Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] The German Revolution: Radical Potential and Reactionary Backlash in 1918–1919

Episode Date: May 31, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Dec 10, 2024 Alyson and Breht finally dive into the German Revolution of 1918! This pivotal yet often overlooked revolutionary moment saw the collapse of the German Empire at the end of World War I, the rise of workers' and soldiers' councils, and intense ideological and political struggles shaping the future of socialism, liberalism, and fascism in Europe. Together they discuss this rather ambigious revolution, give a detailed overview of events, and reflect on what lessons we can learn from it. From the toppling of the Kaiser, to the brutal fight between social democrats and communists (including the horrible murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht), to the rise of the Freikorp and the Weimar Republic (and beyond), they help listeners understand the importance, the successes, the failures, and the tragedies, of this often neglected revolution. Check out the 3-part series on YT mentioned in the episode: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7y0zyKXzhwzrZ0raG4HpT8ZdXx9USoW3 ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio: https://revleftradio.com/      

The German Revolution. A revolution, no doubt, but an ambiguous one. It defeated the monarchical German Empire, the Second Reich, led by Kaiser Wilhelm I, and replaced it ultimately with a liberal parliamentary democracy, known as the Weimar Republic. It was certainly a more left-wing revolution than the American one, but further to the right than the French one. All three saw the end of monarchy and the birth of a republic, though only the American Revolution, perhaps the most economically conservative revolution in modernity survived continuously, whereas the French revolution ended ultimately in Napoleon being crowned emperor in the halls of Notre Dame, and the German revolution ended ultimately with the rise of Hitler's Third Reich. While the American and French

revolutions were both incredibly violent, the German revolution at least of November 9th, 1918, was virtually bloodless. In fact, walking the streets of Munich the day after the monarchy fell, the liberal German novelist and future Nobel Prize laureate Thomas Mann said, quote, The German Revolution is a very German one, even if it is a proper revolution, no French savagery, no Russian communistic excesses, end quote. Adolf Hitler, on the other hand, representing the general sentiment of the German reactionary right, had a quite different interpretation of events. Hitler had been severely wounded and rendered unconscious in a gas attack in the closing days of World War I, and woke up in a field hospital on November 12th to the news that the Second Reich had fallen,

the German Empire had lost the war, and his homeland of Austria-Hungary no longer existed. He later wrote about the experience, saying, quote, I threw myself on my bed and buried my burning head in a pillow. I had not cried since the day I stood at my mother's grave. Now I couldn't do anything else. In the pages of Mind Kampf, Hitler would repeatedly bring up November 9th and rail bitterly against it. Five years after the revolution, to the very day, Hitler would launch his failed beer-hall pooch. The day he chose for his desperate attempt at coup d'etat was no coincidence.

All through the 1920s, the German right would organize mobilizations and rallies on the anniversary of the revolution. And this speaks to another aspect of why the German revolution is not talked about as much as those that came before and after it. In retrospect, it is understood as a brief, almost liminal period between the Second Reich of the German Revolution. German Empire and the rise of the Third Reich under the Nazi regime. Just as the French Revolution cannot be fully comprehended without understanding the Thermidorian reaction, the rise of Napoleon, the fall of the French Republic, and all that came after, so too the German Revolution is marred in retrospect by the failure of the revolutionary left, the subsequent rise of Nazi Germany and the long, dark shadow, it cast

backwards over the product of that revolution, the Weimar Republic. Even on the Marxist left, the German Revolution fails to get the attention it deserves. While many of us know about Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Leibnich, betrayed by the Social Democrats and murdered by the reactionary Freikor, far too few of us know the details. It is never as cherished or as emphasized as the Russian, Chinese, Cuban, or even French revolutions. This, no doubt, is because the Marxist revolutionary left were brutally defeated in their heroic struggle for power in the wake of the revolution in Germany.

Still, the German Revolution must be understood and grappled with, for its successes and for its failures, and not least because of the fact that what makes the German Revolution so important for us today is that it was the only revolution to have happened in an industrialized country where a majority of the population had been proletarianized and urbanized. Its context, therefore, is much closer to our own in North America and Western Europe today, day than are any of the other revolution cited above. On the whole, the German revolution was historic, had widespread consequences for the entirety of the 20th century, and was a bitter blow to the socialist movement and to the

Bolsheviks in particular. Lenin and his comrades observed the events in Germany with bated breath, convinced that their job was to hold the line for socialist revolution until the more industrialized West, and Germany specifically were able to wage their own socialist revolution and give rise to their own dictatorship of the proletariat, signifying what they believed would be the beginning of world revolution. In the wake of the defeat, the Soviet Union found itself isolated, surrounded on all sides by enemies, slightly disoriented, and in for some difficult times. The German workers, soldiers, and communists certainly tried their best, establishing worker and soldier councils or Soviets throughout Germany, building dual power

after the revolution of November 9th, and going for it all in the Spartacist uprising in a bold and courageous attempt to push the revolution definitively in their direction. This uprising, in a tragic series of events, however, was brutally crushed by a coalition of Social Democrats and the German right. Rosa and Carl, charismatic leaders of the newly formed Communist Party of Germany, the KPD, were soon thereafter kidnapped by the Freikor, a group of demobilized and reactionary soldiers operating under the direction of the leader of the Social Democratic Party, Frederick Ebert. They were extrajudicially beaten, tortured, and then murdered. Tens of thousands of people

filled the streets in honor of their memory and in protest of their assassinations. Rosa's body was thrown off a bridge into a canal and was not even found until several months later. Carl's body was symbolically dumped outside the Berlin Zoo in a final insult to his humanity. His eventual grave site was later dug up and destroyed by the Nazis when Hitler came to power. Their deaths and the subsequent deaths of thousands of other German KPD members by paramilitary forces of the new German state represented the nail in the coffin for German communism at that time and cleared the way for the final victory of the Social Democrats, Frederick

Ebert, and capitalism in Germany. It also paved the road to Nazism, as it is very likely that only a victory for the Communist Party could have been sufficient to prevent the rise of Hitler and Nazism. in any case we know that social democracy definitely did not so let us explore this revolution both with curiosity and pride as well as a sense of tragedy and dismay those killed in the sparticist uprising and in the months after it are our comrades and our martyrs moreover all the lives lost in world war two and the holocaust might have been spared if events would have broken in a different direction this was a revolution to be sure but not unlike

the Paris commune before it, one that was drowned in blood, and one that ultimately gave birth to new monsters, the likes of which the world had never hitherto soon. Allison? Yeah, I think that is an exceptional thing, honestly. The few things that I will add is I think there are a couple reasons why this revolution deserves a serious study. You really hit on all of them, but I will just emphasize. It's hard to study the revolution that in many ways from the perspective of the Marxist left was a failure. It was a horrific defeat. The forces of reaction ran rampant and engaged in unbelievable violence. You know, it's this thing where I think it's

become a meme on the left, right, to kind of meme about the death of Luxembourg and Leibnacht and talk about like, oh, the Social Democrats killed Rosa. But it's this very tragic moment in history, right? This is someone who was an incredible leader in the movement that we claimed to stand in the legacy of. This is someone who died in a cause that was just died really in a lot of ways involved in a revolution that she wasn't even sure was the right move at the exact time. There's an incredible complexity here that is hard to wrestle with. And reading about the details of how this revolution ends is, in my opinion, actually very emotionally difficult. Like, there's something hard to confront with this story. And it does not surprise me that it doesn't get the same

attention as the revolutions that went more unambiguously in our favor. At the same time, I think Brett is correct. You can't understand what happens in Germany after this. You cannot understand the Weimar period or the fall of the Weimar Republic without understanding what happened here. You cannot understand the divisions within the socialist movement that would happen later on, the divisions between social Democrats and Marxists, terms that had once been identical with each other, that we now understand is very different today. have a lot of their origins in this revolution and in the incredible and horrific stories of betrayal that exist throughout this revolution. And so there's a lot here that I think you need to really

take in to understand the history of socialism and its development. The final thing that I'll say is that I think in many ways a revolution that does not succeed is in more important lesson than revolutions that do succeed. I always find myself returning to Mao's ideas on failure and failure as the mother of success, right? Not as this thing we should run from, but is something that has to be studied. It's through failures that knowledge can actually be synthesized, allowing us to go back, try again, and test out new ideas. Failures aren't a thing to run from. Actually, as communists, I think most importantly, we ought to focus on our failures. This is what criticism and self-criticism are all about. And so given that, I don't see any way for us to

avoid wrestling with the centrality of this revolution. And so hopefully this episode can contribute to that because having, you know, spent some time diving into the resources about this, there's not as many accessible resources as you would expect compared to other parts of the history of socialism. So broadly, those are kind of my thoughts on why I think this is all worth doing. If you don't have anything, Brett, I'll go ahead and just kind of jump into some of the historical background and get us moving with what happened here. Yeah, I do have a couple of quick points to make. Yeah. What you said was spot on, of course. And, you know, even before we decided to do this episode, my knowledge was was very limited as well, like incredibly limited. And so

diving into this was really eye-opening in a bunch of different ways. No matter how many times I read about the death of Rosa and Carl, specifically Rosa, I cry every time. And I found myself just yesterday rereading some resources about her final, you know, her final hours and just the brutality with which she met her end. It just, it had me utterly weeping. And, and although this was ultimately a failure, and as Allison correctly says, we have to learn and engage with that failure, it was also in so many ways a fascinating success up until their ultimate defeat. The amount of support that the German communists had amongst the workers, amongst the soldiers, I mean, it was really, I mean, if we had anything like a fraction of that amount of mass support,

we would be on a whole new level of struggle here in the United States. So while it was ultimately a failure, we're also going to talk about its successes. the amount of momentum that it did have. So Allison is going to go into a basic chronology of events just so people can sort of understand how things played out. And then we're going to spend the bulk of the episode kind of just going back and forth, reflecting on what happened, pulling out lessons, as we always try to do. I also want to say that Allison and I, I believe, have done Revolution or Reform by Rosa

on Red Menace in the past. And I've done episodes on Rosa Luxembourg just as an individual on Rev Left. So I'll try to remember to link to those in the show notes. But you can obviously search for them and find them if you want to flesh out more of that aspect of it. But before we move on to Allison's chronology of events, I do just want to quickly read a couple quotes from Rosa. These were some of the last quotes that she had. And I just kind of want to emphasize the humanity of, you know, a small, disabled Jewish, Polish woman who rose to be a part of the leadership. of, you know, the German

Communist Party, a really fascinating life story in its own right, but the humanity must be emphasized here. So, two quick quotes. One was something that she was writing to a friend in her last days, kind of seeing the way that things were breaking and

sort of having a sort of dread come over her. She said the following, and this was to a friend, quote, I suppose I must be out of sorts to feel everything so deeply. Sometimes, however, it seems to me that I am not really a human being at all but like a bird or a beast

in human form. I feel so much more at home, even in a scrap of garden like the one here, and still more in the meadows when the grass is humming with bees than at one of our party congresses. I can say that to you for you will not promptly suspect me of treason to socialism.

