Spartacus League


The Spartacus League was a left revolutionary movement organized in Germany during World War I and immediately thereafter. It was founded in August 1914 as the International Group by Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin, and other members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany who were dissatisfied with the party's official policies in support of the war. In 1916 it renamed itself the Spartacus Group and in 1917 joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, which had split off from the SPD as its left wing faction.
During the November Revolution of 1918 that broke out across Germany at the end of the war, the Spartacus Group re-established itself as a nationwide, non-party organization called the "Spartacus League" with the goal of instituting a council republic that would include all of Germany. It became part of the Communist Party of Germany when it was formed on 30 December 1918 and at that point ceased to exist as a separate entity.
The League's name referred to Spartacus, the leader of a major slave uprising against the Roman Republic. For the Spartacists, his name symbolized the ongoing resistance of the oppressed against their exploiters and thus expressed the Marxist view of historical materialism, according to which history is driven by class struggles.

History

Background

At the 1907 congresses of the Second International in London and Stuttgart, it was decided that the European social democratic and socialist parties would oppose the threat of war between the major European powers. At the 1912 Basel conference, additional antiwar measures were decided on, including that the working classes should "exert every effort to prevent the outbreak of war by the means they considered most effective". The SPD had explicitly and repeatedly opposed an imperialist war in Europe, approved measures against it and announced them publicly. During the July crisis of 1914 that followed the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, it reaffirmed its rejection of war in nationwide large-scale demonstrations by its supporters.
On 4 August 1914, just days after the start of World War I, the Reichstag voted on loans to fund the war. The SPD's Reichstag membership voted unanimously in favor of both the loans and Burgfriedenspolitik, a policy of political truce under which the parties would support war loans and not criticize the government or the war, and the trade unions would not strike. Even Karl Liebknecht, an outspoken anti-militarist, voted in favor because of the SPD's unwritten rule to maintain party solidarity and unity. With its approval of the imperial government's war policy, the SPD parliamentary group abandoned three program points that they had adhered to since the party's founding: proletarian internationalism, class struggle and opposition to militarism.

The International Group

The International Group came about through Rosa Luxemburg's initiative. Immediately after the vote on war loans, she invited the SPD opponents of the war who were her friends to her Berlin apartment. The evening meeting on 4 August 1914 was attended by six guests who, together with Luxemburg, formed the nucleus of the later Spartacus League: Hermann Duncker, Hugo Eberlein, Julian Marchlewski, Franz Mehring, Ernst Meyer and Wilhelm Pieck. In the following week, a number of others joined the group: Martha Arendsee, Fritz Ausländer, Heinrich Brandler, Käte Duncker, Otto Gäbel, Otto Geithner, Leo Jogiches, Karl Liebknecht, August Thalheimer and Bertha Thalheimer.
The International Group saw the SPD's approval of the war loans as a betrayal of the goals of pan-European social democracy and especially of the international solidarity of the workers' movement against the war. It maintained its pre-war goals and rejected the war as an imperialist genocide by the ruling bourgeoisie directed against the interests of the peoples of Europe and the proletariat.
The idea of a withdrawal from the SPD that was contemplated by some International Group members was quickly discarded since it was expected that the government would soon ban the SPD's activities and that the SPD majority would then abandon the political truce. It was decided to organize the struggle against the war within the SPD, to persuade the SPD majority to reject further war loans, and to restore international solidarity with other European workers' parties.
The group's first step was to send 300 telegrams to SPD members urging them to publicly reject the SPD Reichstag faction's 4 August resolution. Only Clara Zetkin responded immediately and unreservedly in favor. Among the SPD's local groups, those in Berlin-Charlottenburg and Berlin-Mariendorf were initially the only ones to declare their support for the appeal. On 30 October 1914, the International Group publicly distanced itself from the SPD leadership, which had previously criticized the Second International in the Swiss newspaper Berner Tagwacht. From that point on the group's members were under police surveillance, and soon after some were arrested and imprisoned.
On 2 December 1914 Karl Liebknecht was the first and initially the only SPD deputy in the Reichstag to vote against the extension of the war loans. In January 1915, Otto Rühle and a number of others spoke out against the war and the party majority's affirmation of the war within the SPD parliamentary group.
In March 1915 the group published a magazine under the name Internationale, which appeared only once and was immediately confiscated by the police.

