The Red Flag: A History of Communism (22 page)

A couple of months before the meeting at Kiental, at a rather different type of venue – the newly opened Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich – another intellectual groupuscule expressed its horror at the war: the primitivist artistic movement, Dada. Hans Arp remembered how he and his fellow rebels thought:

Dadaists therefore differed from the Marxists in cutting themselves off from politics, at least at first. But in other ways they had much in common. They wanted to outrage the bourgeoisie, with Dadaist performances at the Cabaret Voltaire designed directly to provoke violence and bring confrontations with the police.

In 1915 both radical Social Democrats and Dadaists seemed to be whistling in the wind. The war continued. Lenin could not even persuade his fellow anti-war Marxists to approve a split in the Second International. Yet within a year, everything had changed. As the bloodshed continued, the more the left became disillusioned with the war. By 1916 the executive of the French Social Democratic SFIO was seriously divided over war credits, and soon the German Social Democratic Party itself split. The majority continued to support the war, but significant figures such as Kautsky and Bernstein now opposed it. At the same time, however, a more radical left-wing minority, led by Rosa Luxemburg and the Marxist lawyer Karl Liebknecht, emerged, calling themselves the ‘Spartacists’ after the leader of the Roman slave revolt. By April 1917 the party had split, with the foundation of the new minority radical Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD).

In 1916, Lenin and the Dadaists would have had nothing but mutual contempt for each other. Lenin would have seen them as utopian Romantics. But by 1918 some Dadaists, especially the Germans, had embraced a radical Marxist politics, and the incongruously named ‘Revolutionary Central Committee of Dada’ had been formed. One of the most famous, the painter George Grosz, incorporated graffiti, children’s drawings and other forms of popular art into angry caricatures of arrogant militarists and greedy capitalists. Grosz was to become a leading member of the German revolutionary movement, and was a founding member of the German Communist Party, the KPD.
⁴

The war had also dented the faith of many ordinary people in the old pre-war elites. Governments demanded enormous sacrifices in the name of patriotism. But as the fighting dragged on, resentment increased.
Equal sacrifice did not seem to produce equal reward. On the home front, living standards and working conditions deteriorated, and food shortages were endemic. Meanwhile on the frontline what many believed was pointless carnage continued.

Unlike the tsarist regime, most combatant governments were willing to forge serious alliances with non-revolutionary socialists. The German Social Democrats continued to support war credits, and the French SFIO joined a ‘sacred union’ (
union sacrée
) with the government. In return they were given a role in running the industrial economy. As the war dragged on, however, the socialists of the Second International became increasingly compromised by their cooperation with the ruling elites. For many ordinary workers the socialists seemed little more than establishment stooges; conditions on the shop-floor were worsening as discipline tightened. A gulf soon emerged between rank-and-file workers on the one side, and moderate socialists and trade unionists on the other. The socialist establishment’s hold over workers was further weakened by an influx of new workers – women, migrants from the countryside and, in the case of Germany, foreign conscripts from occupied lands.
⁵
These new arrivals had few links with established socialist parties and trade unions, and it was these semi-skilled workers, flooding into the new mass industries of the war, who formed the base of support for the post-war revolutions.
⁶

Strikes reached a peak in the years 1918–25.
⁷
In Germany in 1917, over 500 strikes involved 1.5 million workers;
⁸
in Britain strikes remained at a high level throughout the war, and especially affected a few radical areas such as ‘Red Clydeside’. Strikes also became increasingly politicized, with protesters obsessively attentive to the unequal wartime sacrifices made by different classes. In November 1916 railwaymen’s wives in the town of Knittefeld, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, complained that they were being deprived of sugar so that the bourgeois and officers could waste their time in coffee houses.
⁹
In the spring and summer of 1917 mass protests swept Europe and workers also began to demand an end to the war.

So even before the events in Petrograd, a popular backlash was brewing against the war, but the example of the Bolshevik revolution further strengthened the radical left, and in January 1918 massive strikes and demonstrations rocked Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But it was defeat in war, when it seemed that all the sacrifices
had been for nothing, which was crucial in triggering the revolutions. For their radical critics, elites – aristocratic, bourgeois and moderate socialist – had led their countries along a disastrous and pointless path of aggression. As the art-nouveau artist Heinrich Vogeler declared, ‘The war has made a Communist of me. After my war experiences, I could no longer countenance belonging to a class that had driven millions of people to their deaths.’
¹⁰
It was no surprise then that in October and November 1918 the old regimes should have collapsed amidst popular, often nationalist revolutions.

Superficially, German politics looked strikingly similar to Russia’s after February 1917. Workers’ and soldiers’ councils sprang up alongside a new provisional government consisting of left-wing liberals, moderate socialists (the SPD) and a minority of radicals (the USPD), under the SPD’s Friedrich Ebert. At the same time, Luxemburg and a small Spartacist group were demanding a Soviet-style revolution and the end of parliamentary democracy. In fact, most of the councils did not demand a soviet republic, and supported a liberal order; the radicals were a small minority.
¹¹
The sharp division between ‘people’ and elites present in Russia did not exist in Germany – predictably given the profound differences between German and Russian politics before the war. But Ebert was convinced that he was under threat from a new Bolshevik revolution, and was determined not to become another Kerenskii. He therefore acted more decisively than his Russian predecessor, believing that only an alliance with the military and the old imperial elites would ward off the revolutionary danger and guarantee liberal democracy.