You know that I really hope to die at my post in a street fight or in prison. So I think that that quote speaks to both her humanity her love of nature her love period she was a loving human being and she was motivated by love to push for a better world in the same way that we hope to push for a better world today but it also shows her her sense of humor and also her resolve and she predicted correctly that

she was going to die you know that i really hope to die at my post in a street fight or in prison and she did but the the other quote i wanted to read before i handed over to alison was one of her last um let's say this is luxembourg's last known words written on the evening of her execution and so this is what she said quote the contradiction between the powerful decisive aggressive offensive of the of the berlin masses on the one hand and the indecisive half-hearted vacillation of the berlin leadership on the other is the mark of this latest episode the leadership failed but a new leadership can and must be created by the masses and from the masses the masses The masses are the crucial factor.

They are the rock on which the ultimate victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were up to the challenge, and out of this defeat, they have forged a link in the chain of historic defeats, which is the pride and strength of international socialism. That is why future victories will spring from this so-called defeat. Order prevails in Berlin, you foolish lackeys, your order is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will rise up again, clashing its weapons. And to your horror, it will proclaim with trumpets blazing, I was, I am, I shall be. And that's the quote. And I think that again speaks to her, utter resolve, again, on the eve of her own death,

seeing the brutal crackdown by the social Democrats in tandem with the German right on the workers' movement in the Communist Party, still defiant to the very end. And we don't know what took place in that interrogation room when she was kidnapped by the Freikor. taken to an interrogation room, beaten, tortured, knocked unconscious, ultimately shot in the head and dumped off a bridge. But I think we all can sense that she did not go quietly into that good night, that she fought with every bit of strength that she may have had, and that she faced her own death,

not unlike Che Guevara with extreme bravery and courage, and probably a sense of inevitability. Yeah, very well said. And that quote always honestly brings chills to me just the incredible, almost like prophetic voice that is spoken in is really something. Yeah, I'll go ahead and jump into the history a little bit. I'm going to try to keep this brief. As Brett and I were saying before this episode, there is so much history here. It is hard to know which events to focus on and which ones need the most details. I'm going to try to hit on the key moments as I see it in the history of

the German Revolution and give some explanation there. One thing that I will just say real quick as a shout-out. If you want much more depth on the chronology of this revolution, there's a three-part YouTube series by a YouTuber. I'm going to mispronounce this, but Jonas Seika-C-K philosophy who has just like

three hours worth of here's the chronology of the German Revolution. If you want more depth, yeah, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is an exceptional resource. So I want to start off by saying you can get more depth there. But that said, let me try to do some of the historical

work for us here. So I'm going to start with two pieces of background that I think are important here. So one is the relationship between World War I and the socialist movement, and two is the concept of social democracy, because I think you need to have some grasp on these in order to get any of this history to make sense. So we are going to talk a lot about the Social Democratic Party of Germany and the Independent Social Democratic Party. And obviously today, the word Social Democrat is kind of overloaded, right? When we hear that word today, we think of a sort of reformist, left-o-center-left, often kind of populist politics that focuses on legislative change in a socialist-e direction. It's been a very watered-down term from what it meant at the time.

One thing you may know, if you've studied the history of the Bolsheviks, is that at the beginning of the 20th century, that was not the meaning of that term, right? Marxists called themselves social Democrats. This is what the Bolsheviks called themselves early on. So When we're talking about that party, I want you to not bring in some of the ideological baggage that you might have there. The second thing is that all of this really centers around World War I in so many ways. If you recall our episodes that we have done on Lenin's work, Lenin in many ways is responding to World War I. Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, is reflecting on this particular war. The Bolsheviks' own revolution is inseparable from the realities of inter-imperialist war.

And so it would probably be worth doing an entire deep dive into World War I and its causes. We're not going to do that here. But all of that is kind of relevant historically to understand that socialism in this period was very much shaped by this. So let's get a little bit into the chronology. The Social Democratic Party of Germany was founded well before the outbreak of World War I. And I'm not going to get into the entirety of its history. But it's important to point out that by the beginning of the 20th century, the Socialist Democratic Party was really understood as one of the most advanced revolutionary Marxist parties in the entire world. Brett gestured towards this, but pretty much everyone, including the Bolsheviks, was looking to them as the likely vanguard

of global revolution. It was very much seen that if there was anywhere that this revolution was going to break out, it was going to be in Germany. It is really hard to overstate just how large the party was, not just as a political force, but as a social force and as an organizational force outside of even parliamentary politics. The party had its own cadre schools, essentially, party schools where they trained up organizers, produced many people who you will hear about on all sides of the conflict in this story. There were massive social clubs built into the SPD. It really was a almost way of living at the beginning of the 20th century in Germany. The SPD had gone through various forms of illegality and legality over time,

but at the period that we are talking about, we are really going to see the shift of the SPD from this mass revolutionary party to something very different. So I want to start the chronology essentially at the outbreak of World War I. And again, I don't think we can go into the causes of World War I, but it's important to note that World War I posed a fundamental problem for the socialist movement, which understood itself as internationalist. A key claim of socialism and of Marxism in particular is that national identity does not supersede

the international movement of the working class. And so when all of the great imperialist powers went to war with each other, socialists in those countries had to decide where do we stand on this war? Do we side with patriotism, with chauvinism, or do we side with internationalism? And originally, the SPD was very on, early on in the days, on the correct side of this. The SPD was critical of the war at the very beginning of it, coming out of the July crisis, the SPD actually mobilized protests against the war. But they struggled with this question just as much as the movement in Russia struggled with this as well. And while in Russia, the defeatist position, opposition to the war ultimately won out. Unfortunately, in the internal debates within the SPD, there was a shift that occurred,

where the SPD ended up siding in favor of the war, and in particular in favor of war credits. One of the things that's very distinctive about the SPD at this time is that despite having a wide range of beliefs within it and figures on the left and the right, the FPD had very intense party unity. And so when the SPD majority decided to support war credits, the party went along with it. This would include two figures, who we will learn a lot more about Rosa Luxembourg and Carl Leibnacht, who are these massive left-wing figures in our history. Again, we'll later on found the Spartacist League be involved in. the founding of the Communist Party of Germany. But to give a sense, even these incredibly vocal left dissenters, along with Hugo Haas, who were very opposed to the party supporting war credits and supporting the war, ultimately were pulled in by the unity of the party into this.

So led to a very interesting situation where the relationship between the SPD and the German government changed significantly. The German government had been extremely, extremely concerned about the SPD had seen it as a revolutionary destabilizing force. But the Kaiser, after the SPD fell in, actually declared famously, that I know no longer of parties, only Germans, right? This idea that we are all unified in this country behind this war. And the SPD positioned itself ultimately as a patriotic movement within support for the war. And this would be the beginning of all of the problems that would lead to the German Revolution. So again, to talk about Luxembourg and Leibnacht, these are two figures who were

very far to the left of the party. Early on, even when the party had endorsed war credits, they had spoken out internally against war credits, spoken out for the need for internationalism, and these were very popular people within the party. There was a mass level of support with them in many of the unions that existed external to the party or as kind of proxy organizations alongside it, and very much represented the left wing. It is a mass level of support with them. It is worth noting, though, that a lot of other figures from socialist history were involved in the SPD. Edward Bernstein was here at the time. Karl Kautzky was here at the time. Radik, who would later become very important in the concept of Russia was here at the time. And so this party

embodied a lot of different ideas. Now, before we get into again, like the exact events, the other thing that I want to point to is that outside the SPD itself, there was also a high level of organized labor. One figure who's very important, his name is going to come up and over and over again is Richard Mueller. Richard Mueller had been trained through the SPD Party Schools and eventually became first the de facto and then very much official leader of a group known as the Revolutionary Shop Stewards, which were a very important group because of their direct connection to organized labor and their ability to work both within the official unions but also in an unofficial

context pulling in cross-industry union participation in the events that would be about to come. Mueller is very complicated and we will get into some of that, but really a key figure outside of the SPD proper as this external force that is going to be in a back and forth conversation with the various parties that are going to get set up. So there are a lot of things that we could point to. Again, one thing I will say is that the war ends up quickly becoming unpopular domestically, and I think this is the last kind of piece of stage setting. There's a couple of reasons for this. The auxiliary services, which include forced labor mobilization, is massively unpopular with the populace.

