The emergence of the Communist Party of Germany from the World War and the Russian Revolution
Chapter 2 Section 2
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This below is Chapter 2 Section 2:
The emergence of the Communist Party of Germany from the World War and the Russian Revolution
Marxism did not create the workers’ movement, but in a certain way it was itself a product of English Chartism. But it meant the most important advanced formation, even where it merely adopted certain lines of thought: it gave the words worker and working class a weight that made one forget the close genetic connection with the ideas and ways of thinking of journeyman craftsmen; it opposed the workers to capital in the harshest manner and declared the conflicts between labor and capital to be the main antagonism of the epoch; it saw the workers grow to an “immense majority” who would one day soon —simultaneously in all advanced countries of Western and Central Europe—eliminate the few remaining “capital magnates” as such and make them their “paid servants.” In doing so it placed itself completely in the objective movement which, from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, had created a new class of people out of peasants, journeymen artisans, and poor people of all kinds, the workers of great industry; which had first transformed the face of England and in the second half of the 19th century spread more and more to the rest of Europe. When, toward the end of the eighties, it became clear that Marxism had prevailed against its competitors in the most important countries of continental Europe—against the anarchism of Bakunin and the syndicalism of Proudhon, against the reformism of the French Possibilists, against the state socialism of Lassalle, against the insurrection theory of Blanqui—, it could rightly be regarded as a phenomenon of world history, even though it was nowhere involved in a government: if there was a unified workers' party, it had to determine the future more than any other party, because throughout Europe the tendency towards universal suffrage seemed irresistible after the French had stepped into the tracks of the Americans in a peculiar way, and the German Empire had followed Bismarck's example. As soon as universal suffrage had been established and maintained everywhere, according to widespread opinion, the workers' parties had to win a majority or at least play a decisive role in all European countries.
All workers' parties, including the non-Marxist ones, saw themselves as parties of peace that opposed the operations of imperialism which endangered peace, such as the conquest of colonial areas or the rape of small states and, in general, the power politics of the great powers. Here, too, they were as little isolated as they were in their conviction of the future political role of the workers: that the increasing importance of trade and industry would more and more displace the traditional feudal classes with their warlike inclinations was an old doctrine of liberalism, and to everyone’s surprise, the Russian tsar gave the first impetus to convene those peace conferences in the Dutch Hague, which should pave the way to a limitation of the sovereignty of the states and thus to the safeguarding of world peace. But Marxism in particular was not content with being merely an important partial phenomenon within the world change, which led from the agrarian to the industrial situation, which gave the hitherto silent or powerless masses a say in all affairs, which restricted the sovereignty of states and one day that would make a great war technically impossible, but it believed that one day the workers would have all the power in their hands everywhere and would use it precisely to abolish forever the power of men over men, as well as exploitation, misery, national enmities, states, classes, professionalization of activities, bureaucracy, and in general, all separations of man from man. Hopes of this kind, however, were in no way characteristically modern— like the orientation towards large-scale industry or the anticipation of a fundamental change in the relationship between states— but they were ancient, in some ways as old as humanity itself, and they ultimately ran towards the idea of a primordial state which the social philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries had called the “natural society” (societas naturalis) as opposed to “bourgeois society” (societas civilis) and had almost always regarded it — with great exceptions, such as the young Rousseau—as an irretrievable starting point. But it was only the turning to an original state that opposed the alienation and estrangement of modern life and that could be regained at a higher level (original communism) that made Marxism a faith, an ideology that radially rejected the whole present of capitalism and envisaged a completely different of a future that would be socialist for all of humanity. Marxism thus constituted the great party of protest and hope which inevitably had to form wherever the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution destroyed traditional ways of life and forced large masses of people into unfamiliar conditions—insofar as these experiences were able to articulate themselves and gain free opportunities for action.
