The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power

The documents in this book, most of which have never before been published in English, record the first months of the 1918-19 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 re-established 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 Communists and Social Democratic leaders such as Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Leibknecht, Karl Kautsky, and Friedrich Ebert, and the debates within the German Communist Party.

Comments of 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 preperations for the March 1919 founding congress of the Comintern round out this collection.