There is an increased, you know, just death count. World War I ends up being this disaster from a human perspective. And Germany does not do very well in the war as it continues to stretch on. And so we have this long drawn-out process of the war continuing and the populace becoming increasingly unhappy with it. Which makes things complicated because at this point, the SPD, the socialist movement, has put itself on the side of the war. It is here at this period in time that Rosa and Carl end up doing some interesting things

like publishing the Spartacist letters, breaking with party unity, and actually engaging in a criticism of where the SPD has landed on this. Now, at this point, this is not a formal break with the party, but this represented the first kind of socialist criticism that was willing to step outside that huge level of party unity. And we really saw how much this was connected with the masses. in 1916, where a huge mobilization occurred in response to the arrest of Karl Leibnacht and his charge would treason. In response to that charge, there was a massive mobilization, again, involving the work of Richard Mueller and the revolutionary shop stewards, that was able to bring out 55,000

people into the street, calling very directly for the release of Leibnacht. And this tells you, again, that these left-wing figures weren't just kind of fringe nobody. So, 55,000 people calling for your release from prison is something that a leftist in the U.S. could only dream of were an effort to happen, right? This is true mass popularity in an incredible way. And it represented something interesting for the SPD. It made many of the leadership of the SPD

realized that they might not be on the side of the masses. And these massive mobilizations caused them to begin to worry a little bit about whether or not the direction that the socialist movement outside of the party itself was moving in, was going to be on their side. In the wake of these massive mobilizations, a very important thing occurs, which is that the SPD begins to purge the anti-war factions that have been breaking out and have been critical and really not interested in, you know, falling under party unity. In response to these purges, and here is, I'm quite sorry to say, where the acronyms are going

to get very confusing, another party is founded, which is the independent. Social Democratic Party, USPD. So USPD and SPD, we're just going to have to work with that. But the USPD is founded with members like Rosa with Leibnift, with Hugo Haas, and also with Bernstein and Kautzky. So these figures that we now associate very much with the right wing of this movement were still actually in the USPD when it was founded. And the USPD puts, uh-huh. I also wanted to add the name Clara Zetkin was also. Yes, yes, who we have also discussed in. our episodes. Definitely. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah. No, you're good. So the USPD ends up forming as this

kind of oppositional split from the SPD itself with a vocal criticism of the war of the auxiliary service act that is passed and of the support for war credits. And interestingly, as we move forward in time, we start to see additional strikes that begin to occur. And again, I could focus on a few of these, and I'm going to kind of cherry pick. But two very large strikes occur in 1918, with demands that end up being quite expansive. So while the original strike that caused this split was just calling for the release of Leibnacht after being charged with treason, this later set of strikes, which are larger in mobilization, and still have the support of the revolutionary shop stewards, start to make demands that are quite revolutionary

in nature, focusing on voting rights, ending the war, by the third strike, focusing on women's suffrage and the founding of workers' councils, what we would essentially call Soviets, right, in the classical sense of the word. And these strikes really are important because they represent not just these immediate economic demands and not just the end of the war, but the pairing of those economic demands and the end of the war with the foundation of a proper republic that could ensure even just these basic bourgeois rights that did not yet exist within the Reich. And so there's this politicization that really begins to occur here. And the 1918 strike ends up being incredibly important because once it launches off, the workers involved in it have to make decisions about who they want to invite into these councils that they are demanding or created and who they want to invite into the leadership.

Originally, interestingly, interestingly enough, they only invited the USPD. But unfortunately, after further debate in consideration, they invited the SPD as well. And at this point, the Spartacists who have been founded by Rosa and by Leibnacht are pushing really hard for moving this strike into a more revolutionary direction. And it's here that we see the first beginnings of kind of conflict within the movement. At this time, it was the Spartacists who really wanted things to go more towards beyond a strike, an actual revolution. But it was the shop stewards who were a lot more conservative about it. And at the time, we're not sure that this is what it ought to be. And really conceptualized things in turn. of their, you know, being an economic issue, more or less. So the other thing to note about this time period is that because the SPD is brought into the leadership of this new emerging movement, the SPD is really able to kind of hollow out a lot of the revolutionary momentum as well. At this point, the split is so intense that many of the SPD members don't see themselves as revolutionaries at all. They are quite

concerned about the idea of revolution. They are scared of it. They have interoperated. They have entered into a coalition with the German government in favor of the war, and now the revolution might take away the gains and the privileges that they have personally gained as a result of that. And you end up in this very interesting thing, where you have these figures who went through these party and cadre schools together, who were a part of the same party, who were a part of the party during a time when it was illegal, and being a part of it could really ruin your life. And these figures are going toe to toe with each other, now at odds with each other, and really fighting. And so this ends up obviously creating, you know, quite an issue. And this is, yeah,

one of the really beginnings of a split that will turn violent later on. Now, another thing happens as we move into the later half of 1918, which is that it becomes extremely, extremely clear to everyone that this war is not going well. It becomes clear to the military leadership as well that Germany really has no possibility of winning this war and that the best possible situation that they can do is to sue for peace. Now, if you know anything about history, this ends up with the Treaty of Versailles, which does not treat Germany in a way that they're going to be very happy about. But it's important to know that even the military leadership at this time really saw how things were and the fact that the war needed to end. And so one really fascinating thing here

that really sets us up for the Nazis, is that Ludendorff, this military leader at the time, really makes the decision that if suing for peace has to happen, it would be better to put socialists in charge of that process so that they can take the blame for it later on. And Ludendorff famously actually says, you know, these are the people who are opposed to the war all along. Let them take the blame for the failure of the war. And he puts them into these cabinet positions, actually. There, I don't believe are actually that many SPD members that are put into the cabinet positions at this time when the beginning of the peace process begins. But enough are put there that later on this will evolve into kind of the stabbed in the back

myth of World War I, where the German Nazis will say the socialists, and they'll say the socialist Jews in particular undermined our country from the inside and took away our ability to win this war. And the beginnings of that myth were very intentionally set up by the military establishment at this time. I think it's important to recognize. So, petition for peace goes out, and at this time, you know, everyone knows that things are very unstable. The terms of the peace are probably not going to be favorable for Germany, and the Kaiser really wants to emphasize that a revolution is probably coming, a full-blower revolution, and that the state ought to basically be preserved to whatever extent it possibly can be.

The Kaiser comes to this conclusion, not just with the right-wing governments, our parties, but also with the SPD. With the SPD going increasingly right, its leadership overwhelmingly wants to maintain stability, wants to preserve order, and wants to make sure that whatever revolution might break out in the next coming moments doesn't become a full social revolution.

Friedrich Ebert, the kind of head of the SPD at the time, expresses his utter hatred and disdain for the revolution, actually, throughout this time period. And we really see the centralization of its right-wing turn. One other really important thing happens during this period of time where the beginning of suing for peace occurs, which is that the executive committee of workers and soldiers councils is founded. This will be a part of that dual power relationship that Brett gestured to later on. And at this point, this committee is not quite ready to begin a full revolution. That is not really where they're at. But they do begin stockpiling weapons. And we see the beginning of what very likely is the turn towards revolution becoming potentially inevitable. Then, at the end of October, kind of without the planning of any of the parties involved, the sailors stage an uprising within Germany. And the sailor uprising, we can get into some of the details about it.

But one thing that I will point out, this is a thing we see in multiple revolutions. The sailors in Russia were one of the particularly revolutionary groups, I think treated terribly on both sides within this war and more prone to self-organization. And so a sailor's uprising happens at this time period. And in response to that, there are massive mobilizations that occur alongside it. And faster than anyone could have expected, both the government and the socialist parties, we see the rapid disintegration of the government take place. The workers' councils that had been established already and now have this new executive committee

respond to this disintegration by taking power. And in the wake of all of this, the Kaiser, actually resigns or abdicates, I guess, is probably the technical term here. And so this first revolution happens from a fairly spontaneous uprising that caught everybody off guard, and to an extent no one really knew what to do about it. One of the first decisive things that happens in the wake of this is that while the workers' councils are themselves taking power, a new council is formed, which is the council of people's deputies. And this council includes the SPD and the USPD in equal measure. And within this council, one of the emerging figures is Friedrich Ebert, who we have alluded to before, kind of the arc reactionary, in my opinion, within the SPD. And he quickly positions himself here and takes control of the council and really is going to

use it as a right-wing tool against the revolutionary parts of the movement. One of the important things to note here is even though the Kaiser abdicates, even though the state begins to be taken over partially by workers' councils, much of the military is left completely intact, unfortunately. The officers' corps is not particularly, you know, hollowed out. Many of the arc reactionaries in the military are completely left in their previous positions. And this is going to really add some complications later down the line. And Allison, I would just add to that not only in the military, but in the bureaucracy itself. Yes.

From the imperial German bureaucracy, a lot of those people are left in their positions. and, of course, the capitalist, you know, control over the banks and the factories are more or less left in power as well. So that's a huge aspect of this revolution is that you're leaving these power centers in the economy and politics and in the military of the old elites and the old order very much intact. Right. And that is kind of one of the complicated things because on the one hand, what happens here looks very similar to what happened in Russia, where Soviets, workers, councils are created. But those councils never really actually have a particularly high level of control, right? You're correct. These other institutions are very much left in place, which creates what Lenin referred to as this situation of dual power, where you have on the one hand, the workers' councils and

the executive committee of workers' councils, but you also have the proper German state itself and the council of people's deputies at odds with each other. And unfortunately, as this dual power situation really begins to develop, the workers' councils get pushed increasingly to the side. Now, it's interesting because on paper, the executive committee of workers councils was actually supposed to have authority over the committee of people's deputies. But in practice, the people's deputies just completely ignore them and invert exercises fairly unilateral control from within that position. And so a particularly important moment occurs on December 6th, 1918. And what I really want to emphasize here is that we can

see just how fractured everything has gone. At this point, essentially a counter-revolution takes place where reactionary soldiers, largely within the officer's courts, march and move to actually ask Ebert to step into power unilaterally. Now, Ebert interestingly refuses at this time, but it is worth noting that soldiers had actually moved and begun to position themselves to arrest the workers' counsel. So we can see that although parts of the military are very on board with the revolution. There are parts of it that are still quite reactionary, and the right-wing SPD are trying to position themselves in this route a complicated way. Ebert is still publicly seen as a socialist in many ways, even though he's undermining the revolution from the inside. So he doesn't outright

take power here. But interestingly, in the wake of this, Ebert takes an action that I think places him firmly, publicly on the right. During an organized marching of these troops through Berlin, Ebert gives a speech where he reinforces the stabbed in the back myth, and he states that no enemy actually overcame the German revolution. The implication being that they didn't lose to foreign powers, they lost to domestic upheaval by the socialists. And this is really a clear hint of where Ebert is going to land in terms of all of this. Now, another thing that occurs in December is the Christmas crisis.