But Marx and Engels were by no means lacking a sense of how closely this protest and this hope were often connected with reactionary or primitivist ideas—for example, as in Bakunin, and therefore they wanted to make it the unmistakable main characteristic of their doctrine, that socialism, as the dissolution of all dissonances in definitive harmony, presupposed precisely the sharpest formation of the divisions and conflicts that have hitherto been characterized the modern world, and that socialism can therefore only follow a fully developed capitalism that is incapable of further development. Thus, on the one hand, Marxism was the basis of the party of protest and hope, of the industrial age, which was based on an ancient dream of mankind, and, on the other hand, it justified the convictions of a rising class of skilled workers who demanded the right of participation in a new civilization, but hardly seriously envisaged their autocratic sole rule as a preliminary stage to global rulelessness. Many contemporary observers, Max Weber among them, perceived this class and this character, and not infrequently they spoke disdainfully of philistines who made themselves felt in the labor movement. But these philistines had their own masterminds who were called revisionists by their orthodox opponents and who were often accused of having a bourgeois way of thinking. The revisionists, for their part, invoked time as the most powerful enforcer of revisions: contrary to what Marx assumed, the number of citizens, i.e., of those who were not engaged in direct production and who devoted themselves to manifold kind of mediation were not diminishing in number, but were growing to an astonishing rate; the opposition between capitalists and workers is not rigid and merely negative, for there is a labor of capital (i.e. the entrepreneurs) as in capital of (qualified and indispensable) labor, and only this contrast makes genuine trade unions and the participation of workers in determining the rate of investment of the national economy possible; the postulated homogeneity of the proletariat does not even exist in the industrialized countries themselves and certainly not in the world; the fate of each worker is closely related to the fate of his state; capitalism is by no means on the verge of collapse, but still has a great future ahead of it, in which, however, it will transform itself more and more in the direction of the welfare state and only come to socialism after a long period of transition.
Certainly the revisionists, Bernstein, Schippel, Vollmar and others, were ideologists, i.e. people who tried to make the incomprehensible whole of historical development comprehensible through selection and combination, but they nevertheless detached the workers’ movement from the utopian and actually ideological impulse, which includes a socio-religious belief in sudden redemption and final salvation and they declared that doctrine of evolution to be the core of Marxism, which, in truth, was merely one of its components.
The final triumph of revisionism seemed to be demonstrated by the behavior of the workers in all countries when the war broke out. In Germany in particular the workers, like all other citizens, answered the call to the flag with a unanimity, indeed with an enthusiasm, that showed how little they regarded the world proletariat as their real fatherland and how well they were aware that the conditions in Germany, despite feudalism and perhaps even because of it, were better for them than the conditions in the far more unfettered capitalism of England, or in the absolutist tsarist monarchy. If the parliamentary group of the Social Democratic Party had refused to approve the war credits on August 4, 1914, it would, in all probability, have been swept away by the indignation of party members, and soon some of the once most radical representatives of the left wing of the party turned themselves into champions of a will to war which very emphatically linked to certain but little-known ideas of Marx and interpreted the class struggle as a class struggle of nations in which the primacy of English capitalism, having become obsolete, would be fought down by Germany as the more modern and stronger industrial power. Thus, in the world revolution of war, a system of world states would be formed, in which Germany would rise to the natural center of non-Russian and non-English Europe, and was already through the mere self-assertion, which does not require political conquest and could therefore be accepted by the other peoples of Central Europe as a protection as a starting point for federal unions. In the opinion of men like Paul Lensch, however, this development presupposed that the Social Democratic Party would not merely half-heartedly abandon its previous oppositional stance and see itself as a leading force of present and future Germany, without, of course raising the unrealistic claim to sole rule; it was also dependent on the previous opponents, especially the East Elbe Junkers, coming to terms with the diminution of their position and not making territorial demands for national-egoistic reasons that would make Germany hated by its neighbors. Another precondition for the success of this concept was that an overpowering coalition would not be formed against Germany, the firmest cement of which would have to be resistance to German claims to world power, which, in their ostentatious grandiloquence, would be as dangerous as they would be superfluous, since an undefeated Germany as a state of the “great central people of Europe” would be one of the world powers anyway. Whether this concept of defensively winning German supremacy in Europe and a no-longer-Marxist further development of Social Democracy had any prospect of realization, therefore, had to depend on its opponents, the opponents on the pan-German right and the opponents on the ideological wing of the Social Democrats.
