The Revolutionary Shop Stewards in Germany, 1914–1918

Ralf Hoffrogge

When World War I broke out in the summer of 1914, the labor movements of most European countries abandoned their internationalist principles and turned their support toward the war efforts of their respective governments.³⁴ This rapid and unforeseen change did not go without protest. Within the German labor movement, by then the leading Socialist group in the Second International, two parallel movements against the war developed. The first formed inside the Social Democratic Party (SPD); another opposition emerged out of the strong union movement. Both movements fought to bring organized labor back to the idea of peace and international solidarity. The protests within the SPD eventually led to the splintering of the party—first into Social Democrats and Independent Socialists, later into Social Democrats and Communists.

While the split between Communists and Social Democrats developed into a longstanding and worldwide rivalry, the split within the German unionist movement did not form any new organization that survived the postwar period. This is the main reason that today it is largely overlooked. Nevertheless, it can be said that this unionist antiwar movement was historically as important as its counterpart in the Reichstag, the German parliament. Starting as small groups of dissenting unionists, it evolved into a large mass-strike movement that later transformed itself into a movement of workers’ councils, directed against both the government and the union bureaucracy.

During the German Revolution of November 1918, this workers’ movement, along with rebellious soldiers and naval conscripts, brought down the monarchy in Germany and ultimately ended the Great War, which had already cost millions of lives. The movement also inspired a completely new idea of socialism, one that focused not on state power and centralization but instead on grassroots democracy and workers’ control: the idea of council communism.

This bottom-up model took all the major socialist theoreticians by surprise. Whether they were centrists like Karl Kautsky or left-wing radicals like Lenin or Rosa Luxemburg, for decades all of them had imagined socialism as the end point of a gradual centralization of both economic and state power. Now, in the middle of one of the greatest crises that capitalism had ever seen, workers themselves generated a model of socialism that was not built upon the idea of central economic planning but instead was focused on the self-governance of the working class.

The Revolutionary Shop Stewards

This essay will describe the history of the Revolutionary Shop Stewards, who were the main organizers of the German mass-strike movement between 1916 and 1918. The Revolutionary Stewards were the only antiwar organization in Germany that actually had a network of activists within the factories, organizing the working class from the very bottom. In Berlin, fifty to eighty Revolutionary Stewards coordinated a network of several hundred spokesmen, which, in turn, represented several thousand workers in the factories. Only experienced union veterans were ushered into the inner circle of this group. The Revolutionary Stewards and their political leader, Richard Müller, followed a radical pragmatism: they intended to mobilize and radicalize the masses, but never called for actions that might lack the support of the majority. Between 1916 and 1918 they managed to become a synthesis of an avant-garde group and a grassroots organization, pushing the masses forward but never failing to represent them. In November 1918, the Revolutionary Stewards were one of the main organizing forces behind the German Revolution; afterward, they became a driving force within the movement of workers’ councils.

Despite its strength and momentum this movement was very short-lived. By the end of 1920, the working class was represented once again by political parties and unions alone. What happened? The revolution and its councils were stopped both by counterrevolutionary violence and their own failure to disarm the economic and political elites of imperial Germany. After an unsuccessful general strike in March 1919, the workers’ councils were dissolved by state legislation and transformed into subordinate organs, which still exist as Betriebsräte (work councils) in contemporary German labor legislation.

The Revolutionary Shop Stewards disintegrated and one faction joined the Communist Party, as did many other groups and individual protagonists of the councils’ movement. Unlike the Social Democrats or the Communists, grassroots radicals like the Revolutionary Stewards never established their own historiographic tradition. Very few scholarly works about their history exist; almost none of this has been published in any language other than German.³⁵

Richard Müller and the German Metalworkers Union

The Revolutionary Stewards evolved out of the lathe operators’ section within the Berlin branch of the German Metalworkers Union, DMV (Deutscher Metallarbeiter-Verband). The head of the DMV lathe workers section was Richard Müller, who had resisted the collaborationist policies of the union leadership since 1914. The Berlin lathe operators were a highly skilled workforce and, as such, enjoyed a good bargaining position. They used this not only to pursue their own demands, but also to protect more vulnerable groups of employees—for example, the many female workers who were drawn into the production sphere during the war (Müller 1924, 94).³⁶

Richard Müller was not a radical from the beginning. Back in 1913, he presented himself as a rather typical unionist of his time. In the preface of a pamphlet on his work he declared that his personal goal was to “educate the last one among our colleagues to be a fighter—fighter for the idea of socialism (Müller 1913).³⁷ In order to realize this goal Müller used rather peculiar methods. He invented a system of six different kinds of matching forms and questionnaires. This bulk of paperwork was used to control and secure the participation of the members of his union, who were scattered around the city in many small-scale shops that often had poor internal communication.

