Spartacus League
스파르타쿠스단
The organisation of the Marxist left around Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht that opposed the German Social Democratic Party's support for the First World War. It began in August 1914 as the International Group, took the name Spartacus Group in 1916 from its illegal Spartacus Letters and joined the Independent Social Democratic Party in 1917 as its left wing. During the November Revolution it was refounded on 11 November 1918 as the independent Spartacus League, demanding a council republic for all Germany, and at the founding congress of 30 December 1918 to 1 January 1919 it became the Communist Party of Germany.
In depth
Seven people against the war credits
On 4 August 1914 the SPD Reichstag group voted unanimously for war credits in line with the policy of civil truce (Burgfrieden). That evening Rosa Luxemburg invited party comrades who opposed the war to her Berlin flat; six came: Hermann Duncker, Hugo Eberlein, Julian Marchlewski, Franz Mehring, Ernst Meyer and Wilhelm Pieck. This meeting was the nucleus of the later Spartacus League. In the following week Leo Jogiches, Karl Liebknecht, August Thalheimer and others joined, and Clara Zetkin gave her support at once. In March 1915 the group published a journal, Die Internationale, whose single issue was immediately confiscated by the police; from it the group was called the International Group.
On 2 December 1914 Liebknecht became the first, and at first the only, SPD deputy to vote against the extension of war credits. On 1 January 1916 the group adopted as its programme the Theses on the Tasks of International Social Democracy that Luxemburg had written in prison, and on 27 January the first of its illegal Spartacus Letters appeared. People began to call the group "Spartacus", and it then called itself the Spartacus Group. The name came from Spartacus, leader of the great slave revolt against Rome (73–71 BC), and stood for the continuing resistance of the oppressed against their exploiters.
The left wing of the USPD
When opponents of the war founded the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) in April 1917, the Spartacus Group joined it, although it had always opposed splitting the SPD. It kept its status as a "closed propaganda association", since it agreed with revisionists such as Bernstein and centrists such as Kautsky and Haase only in rejecting war credits.
The group welcomed the Russian February Revolution of 1917 but was not influenced by the Bolsheviks, and until it merged into the KPD it remained organisationally and politically independent of them. In her prison manuscript The Russian Revolution (autumn 1918) Luxemburg welcomed the October Revolution in principle but criticised Lenin's conception of party organisation and the dictatorship within the party as bound to stifle the democratic participation of the workers. Paul Levi published it only in 1922, after her death.
The November Revolution and the council-republic programme
An illegal national conference on 7 October 1918 adopted a programme demanding an immediate end to the war, annulment of the war loans, democratisation of the army, socialisation of the banks, mines and heavy industry, and a socialist republic. On 9 November, about two hours after Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed "the German Republic" from the Reichstag, Liebknecht proclaimed "the free socialist republic of Germany" in the Lustgarten and from the Berlin Palace. On 11 November the group was refounded at the Hotel Excelsior as a nationwide independent organisation, the Spartacus League, and began publishing the daily Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag).
The programme Luxemburg wrote demanded the disarming of the police and the ruling classes, arming of the proletariat and formation of a Red Guard, takeover of local and state assemblies by workers' and soldiers' councils, and socialisation of all banks, mines and large enterprises. On 14 December she published the draft programme "What Does the Spartacus League Want?" in Die Rote Fahne. But at the Reich Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Councils that opened on 16 December only 10 of 489 delegates represented the League, and Luxemburg and Liebknecht were not even admitted as guests. When the congress set elections to the National Assembly for 19 January 1919, Luxemburg called it "a willing tool of the counter-revolution".
Into the Communist Party
After the USPD refused the party congress Luxemburg had proposed, the League decided to found a new party with other left radicals. At the founding congress in Berlin from 30 December 1918 to 1 January 1919, 127 delegates, among them 94 Spartacists and 29 from the International Communists of Germany (IKD), resolved to unite as the "Communist Party of Germany (Spartacus League)". Karl Radek, arriving from Russia, argued for the merger, while Luxemburg wanted the name "Socialist Party" to preserve independence from the Bolsheviks. On participation in the National Assembly elections Luxemburg, Levi and Jogiches were in favour, but the boycott motion of Otto Rühle and the IKD carried by 62 votes to 23.
When the Revolutionary Stewards called for an armed rising on 5 January 1919 against the dismissal of police president Emil Eichhorn, the KPD joined in. Old army units and new Freikorps under Gustav Noske's orders crushed this "Spartacist uprising", and on 15 January Luxemburg and Liebknecht were captured and murdered by members of the Guards Cavalry Rifle Division. Mehring died at the end of January and Jogiches was murdered in March; with the deaths of four of its founders the history of the Spartacus League came to an end.