On the evening of August 4th, all hopes of this wing of the party seemed to be shattered, and it was only a small group of deputies who met in Rosa Luxemburg's apartment to discuss the situation. Basically, Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, and at that time, Paul Lensch, could not hide the fact that the masses themselves had betrayed the world mission to which they ascribed to them and that the real struggle had to be waged against the nationalist ideology which (as it was said in an early leaflet by the Spartacus group) had changed people “deep into our ranks” in a frightening way, in such a way that they had completely forgotten the feeling of brotherhood towards their class-comrades from other nations and saw only the Russian or French or English enemy. Nevertheless, the small group never refrained from attacking the members of the executive committee and the Reichstag faction of the Social Democratic Party in the harshest and extremely personal terms such as traitors, who had separated themselves from the old faith of all Socialists and sullied the purity of the doctrine. In this respect, the opposition of those who soon published the first and only number of the journal Die Internationale and then the Spartacus Letters was nothing more than the opposition of the traditionalists in the Social Democratic Party, who were not shaken in their old belief by the new and disconcerting events. Thus, something strongly defensive can be seen in the great pathos with which Karl Liebknecht justified his refusal to approve new war credits or, after his arrest in May 1916, commented on the accusations of having committed treason as follows: “Treason is complete nonsense for the international Socialist…To break all imperialist powers at once in international interaction with the socialists of other countries is the quintessence of his endeavors.” But the longer the war lasted, the more this old and initially largely defensive pathos had to be heard among the people whose fathers, brothers and sons were filling the mass graves on the battlefields in even greater numbers, and who themselves were suffering bitter hunger while they had long and hard labor to do in the war industries or in the countryside. And so the leaflets which the "Gruppe Internationale" illegally printed were read more and more, and the authorities were seriously alarmed. How could it not have made a great impression when, at the end of 1915, No. 11 of the Political Letters said: “The world is spewing blood. The number of dead killed by the strangle-war in the east and west has already risen to more than a million, that of the wounded to three times that number…that war spares the peaceful citizen has become a laughable phrase on sea a well as on land, international law has shattered into a thousand pieces under war’s rough fist, and from the broth of blood and ashes the cloud of hatred rises ever thicker, which clouds the conscience of humanity rising to socialist solidarity.”
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht therefore regarded the war as the “greatest of all crimes” and not as a link in God's world-order, as their opponents on the Right did, but also not as an unavoidable phase in the mighty class struggle of nations that would bring about a new and lasting world condition of large states and associations of states. From the perspective of the second half of the 20th century, they were undoubtedly right insofar as the technical means with which this war was waged had already tended to reach the quality that would make the self-destruction of humanity possible within a few decades, and, in any case, had already led to the threshold of intolerable losses and the annihilation of what was called European culture, especially when one considers that this war, an early end which did no serious injustice to any nation or large group, was bound to generate so much continuing hatred that, in the opinion of observers from all camps, it would lead to further wars. The Spartacus League and those internationalist socialists who gathered in the Swiss villages of Zimmerwald and Kienthal in 1915 and 1916 were thus on a firm foundation of future and partially current law. Their right was only partial, because the complete rejection of the war also included the negation of personal bravery and the willingness to protect women and children, which were still possible in this two-sided war, and because opposition to the war could also arise from sheer cowardice. Of course, they shared their right with pacifists of all shades, and their prevailing view can be summarized as follows: the real crime is the adherence of all those involved to the idea of unlimited sovereignty of states, because this inevitably results in larger conflicts only be decided by war. It is therefore essential that, after the end of the world war, this unconditional sovereignty of individual states should be renounced and a League of Nations should be established, whose primary task must be to secure peace. The introduction of universal suffrage in all important countries will create the guarantee that any belligerence on the part of the military or individual factions of the ruling classes will not prevail, because the overwhelming majority of the people everywhere has become peace-loving at the latest as a result of this war and it will not permit the inevitable conflicts to be resolved by military means.
But for the Spartacus League and the two other international socialists, the right to oppose the war was intimately bound up with a certain interpretation of current events, which could be derived from Marx’s “Capital” with great difficulty at best. In a leaflet distributed on May 1, 1916, it was said: “For the second time the day of May 1 rises above the sea of blood of mass slaughter…And for whose benefit and piety, for what purpose all these horrors and bestialities? So that the East Elbian Junkers and the capitalist profiteers associated with them can fill their pockets by subjugating and exploiting new countries. So that the agitators from heavy industry, the army suppliers from the bloody fields of corpses drag golden harvests into their barns. So that stock market jobbers do usurious business with war bonds. So that food speculators fatten themselves at the expense of the starving people…” in short “Millions of men have already given their lives at the behest of the bourgeoisie.”