His questionnaires enabled Müller to gather information and develop statistics about the size of the workforce in every enterprise, the working conditions, the average wage, and the degree of organization in every single shop. This system professionalized the work of the union and especially the system of collective bargaining. With the information from Müller’s questionnaires, the workers’ representatives possessed their own in-depth knowledge about the production experience and used this knowledge to push for their demands.

Considering all these advantages, however, the professionalization and specialization of German unionism also meant bureaucratization. On the one hand there was a fierce revolutionary rhetoric of socialism and class struggle; on the other hand, the actual class struggle became more and more piecemeal and full of paperwork, organized by professionals and semiprofessionals like Müller. At the time, however, as an organizer Müller did not see any contradiction between the ideals and the practices of his union. It was the shock of the war that eventually made him and others reconsider their former activities.

The outbreak of World War I was not a total surprise to the European labor movement. Since the turn of the century there had been growing international tensions among the European powers—a development that had prompted the Socialist parties of Europe to discuss taking measures against a potential war. Peace conferences were organized, like the one held in Basel in 1912, and resolutions were made, but in the end such measures were symbolic more than anything else. No concrete strategies of resistance in the case of war were formed.

Due to the strong symbolism of the peace conferences, however, it came as a surprise—indeed, to many as a shock—when the German Social Democrats, along with all the other major socialist parties of Europe, decided not to resist the war but instead to support their national governments. In Germany, the decision of the unions to drop all strikes during wartime even preceded the Social Democrats’ parliamentary support of war bonds on August 4, 1914. It was argued that in Germany’s case, the war was a war of defense and therefore justified—furthermore, the working class would suffer most from a military defeat. Therefore the war had to be supported from the beginning.

The lathe operators and other branches of the Berlin metalworkers resisted this nationalist turn within their union. It is interesting to note that they were not driven by pacifist or internationalist principles from the beginning. Until 1916 they resisted the prohibition of strikes during the war mainly because they did not want to give up their only means of putting pressure on the employers. Only later did Müller and his circle become radicals. The name “Revolutionary Shop Stewards” itself was chosen relatively late, in November 1918.

The Revolutionary Stewards acted as a parallel structure within the metalworkers union, DMV. They started in Berlin, where the lathe operators organized allegedly apolitical pub evenings or met privately after the official union sessions—sessions that were often infiltrated by the police or at least dominated by patriotic unionists. Paul Blumenthal, the leader of the welders’ section of the Berlin DMV, later made this comment regarding how the Revolutionary Stewards first formed: “In the conferences unionist questions were discussed. But soon the oppositional comrades began to recognize each other, and later we met over a glass of beer. We exchanged our experiences and this became the beginning of the Revolutionary Stewards in Berlin!”³⁸ Before long the informal drinking events became clandestine meetings and soon Müller and his fellow workers began the systematic organization of a resistance group.³⁹

From Opposition to Resistance: The Union Goes Underground

The Revolutionary Stewards could build upon systems of workers’ representatives that were already in place. Like Müller and Blumenthal, who led the sections of the lathe operators and welders, there were representatives for every profession within the industry. Every section had a system of shop stewards in the big enterprises and each steward had sub-stewards and confidants in the departments and workshops of the enterprise. These representatives were informal positions approved by the union—unpaid, not protected by law, and often not recognized by the employers. They were the connection between the rank-and-file unionists and the union leadership. What happened between 1916 and 1918 was essentially a rebellion against the union leadership by the members and the lower representatives of the DMV.

Müller and his comrades began to organize the Revolutionary Stewards apart from the official channels. Due to the fact that one steward represented an entire enterprise or at least a factory, the Revolutionary Stewards could, after a time, directly influence and represent thousands of workers, even though their organization had only fifty to eighty members at any given time. Because of this structure the Revolutionary Stewards were not “mass organizations to which everybody had access. They were an exclusive circle of people who had a certain education and experience in the political as well as the unionist struggles of the day.” They also needed to have a certain influence among the workers. As Müller put it, the Stewards literally were a “vanguard of the proletariat” (Müller 1924, 161f ).

