100 years ago this month close to the end of great war, revolution erupted across Germany. Exhausted from the bloody imperialist war and inspired by Russia’s October revolution the year before, the German workers formed workers-councils. In the wake of the revolutionary moment, the SPD, Germany’s largest social-democratic party, sought to maintain capitalist social relations by means of laying hold of the German bourgeois state.
Rosa Luxemburg and the Spartacist league split from the SPD over this betrayal of the workers and maintained that the working class had to take power directly themselves. The workers had to form their own revolutionary associations, they could not transform the bourgeois state apparatus into a revolutionary administration. It is the workers and the workers alone that hold all power.
The counter-revolutionary and reformist leadership of the SPD along with the Military leadership called upon the reactionary Freikorps (some of whom became high-ranking nazis) to torture and murder Luxemburg along with killing and suppressing the workers-councils. In murdering Luxemburg and the spartacists, the SPD vindicated Luxemburg’s position that the workers had to be at the head of revolutionary moments and the worker bodies that assume the role of revolutionary administration. It was the SPD’s engagement in bourgeois democratic politics as part of their minimum program that engendered the split between the party’s leadership and the working class masses.
The SPD came too enamored with the thought of winning votes and gain parliamentary representation, in doing so they came divorced form the goals of the maximum program and identified with the bourgeois state rather than the workers. Taking part in bourgeois democratic necessarily excludes any profound change that would be found in a maximum program, as it is a system whose function is mask and legitimise the barefaced exploitation of the capitalist system. One merely changes who administers the exploitation at the heart of the capitalist system.
The capitalists will not allow the workers to vote away their power. Any attempt to do so will be met with the suspension of the illusion of bourgeois democracy until capitalist supremacy can be reinstated. To quote Liebknecht:
“The ruling class is not thinking of giving up its class rule. They can be put down only in the class struggle. And this class struggle will and must pass over the bodies of all governments that do not dare take up the struggle with capitalism, and preach instead to the workers—day by day—peace, order, the wickedness of strikes.”
The death of Rosa Luxemburg and the spartacists is one of the greatest blows to the working class we have ever suffered. We should learn from this defeat a lesson that is as important, if not more important now than ever. To create a world in which the forces of production are used to satisfy human need and not captial accumulation, we can not wait for the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and so on… no matter how good their intentions are, to act faithfully in our best interest. The what is needed is direct working class engagement in society, we need to assume responsibility for the society our labour creates and collectively decide how best that society can fulfill our needs and wants. We need it now, because as Luxemburg said:
“Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism.”
*The above photo shows members of the sparticusbund preparing a defensive position against the counter-revolutionary Freikorps
Marx in the Carparx 