These statements apparently apply to all countries. In them war does not appear as a crime because it is opposed to the objectively already possible, indeed necessary, world peace, but rather it presents itself as the crime of concrete criminals who are guided by selfish purposes. This gang of criminals is essentially the bourgeoisie, even if the term is only used in other leaflets to refer to the alleged instigators in Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Here it is necessary to pause for a moment. No doubt there were war profiteers, food pushers, stock market speculators, sharks (as they said in Italy) everywhere, and they were extremely hateful to ordinary people everywhere. In some cases, these phenomena were unavoidable, since the economic freedom of movement of individuals and companies, as well as the reward for special achievements, were as little completely eliminated even in the German war economy as the price system as indicators of scarcity. But it was a very bold, indeed untenable, thesis that this very narrow class had instigated the war in order to satisfy their greed. If one spoke of the bourgeoisie, one found oneself, of course, on the familiar terrain of Marx’s main antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, between capital and labor. But it was impossible to limit the bourgeoisie to that small class. At the very least, it included all entrepreneurs and presumably also all those who were in the service of the entrepreneurs and the capitalist state: the officer corps, the civil servants, teachers of all branches, the liberal professions. And to this bourgeoisie might even include those labor aristocrats who always appeared when a sociological explanation of the August 4th betrayal was sought. This bourgeoisie, certainly a minority, but in all western and central European states a comparatively very strong minority compared to the common workers and farm workers, did not benefit from the war. Indeed, it sent its sons out just as all the other members of the nation did; practically all reserve officers came from its ranks, and the officers’ corps as a whole suffered twice as many casualties as the men. No statement could be more unjust than that this officer corps were murdering the men, let alone for the sake of material advantages.
Here, too, the writers of the articles and pamphlets of the Spartacus League confused the actual cause and mere accompanying circumstances, just as in the case of the betrayal of the Social Democratic leaders. Human originators and thus criminals took the place of the great supra-personal system characteristics, which one tried to encompass at best with the term “capitalism” and which, however, were far more correctly to be characterized by the term unconditional sovereignty of the individual states. But according to the traditional Marxist doctrine, the world revolution of the proletariat would not only eliminate this unconditionality, but would also eliminate the states in general and with them the classes and with them the solidified division of labor, so that the masses themselves exercise rule through the mediation by professionalized apparatuses and create a harmonious world without state and national borders, yes even without different languages.
The pacifism of the internationalist socialists thus was very different from that of the rest of the bourgeois pacifists: it was in unrestricted and militant universalism, and this made it possible for it to come into sharp opposition to the bourgeoisie in yet another different and broader sense, namely to all who did not share the belief in the imminent advent of the one, peaceful, undivided and harmonious humanity, which was in fact an ancient belief and had already found a well-known expression in some books of the Bible. Thus the Spartacus League and the internationalist socialists were the party of a faith, the party of the fighters of God, as one could say using obvious analogies, or at least the fighters for justice. But from time immemorial, fighters of God have always had the will to exterminate the wicked and to wipe out the empire of injustice from the face of the earth. Thus the great right to oppose war was linked to a belief that necessarily sought, with Karl Liebknecht, to replace the castle-peace with castle-war or, with Lenin, to transform war into civil war. If this party persisted in not blaming the original crime of war on system characteristics or a historical phase of development, but instead hitting human originators as criminals with the charge of guilt and a corresponding intention annihilation, then paradoxically it would have to become a war party of a special kind if it did not succeed in asserting itself quickly and completely and everywhere.
Once again a new level was entered when the party abandoned from the universal accusation of guilt in practice and directed its fight against some particularly guilty parties. From the outset there was the great danger that not all socialists in all warring countries would fight their struggle with equal energy and with equal success, and that precisely the state which had the strongest and most active socialist party would then suffer a defeat. This was an argument which was put forward by all defenders of the fatherland or social patriots within the socialist parties and which for a long time seemed far more plausible to the masses of German workers than the stigmatization of war profiteers or the militarists or the bourgeoisie as criminals. But the longer the war lasted, the more clearly the propaganda of the Spartacus League turned primarily against the German Reich, which apparently had considerable chances of victory in the first half of 1918. In Spartacus Letter No. 9 of June 1918, Rosa Luxemburg, who was in prison but engaged in an intense agitational activity under the rule of Prussian militarism, as Trotsky did in Kerensky's prison, took up a distinction from Paul Lensch with the opposite valence: “English and French imperialism are rooted in an old colonial policy, tied to traditional trajectories; the German imperialism was in the embryonic stage until the outbreak of the world war, only grew to monstrous dimensions in the course of the war, is still growing every day and is filling itself with the bloodlust of the slaughter of millions with a world-conquering urge that has no traditions, no fetters and no considerations.” But can a small layer of Junkers, war profiteers, and stock market speculators accomplish such monstrous deeds? What would they be able to do without the field grays who, in the opinion of the Spartacus League, were only disguised proletarians, and yet who, in the opinion of their opponents of the war, such as Louis de Robiens and shortly afterwards Churchill, were eagerly awaited by large parts of the population in the Ukraine and Russia because they brought order? Never did any Junker or bourgeois insulted the German workers with harsher words and worse metaphors than they were to be read in the 10th Spartacus Letter: “The German proletariat truly surpasses the most famous example of true servility: the Swiss Guard who stands in front of the palace of the last Bourbons and lets itself be cut down by storming revolutionaries…If a second Thorwaldsen should be found, who will carve the image of this poignant slave loyalty after four years of world war for the benefit and piety of distant generations in marble, he will definitely choose not a lion as a symbol, but a dog!”