And during the Christmas crisis, the revolutionary sailors, again, are kind of a main character in this story over and over again, engage in an occupation of the Reich Chancellery in order to try to get pay that they are owed. When this occurs, there is some amount of violence that happens in the fight over the Reich Chancellery, although, as Pratt said, it is nowhere near as bloody as any of the other fights that we see. I believe the casualty rate on the high end is estimated to be in the dozens from this fighting, but this leads to a couple of important things. In the wake of this, and in the wake of the SPD denouncing this uprising and mobilizing other troops against it, the USPD resigns from

the Council of Deputies. This, of course, means the Council of Deputies, which has increasingly become the de facto more powerful government within the dual power situation, is able to fill those seats with SPD members. One of those members, Gustav Noske, is particularly important because he comes in to fill a seat of overseeing the military, and at this time he notes that the revolution is probably not over, is likely to get worse, and that the party should begin to move arms shipment to the Frye Court. So the Frye Corps, to just kind of give a very brief overview, are largely paramilitaries made up of World War I veterans who are angry, right-wing, buy into this idea that the socialist betrayed them, and who see themselves as having suffered

through this war for nothing. Germany didn't come out of it on top. Now they're facing this peace process that is going to impose an increasingly stringent and difficult economic hardship on them, and they feel thoroughly, thoroughly betrayed. They are pretty much the basis of what will later be the Nazi party. In fact, many of their units are directly transformed into the SA when the Nazis take power. This is kind of that core paramilitary base, and this is who the Social Democrats decide they need to start moving arms to. So, we now find ourselves in this where the dual power exists. The SDP has moved as far to the right as it conceivably could for a supposedly socialist party. It begins to publicly talk about the need not for revolution,

but for winning socialism through democratic means and differentiating itself from the Marxists, and the USPD has completely backed out of the council where it might have had power. The next thing that matters here is that the Spartacists within the USPD decide to initiate yet another split and leave the USPD and declare the Communist Party of Germany. The Communist Party of Germany is not a party that we will go too much into the depth details of, because history extends well past the end of our summation. But it is important to say that the Communist Party of Germany quickly had solidified ties with international communist organizations. It was made up of the groups that were largely seen as the ultra-left of the USPD,

again, Luxembourg and Leibnick being key figures within it, and it quickly voted against participating in the elections that were going to occur and against participating within the mainstream unions as well. There was a discussion of the revolutionary stewards, the group again led by Richard Mueller, being able to join the Communist Party at this point, but there was a pretty solid disagreement between them in terms of what should happen. The stewards really did not like the idea of boycotting the elections in the unions, which kind of makes sense, given their relationship to the union movement into actual organized labor, there were disagreements about decentralization and organicness in the revolution. And so, you know, we really do see the

ultra-left kind of solidify itself, and this actually alienates parts of the workers' movement that are revolutionary in themselves and have participated in all of this. Now, I'll try to get to these final events, you know, relatively quickly, since we're already fairly high on time. And Allison, before you continue, just very quickly, just to help people kind of continue to follow this thread, you have the Social Democratic Party, the SPD, up until 1917, there's a split within that party for the pro, kind of the pro war and the anti-war aspects of the SPD split. And that gives rise to the USPD, as Allison was talking about earlier, Carl, Carl, Rosa, Clarizetkin, etc. We're against the war. The SPD, the right wing of the SPD is now talking in nationalistic terms, etc. so that holds for a couple years through World War I and then the revolution happens quote unquote in November 9th of 1918 and then you know all these events unfold and then the USPD basically and correct me if I'm wrong here but becomes the communist party in the in January

of 1919 right not all of the USPD goes along with that but yeah that's probably the easiest way to look at it's the third split kind of is a way to think about yes and that that would go on the Communist Party of Germany would continue on until the rise of the Nazis, and then they obviously destroyed the party. Yes, exactly. Sorry, go ahead. I just want to make sure people are keeping up with all those acronyms. Yes, it's a lot of divisions to track, unfortunately.

And, again, a lot of acronyms, many of which are similar. So the kind of concluding story, at least for our part of this, begins in January of 1990, where an uprising happens largely around the appointment of someone named Emil I. to the position of revolutionary police officer. I'm not going to get a ton into the details of that, but Emil Iikorn had significant popular support among the masses for being appointed to this, but the SPD opposed and actually blocked his appointment. By this period in time, the SPD had essentially joined the right-wing press

in putting out anti-communist propaganda, talking about the dangers of these kind of barbarous communists. And so, you know, there is just really, just this tension that is here when this happens. In response to the blocking of the appointment of ICORN, a more or less organic uprising occurs. Workers turn out to the streets in numbers that are significantly higher than anyone could have expected. They seize print publications and press offices. They seize buildings and they really do show up in ways that no one would have anticipated. In response to this, there is more or less a crisis within the left wing movement. It appears that a revolution is taking place whether or not anyone likes it or not, and there is

massive disagreement about whether or not the Communist Party should support it. A revolutionary committee is formed to decide whether or not to declare a revolution, which Karl Leibnich joins, and unilaterally against the advice and wishes of the rest of the Communist Party of Germany, supports declaring a revolution and wants to kick it off. The more common line, in the KPD, and the line that Rosa herself held, was that it would be premature to declare a revolution. But nonetheless, this revolutionary committee formed in Berlin, mostly made up of the USPD and the revolutionary stop stewards, declare a revolution, but provide no real direction. Again, they're extremely caught off guard. They are not able to mobilize military assets

very quickly. And to everyone's surprise, the people's navy divisions, who again, had been this very important part of the revolutionary movements up to this, declare that they are not interested in entering into this revolution. And so, the revolution begins to kind of die down. The strike that has declared slowly loses steam. I-Corn is successfully removed. Fights kick off in the street, and the Revolutionary Committee finds itself caught significantly off guard.

Ebert and the SPD move to mobilize the Fricor into the street to put down the remaining people who are still out trying to fight for this revolution. The Frye Corps engage in intense paramilitary, almost civil warlike violence. The death toll doesn't end up being that high because people leave, but it is a quick, strong show of brutality. And Frye Cor executions occur basically summarily here. Most, you know, kind of importantly in our memory, this occurs with Rosa and Carl, who refused to leave the country, who refused to flee Berlin and stick around for it. And there's a real

tragedy here because while Leipnik did support the revolution and actually broke party unity within the KPD to vote for it, Rosa had been opposed to it all along. She thought that this was a massive mistake and only supported it at the last minute once it was too late to back out for the sake of making a united face and because she believed that defeat would be more strategic than to back off. And so both Rosa and Carl are captured. Both of them, as Brett said, are interrogated, almost certainly tortured, slammed in the head with a rifle and shot and summarily executed by the Frye Corps, again by a unit that would later on be directly integrated into the Nazi party's SA and its paramilitary formations. And so the two kind of great left-wing leaders

within this movement are dead. In the wake of this, in the following months, there are some further revolts that are all successfully put down by the government. There are some councils that essentially declare themselves new Soviet republics within Germany that are also put down and do not last. After the failure of the January 1919 strikes, the momentum was really gone. And so again, later on in January, we actually see the foundation of the National Assembly as a parliamentary, uh, assembly that will exist within Germany where the SPD win a plurality of votes. They actually end up with 38% and the USPD receives only 7.6% of the vote and the KPD in line with what we said was its policy chooses not to participate. And so the left ends up very sidelined within this

and this new constituent assembly ends up adopting the Weimar constitution, which as Brett said, does include some real liberalizing reforms, right? And we find ourselves at the end of this story in an interesting situation, where a revolution that was never clearly a liberal bourgeois revolution or a socialist revolution, but had factions both simultaneously, has kicked off, where those factions turned to murder and execution and fighting in the streets together. And ultimately, we have a revolution that is a success in the sense that it does see the overthrow of the monarchy within Germany and the establishment of a constitutional republic that guarantees liberal rights.

But simultaneously, the failure of the socialist revolution, the consolidation of right-wing paramilitaries, and an alliance between the social Democrats and the very people who would go on to become the Nazi party. And I think that is where I will end kind of the chronology here. I hope it was not too long, but there's some of it. yeah so first and foremost that was an absolutely masterful summary i i could not in a hundred years do better than that covering so much nuance and knowing what to emphasize and whatnot really really really well done and that's i mean you know without without alice in this show doesn't exist for for that reason among many others um but but you spoke at the end towards about the ambiguity as i spoke about

in the intro of this of this very weird ass revolution um and and part of the weirdness comes precisely from the SPD, the Social Democratic Party, and this is something you covered very well in the summary, but just to kind of go over it again, you can see the SPD starting from really revolutionary and really was made illegal. So it's a revolutionary illegal party, right? And then it becomes legalized, and there's a certain amount of comfort after the SPD is legalized amongst the parliamentary leadership. Now, we're still within the German Empire but the German Empire was a parliamentary semi-constitutional monarchy. So, you know, it did have a parliament.

