In the past two months the Trump administration has rampaged through the U.S. government, firing tens of thousands, destroying basic systems that have functioned for decades, ignoring court orders, attacking free speech and any type of dissent, eliminating entire departments and agencies, and removing any opposition to him, Musk, and their minions.
In the face of these attacks on things that millions of working people rely upon, many ask what can be done to stop them. We see scattered protests, many passionate but mostly small. Some still look to the Democrats, hoping that they will somehow “do the right thing,” despite all the evidence. Some are looking to the courts. Some ask what we ourselves can do.
There is only one force that is capable of both challenging and stopping the reactionary Trump bulldozer. It’s not the courts, it’s not Congress, nor will it be the Democrats. The force is the working class. We have the power to intervene in society in ways that can stop powerful people and forces.
Today, March 14, is the anniversary of one event that demonstrated the power of the working class to stop in its tracks an authoritarian dictatorship. Today we are seeing the Trump administration rapidly head in a more authoritarian and dictatorial direction. For anyone wondering what it will take to stop the Trump administration from continuing its attacks on us, we can look to the working-class response to the Kapp Putsch in 1920 Germany for inspiration.
The German Revolution
At the end of World War I the German working class, along with large sections of the defeated military, rose up in revolt. In November 1918, sailors, soldiers and hundreds of thousands of workers formed councils that began to take power into their hands. As the revolutionary movement spread, millions soon flung themselves into political activity for the first time, the Kaiser who had ruled Germany for decades fled, and the German people attempted to carry out a political and social revolution. The vast majority wanted democracy, social progress, and an end to the war. Large segments of that majority wanted revolutionary change. The German Revolution had begun.
But the parties that claimed to speak for the working class were divided. The largest and most influential, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), had long since become reformist, bureaucratic and conservative, and didn’t want a revolution at all. Its leaders worked to bring the revolutionary forces back into the capitalist state that the revolutionaries were trying to overthrow. Others, like the newly formed Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) were more militant and led by rank-and-file workers but did not have revolutionary experience to guide their radical actions. Another, the Spartacus League, was made of committed revolutionaries in the tradition of Karl Marx, Fredrich Engels, and the Russian Revolutionaries Vladmir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. But the Spartacists were numerically small, had not developed deep roots in the working class nationwide, and their most able leaders were murdered in 1919. This left the Spartacists (soon to become the German Communist Party, or KPD) unable to offer effective guidance to the revolutionary movement in its moments of greatest need.
Despite massive protests, marches, communal experiments and one-day strikes in 1918 and 1919, by the end of that year the most militant forces in the Revolution had been temporarily contained. The SPD had allied itself with the most reactionary generals to create the Free Corps, right-wing military units that violently suppressed the councils and strikes throughout Germany. The leaders of the Spartacists were killed by the Free Corps acting on the orders from the SPD leadership. The SPD urged workers and soldiers and sailors to unify in support of a new government, leaving in place all the class divisions and capitalist forces that drove Germany to war and immiserated the working class in the first place. This new government, called the Weimar Republic, would be the first nominally democratic government in German history, and led many to compromise their hopes for real change in order to support this political advancement. The German capitalist class, despite their initial fear of the revolutionary wave, had regained their confidence that they could use the Free Corps, the Weimar government and the SPD to stifle the revolution. In the face of these forces working to undermine the revolution, the workers’ upsurge lost some of its dynamism by the beginning of 1920, and the fate of the revolution was uncertain.
The Kapp Putsch and The Response of the Working Class
After the uprising of November 1918 to late 1919 had been beaten back, the German ruling class (the big capitalists, the big landowners, the Prussian military caste) sensed that the they could not only hang on to power, but that they could also begin to roll back the gains the workers had won. At this point, in March 1920, they decided they were strong enough again to take back power for themselves by dispensing with the Social Democratic Party and their Weimar Republic. To do so, they engineered a military coup. In the early morning hours of March 13, 1920, detachments of German regular army troops marched into Berlin, took control of the government center, installed a conservative Prussian landowner as Chancellor, and declared the Weimar Republic dead. This coup is known as the Kapp Putsch, after Wolfgang Kapp, the Prussian landowner who was put forward as the figurehead Chancellor for what was to be a dictatorship of the generals.