Richard Müller’s words should not be mistaken for some kind of top-down, Leninist concept of the vanguard: despite their restricted membership the Revolutionary Stewards were the most authentic representatives of the German working class at the time. Because they were so deeply rooted in the shops and factories, their demands came directly from the workers and the Stewards never forced the masses to take action against their will. In the event of a strike there were often walkouts in factories that were not even part of the Stewards’ network. In 1918, the fourth year of the war, the group was able to totally paralyze the entire war industry of Berlin as well as that of some other cities (Müller 1924, 161).

Because of their unique combination of grassroots organizing and small membership the Stewards were not only very efficient, but also well protected against agents provocateurs and infiltration by the police. In the aftermath of the larger strikes many of the Stewards were drafted into the military as punishment—but the police never once managed to immobilize or infiltrate the network.⁴⁰

Independent Socialism

In April 1917, conflicts about the further support of the war led to a split within the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Conflicts had arisen back in late 1914, but similar to the unions the party opposition took almost two years to organize. The final break came when those Social Democratic members of the Reichstag who refused to vote for another series of war bonds were expelled from the party. In reaction to this provocation, the opposition members of the Reichstag and the state parliaments formed, along with some rank-and-file opposition, the Independent Social Democratic Party. The Independents, or USPD, served as a kind of collecting pool for the formerly scattered opposition. The new party was therefore very heterogeneous. It included both left-wing radicals like Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and their Spartacist League, as well as leading revisionists like Eduard Bernstein, who openly argued for a “revision” of Marxism and the transformation of the SPD into a reform-oriented party. Bernstein and his followers were as opposed to revolution as they were to the war.

The Stewards became members of the new independent party, but also remained independent unto themselves. They never subordinated their network to the party leadership and rather used the USPD as a platform for their grassroots activism (Müller 1924, 161f ).

Mass Strikes against the War

In the event of a political strike, the Stewards were the ones who gave out the orders. This utterly confused the German labor movement, with its well-established division of responsibility. According to custom, the party was responsible for the political sphere, while the unions were to deal only with economic issues. The Revolutionary Shop Stewards were the first to introduce political mass strikes into German politics. Before that they had existed only in theory, advocated by leftists like Luxemburg but rejected by the center. Now the Stewards organized these strikes from below without the permission of party or union officials.

The Stewards independently decided on the timing. Only when the plans were suspended did they ask the leadership of the USPD for support, but not for permission. For example, in January 1918, the Stewards invited USPD deputies from the Reichstag and several state parliaments to a meeting and demanded support for a revolutionary strike. The party leaders were hesitant, fearing repression or a complete ban of the newly formed party. Eventually they agreed to a leaflet that called for “protests” but did not directly mention strikes or uprisings (Muller 1924, 139).⁴¹

The Stewards were always a workers’ organization; the only intellectuals admitted into their ranks where Ernst Däumig and Georg Ledebour. Däumig was the former editor of the main social democratic newspaper, Vorwärts , who had lost his position due to his oppositional stance.⁴² Ledebour was a well-known member of the Reichstag from the SPD’s left wing and subsequently a founding member of USPD.

Däumig became a member of the Stewards late, in the summer of 1918, after Richard Müller had been drafted into the military following the January 1918 strike. Together with Emil Barth, head of the plumbers’ section of the metalworkers union, Däumig quickly became a leading figure in the organization.

The general political route the Stewards took during the war can be described as both pragmatic and radical. They were leftists compared to the rest of the USPD and its leadership, who strongly resisted extra-parliamentary actions. But the Stewards also were opposed to the Spartacus League, led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The Spartacists demanded ongoing actions, strikes, and demonstrations. They did not fear confrontations with the police but rather embraced them, hoping that street fights would escalate the tension and bring about a revolutionary situation. The Stewards ridiculed these tactics as “revolutionary gymnastics”; Richard Müller condemned them as idealistic voluntarism that the working masses would not accept (ibid., 165ff). Because of these disagreements the Stewards did not allow the Spartacists to join their regular meetings and met separately with Liebknecht and his followers. But despite their differences both groups cooperated when it came to decisive actions.

The Stewards organized three major mass strikes.The first, which took place in June 1916, was intended to express solidarity with Karl Liebknecht, who had been arrested in the course of an illegal May Day demonstration. The second was organized in April 1917 and became a massive protest against the food shortages of that year. The third political strike took place in January 1918. In this last mobilization, involving about half a million workers in Berlin, the strike committee called itself a “workers’ council” (Arbeiterrat), and became a model for the councils that emerged during the German Revolution (Schneider and Kuda 1968, 21).