Ebert’s willingness to ally his government with the right against the workers’ councils has generated a great deal of debate, and in retrospect it seems to have been an overreaction that contributed to the damaging polarization of German politics between the wars.
¹²
But at the time, the prospects for European Bolshevik revolutions did not look far-fetched, either to the left or to the right. The Bolsheviks themselves were certainly full of optimism. In March 1919 the foundation of the Third ‘Communist’ International (Comintern) formalized the split within Marxism between Communists and Social Democrats and brought together the more radical, pro-Soviet parties. Soviet republics were declared in Hungary (in March), Bavaria (April) and Slovakia (June), and seemed to show that there was a real chance that Bolshevism would spread, although the Hungarian government of the pro-Moscow
journalist Béla Kun was the only Communist regime fully to take power in the West. Strikes and radical protest continued throughout the period 1919–21. In the June 1920 elections in Germany, the radical left were at rough parity with the moderate socialists (20.3 per cent of the vote, compared with the Social Democrats’ 21.6 per cent). The red wave also affected southern Europe, and the years 1918–20 were to be dubbed the ‘
Trieno Bolchevista
’ in Spain, whilst Italy experienced its ‘
biennio rosso
’ in 1919–20. In Northern Italy it briefly seemed as if the factory council movement and the ‘occupation of the factories’ would really bring about an Italian Communist revolution. Worker unrest, some inspired by the Wobblies and other leftists, was especially widespread in the United States, and 1919 and 1920 saw the most powerful strike wave in American history, as workers demanded improvements in conditions and more factory democracy.

Communist parties benefited from this grassroots radicalism. Their members were generally young, and often unskilled or semi-skilled: a majority of the participants in the Second Comintern Congress of July 1920 were under forty and few had played important roles in the pre-war Social Democratic movement.
¹³
Many had emerged from the workers’ and soldiers’ councils of wartime, rather than through organized parties or trade unions, and were reacting against what they saw as a middle-aged, stodgy and excessively compliant Social Democratic culture.
¹⁴

Communists were in part driven by economic concerns, but several were also radicalized by their experience of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, with their rigid hierarchies and harsh discipline. Walter Ulbricht was typical of these Communist activists. Born in Leipzig, his father a tailor and his mother a seamstress and Social Democrat, he was brought up within the all-embracing culture of Marxist socialism and Kautsky’s party. But it was the outbreak of war that led him to embrace militant leftist socialism. His experience of the German army gave him a life-long hatred of ‘the spirit of the Prussian military’. He certainly had a difficult four years, suffering both from disease (he caught malaria) and punishments for distributing Spartacist literature. He finally escaped military prison and returned to Leipzig, becoming active in KPD politics. He then swiftly rose in the Communist hierarchy, becoming party leader in Thuringia, and a delegate to the Fourth Comintern Congress in Moscow in 1921, where he met Lenin.
¹⁵
It was this generation of Communists – born into the proletarian, Marxist
subculture of imperial Germany, and radicalized by war – that was to dominate the Communist East German regime after World War II; Ulbricht himself rose to be General Secretary of the ruling Communist party between 1950 and 1971.

The experience of war and defeat also pushed some intellectuals towards revolutionary Marxism. Much of the reason for this lay in their attitude to the ‘bourgeoisie’, but the bourgeois they railed against was of a particular type. He was not the narrow, hard-nosed Gradgrind of Marx’s
Capital
but was best represented by Diederich Hessling, the anti-hero of Heinrich Mann in his popular novel
Man of Straw
(
Der Untertan
, literally
The Subject
) (1918). Hessling is a ‘feudalized’ bourgeois, a submissive Hermes to the Wilhelmine Zeus. He is, at root, a cynical opportunist but has learnt at school and university to venerate hierarchy. Pathetically he attempts to ingratiate himself with the aristocracy, joining duelling fraternities and even adopting a Kaiser-style moustache, and embraces the fashionable militarism and imperialism. Meanwhile he exploits the workers beneath him.
¹⁶

Man of Straw
dramatized the theories of imperialism of Marxists like Rosa Luxemburg. They suggested that capitalism had become intimately connected with imperialism and militarism. The old liberal defence of capitalism as the bearer of freedom and peace no longer seemed credible. This analysis made sense to many, even those who were not fully paid-up Marxists. Karl Kraus, the owner of the Viennese satirical magazine
Die Fackel
(
The Torch
) and a critic of nationalism (but by no means a Marxist), captured the appeal of Communism to angry intellectuals. Writing in November 1920 he explained:

But whilst Kraus may have had his doubts about Communism’s ‘harshness’, for others it now seemed normal; fire had to be fought with fire. Before the war, many of the avant-garde intelligentsia despaired of mundane, ‘philistine’, bourgeois life, with its enslavement to money and technology. They hoped for a politics of spirit, soul and enthusiasm. These Romantic anti-capitalists often welcomed the war as an opportunity to smash bourgeois complacency and create a new man, full of renewed vigour and spirit.
¹⁸
But the war affected radicals in different ways. For some, like the Futurist Marinetti, who ended up on the fascist right, it showed the need for even more intense, messianic nationalism. But a more common response was a profound disillusionment with nationalistic flag-waving. Many of the leftist intellectuals of the Weimar period were deeply affected by fighting at the front.