Spartacus Group

In 1916 the group expanded its organization throughout the Reich. On 1 January it adopted as its program the "Guiding Principles on the Tasks of International Social Democracy" that Rosa Luxemburg had written while in prison. On 27 January the first of the illegal "Spartacus Letters" appeared. They detailed the group's goals and gave it the popular name "Spartacus" that its members adopted, calling themselves the "Spartacus Group".
The minority of declared opponents of the war within the SPD parliamentary group had grown to 20 by December 1915. Karl Liebknecht was expelled from the party in January 1916, Otto Rühle resigned in solidarity with Liebknecht, and the 18 other dissenters were expelled in March 1916. Meanwhile, the Spartacus Group gained new members. Among the better known were Willi Budich, Edwin Hoernle, Paul Lange, Jacob Walcher and Friedrich Westmeyer.

Affiliation with the USPD

In April 1917 the opponents of the war within the SPD founded their own party, the Independent Social Democratic Party ; the rest of the SPD then took the name Majority Social Democratic Party. The Spartacus Group joined the USPD even though it had previously opposed splitting the SPD. But it retained its group status as a "closed propaganda association" in order to influence the USPD. In the USPD, too, the internationalist Marxists were a minority. Revisionists like Eduard Bernstein and centrists like Hugo Haase and the SPD's former platform writer Karl Kautsky were in agreement with the Spartacists only when it came to rejecting war loans. At the Zimmerwald Conference, an international antiwar convention held in September 1915, they had refused to defend their rejection in the face of the party discipline of the SPD in the Reichstag. The Spartacus Group had severely criticized them at the time.

Relationship with the Bolsheviks

In 1917 the Spartacus Group hailed the first revolution in Russia that year as a victory for its own cause that was important for Europe and the whole world. Rosa Luxemburg saw educating German workers about the revolution as the Spartacus Group's most important task at the time. From the summer of 1917 she and Leo Jogiches criticized the Bolsheviks' putschist policies against Alexander Kerensky's government in Petrograd. They also rejected Lenin's and Leon Trotsky's pursuit of a separate peace with the German Empire because they thought that such a peace would endanger both international proletarian opposition to war and the prospect for a successful German revolution. Luxemburg distanced herself from the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that ended the war between Germany and Russia, as well as from the supplementary agreement to it of 27 August 1918. She found the terrorist measures of the Bolsheviks under Felix Dzerzhinsky repugnant. In September 1918 she called the threats made by Lenin's friend Karl Radek to "slaughter the bourgeoisie" after an attempted assassination of Lenin "an idiocy of the first order".
In her essay The Russian Revolution from the fall of 1918, Luxemburg welcomed in principle the October Revolution of 1917, in which the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Leon Trotsky dissolved the Duma and seized state power, but she criticized the Bolsheviks' party organization, Lenin's cadre concept, and the intra-party dictatorship for the way they impeded and stifled the democratic participation of workers in the revolution. The other Spartacists deferred public criticism of the Bolsheviks out of loyalty. Paul Levi did not publish Luxemburg's essay until 1922, three years after the author's death.
The Spartacus Group remained organizationally and politically independent of communists until it was absorbed into the KPD. It came closer to them politically only in the course of the November Revolution in Germany, when it decided in December 1918 to found a separate party with other left-wing radicals. This was in response to the USPD's rejection of a party congress proposed by Luxemburg.

Revolutionary program

In October 1918 the German government passed a series of constitutional and legislative reforms, in part in the hope of securing better peace conditions from the Allies of World War I. The reforms strengthened the Reichstag and the parliamentary form of government, but the emperor still appointed the chancellor and retained command authority. On 7 October 1918 the Spartacus Group reacted to the reforms and to the SPD's participation in them with an illegally held Reich conference in Berlin. There a revolutionary program against war and capitalism was adopted. Its demands were:
  • the immediate end of the war,
  • cancellation of all war bonds without any compensation,
  • the achievement of democratic rights and freedoms,
  • comprehensive judicial reform to abolish class suffrage and class justice,
  • the direct democratic disempowerment and disarmament of the imperial officer corps,
  • the socialization of the means of production, the expropriation of all bank capital, mines and smelters – in other words, the heavy industry that was decisive for the war, above all the armaments industry,
  • finally, the establishment of a socialist republic.
The demands for the democratization of the army were particularly detailed, as this was seen as the key to a successful revolution:
  • granting soldiers the right of association and assembly in on-duty and off-duty matters,
  • abolition of disciplinary punishment by superiors; discipline to be maintained by soldier delegates,
  • abolition of courts-martial,
  • removal of superiors by majority vote of those subordinate to them,
  • abolition of the death penalty and penal sentences for political and military offenses.
The Spartacus Group issued a Reich-wide leaflet with these demands. It stressed that they were a touchstone for the democratic intentions of the MSPD, whose entry into the wartime government it regarded as a betrayal of the workers' interests.
The Spartacus Group made reference to the 1848 Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and pledged itself to the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. workers' control of the means of production and operation. Unlike the Bolsheviks, however, the Spartacus Group was not constituted as an elite cadre party.