It had a constitution that kind of restrained aspects of the monarchy. It was still a monarchy. So you had the SPD in that context rise up in figures like, you know, Frederick Ebert, who ultimately turns out to be an incredible snake, a real villain. You know, these people get very comfortable. And you can kind of think about people wanting to enter the Democratic Party to change it today. What happens? They start getting that six.

figure income. They're rubbing elbows with really, you know, famous, rich people. They start to realize they don't have to do much work at all. It's a great gig. And then over time, they begin to convince themselves, well, if I wasn't in this position, somebody worse would take it. You know, I have to compromise on this or that principle because I, you know, I need to stay in this position or else somebody worse will be in, you know, you can see how that process of kind of comfort plays out and how politicians with this really cushy job kind of become less revolutionary. The status quo, in a sense, is pretty good for them. And I think it's true to say of Frederick Ebert, again, the leader of the Social Democratic Party,

ostensibly a revolutionary socialist, at least at a certain point, by the end of this thing, he's calling what ultimately amounts to a bourgeois revolution. He's calling that, you know, despicable. He says he hates it as much as he hates sin. And so it becomes clear that a figure like Frederick Ebert would have been comfortable just kind of staying in his position under a constitutional monarchy. He was willing to go to a liberal parliamentary democracy, but he was willing to team up with literal, you know, fascist and the worst reactionaries to prevent the emergence of socialist council democracy. And so what happens after, after November 9th, 1918, right, Kaiser Wilhelm abdicates. and so the monarchy, the German Empire, has more or less fallen,

where now it's a battle between a liberal parliamentary democracy or a socialist council democracy. And what is a council democracy? Well, you could think of the Soviet Union, but, you know, consuls or Soviets are just independent, self-organized, democratic formations of by and four, you know, in this case the workers. So they, you know, you can think of it's a union on steroids.

It's a union become political. as a political apparatus right economically democratically organizes workplaces and makes political decisions you have recall right so the workers will come together they'll have a delegate represent that workers council always subject to recall if that delegate does not abide by the workers interest and wishes this is a more robust form of democracy this is real democracy extended into the economic realm and that's why we are socialists we believe in this and liberal parliamentary democracy democracy is what Germany has become, is what America is today, it's what all of Western Europe is, right? It is what we see, what we have. And so obviously we prefer a socialist council democracy, but after November 9th, that's the fight that plays out. And the, as we said, the military still has deep, you know, entrenched reactionary interests. The bureaucracy still has the imperial elites from the, from the German Empire, the Second Reich. And capitalism itself is still left in place. And so this is a real battle and this is out of out of this sort of conflict emerges this dual power

situation where workers are self-organizing into councils and in some cities more than others they have a real political power and it is ebert the SPD teaming up with the fricor and these other reactionary old elites that go out and put down in these different cities put down these worker councils you know there was one i forget the exact details and you have to go to that YouTube channel that I also got a lot from and Allison recommended earlier, but anybody who was pretending to be in power, right? That is in conflict with the liberal parliamentary democracy that the SPD wants to build is to be shot on site. So if you're somebody in a socialist workers council in whatever city and you're assuming a political power, you know, there was

the directions from Ebert and the SPD to be put down on site because you are, again, are building dual power. You are saying that you have a position of political power that based on their interpretation of who's supposed to win this fight, you do not have, and therefore extreme brutality and violence was inflicted on them. And so, you know, and it goes back to the SPD's evolution over time, the comfortability that the leadership had, that split, just a classic split among socialists when war breaks out, right? We see this time and time again. Do you support, Do you become nationalistic and in support of your country in an inter-imperilist war? Or do you stand for the international proletariat against the warmongers?

Lennon made the right choice. The SPD made the wrong one. And that facilitated the split between the SPD and the USPD, which would eventually give rise to the KPD in 1919. The other aspect of this that I think is particularly interesting is Allison mentioned Eric Ludendorf, right, arch reactionary. this was a quote that he said and this speaks to a lesson that we've had to learn time and time again which is and it speaks to the Cuban revolution right is how do you treat the reactionary right post revolution now clearly if the communists would have won I think the reactionary right would have been treated much more harshly and that gestures back to my point earlier about maybe that could have prevented the rise of nazism and thus world war two and the holocaust etc but obviously the SPD is team up with the reactionary right, leaving them in positions of political power, and notably

being incredibly gentle with them post-revolution. So we talk about this virtually bloodless revolution on November 9th. It turned bloody, of course, in the following months. But it was originally a pretty bloodless takeover. And the right was treated incredibly gently. And so Eric Ludendorf has this famous quote saying, the revolutionary's greatest piece of stupidity, was to leave us all alive. Well, if I ever come to power again, there will be no pardons. With a good conscience,

I would have Ebert, Shidenman, and company strung up and dangling. So this is the reactionary right, talking about the moderate center of fucking Frederick Ebert, being a revolutionary to the point that if they had one power, you would have been strung up by your fucking neck.

And in the meantime, Ebert is, you know, kind of making friendships with them, creating alliances with them, allying with them straight up. And so that speaks to something in the liberal mindset that would time and time again choose fascism over socialism, right? We see that. It's almost a cliche on the left at this point.

There's a reason why it's a cliche because historically it's been true. And then we don't have to look far. We don't have to take him at his word because in just a few short years later, the Nazis rise to power and they fucking obliterate. everybody, including the left wing of their own Nazi fascist party and, you know, the night of the long knives. So this is a lesson to revolutionaries writ large about consolidating the revolution after it and, you know, treating the reactionary right.

They're very specific with how they treat you, you know? If the fascist right comes to power, they make no bones about what they're going to do to the socialist and the communists and the liberals and they don't make distinctions. And so there's something, there's a deep lesson. a rather cruel one, but a deep lesson in that as well. And so those are some of my initial thoughts. But yeah, do you have any thoughts on that or any sort of general reflections in this now third part of the episode? Yeah, I think all of that is good.

So I'll touch on a couple of things. One thing I think is like so interesting. And maybe we need to do a full proper historical episode on the Russian Revolution. But is the similarities and differences with the Russian Revolution here, right? So what is fascinating is dual power emerges in both of them. So here it is between the workers' councils and kind of between the council people's deputies. And in Russia, dual power emerges between the provisional government and the Soviets and the Petrograd Soviet being really the main one, these two competing sources of power. And in both cases, the left, you know, comes together under the same slogans. The way it was articulated in Russia is all power to the Soviets. right, which is eventually the position the USPD and the KPD, yeah, Congress Party of Germany will adopt, right? They end up on that same slogan. So there's a very similar conditions. And then you have to wonder what goes differently, right? And I think there are some lessons to be learned

there. So on the one hand, I think there's a level of decisiveness that the Bolsheviks had that is very different than the KPD in the story, right? When the Bolsheviks decided to act, acted, and they really saw it through and were able to overthrow the provisional government. But in the case of the German revolution, we really find the KPD floundering, right, at the time that the revolution occurs. That's because they weren't the ones who kicked it off to a large degree. It happened somewhat organically, and because they didn't have the same level of party discipline. Karl Leibnick, breaking with the party on the question of the revolution, really had this kind of, I would say, detrimental effect here.

And in fact, the distance between the party and the factions that were more involved in the revolution, such as the revolutionary shop stewards, really gets at a difference too, which is that I do think you get the sense that although the KPD is made up of these people who individually had mass support, again, the popularity of Karl and Rosa is pretty undisputable. The party itself didn't have these ties to the masses in the same way that the Bolsheviks did. So there's these interesting differences there that I think are important. to think about and show to an extent why the question of having the support of the masses isn't just like some abstract idea. It's not just something about like being, you know, more democratic or socialism from the bottom up. It's also an instance of when things move, if you're not ready and if you're not united with the masses, it might be your head, right? Like that is the reality of the story that we see. There is safety in having the connections and support of the masses when the decisive

moment comes. So I think there's really something to learn there. And then, yeah, I think unquestionably, you hint at this, or not hinted at this. I mean, you read the Ludendorf quote. It's very direct. The not crushing of the old state institutions really ends up being a disaster here. And I think, you know, we can really see the necessity of proletarian dictatorship in this way, right? That is a term. When we talk about proletarian dictatorship and the dictatorship of the proletariat, people don't like that term. Right. It's scary words. But I'll tell you what, the alternative is a lot scarier, right?

The alternative of leaving the reactionaries in power, leaving them armed and setting them up to retaliate against the socialists, and my God, they did not stop with the socialists. They went on to do the Holocaust, right? The thing that was unleashed by that decision really gets at the fact that if you are going to do revolution, if it is a thing that you are going to do, you have to win it decisively, and you have to not leave those reactionary powers intact, the old state institutions have to be smashed rather than left in place. And that is, I think, one of the clearest lessons from this. And so, yes, I will fully concede the idea of proletarian dictatorship sounds harsh. It sounds scary.

