The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power: Documents, 1918-1919; Preparing the Founding Congress

The documents in this book, most of which have never before been published in English, record the first months of the 1918 German Revolution.

In November of that year workers and soldiers toppled the German Empire and forced an abrupt end to the World War. A sharp struggle wracked the newborn republic. Should capitalist rule be reestablished or should it be replaced by a government based on councils of the exploited working people?

Part of a multivolume series on the Communist International, this book shows the important role of the German revolution in the International’s formation and in posing key questions debated at its first four congresses.

Recorded here are the contending positions of German Communist and Social Democratic leaders such as Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Karl Kautsky, and Friedrich Ebert, and debates within the German Communist Party.

Comments on the German events by Bolshevik leaders including V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Karl Radek; the debate between Kautsky and Lenin on Soviet power in Russia; and preparations for the March 1919 founding congress of the Comintern round out this collection.

This book is part of a series, The Communist International in Lenin's Time. Click to see the other titles in this series.