But these harsh words were not only the expression of a deceived trust, which in Rosa Luxemburg’s opinion would one day be justified after all, but they also presupposed “the great Russian Revolution,” as the March Revolution had been called by the Spartacus League, and they were spoken with knowledge of the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power. They were preceded by the mutiny on the German fleet, which had so encouraged Lenin’s decisions in the autumn of 1917, the January strikes of 1918 in Berlin, the leaflets and pamphlets that had been brought to Germany via Norway and contained exhortations such as the following: “The victorious revolution will not require so much victims as a single day’s fighting out in the field of madness. Kill the war-beasts, hang your executioners, and you will be redeemed, free and happy with your brothers all over the world.” They also presupposed the news of the mass shootings by the Cheka and of the atrocities of which the Bolsheviks were guilty and Rosa Luxemburg had indeed written very critical remarks about the authoritarian dictatorship of Lenin and Trotsky. But it self-evident to her and her fellow militants that all barbarism and all chaos stemmed predominantly from the resistance of the enemy and that the Russian revolution would become European and Marxist at the moment when the revolution would finally break out in the developed capitalist countries and would free the hard-oppressed Russian comrades from their fatal isolation. That is why, after their release from prison, she and Karl Liebknecht worked together with full of determination with the so-called revolutionary stewards and with parts of the “Independent Social Democrats” that had existed since March 1917, but also with the Soviet Russian embassy in Berlin, to bring about this peaceful and world-redeeming revolution.
What happened was the German military collapse in November, and no one can determine with certainty how great, apart from the failure of the offensives of spring and summer 1918 in France, was the share of the revolutionaries on the one hand, and Ludendorff's share on the other, who wanted to shift the responsibility to the new regime of parliamentary monarchy. In any case, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were convinced that the German revolution—undoubtedly a revolution of collapse like the Russian one of March 1917—had now entered its Kerensky stage under the government of the People's Deputies as majority Social Democrats and Independents, and that it was necessary to push it forward to socialism as the ruleless rule of the working masses themselves. But if Friedrich Ebert was the German Kerensky, he, unlike his Russian counterpart, had brought about peace, and never tired of pointing out the Russian chaos and the Bolshevik horrors that would ruin Germany and deliver her to occupation by the Allies when Spartacus gained the upper hand. In the unrest of November and December the Spartacists were at least as much victims as perpetrators, but the fear of Russian conditions had a decisive effect, although it cannot be denied that some lumpenproletarian and merely militant elements had joined in and contributed to it. to increase aversion and hatred of Spartacus. It was an extremely symptomatic fact that Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were unable to obtain a mandate to participate in the first Reich Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, which took place in Berlin in mid-December. Nevertheless, it was a highly publicized event when the delegates of the Spartacus League met from December 30, 1918 to January 1, 1919 in the Prussian House of Representatives to found the “Communist Party of Germany (Spartacus League).”
That not just a German party was gathering here became symbolically clear when an important representative of the Bolshevik Party, Karl Radek, gave a major speech. And it was also characteristic that he explicitly described the German workers as the older brother of the much younger and organizationally far less experienced workers in Russia, whose appearance on the world-historical stage fills the Russian workers with deep joy. In fact, since his public protest against the war on May 1, 1916, at least until the Bolsheviks came to power, Karl Liebknecht had been a much better known name than Vladimir Ilyich Lenin among the opponents of war in all countries. So it was only consistent when Radek expressed the hope that the international workers’ council would soon meet in Berlin, the body of the final victory of the anti-war party, because Bolshevism was essentially nothing other than “the tears of widows and children, the pain for those killed and the despair of those who returned.” But the party by no means wanted to be merely or primarily a pacifist party, as this moving phrase of Radek might have suggested. The program that it adopted and which Rosa Luxemburg had written included a host of very far-reaching demands.