But I think when you look to this revolution, you see what the alternative is. You see how much more horrific that is. I think you're right, Brett. If that smashing had occurred, we probably wouldn't have had the Nazis, right? Like, imagine how different the world would look today. So that is kind of the other really big lesson that I take out of this, is the necessity of proletarian dictatorship, the necessity of decisiveness, of unity, of all of these things, I think, is really important and hard to wrestle with. And then I think I will say at the end of the day, one of the things that I take from

this history, and, you know, again, this is maybe more on a personal level than a political one, is there's a profound story of bravery here at the same time. Right. One of the things that's really fascinating about many revolutions, I don't think it's unique to the German Revolution, is that revolutions often catch the revolutionaries off guard, right? The February Revolution broke out, well, Lenin was in Switzerland, right? It's not like he was in Russia ready for it. In fact, a whole part of this story that we didn't talk about is the Germans getting Lenin to Russia during this time period. You know, there's, it always catches people off guard. That is just a reality of how revolutions work. And so there is this question

of can you step up when that happens. Are you ready to act? And again, we saw that fail here in this very tragic way. But one of the things that I think is, you know, so profound about Rosa in this story and so difficult to wrestle with is that, again, Rosa was opposed to declaring the revolution during the final uprising. She did think it was premature. She believed the KPD decision was correct. But when the revolution had already started and when the state had begun to crack down, when the fry core had taken to the street, that's when Rosa flipped sides, right? She saw what the situation was. She saw that now this had turned to open fighting, and instead of running away from that, she said, okay, I still kind of think we're going to lose this, right? I still think

we don't have it, but it is much better for us to die fighting it than to back down at this moment. And you see that reflected to the very last moment of her not fleeing Berlin when she could have, right? This is someone who, again, despite frustration with everything around her, despite disagreeing with the direction that things had moved in, still understood the necessity of fighting and just in this profound way, the necessity of dying on your feet, right? Like, going down in that way. And there is an incredible story of bravery here. There's an incredible story of these people who took what came to them, did their best with it, and didn't run, and face down reaction in its most kind of intense levels. And so I think that really sticks with me, too. There's an

inspiration there. And Rosa's death, while tragic, also signals the level of commitment she had, such that she's this figure where, my God, you can't find a faction within Marxism that doesn't like her, right? That is how universal she is. Yeah, and it's very, there, there is something beautiful there, but I do think we should take inspiration from, aside from learning, from the negative lessons and failures that were involved. Absolutely. She goes in the pantheon of

the socialist tradition. And if and when the socialist and communist movements ever do win, and I think if we stay around as a species long enough, it will happen. Could happen tomorrow, could happen in a century, could happen in five. But she will go down in history as being on the right side of history. And even if we lose,

ultimately, she'll go down as it being on the right side of history because she represented the best of the human spirit and that's why she and i've told i've said this over many many years on rev left and red menace she is up there with the malcolm x's the che Guevara's all of whom knew they were going to die and they could have fled and how many of us knowing that death is coming to our doorstep would have the courage and the bravery and the sincerity of our convictions to stand there stay in the pocket look death in the eye and face it with courage you know chase said shoot coward you're only going to kill a man. Malcolm X was haunted in his final days, but still putting in the work,

knowing he had kids and shit, he knew that he was going to die, and he knew that they were coming for his head, and Rosa did the same thing. And even if she technically disagreed with the decision, and ultimately, perhaps was vindicated. You know, that uprising, I mean, because it was crushed, was probably in retrospect, premature, and not the right time. And, you know, but she stood by her party. She didn't say, I was right, you were wrong. She didn't flee. and she paid with her fucking life. And that is the biggest price anybody can pay. And what does that mean?

That means putting other people, putting values and principles, putting anything and everything, something bigger than yourself, living and dying for something other than merely yourself. And to be in that mindset where you are literally willing to lay down your own motherfucking life, to have the lights go out for something bigger than yourself, that's anathema to the hyper.

individualist neo-liberal subject of today that there is nothing bigger than the self there is nothing bigger than satisfying the self desires consumption to to satisfy the desires of the self me me me me and and these people stand out as sort of pointing a loving but accusing finger at everybody like what are you willing to put on the line what do you really believe in and and so you know her martyrdom cannot be overstated but you know I think you're absolutely right about the core lessons being the dictatorship of the proletariat, the decisiveness, and welcoming the hatred of your fucking enemies. Because even in this critical moment, SPD, Ebert, all these centrists and, you know,

even right-wingers are framing this battle against the communists, against the workers, as a battle between democracy and dictatorship. You know, they're framing Rosa and Carl in the working class. as, you know, future Stalin's or dictators or robespiers that must be defeated in the name of democracy. And look what happens to their so-called democracy. It gets turned into the most brutal, fascist regime in human history. And I think those lessons just present themselves to us. What the alternative history would have been like, right? Like, just imagine the implications of that domino tilting a different direction.

Communist win. They repress the right. They eradicate the material basis for the emergence of Nazism. And then what happens? There's no World War II. There's no Holocaust. What does that say for the Cold War for the rest of the century? Does socialism spread?

I mean, the implications are certainly ambiguous. We'll never know. But we know for a fact they would have been profound. Whatever way history would have taken? the biggest event of the 20th century would have not happened and that would have that would have had repercussions that we would be we would Allison and I as we speak would be sitting in a totally different world probably a totally different fucking country who knows

but you know that that is just that's just a terrain of endless speculation but the last point I would make before I bring up one issue is you mentioned Lenin and Lenin right before the revolution pops off was writing letters pretty much resigning himself to the idea that the revolution wouldn't happen in his lifetime and all of us say the Lenin quote you know there are there are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen but Lenin said that because he fucking lived it where he was like kind of he was convinced that he was going to die before the revolution happened and then all the sudden shit starts popping off he rushes back right

of just a crazy crazy set of events that you can't predict even the most in tune tapped in motherfucker on the planet wasn't predicting that it was going to pop off when it did so that's a lesson to us all but the last thing i was going to say and i'll toss this back over to you and it's kind it's kind of about your point about the differences between the german and the russian revolution you made really really good strong points about how those two revolutions win differently we could sit here all day and just talk about the differences between germany and russia at those times but one of them seemed to be Russia was still in the midst of World War I and Germany had ended. So Germany had been defeated and there's a little bit of a different context for people

who are living on the other side of a war than the people living in the middle of a war. And what happens with the revolution and who becomes powerful dictates how this war actually ends as opposed to this war has already ended where we've lost i mean germany and world war one lost over two million men 19 to 20 million injuries wounds casualties right in the sense they didn't die but they were wounded this is a huge impact on a society and in the russian context you can kind of think about it in the trotsky versus stalin debates where trotsky is kind of this fervent permanent revolution guy who's arguing of after world war one in the fucking civil war let's do more war and the people of Russia, you know, being like, maybe we can, maybe we could do socialism

in one country. Chill the fuck out, Trotsky. Right. There's, there's kind of maybe something there. And people that, you know, are not communist will argue that the SPD, the moderates, they actually had more support amongst the populace more broadly. And, and that was in parts of reflection of the fact that Germany had come out of the war. And they didn't want, you know, they weren't necessarily. as susceptible to radicalization, etc. So what do you make of this difference between Russia and the Soviets operating in the context of an ongoing war and then the German revolutionaries trying to, you know, push the revolution in their direction after a war had already ended?

Yeah, I think that's a really astute observation, right? So basically I think both revolutions, the German and Russian revolutions, you can conceptualize as two-part revolutions, right? an initial revolution, which establishes a situation of dual power, and then a second revolution, which tries, and, you know, different outcomes, to transition from dual power to power in the hands of the workers, right? And in particular, the workers' councils. So, yeah, you make an interesting point. In the case of the German revolution, the end of the war is the beginning of that first stage of the revolution, right? But in the case of

the Russian revolution, the end of Russia's participation in the war is the ending of the second stage, right? That is what the Bolsheviks do after they've ceased power. And I think that's a very astute observation because, yes, one of the things that the Bolsheviks really lean into, and again, this is when we get into the differences, the Bolsheviks were the defeatist faction, right? So revolutionary defeatism, this notion that Lenin put forward, which is in a time of imperialist war, you need to oppose the imperialist war, transform it into civil war, as how he puts it, and, you know, fight for international. And this is really what defined the Bolsheviks against every other socialist party within

Russia and within the provisional government. And so at the time that the Bolsheviks are then fighting back against that situation of dual power, there is only growing discontent with the war the entire time. The casualty rates get significantly higher. There is, you know, significant disruptions to labor happening from conscription that is occurring. And so that certainly helps the Bolsheviks, and then here's the key difference. By the time the Bolsheviks signed a treaty to end the war, which also imposes terrible costs on Russia, significant territorial costs, that is after the second part of the revolution, right? At that point, they have already solidified unitary power and moved beyond the dual power situation, whereas in Germany, it is

the opposite, the, you know, particularly egregious peace terms happen before dual power has passed away and the transition has occurred. So during the period of dual power, you already have resentment growing about the loss of the war. Maybe some of these soldiers who hated the war while they were in it, but now are starting to get mad

about it ending for what they see as no reason at all, right? And so I do think that ends up playing a really big part in it. It is important to note that in both cases, both of these revolutions, the military ends up being incredibly important. I pointed out that the sailors end up being

particularly revolutionary in both the Russia, and the German Revolution. So both of them have those similarities that are certainly at play. But I think you're right. The Bolsheviks are aided by the fact that they are able to seize power from the provisional government and overthrow it precisely at a time that the war is still ongoing and is extremely unpopular. And that makes them a distinguishing faction. The reason that the USPD had grown in popularity compared to the SPD was because people were frustrated about the war. But when the war ends, what did they have that the war?

the Social Democratic Party doesn't have more instability potentially, right? That is certainly how the SPD framed it. And that makes it a lot harder to maintain that kind of mass support, I think. Yeah, yeah, really, really insightful. There is that uncomfortable aspect for those of us sitting in the United States in 2024, you know, looking at the mass support that all these revolutions had, the deep connections that these parties had with the working classes. And perhaps most uncomfortably, the aspect of the military in all these instances, I mean, you talk about China or you talk about Russia, you talk about the German revolution.

You talk about like Hugo Chavez and Venezuela coming from a faction of the military that was against and probably wouldn't have been able to come to power if he didn't have those connections and that experience. And then today we look at our situation and there is, you know, living in the belly of the imperial beast. No connection whatsoever. I mean, we struggle to have connection with the working class, mass support of any sort. But there's an outright disregard of the very idea that we should make any overtures whatsoever to anybody that has been in the military or is in the military currently, right? And, you know, that's always kind of an interesting thing that is a sort of asynchronous with history. And I don't exactly know what to make of it. I mean, these militaries were also brutal.

