https://iclfi.org/spartacist/en/69/eichhorn
Repudiating the ICL’s opposition to contesting and holding executive government offices requires correcting as well the Spartacist No. 65 (Summer 2017) article, “The Police and the 1918-19 German Revolution.” Criticizing our 1994 pamphlet Militant Labour’s Touching Faith in the Capitalist State, the article condemned the work of Emil Eichhorn, a left-wing member of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) who led insurgent workers in disarming the police in Berlin in November 1918. Taking over as head of the police, Eichhorn recruited a militia of thousands of socialist workers and soldiers. After Prussian authorities fired him in January 1919, workers rose in an insurrection known as the Spartakist Uprising, which was murderously suppressed by the Social Democratic government.
Addressing Eichhorn’s role in these events, our 1994 pamphlet correctly asserted:
“Eichhorn was not a bourgeois cop, and neither were the core of his forces. In a situation of revolutionary turmoil, Eichhorn and his militia sought to replace the existing bourgeois police force and regarded themselves as accountable to the workers councils and the left, not to the capitalist government. However, in a fatal mistake symptomatic of the confusion of the Berlin uprising, Eichhorn did not disband the old police force but merged his militia with them.”
Overturning this assessment, the Spartacist article painted Eichhorn as a reformist fool, denouncing his “delusion” that he could replace the police force in the course of the revolutionary events and chastising the workers who rose up in his defense as well. The “fatal illusion” that “one could simply take over the existing organs of the bourgeois state,” we declared, “helped determine the course of events in January 1919. The workers, many of whom were armed, were not organized to struggle for power.”
This article is a pure expression of the lifeless, formalistic method behind our previous position on executive offices. Mistakes and all, Eichhorn and the workers he led did not “simply take over” the police apparatus but used his position to create a new force based on armed workers and accountable to the workers councils, which is what any revolution must seek to do. Eichhorn was clear about his purpose, announcing to a massive crowd after he was sacked, “I got my job from the Revolution, and I shall give it up only to the Revolution” (quoted in Pierre Broué, The German Revolution, 1917-1923 [Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006]).
Our scholastic condemnation of Eichhorn downplayed the central lesson of the failed German Revolution. The reason workers “were not organized to struggle for power” was that they lacked a seasoned revolutionary leadership. The Communist Party had been formed only at the end of December 1918, after its main leaders split with the USPD. Their extremely belated split from the Social Democrats was key to the tragic unfolding of events in 1918-19, culminating in the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg by Gustav Noske’s bloodhounds. This fundamental truth, and whatever Eichhorn’s faults, in no way diminish the role he played as a hero of our class.