The strike committees consisted mostly of the Stewards themselves, but in the January strike they co-opted representatives from the USPD and even the SPD to widen the strike’s influence. To the military authorities and the government these wildcat mass strikes, especially in the arms industry, were the most alarming manifestations of resistance against the war. Neither the alliance of state military and union leadership nor the mass repression and drafting of revolutionary workers in the aftermath of each strike could bring the movement to a permanent stop. The initiative for these strikes always came from the Stewards, because both the USPD and Spartacus League lacked the network of active workers that the Stewards had built within the factories. The Spartacists were able to organize only some local strikes; the USPD confined itself to parliamentary action. Therefore the Stewards—especially after 1917, when they expanded their contact with activists in other cities—were the strongest oppositional group in Germany during the First World War.

Being an illegal and secret organization, the Stewards did not advertise their successes. They did not issue flyers nor did they leave behind protocols of their meetings. They acted in secrecy, and only in the weeks following the November Revolution of 1918 did they issue the first press release with their name on it. This lack of paper trail is a main reason that later historians, for the most part, have underestimated the influence of the Stewards.

The public actions against the war were undertaken by Spartacus and the USPD. Both groups agitated against the war and the covert establishment of a military dictatorship in the homeland. The illegal literature of the Spartacists and the parliamentary speeches by the Independents definitely had more influence on public opinion than did the secret organizational work of the Stewards, and were fundamentally important not only for affecting public opinion, but also for radicalizing the Stewards themselves. Without the continuous discussions with the other groups and consequent mutual influences, the Stewards might have remained ordinary unionists not opposed to the war as such, only to its negative influence on wages and working conditions.⁴³

It is a fact that the three mass strikes organized by the Stewards failed. All three broke down after several days with none of the demands having been met. But each of these strikes was bigger than the one before. Starting with fifty thousand workers in Berlin in 1916, they followed with four hundred thousand strikers in several cities in April 1917 and, in January 1918, an estimated seven hundred fifty thousand people were on strike. After this last strike was suppressed without yielding results, the Stewards changed their tactics. In 1918, they began stockpiling weapons in order to make the next strike an armed uprising. These plans were, by and large, inspired by the October Revolution in Russia.

From Strike to Revolution

Both Germany and Russia prior to 1917 were authoritarian monarchies; both rulers claimed to be fighting a war of self-defense. But in 1917 the Bolshevik Revolution changed everything when Lenin made clear that the Bolsheviks were willing to stop the war immediately and start negotiations.

Peace talks began, but the German government insisted on taking over Ukraine, parts of Poland, and the Baltic states—their aim was to exploit Russia’s weakness in order to realize the dream of a German colonial empire in Eastern Europe. Peace negotiations slowed to a complete halt when these demands were presented. At this point in history, it was clear that in Germany’s case the World War had never been one of self-defense. Even Social Democratic workers or members of influential Christian unions now knew that there would be no peace unless a political revolution were to overthrow the monarchy and break its military backbone. Radicalization was on its way. Tensions mounted even after Germany and Russia made a separate peace in March 1918: the war continued on the Western Front, and the large annexations in the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty stood as a sign for the ongoing aggression of German imperialism.

The strike of January 1918, which took place just weeks after the Bol-shevik Revolution, was directly caused by the breakdown of the peace process. It was the first attempt at going beyond the act of protesting to try to stop the war by means of a civil uprising. It failed because the German army was still intact and willing to defend the monarchy, but the Stewards knew this situation could change so they prepared for that future day.

Unexpectedly, however, the German Revolution did not start in Berlin. Although the Stewards were the only group prepared for an armed uprising, it was sailors from the coast who started the movement toward revolution.

The revolt within the navy had begun at the end of October 1918. An order of the admiralty had called for the fleet to seek a decisive battle with Britain. The sailors, already radicalized by a suppressed revolt the year before, refused this order, which they saw as a suicide mission, and staged a mutiny on their ships. They succeeded: the German fleet was totally immobilized. On November 4, 1918, the revolt moved from the sea to the land: the navy men took over the northern port city of Kiel and established a soldiers’ council controlling the city. They knew from their previous revolt that if they did not move further and enforce peace, heavy repression, culminating with the death penalty, would hit them all. Most of the sailors were former workers, some of them even union members or socialists. The giant battleships of World War I, sometimes called “floating factories” by contemporary commentators, became the starting point for the revolution.