It starts from a pronounced thesis of guilt: bourgeois class rule is the real culprit of the world war in Germany as in France, in Russia as in England, in Europe as in America. It, and by no means just the feudal Junker rule in Germany, forfeited its right to exist with production of the world war. From the yawning abyss that it has created there is no salvation except socialism, and therefore the slogan of the hour must be: “Down with the wage system!” But socialism could achieve victory only through the most tremendous civil war in the history of the world against the bitter resistance of the “imperialist capitalist class” which would use the peasants and the officers to preserve wage slavery and would even incite “backward working classes” against the socialist vanguard. The Spartacus League should therefore on no account be prepared to share government power with “stooges of the bourgeoisie, with Scheidemann-Ebert.” Therefore, the immediate demands included, among others, were: disarming the entire police force, disarming all officers and non-proletarian soldiers, forming a Red Guard, setting up a revolutionary tribunal, a six-hour maximum working day, cancellation of the state and other public debts, confiscation of all assets from a certain amount. All of this must be carried out “with an iron determination.” It was also said that the proletarian revolution did not need terror for its aims, that it hated and abhorred the murder of human beings. But that sounded very different from the similar formulations of humanitarian socialism, such as those put forward by Kurt Eisner in Bavaria, when it was seen together with the closing sentences: “Up, proletarians! To the fight! It is a matter of conquering a world and fighting against a world. In this last class struggle in world history for the highest goals of mankind. The word is to the enemy: thumb on the eye, and knee on the chest!”
With the adoption of this program, a very special kind of party had come into being indeed.
No party can undertake anything more extraordinary and serious than “a complete restructuring of the state and a complete revolution in the economic and social foundations of society,” i.e. ultimately the abolition of private ownership in the means of production, of the state and of the class structure of society. Such a program puts the entire national wealth and all state positions at the disposal of a single group, at least for a transitional period, and thus sets itself a fighting goal which is incomparably greater than that of any other party and which can nevertheless be reconciled with “the highest idealism” because it sets as its goal precisely the elimination of all individual and group interests. Formally, it was nothing else than the old, pre-revisionist program of the Social Democrats, but in the post-war situation it had become something new. It had severed the connection with that consciousness of advancement of the skilled workers and the practical reformism of the trade unions, so that the ideological-utopian stood out much more strongly. But it also differed from the Bolsheviks' program because it arose out of that classical-Marxist situation that simply did not exist in Russia. This party could ascribe itself the merit of the end of the war or at least the distinction of a proven opponent of war and thereby gain an approval that went far beyond the ranks of the proletarians. It could attract all those who revolted against the pressures and crises of modern life under the banner of anti-capitalism. It could make demands like the one after the six-hour day, which every other party had to call unreal and demagogic. It was not only the great party of protest and hope, but the party of an ancient and for that reason alone questionable faith, the party of a great right that threatened to turn into injustice through the personalization of the causes of war, and the party of national and international civil war. Precisely for this reason it must arouse the bitter enmity of all those who owned or hoped to acquire any property, and that warned the citizens in a very broad sense; in particular it must have drawn the irrepressible hatred of almost all officers who could boast of having made greater blood sacrifices than any other group for the protection of their homeland, and who had all followed the news from Russia closely enough to know what the demand “thumb on eye and knee on the chest” meant for them; it must have caused at least a cautious distancing from those who did not believe that the destruction of order in an extremely complex industrial state would somehow and inevitably result in a better order. Tendentially and in a certain way, this party had almost all Germans on its side; tendentially and in other ways, it had almost all Germans against it.
Above all, however, unlike the pre-war Social Democrat Party, it was in the completely new situation of looking towards a brother party that was already running the government in a large state—the largest state in the world —although it was younger and more immature in Marxist terms and actually shouldn't have seized power yet. If the Communist Party of Germany was really “the older brother,” then it would soon have to win and come to the aid of Lenin's party, which was no longer against the “giants” of German militarism, but which was engaged in a severe struggle against the white armies and against intervention troops of the Allied and Associated Powers.