In just more than twenty-four hours, in response to this military coup, the German working class did something remarkable. By the millions, workers rose up against the Kapp Putsch and in defense of the Weimar Republic. Driven to action not only by a few principled trade union leaders who broke with the timid SPD leadership, but also by the expectation that a successful coup would signal repression and the end of democracy in Germany, by midday on the 13th union leaders had called for a general strike in defense of Weimar. The next day, March 14, millions of workers nationwide heeded the call to stay home from work, and marched in protest. In dozens of cities and regions, workers actually armed themselves and formed revolutionary militias! The nation ground to a halt. In little more than a day, one observer wrote of the coup-plotters and the military, “The general strike now grips them in its terrible, silent power!” When Kapp threatened to use force against the workers, one big capitalist wrote pessimistically that it would fail, because “unanimity is so great that it is impossible to distinguish the agitators from the millions of workers who have stopped work.” The sheer scale of the worker rebellion made it impossible for Kapp to govern, or for society to function.
Even more than the scale of the massive work stoppage, the collective actions of the workers also struck fear in the hearts of the ruling class. In central German towns like Gotha, Weimar, Jena and Erfurt, workers armed themselves, formed defense committees, organized factory councils, took over public buildings, and disarmed reactionary “Farmer Guards.” In Gotha, workers defeated the Army in an armed battle. In Erfurt, workers disarmed the “Home Guard,” another reactionary force, and used captured weapons to create a “Workers Army.” In Chemnitz, an eastern industrial center and bastion of working-class militancy, a leadership body made up equally of Social Democrats, Independent Social Democrats, and Communists effectively took over the town and armed three thousand workers. Most spectacularly, in the Ruhr River Valley on the border with France – the industrial heartland of Germany where Krupps, Stinnes and other major German corporations were based – workers responded to army provocations with force. In the town of Hagen, workers fought two brigades of soldiers in a pitched battle, leaving a few dozen dead. After a battle lasting days, Essen, the home of Krupps military production, was taken by workers. Within five days of the start of the Kapp Putsch, workers had formed a Ruhr Red Army numbering fifty thousand. Many newly organized rank-and-file Communist militants who had deep roots in the working class throughout the nation took part in these struggles, uniting with other rank-and-file workers who were members of the both the SPD and USPD.
Millions were thinking politically and standing in defense of the democracy, no matter how weak or bourgeois it was. These millions were workers of different political leanings, but all becoming more militant under the pressure of events. It was an opportunity to turn a defensive action against the counterrevolution into an offensive action that might defeat not only the reactionary putsch, but also to build a force that could carry out a successful revolution against the capitalist system itself.
The Kapp regime lasted until only March 18th (less than five days) before the general strike forced them to admit defeat and flee. But workers in many parts of the country, needing better pay and work conditions, yet also wanting at least some control over their workplaces and larger lives, refused to stop the strike. In the Ruhr Valley, where coal and iron miners and industrial laborers were the majority, detachments of armed workers in the Ruhr Red Army held out for weeks. With a combination of political maneuvering by the SPD and military violence by the Free Corps, the forces of the ruling class managed to slowly bring the uprising to an end. While another upsurge occurred in 1923 before the Revolution died out, the massive general strike that stopped the Kapp dictatorship from holding on to power in 1920 marked a high point in worker mobilization and was perhaps the best opportunity for the working class to actually seize power during the German Revolution. With that defeat, the rise of Nazism followed.
Lessons for Today
Despite the failure of the German Revolution and the tragic consequences of that failure, we can take lessons from the working-class response to the Kapp Putsch. The first is that the mass general strike is a powerful weapon that working people can use against the bosses and their governments. Since workers do the work that keeps the system running, when workers stop work, the system grinds to a halt. The German workers understood that their interests as workers were in conflict with the interests of the ruling class of capitalist bosses. The German working class knew that the Kapp Putsch was an attempt by the ruling class to destroy the democracy that the workers themselves had brought into being only one year earlier. They also knew that by withholding their labor, they possessed the most powerful force in their society, and that using it could defeat even seemingly powerful enemies.
In the U.S. today, the working class is disorganized and politically inexperienced. We are under attack from an authoritarian leader and his powerful supporters, who are destroying gains that working people have won through previous struggles over many decades. We are facing an authoritarian leader and his powerful supporters who are working directly to dismantle what little democracy we ever had.
But despite all those weaknesses, we too have the power to stop them. When we organize, withhold our labor, and decide to struggle for power, the working class can be the most powerful force against reactionary aggression. Among other examples, the German working class of 1920 demonstrated that a general strike, organized and carried out for political purposes, can bring even powerful ruling classes and their generals to their knees. Their actions in 1920 stopped a military government from crushing their gains and creating a dictatorship.
On March 14, we remember the organized, collective action of the German workers in 1920. They are a reminder that we can’t wait for anyone to protect us from our enemies or save us. We can and must do so ourselves. The German working class in March 1920 provides us with a shining example of how we can do so.
Strikers march against the Kapp Putsch, March 1920.
Strikers who joined the Ruhr Red Army distribute arms in March 1920 in anticipation of conflict with Free Korps troops.
