Introduction

Introduction The two paths by which socialist parties came to power in the twentieth century were, on the one hand, by confining themselves to a limited set of reforms, and on the other, by taking power without an electoral-democratic mandate. Both can be seen as departures from Marx’s anticipated revolution of a proletarian majority, but also as adaptations to local conditions that advanced the cause of the work- ing class to a certain degree. In the world of today, the one seems inadequate and the other unfeasible. Revolution against the existing power-structure offers the only way to stop the stampede into plan- etary disaster, yet this can hardly succeed except as the act of a majority. However different conditions today are from those of the early twentieth century, it is not just out of historical interest that it is worth studying the politics of majority-revolution where this came closest to success: in Germany in the years immediately following the First World-War. This politics is associated above all with Rosa Lux- emburg, despite her death in the first phase of this period of revolution. Already before the War, she had done more than anyone to revitalise Marxism against the mainstream of the SPD, whose professed orthodoxy concealed a politics of passive anticipa- tion. After the disaster of , it was around her that the core of revolutionary opposition formed, taking the name of Spartakus that she coined for it. • Introduction The Spartacus group remained small until a mass-movement of work- ers and soldiers broke out in the second half of , by which time the great example of the Bolshevik Revolution was making itself felt. But, when Germany’s revolutionary socialists came to form a new party in December , this was under the tutelage of the Spartakusbund, and it took the name Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Spartakus).1 Two weeks later, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were dead, followed in March by Leo Jogiches. For the next two years, the orphaned KPD was led by Paul Levi, who sought to continue Luxemburg’s politics of majority-revolution and succeeded in building the KPD into a mass-party of a third of a million members. But, despite Levi’s own enthusiasm for the Bol- shevik Revolution and the newly formed Communist International, his good relations with Lenin and his readiness to learn from Russian experience, the KPD came under increasing pressure to adopt unsuitable tactics decided in Moscow. The watershed of the ‘March Action’ in led to a break between Levi and the KPD, followed in short order by the ‘Bolshevisation’ of the Ger- man Party, and an explicit rejection of the ‘Luxemburgist’ heresy. Paul Levi was years old when he became, not by his own choice, the leading figure in the KPD. As Clara Zetkin said in her Conversations with Lenin, ‘Following the murder of Rosa, Karl and Leo he had to take it over [the lead- ership of the Party], though he often enough resisted it.’2 What were Levi’s special qualities, so that Lenin would say, after Levi had supposedly ‘lost his head’, that ‘he at least had something to lose: one can’t even say that about the others [in Germany]’?3 Levi was born on March into a securely bourgeois family, typical of assimilated Germans of Jewish origin in its dedication to literature and the arts, and to the values of liberal democracy.4 He grew up in Hechingen, a small 1. After the merger with the left Independent Social Democrats in November , the Party was known as the Vereinigte Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, then, from April , as the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Sektion der Kommu- nistischen Internationale). It is generally referred to here as the KPD. 2. Cited after Gruber (ed.) , p. 3. Reported in Trotsky , p. 4. The material on Levi’s early life here draws especially on Beradt and Quack . Charlotte Beradt’s book is extremely patchy, lacks an analytical framework, and is especially inadequate on Levi’s KPD period. The subject of Sybille Quack’s is explained by its subtitle, ‘Paul Levi – Rosa Luxemburg. Political Work and Personal Relationship’. Both authors had access to the Paul Levi collection now at the Archiv der Sozialdemokratie in Bonn, which is the necessary starting point for any further .

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