They were, you know, the German Empire under Tsar Nicholas in Russia. I mean, they're imperialist powers 100% as well. But still, they had this buy-in from not only workers, but from at least certain segments of the military. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on how to wrestle with that. It's a big question mark for me, but. Yeah, so I think it is complicated, right? because you just definitely cannot deny the importance of the military within all of these

revolutions. So the thing that I always point to, that I think is very different about our current situation, but does it may not always be different, is that we have like an entirely volunteer professional army, right? And that is very different than the military in these cases, where the mobilization was so massive that conscription did become necessary and conscription kicked off very early on. And so that led to soldiers who were in a slight different positions than U.S. soldiers, right? Because they were often people who did not want to be there at all, were quite angry about being there, were badly trained and felt like they were being thrown into battles without the provisions or training that they needed to have a chance at succeeding. And I think

that really changes the relationship that those soldiers have then to the government, right? It actually starts off very adversarial from the very beginning of the time that they end up being conscripted. And so I think that's one of the reasons that we see a big difference between these situations in the United States. Now, if conscription ever came back to the United States, I think that's an opportunity, right? I think that very much is the case. And I think the left saw that during Vietnam, right? Like, that is an important thing that emerged during the Vietnam war. That was a site where the left really did actually start to make connections. So I don't think it's outside of the possibility in the U.S., but I do think it's hard to draw the comparison

you know, basically with the army as it has existed since Vietnam to the armies that existed in these contexts. So that's one reason that I think there's a very large gap there that, you know, there's a point of difference there. And I'm definitely on the side of, I don't think trying to organize within the military and peace times makes a ton of sense, honestly. I think that the United States, you know, has a good job of shutting that kind of stuff down within the military generally. But when moments of conscription happen, I think it's essentially necessary. Like, I really do think conscription opens a new contradiction, essentially, between the, at least the infantry and, you know, the government. So that's more or less how I view that. And I think that is

the difference. But I think, you know, for anyone who would dogmatically say there's no context under which the organization of soldiers in the United States should occur is missing those differences as well, right? They're also not paying attention to what the actual divergences are. and are engaging in a form of dogmatism that I think would be a massive error. Yeah, that's really insightful. And I completely agree with that point. And, you know, sitting on the precipice of the possibility of World War III as we are right now, talking about, you know, decades happening within weeks, who knows where all of this, you know,

these conflicts are ultimately going to go. I do have this sort of vague amorphous sense that every century in human history is marked by at least one horrific event. And in the era of globalization, those horrific events are global conflagrations of one sort or another, and specifically world wars. And, you know, it's not beyond the realm of feasibility that World War III happens in our lifetime. And even if it doesn't happen now, things can happen in the next several years. And I think there's a decaying imperial order. There is a widespread domestic, you know, turmoil in many countries. especially across the west, but in countries more general.

So there's this, both this dual domestic and international sort of coming to a head of something, like something has to give. We see the ramping up of imperial violence and aggression by a sort of slowly but surely kind of decaying American empire, not decaying in money and power and weaponry, but in reputation, and certainly in unipolar hegemony. and these sort of cracks and crevices often throughout history are the preludes to war where there is a shakeup in the international order things aren't definite and defined and accepted and in those more moments of transition is when these sorts of conflicts erupt and then

you have this situation in that broader context where you know more and more Americans aren't fit for military service they're not interested in fighting for geopolitical hegemony and foreign lands there's a lot of criticism um military is having a very hard time recruiting and so you can imagine a scenario where things do escalate um things spiral into a regional or multi regional or straight up global war i think there's already a regional war happening in west asia um and then because there is a lack of volunteers especially in a situation where america is broadly seen by the youth of america to be on the wrong side or to be fighting for something that doesn't directly impact us, certainly not defensive in any way, where people are not voluntary, not signing

up in the numbers needed. And there is a draft that is imposed. But in all of these instances in which those things did lead to a competent and effective communist movement, success or failure, there was often years and sometimes decades of prefigrative organizations leading up to that. So it's not the case that these wars just popped off. And then a bunch of ideological communists scattered around to get together organizations. No, they had organizations firmly built, rooted in the masses that were then able to take advantage of that widespread discontent in the military and in the populations more broadly. So I think that tells us a few things. One, we need to higher levels of organization no matter what the fuck happens. We need

to build motherfucking organization at the highest levels we possibly fucking can. but also that these revolutionary moments are opened, these opportunities are opened up by disaster, by catastrophe. Right. China, the Soviet Union, Cuba, an instance after instance after instance, it is not we're living in times of relative peace and then a party organizes really strongly and then wages revolution, right? It's there is, there is a prevailing order that is systematically delegitimized by almost always some horrendous. horrific catastrophe or disaster and in that vacuum there are contending powers and whoever is the most fucking organized and has the most support can take advantage of those opportunities and come to power right and so i don't we're not anywhere near that and hope to god world war three

doesn't pop off tomorrow because if if a crisis of leadership and a vacuum of power opens up in the u.s i think at this moment in time it's decisively breaking to the right and not the left yes the center is falling out. But the rights is much more entrenched in the power structures already. And this is just an ideologically sort of right leaning society that built on slavery

and genocide and maintained by global imperialism that is not easily going to break left. And time and time again, we see it break right in moments of crisis or even smaller moments of transition. And I think we see that with the Trump era, right? The crisis of neoliberalism, not World War III, not

anything like the Germans or the Russian faced in these world wars, but it's still symbolizing some transition out of a previous orthodoxy and given the left's inability to organize at a high enough level to compete, when the center drops out, it just almost automatically shifts to the right, right? Unfortunately, yes. So those are just some thoughts that I have about revolution. And those of us that are interested in revolution have a lot of thinking to do, but more than that, a lot of mother fucking work to do.

Yeah, and I think that comes back to, again, what I want to emphasize here is, like, when revolutions happen, they are ugly things, right? There is so much romanticization of revolutions that occur. And I understand that. I think there is something almost like inherently romantic to the idea of them. But at the same time, like, this is a story about a revolution that came that hit a situation where the left was not prepared and where things went quite disastrously as a result of that. And I think, you know, we really should take to heart. that that is part of the reason that we need to organize, right? If the crisis comes and the reaction comes and we're not organized, they're not going to look at us and be like, oh, well, you all are communist, but you're not very organized. We'll just ignore you. No, they'll kill us, right? That is precisely what they will do. And so revolution is this thing that is life or death, in a sense, right? By the time that you get there, it is very black and white in that particular way. And I think this really gets at that. And I think you're right, Brett, like the United States, we're not there.

We just really aren't. We don't have the mass popular support. We don't have the broader organizational aspects that exist at all. There are people who've been trying to build those things. You know, it's not like that is not happening. But I do think as we go into, you know, the part of the 21st century that is feeling more and more unstable, more and more crisis-ridden, it really does underscore how important it is for us to get our shit together and to get it in order. Because you're right.

Who knows if World War III is going to be. coming, but I do know that within the last, like, 72 hours the war in Syria has restarted. There appears to have been an attempted coup within South Korea. There has been the falling apart of the ceasefire in Lebanon. Like, things are not in a stable state right now whatsoever, and probably will not stay, you know, even this level of stability moving forward. And we ought to take that seriously, and that ought to be a part of what motivates us. I think, believe that really strongly. because when the crisis comes, you do just have to be ready for it. Yeah, absolutely.

You know, one interesting little factoid I picked up on my research of the German Revolution was that, you know, Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated, you know, that Second Reich was overthrown in the German Revolution. Now, for those that are interested, and I was interested in this as well, we know the Third Reich is the Nazis, the Second Reich is the German Empire. What's the First Reich? Well, that's the Holy Roman Empire, right? And so that goes away in the beginning of the 19th century, and then Germany at that point is just a bunch of little territories, you know, dozens to hundreds of little municipalities and duchies and whatnot.

And in 1871, Germany is reunified as an actual nation state under the banner of the German Empire. So that's the chronology of that there. But Wilhelm abdicates in 1918 the Nazis come to power a little over a decade or two later. And Wilhelm, interestingly, thought that with the rise of the Nazis and the rise of Hitler to power, that Hitler might actually restore him or one of his sons to the monarchy and kind of re-entrench the German Empire as it once was, and him or his progeny would take back over. But clearly Hitler had no such intentions. His fascism was something fundamentally different from aristocratic monarchism, which figures like Julius Evela detested for its. modernism, right? This idea that you would, the vulgarity of having

a mass movement, etc. So I just thought that was very interesting that Wilhelm kind of thought that maybe Hitler and the Nazis will put me back on the throne. And Hitler had zero interest in that, even though he was very distraught when, you know,

the Kaiser abdicated. So that's just an interesting little, interesting little factoid. Yeah, and it gets that something interesting too about the Nazis, right? Which is to the extent to which fascism as they embalt. body it isn't just about a return to a pre-capitalist order, right? It is quite the opposite. It's about a defense of the capitalist order, such that, no, Hitler would not return to the Second Reich, which, you know, again, had capitalist development under it, but also that

development was hindered by the old aristocratic aspects of the state and of society, right? And fascism, although it appeals to aristocracy, it appeals to those facets, ultimately in its purpose is to continue to preserve capitalism. And so, it ended up being a whole other kind of reaction that no, would not do that, that would have a mass movement alongside of its reaction in this really fascinating way. One of these days, we'll have to do one of the many books on like theories of fascism in order to really deep dive it. But yeah, I think you really see that quite clearly there.

