The Majority Socialists' three delegates conferred again with Dittmann, Vogtherr and Ledebour, the Independents' representatives. They were unable to come to an agreement, and the Independents withdrew to confer with their party's executive committee. This committee debated the question for some hours with the Workmen's and Soldiers' Council. [35] Liebknecht, still nominally an Independent, for the Spartacus Bund had not yet been formally organized as a separate party; Ledebour, Dittmann, and Barth, who was chairman of the council, took a leading part in the debate that ensued. It was finally decided to make the Independents' participation in the government conditional upon the granting of certain demands. First of all, the new government must be only a provisorium for the conclusion of the armistice, and its existence was to be limited to three days. Before the expiration of that term the Soviet was to decide what course should then be taken. The republic must be a socialistic republic, [36] and all legislative, executive and judicial power must rest in the hands of the Workmen's and Soldiers' Councils, who were to be elected by "the laboring population under the exclusion of all bourgeois elements." [37]
[ [35] That the radical wing of the German Socialists conferred in a party matter with this council, which was supposed to represent Socialists of both parties, is significant. As a matter of fact, the real power in the council was from the beginning in the hands of the Independent and Spartacan members, and their ascendancy grew steadily.
[ [36] Here, as the demands show, "socialistic" in the most rigid and "class-conscious" partisan sense.
[ [37] The italics are those of the Independents themselves, as used in publishing their demands in their party organ.
These demands were communicated to the Majority Socialist delegates, who, after a conference with their party's executive committee, rejected them. They especially opposed the exclusion of all bourgeois statesmen from the government, declaring that this would make the provisioning of the people impossible. They demanded coöperation of the two parties until the convening of a constituent assembly, and rejected the three-day limitation upon the existence of the government to be formed. Further negotiations between the two sets of delegates were agreed on for Sunday morning.
The German Socialists have always had a keen appreciation of the influence of the press. No other country has such an extensive, well-edited and influential array of Socialist newspapers and periodicals as Germany, and in no other country are the Socialists so carefully disciplined into taking their political views from their party organs. As the parent party, the Majority Socialists already had their press. The Independents had no organ of any importance in Berlin, and Liebknecht's Spartacans had none at all. This, for persons who, if not in abstract theory, nevertheless in actual practice refuse to admit that the bourgeoisie has any rights whatever, was a matter easily remedied. Liebknecht, at the head of a group of armed soldiers, went in the evening to the plant of the Conservative Lokal-Anzeiger, turned out the whole staff and took possession. The paper appeared Sunday morning as Die rote Fahne (The Red Flag). Independent Socialists and members of the Workmen's and Soldiers' Council at the same time took violent possession of the venerable Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, which they published Sunday morning as Die Internationale.
The Wolff Bureau had already been occupied by members of the Workmen's and Soldiers' Council. It was compelled to send out any articles coming from that council, and its other news dispatches were subjected to a censorship quite as rigid and tendencieuse and even less intelligent than that prevailing under the old régime. The committee put in charge of the Wolff Bureau was nominally composed of an equal number of Majority and Independent Socialists, but the latter, by dint of their rabid energy and resolution, were able for a long time to put their imprint on all news issuing from the bureau.
Die rote Fahne of Sunday morning published on the first page a leading article which undoubtedly was written by Liebknecht himself. It began:
"Proudly the red flag floats over the imperial capital. Berlin has tardily followed the glorious example of the Kiel sailors, the Hamburg shipyard laborers and the soldiers and workingmen of various other states."
The article glorified the revolution and declared that it must sweep away "the remains and ruins of feudalism." There must be not merely a republic, but a socialistic republic, and its flag must not be "the black, red and gold flag of the bourgeois Republic of 1848, but the red flag of the international socialistic proletariat, the red flag of the Commune of 1871 and of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1912. **** The revolutionary, triumphant proletariat must erect a new order out of the ruins of the World War. **** The first tasks in this direction are speedy peace, genuine proletarian domination, reshaping of economic life from the pseudo-socialism of the war to the real socialism of peace."