In Berlin, things did not move as quickly. In a secret meeting on November 2, the Revolutionary Stewards, the Spartacus League, and some members from the left wing of the USPD had decided to postpone an uprising planned for November 4. Instead, they wanted to mobilize for an armed general strike on the 11th. The reason was that no one could provide detailed information about the political atmosphere beyond Berlin and, more importantly, about the loyalty of the troops. The Stewards knew they could never win a civil war against a functioning and loyal German army. Especially in Berlin, where the military presence was concentrated to protect government buildings and other institutions, a victory would only be possible if the troops sided with the uprising or stayed neutral. Müller feared that premature action might lead to a failure of the uprising and result in an unprecedented bloodbath (Müller 1924, 173).

Karl Liebknecht and the Spartacus League, in particular, were unhappy with Müller’s hesitation. Liebknecht, who had been released from jail on an amnesty intended to appease the situation, called for instant action. But Müller, Emil Barth, and the Stewards refused. They did not want to take the risk; Liebknecht and the Spartacus radicals would have to wait.

But when rumors about the revolt in the north spread to Berlin, the plans had to be changed. After Ernst Däumig was arrested on treason charges on November 8, the Revolutionary Stewards decided in favor of instant action, since they feared that otherwise their plans would be revealed to the police. All three groups called for a general strike the next day.

The response was overwhelming. Everywhere, the working masses took to the streets, and the plan succeeded in taking the police and troops by surprise. There was almost no resistance; the vast majority of the exhausted troops sided with the revolutionaries in the hope for instant peace.

The rule of the Hohenzollern Dynasty, which had ruled Prussia and Germany for centuries, fell within one day.

The Socialist Republic of Germany

On the afternoon of November 9, 1918, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards met at the Reichstag, where a motley congregation of soldiers’ councils was debating. The Stewards took over the meeting and convinced the participants to issue a call for a central vote the next day of workers’ and soldiers’ councils throughout Berlin with the purpose of electing a revolutionary government.

The election took place, but the Stewards failed to dominate this new government. Due to the chaotic and sudden course of the revolutionary events, but even more so due to the immediate reaction of the SPD, the Stewards had to accept parity between the USPD and the SPD in the revolutionary government.

Two revolutionary governmental bodies were elected: the Berlin Executive Council and the Council of the Peoples’ Deputies. The Executive Council was elected by the Berlin workers’ councils and would serve as the highest revolutionary authority until a national convention of workers’ and soldiers’ councils could congregate. Richard Müller became one of the two chairmen of this council, and all the USPD seats were filled by the Revolutionary Stewards. Since the Executive Council was the highest organ of the revolutionary regime, Müller technically was head of state of the newly declared Socialist Republic of Germany.

But the real power was exercised elsewhere, by the Council of the People’s Deputies. This organ served as an interim government and became increasingly dominant.⁴⁴ The plumber Emil Barth represented the Stewards on this council—but he was the only radical among the six deputies. When decisions were urgently required, Barth’s two USPD colleagues, members of the moderate wing of the party, collaborated with the SPD deputies and often voted against him.

Therefore Friedrich Ebert, the leader of the three SPD deputies, gradually came to dominate the Council of the People’s Deputies, specifically because he and his party had the support of the military elite, the liberal press, and the state apparatus—an apparatus that had been briefly disempowered by the revolution but was never destroyed. The old elite of the German Empire hoped that their support for the Social Democrats would decrease the influence of the Independents and other radicals—a move that was successful.

In the Executive Council, Müller and the USPD members had constant fights not only with the Social Democrats, but also with the soldiers’ delegates. Many of the latter had only recently been drawn into politics; almost none of them had a clear political conviction. When in doubt they tended to side with the Social Democrats because they mistrusted the radicals. The Executive Council therefore quickly became paralyzed. The intention to establish a “red guard” to defend the revolutionary achievements was vetoed by soldiers and Social Democrats—a fatal turn of events, which not only prevented the revolutionaries from consolidating the process within the critical first weeks, but also left both Social Democrats and leftist radicals defenseless when the counterrevolution made its moves in 1919. Since the Executive Council had blocked itself, it was easy for Ebert and the SPD to gain control of the political process via the Council of the People’s Deputies. At the end of December 1918, the USPD left the Council of the People’s Deputies in protest after an attack by government troops on revolutionary soldiers in Berlin. From that point on, the Social Democrats were in control of the main revolutionary institutions.