I think it'd be, it'd even be interesting for you and I to maybe continue this historical trajectory through Weimar and to the rise of the Nazis at some point. But there's so many texts and periods of history that you and I can. do it's hard to favor any single one but um i guess as some final thoughts and i would let you also you know offer your final thoughts or any questions you may have two questions that might be worth reflecting on is um what are we to make of the classic orthodoxy of like this sort of idea coming out of marks and angles that there are certain stages to historical development that you have to pass through liberal capitalism a bourgeois revolution first and then once that's entrenched

you build up the productive forces and relations of production such that a socialist break can happen. But if it was going to happen anywhere, that was going to happen in Germany. And it's not certainly not the only reason that it failed. There are many, many, many more variables. But the communist and Marxist revolutions that have succeeded have happened in, you know, not highly industrialized. It's happened in China and Russia, you know, and Cuba and places like that where that don't fit neatly into that that original orthodox Marxist perspective. So there's that question you can take that wherever you want. And the other question that we kind of talked about in texts is, you know, why is this revolution so much less studied than the others?

I mean, you know, we even, as Marxists, we know more about the American Revolution than we do the German Revolution. There was a communist force, you know, fighting in that revolution. So, you know, my initial thoughts was, I'll just read the text. I sent to you, which is it lacks that sort of legacy in part because the left and right kind of lost and the center, if you will, the center is always changing, of course, but you know, in coming out of the German Empire, the center left even won. So the revolution wasn't super dramatic in the way that later the Nazi capture or, you know, the left wing winning in the French revolutions or the Russian revolutions were. The people who made up, as I was

saying earlier the imperial bureaucracy and aspects of the military and of course the economy stayed in their positions for the most part so it wasn't as disruptive as some others and the nazi takeover i think a few years later really casts a shadow backwards over the entire affair making it feel temporary and liminal in a way that the russian chinese cuban French, American, et cetera, revolutions weren't. Haitian is also another revolution to bring up in these conversations as well. So there's probably a lot more to that, but those are just some initial thoughts on why this revolution isn't as prioritized, emphasized, studied, and lauded as much as other revolutions. Even ones where, like the American Revolution, for instance, where it didn't go our way, or even in the French Revolution, where you have this reaction and then the rise of Napoleon as emperor.

and even in the Soviet Union where eventually it collapsed in the late 80s, early 90s. So those are just some initial thoughts. But yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts on either of those. Yeah, I'll just take them in the same order that you presented them, I think. So on the first one, I think, yeah, this revolution, the result of it, in relation to the Russian Revolution in particular, did challenge a certain orthodoxy, right? Which was the belief that the revolution would first break out, the revolution here not as a specific national revolution, but the idea of the social revolution would first break out in the most advanced capitalist states, right? So Marx really thought, you know, England would be the place

for that. And at the time of this revolution, the consensus was very largely that Germany was likely the place where the revolution would break out. Again, and as you said much earlier in this episode, to the extent that the Bolsheviks after their revolution are like, shit, I guess we just got to wait for the Germans, right? Like, we have to hold out until they do it as well. Everyone thought that was coming. And you're correct that in the wake of this, in the wake of the Russian Revolution and later the Chinese Revolution, we really see that that idea did not hold true. And that in fact, the revolutions that occurred throughout the 20th century that were socialist and Marxist and orientation were revolutions that broke out in sort of the periphery

of imperial relations. I think one part of that is something that I really do think, like, Leninism, in whatever sense you want to understand that word, has accounted for. I think this is what Lennon wrestles with in many ways, and imperialism in the highest stage of capitalism, is the fact that while we were all focused on the internal contradictions within a given capitalist society, which matter and are generative, there were also these broader colonial and imperial contradictions, right? And that it very much turned out in the 20th century that those are the contradictions

that very easily spilled over into these revolutions. And so Lennon does really say we need to understand capitalism in the 20th century as imperialism. That is the stage that it is in. And in that stage, there are these contradictions on the international scale, which become the productive sites of revolutionary action. So I think, you know, I think that's been theoretically accounted for in that particular regard. I think there are still these open questions then about stages of development, right? Because the difficulty that we end up having is that these revolutions occur in places that hadn't really instituted industrial capitalism at any level of scale, right? And we see, you know, the Chinese revolution and the Russian

revolution struggle with that via the great leap forward via the NDP, right? There are all of these attempts that these states have to deal with that. And I actually think this is a question that is still not answered, actually, right? I think the vast majority of the revolutions that we see is successful really struggled with what development looks like when you have a revolution in a society that is not fully capitalist yet, right? And yeah, I think that's an open question. I think it's a point where there's a lot of theoretical development that has been done and still needs to be studied further because I think revolutions will continue to

happen in the periphery. I think that continues to be the most productive site for them, and that is one thing that, you know, our tradition struggles with in many ways. And again, you can look at the concrete failures of some of those policies where they were undertaken. But, yeah, I mean, by and large, I think the failure of the German revolution alongside the success of those other revolutions vindicates the synthesis that Lenin later presents, right? And is the reason from my perspective that Marxism

Leninism becomes the form of Marxism for the 20th century, right? And we can debate later whether or not another thing comes after that. But at least for a certain time period, it is the synthesis that takes this reality into account and works with it and does something with it. So that's kind of how I see that there. And then on that last question, Which, yeah, was really the question that I've kind of been wrestling with, which is why is there so little legacy to this revolution within the broader left, right? You know, we're talking about it here. People know about it. It's not an unheard of revolution. I don't think it's like a lost history, but it's certainly not studied as big as the other revolutions. And like on a certain level, part of that is probably it's more enjoyable to read about our successes than our failures, perhaps, right? I think that just is, you know, an aspect of it.

When I read about the Russian Revolution, that is a story that ends in victory for our side, right? And this is one that ends in a really tragic and difficult to accept defeat. So I think that is one part of it. And you are right. Like, when we think about Germany, the Weimar Republic and its founding is actually really a footnote for why World War II happens, right? The thing we focus on is that event. And all of that gets treated as just the necessary background knowledge. So it gets dwarfed by this larger thing that happens.

And I think that's a part of it as well. So those are kind of, I think, the more obvious reasons. And then, you know, the other thing is, yeah, it's a hard revolution to assess. It's not straightforward. As Marxists, we look at revolutions and we will ask ourselves, like, is that a progressive revolution or not a progressive revolution? And in this one, well, a bit of both, right? Like, both of those realities are at play there. On the one hand, yes, the progressive development of the Weimar Republic over the right is certainly a progressive.

have developed it. But on the other hand, the concentration of military power and the paramilitaries that will become reaction, certainly a counter-revolution, right? And there's an ambiguity that is just hard to tease out. So I think people move away from it in a lot of ways. And so those are all kind of things that play there. And I think it's something we need to correct for. Like, I would encourage you, if you're listening to this, go study beyond this, because we are doing a very surface-level dive into this history, right? There's a lot more depth here. But there are lessons to be learned and our failures, again, are as not, you know, equally if not more important than our successes for learning. So I do think this is a thing that has to be studied. It's

something that you have to talk about. Again, I'm very thankful for the three-part YouTube video that we shouted out for someone taking a first shot at in like a popular media format trying to do this. An incredible contribution. Hopefully we'll see more like this. And this can kind of be an additional contribution to an attempt to make this history accessible for people. absolutely yeah we did our best and we hope people find this worthwhile and yeah that series that three-part series the german revolution by jonas siika c c k philosophy we'll link to it in the show notes so you can go find it every episode is just a little over an hour so yeah three three and a half hour deep dive into all the events with the visual images which can often be helpful with people

trying to digest and metabolize the history here lots of fascinating you know um video of just thousands and thousands of people waving red flags and downtown Berlin and stuff so hats off to that comrade and we'll link to that in the show notes and then you mentioned lenin's imperialism the highest age of capitalism alison and i are have been invited on to our our friend's show upstream which many of you are probably familiar with later this month um to to do an episode on that i think it was was it was it wasn't the first episode we ever did together was it alison second it maybe second episode yeah it's like years and years ago one of our first

yeah um so to be able to revisit it um with with the comrades over at upstream is going to be very very fun and i'm going to give the whole the whole book a total rereading um you know to kind of refresh my memory in its totality um and hopefully that'll be a really fun conversation people can look

forward to um but i just have to say as well alison i couldn't ask for a better you know partner in crime as it were um for these sort of shows but for everything we do on Red Menace and Rev Left. It's one of the best things that ever happened to me that you and I happen to meet and become friends. And an episode like this just has me constantly sitting back with a grin on my face just so happy that I could work with somebody of your intellectual and moral caliber. So I just wanted to make that statement as well. Yeah, thank you. I mean,

I love this show. I'm glad for what we get to do. It truly is like my time to get to deep dive on stuff now that I'm not a graduate student in Dior. Right. Like this is the chance to do that. So I I'm so appreciative of it. And, you know, I also could not ask for a better co-host. Literally every time we do something, it is bizarre how much our thoughts of what we need to do already overlap before we start planning it. So I know. It really works out perfect.

We do not coordinate. Like, we come to, we go and study separately and then we come together and it's like, oh, everything matches up. And not even politics. We talk about like spirituality and shit. We have the exact same thoughts. So there's definitely a deeper spiritual, mystical connection. But, yeah, so always a pleasure and an honor to work with you.

I hope people find this useful. We'll be back very soon for another episode, whatever we decide to cover. Current events are escalating very quickly, so maybe we'll shift in that direction. But thank you to everybody who supports Reve-Left and Red Menace. We'll keep doing our absolute best to provide people useful and worthwhile

and educational content that deepens their political education and can be used in organizing circles or just individually to raise your level of historical and social consciousness. So thank you to everybody that supports the show. And, you know, we're in December, so I hope everybody out there has happy holidays, safe holidays with their family. Our hearts are still firmly in Palestine and with the people in West Asia struggling for self-determination, freedom, and democracy against imperialism and colonialism. And that will never stop.

So, you know, huge red salute to everybody fighting there. Our hearts are constantly breaking, continuing to see the images of starvation and deprivation and immiseration imposed on wholly innocent people. It is a world historical crime that I think the U.S. and Israel and their allies will ultimately pay for, and that day can't come soon enough. But in the meantime, stay safe. Love and solidarity. We'll talk to you soon.