International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest

Extract

The German Communist Party (KPD) was founded during the German Revolution of 1918–19. At this time, German communists played only a peripheral role in the revolution and the council movement that revolutionaries expected would supplant the “bourgeois state.” Even so the conflicts in German society that laid the basis for the first mass-based communist movement outside of Soviet Russia were already taking shape and the dilemmas facing German communism at this time became recurring themes through the party's development under the Weimar Republic. The split in the German workers' movement grew out of ideological and programmatic tensions within the prewar Social Democratic Party (SPD), which became acute after the outbreak of World War I. By 1913 the party was dominated by its reformist wing, under party chairman Friedrich Ebert. Against the opposition of the Marxist Center and the far left, international socialism and the class war were abandoned in favor of “defense of the fatherland” and “civil peace.” In August 1914 party discipline was able to ensure that all SPD Reichstag deputies – including the anti-militarist campaigner Karl Liebknecht – voted in support of the Kaiser's war effort. This unity, however, soon broke down. In order to maintain party discipline, the SPD leadership initially purged individual opponents of the war, such as Liebknecht and Otto Rühle. This was followed ... log in or subscribe to read full text