Moreover, the revolution was blocked from below as well as from above. The national convention of workers’ councils, which met on December 16, 1918, voted against the consolidation of the council system and instead decided to elect a national parliament. Richard Müller, who had held the inaugural address for the national convention of councils, was shocked that the councils had voted themselves out of power and called the convention a “suicide club” (Engel 1997,16).⁴⁵ In December 1918 the Social Democrats had a strong majority even within the council movement, although the party itself rejected the very idea of workers’ councils. But the USPD and the radicals failed to convince the majority of the German workers to follow their ideas. Many workers did not see any reason to draw support away from the SPD. When the war that had split the party was over, they demanded a joint action of their representatives in both parties, overlooking the fact that behind the question of war lay other deep splits within the labor movement.

The crisis of December 1918 regarding the future of the revolution also led to a split between the Stewards and the USPD leadership, which left the Stewards isolated within the USPD. Nevertheless, they did not align with the Spartacists, who formed their own party on January 1, 1919, the German Communist Party (KPD). The Stewards were invited to the founding congress, but the meeting was disrupted when the negotiations between the Stewards and Spartacists took longer than expected. In the end no compromise was reached. It is interesting that Müller and the Stewards were alienated by the dominance of syndicalism in the newly formed KPD, which later would become a model Leninist party. In particular, the Stewards were strongly opposed to the idea of boycotting the election of the national assembly (Hoffrogge 2008, 96ff ).

The Workers’ Council Movement

The Stewards remained a part of the USPD but continued to act independent from official party leadership. Their new field of action was the workers’ council movement. In the early days of 1919, this movement evolved out of the diverse collection of councils, which by this time were very heterogeneous and did not share a common program. Although there had been councils during the mutinies and mass strikes since 1917, there was no unifying theory of council communism, nor had there been debates about this form of organization among the German socialists before or during the war. As was the case in Russia in 1917, the councils had developed spontaneously out of the political struggles.⁴⁶ The historical precedents and theoretical analyses were present to facilitate moving forward—for example, the Paris Commune of 1871 and Marx’s reflections on those events. But those writings of Marx were not prominent among the ideas of Germany’s prewar Social Democrats—they held a rather statist if not authoritarian idea of politics, largely informed by the realities of the authoritarian imperial regime, which explains their astonishing hostility toward any attempts to further the German Revolution (see Hoffrogge 2009b).

Richard Müller and Ernst Däumig founded a newspaper called Der Arbeiter-Rat (The Workers’ Council) and outlined a theory of council communism—the “pure council system” (reines Rätesystem). This was one of the first theories of council democracy, which ranged from single-factory councils to regional-industry councils all the way to a national economic council.⁴⁷ Critics at the time as well as afterward described their ideas as schematic; nevertheless, this was the first attempt by the revolutionaries to offer a coherent vision of what a society governed by the producers could look like.

In spring 1919, it became obvious that the Council of People’s Deputies was not doing much to further the socialization of the main industries. The idea of socializing the heavy industries and other highly concentrated and monopolized sectors of the German economy was supported by all three Socialist parties and was even popular among unorganized workers and other parts of the population. Accordingly, the national convention of workers’ councils in December had assigned the government to implement these plans. Nothing happened, however, and the Peoples’ Deputies did not take any serious steps toward socialization.

This lack of action, coupled with the repressive politics of the government—which, in January had suppressed an uprising in Berlin with military force—caused major unrest among the workers. The January uprising had started as a general strike and culminated in shootouts between government troops and armed workers. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the leaders of the young KPD, were murdered in the aftermath of the fights.⁴⁸ The Revolutionary Stewards themselves were divided on this issue. While Müller was opposed to the insurgency as being premature, other members of the group were leading figures in the revolutionary committee that cooordinated the uprising.

Although the revolutionaries were defeated, the government lost much of its legitimacy after these events, and the unrest among the working masses grew. Out of this atmosphere a wave of strikes erupted in the spring of 1919, with centers in Berlin, the Ruhr area, and the industrial regions around Halle and Merseburg. This strike wave was the most powerful action put forth by the followers of the council system and helped create national momentum. Ideas that had been confined to the small circle of the Stewards and popularized in the Arbeiter-Rat newspaper now proliferated to become popular demands of a national movement. By surrounding the city of Weimar and blocking the proceedings of the national assembly, the strikes seemed to reopen the question, “workers’ councils or parliamentary democracy?”

