurrection, even though the working class was in a passive and demoralized mood. In other words, to embark upon the type of action that the KPD had done in January of 1919 and which Levi and Radek and Brandler had fought against for the proceeding two years. Indeed, it was this type of action that had repelled the left wing of the USPD from joining the KPD back in December of 1918. Frölich was ideologically predisposed to ultra-leftism, but it is more difficult to understand why Brandler, who had always supported Levi against the ultra-lefts, went along with it, and in fact, was the lead organizer of it. In the end, the so-called March Action was an unmitigated disaster. The KPD call for a general strike was met with indifference by the mass of workers, so party leaders ordered unemployed members to attempt to physically stop workers from going to work. This provoked fist fights and even gun fights between communists and other workers. (501) In the aftermath of the fiasco, the party was driven back underground and lost over 200,000 members, reducing the party to some 150,000 members. Hundreds of party activists were jailed, four were sentenced to death, and Brandler was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for high treason. (506)
(...) the French army occupied the main coal- and iron- producing region of Germany, the Ruhr Valley, in order to extract war debts mandated in the Treaty of Versailles. Ebert’s SPD government and the German ruling class tried to use the invasion to win German workers, especially in the Ruhr, to unite with them against the French. The KPD agreed that the French should be resisted, but refused to agree to ally with the SPD or the bosses.
(...) On January 23, 1923, the dollar was worth 8,000 marks; by September 7, it was worth 60 million, and a miner had to work for an hour to buy one egg. Hyperinflation wiped out wages and savings, and led to a dramatic rise in unemployment and homelessness. By the summer of 1923, the crisis was laying bare the uselessness of the reformist socialists’ belief in the sanctity of capitalism and the trade union bureaucracy’s reliance on negotiating pay raises once a year. The KPD’s influence grew quickly and 20,000 factory and workers’ councils sprang up all over Germany in the desperate struggle for food. These councils were not the same as the soviets that grew up in November of 1918 because they organized only within individual workplaces. And, unlike the Russian soviets in 1917, they did not represent the rank and file of the army. However, the massive surge of rank-and-file organization at the factory level, surpassed no more than a handful of times in the international history of the working class, was clearly once again raising the question of the potential for dual power. Furthermore, the KPD became the leading force in the workers’ council movement, gaining the allegiance of millions of workers beyond their membership. To defend workers from the police and from the far Right, the KPD initiated a militia called the “proletarian hundreds.” By May 1, 1923, 25,000 of these men marched through downtown Berlin with red armbands, a “real workers’ militia,” says Broué.
(...) To Brandler’s credit, he realized that the KPD had to show that it could lead a nationwide movement to coordinate the disconnected strike waves rolling across Germany as well as give leadership to the brewing civil war between the police and the fascists on the one hand and the workers’ councils and militias on the other. If the KPD did not lead, then the danger loomed of useless and scattered resistance burning itself out across the country, as it had done in 1919. He proposed an “Anti-Fascist Day” on July 29, 1923.
(...) Unable to decide for themselves, they sent a telegram to Moscow asking what to do. Lenin was incapacitated by a series of strokes. Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bukharin were all on vacation. Radek received the telegram and warned against the mistakes of 1921. Zinoviev and Bukharin, by telegraph, argued to defy the ban. Stalin disagreed. In the end, Radek telegraphed to Brandler, “We fear a trap,” and the Anti-Fascist Day was called off. (741) Certainly it was not a crime in asking the Bolsheviks for their advice, but canceling what might have been the start of the fight for power in Germany on the strength of a telegram once again exposed the weaknesses of the KPD’s leadership.
(...) It is clear that within weeks of calling off the protest, the government of conservative Prime Minister Cuno collapsed under the pressure of a wave of mass strikes. The fall of the Cuno government in mid-August finally jarred the KPD and the Communist International into realizing that the crisis in Germany was analogous to Russia in the months of September and October 1917, that is to say, a pre-revolutionary situation was maturing and the KPD would soon be faced with a fight for power.
(...) In October 1917, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks led the insurrection through the Soviets, that is, in alliance with the extreme left wing of several other parties, but at no time did they give the leadership of those other parties, who were caught between reform and revolution, the opportunity to veto their actions. Unfortunately, in Germany, Brandler, with Zinoviev’s blessing, publicly proposed in late October to the leadership of the left wing of the SPD to start the revolution together. When the SPD minister refused to go along with a KDP-proposed general strike at a conference of factory committees, Brandler called off the insurrection. To add insult to injury, in Hamburg, the KPD did not receive the news that the insurrection had been canceled. There, the party proceeded with its plan and was isolated and wiped out. Twenty-one were killed, and hundreds were wounded or taken prisoner.
(...) Now, having raised the hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file KPD members and millions of radicalized workers to the point of the fight for power, the sudden, and chaotic letdown destroyed the party as a fighting force. For some weeks, Zinoviev tried to pretend that everything was fine and that the insurrection was simply delayed. But as time wore on, the German bourgeoisie took the opportunity to impose martial law and it became obvious that the revolution was defeated.

(...) Broué’s conclusion must be the starting point for Marxists to come to grips with the defeat in Germany. The objective economic circumstances of prewar German capitalism dialectically conditioned the political forms of organization adopted by the working class and this history, in turn, shaped the ideas and experiences of the leading socialist revolutionaries. Looking back on it, Levi was certainly correct to conclude that they should have begun in 1903 to build an independent revolutionary party, but that presupposes Luxemburg and Liebknecht drawing lessons from circumstances that did not occur in Germany (as they did in Russia) or had not yet occurred in Germany. Having realized their error too late, the political leaders most capable of correcting it (Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Mehring, Jogiches) were all gunned down in early 1919. What they left behind was not an organized Bolshevik Party, but the idea of a party, supported by Lenin to be sure, but populated by unstable and impatient ultra-lefts, hostile and separate from the working-class revolutionary leaders who remained in the USPD until 1920.
(...) But if the KPD failed to lead the revolution, the peaceful, reformist capitalist democracy that Bernstein and Kautsky had dreamed of turned out to be a cruel joke. It ended in the victory of Hitler’s Nazis in 1933 and the total liquidation of the workers’ movement in Germany, and in much of Europe. The defeat also doomed the Russian Revolution to permanent isolation, creating the desperate conditions upon which Stalin built his bureaucratic state capitalist monstrosity, which politically and physically negated the core of Bolshevik theory and practice. At a terrible price, Rosa Luxemburg’s warning that either socialism or barbarism would prevail proved prophetic. But only those who believe that capitalism is humanity’s highest and final product can fail to appreciate the heroics, alongside the follies, of the generation of men and women of the KPD who gave their lives for a better world.