But these strikes suffered the same fate as the uprising in January 1919 and all other efforts to drive forward the revolutionary process: they remained local and uncoordinated events that could easily be isolated and suppressed by the military.⁴⁹ Richard Müller and the communist Wilhelm Koenen anticipated this problem and tried to establish a nationwide coordination for the ongoing strikes in order to concentrate their power—but this attempt failed. While in one region the strikes had just started, they had already begun to fade elsewhere. And if they had not, brute force would make them fade: in Berlin the end of the strikes in March 1919 closely resembled a civil war. Government troops, formed mostly of right-wing units, used heavy artillery and machine guns in the working-class districts of Berlin-Lichtenberg and Berlin-Friedrichshain. Many uninvolved civilians were killed and the casualties numbered more than one thousand (Müller 1925b, 124–163; Morgan 1975, 230ff ) .⁵⁰

End of the Revolution: Integration of the Councils

The brutal crushing of the strike movements in 1919 destroyed all hopes that another armed revolution could topple the Social Democratic government. Following the USPD’s departure from the Council of People’s Deputies at the end of December 1918, the Social Democrats had ruled alone. And they had done everything to transform the revolutionary regime into a liberal but capitalist democracy. The national assembly was the final triumph in this process. In response to this situation Müller, Däumig, and most of the Stewards changed their course.

After realizing that the full installation of a workers’ council republic was impossible, they tried to integrate the councils into the new constitution as secondary institutions (Morgan 1983, 252). By this time, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards had lost its unique, exclusive character and had more or less merged with the USPD faction of the general council movement. A split had developed in the organization back in January at the time of the uprising. A faction of the Stewards had supported the action, but Müller and Däumig had vetoed this decision, seeing no chance for success—the strike was based only in Berlin, and although a majority of Berliner workers supported it, they were strictly opposed to armed fighting. These differences surrounding the uprising seem to have weakened the Stewards as a group, but it is unclear whether they actually dissolved at this point or not. Regardless, many of the Stewards continued to work together in the Executive Council, in the council movement in general, and later within the KPD.

After the defeats of the year 1919, the workers’ council movement was transformed into a movement of shop councils or factory councils, since the regional councils had fallen apart. These shop councils (Betriebsräte) were intended to represent the workers of a singular enterprise. The new German Constitution of 1919, legislated by the national assembly, included a paragraph on workers’ councils that was open to interpretation. It had been drafted under pressure from the strikes in March, and a special law was supposed to concretize what role the councils would eventually play. Müller, Däumig, and their comrades aimed to secure as much influence for these councils as possible, campaigning for the shop councils to be autonomous from the entrepreneurs and permitted to associate on a regional and national level. They also proposed a national council to exercise a strong influence over the general economic decisions of the government. But all these plans failed. The final law on industrial relations only legalized the existing councils on the shop level. They were allowed to represent workers’ demands, but exercised no control over the production. A national economic council was put in place as well, but it also included factory owners and thus was intended as an instrument of class collaboration rather than class struggle. In practice, the national economic council rarely met and exercised almost no influence.

Protests against this legislation failed; during the parliamentary debate on the subject, a huge demonstration in Berlin demanding more rights for workers was shot upon. Forty-two people were killed, yet the legislation was not changed. As a result, the shop councils of the newborn German Republic became subaltern and powerless organs, reduced to basically the same rights as the Betriebsräte of Germany today.

The last fight on this field was a battle over the actual politics of the newly legalized shop councils. Would they act autonomously as a movement, or would they be subordinated to the unions—unions still dominated by the SDP? Richard Müller was the most prominent figure to argue for autonomous councils. When the Executive Council was dissolved by force in the summer of 1919, he and some of the Stewards created an independent center of shop councils in Berlin. The idea was to bundle the forces of these councils for further revolutionary movements. At the first national congress of shop councils, held in Berlin in October 1920, Müller and the communist Heinrich Brandler defended the Berlin model but failed to convince the delegates. The councils were subordinated to the unions. The council movement in Germany was over.⁵¹

The Revolutionary Stewards Become Leninists

During these crucial confrontations, it became evident that Müller and some of the former Stewards were drifting toward the KPD. When the USPD split in late 1920, the Stewards were part of the left wing, which supported Lenin’s “Twenty-one Conditions” for membership in the newly founded Third International. Although the majority accepted these conditions, there was a large faction opposed. This faction split from the majority and merged with the Social Democrats in 1922, while the left-wing majority joined the KPD in December 1920.

In 1920, for some months Richard Müller was part of the Central Committee of the left USPD and after the merger he became chairman of the Center on Union Affairs within the KPD. Formed out of the failed Berlin center of shop councils, most of its members were former Revolutionary Stewards.

The merger was a giant leap for the young KPD. Beforehand it had been nothing more than a radical splinter party, organizing a small minority of the German workers. The merger not only brought three hundred thousand members to a party that previously numbered only seventy thousand members, but it also brought the experience of people like the Stewards and existing infrastructure, such as newspapers, to the Communist Party. It was only after this merger that communism in Germany truly became a mass movement (Krause 1975, 132–216).

Müller, Däumig, and many other members of the Stewards now worked within the KPD—Däumig even became chairman of the party. But just weeks after starting, Däumig was forced to resign due to internal fighting. In March 1921, Müller was forced to give up his position as chairman for union affairs as well because he criticized the “March Action,” a failed uprising in the industrial region around the cities of Halle and Leuna. In a parallel to the failed January 1919 uprising, Müller refused to call strikes for Berlin—but the party officials did not want to hear his criticism.

Thanks to an intervention by Clara Zetkin, a founding member of the KPD, Müller and other former Stewards such as Heinrich Malzahn were invited to the Third Worldwide Congress of the Communist International, which took place in Moscow in the summer of 1921. Zetkin organized a personal meeting between Müller, Malzahn, and Lenin.

Lenin was enthusiastic about this meeting with Müller and the Stewards and very critical of the failed uprising of March, which he condemned in front of the congress. The delegates sided with Lenin, and the divided KPD was forced to accept this judgment.

But back in Germany the conflict resumed—and this time Müller and other opposition members did not get support from Moscow. In order to preserve the integrity of the party both Trotsky and Lenin switched sides and supported the KPD leadership against the growing number of critics. Müller and many others were forced to leave the Communist Party (Tosstorff 2004, 392–395).

Despite this ugly affair, Müller continued to support Lenin, even praising him in the foreword of the three-volume history of the German Revolution he wrote between 1924 and 1925 (Müller 1924, 9; see also Müller 1925a; 1925b). These works by Müller remain noteworthy today, as they offer a fascinating narrative of the war, the rise of the labor opposition, and the revolution and its eventual failure. Because he drew upon many unpublished records of meetings from his private collection, his writings are histories, not merely memoirs. Although Müller’s works are not completely free of apologetics, they are interesting to read. He sides with neither the Social Democrats nor with the Spartacists, subverting the two interpretations that became canonized during the Cold War and still dominate the historiography of the German Revolution (Hoffrogge 2008, 171–183).

Müller’s activities endeavors as a historian marked the end of his political career. It is difficult to trace his activities or those of the Stewards beyond 1921. The informal core group of Stewards that had coordinated the unionist activities of the KPD was dissolved with Müller’s and Däumig’s dismissal from the party.

The Disappearance of the Revolutionary Shop Stewards

By 1920, the council movement was over and the political concept of the Stewards seemed to have no place in the postrevolutionary era. The political parties once again became the main agents of socialist politics and the unions were reduced to dealing with purely economic issues. Although Germany now had more than one political party, two rather dubious patterns of prewar socialist politics were reinstated: the leading role of the party within the labor movement and the separation of the economic and political spheres.

The Stewards themselves had long ago lost their political homeland. Within the USPD they had managed to maintain a very productive symbiosis of party politics and grassroots activism, but this was impossible within a Communist Party that had become more and more centralized. There were some later attempts to launch a new network of Revolutionary Shop Stewards as an autonomous structure, but these efforts failed (Koch-Baumgarten 1986, 418ff ). By the 1920s, only a few Stewards remained within the KPD. Others participated in smaller splinter groups; many abandoned politics completely. Richard Müller did so and became a businessman. Little is known about his life after 1925. He died in 1943.⁵²

The vanishing of Richard Müller—from a prominent position as a head of state into oblivion—parallels the history of the Stewards as an organization. Although they completely revolutionized not only the patterns of Socialist politics but also the idea of socialism itself, the Stewards failed to create a legacy for their movement. While the Spartacists were immortalized by generations of historians from the KPD and East Germany, the history of the Revolutionary Shop Stewards has disappeared among the footnotes.