Enthusiasm was heightened in the first week of the revolutionary government's existence by reports that enemy countries were also in the grip of revolution. Tuesday's papers published a report that Foch had been murdered, Poincaré had fled from Paris and the French government had been overthrown. Reports came from Hamburg and Kiel that English sailors had hoisted the red flag and were fraternizing with German ships' crews on the North Sea. The Soldiers' Council at Paderborn reported that the red flag had been hoisted in the French trenches from the Belgian border to Mons, and that French soldiers were fraternizing with the Germans. That these reports found considerable credence throws a certain light on the German psychology of these days. The reaction when they were found to be false further increased the former despondency.
The six-man cabinet decreed on November 15th the dissolution of the Prussian Diet and the abolishment of the House of Lords. Replying to a telegram from President Fehrenbach of the Reichstag, asking whether the government intended to prevent the Reichstag from coming together in the following week, the cabinet telegraphed:
"As a consequence of the political overturn, which has done away with the institution of German Kaiserdom as well as with the Federal Council in its capacity of a lawgiving body, the Reichstag which was elected in 1912 can also not reconvene."
The cabinet—subject to the control theoretically exercisable by the Vollzugsrat—was thus untrammeled by other legislative or administrative institutions. But it was, as we have seen, trammeled from without by the disastrous material conditions in Germany, by the mental and moral shipwreck of its people, by the peculiar German psychology and by the political immaturity of the whole nation—a political immaturity, moreover, which even certain cabinet members shared. From within the cabinet was also seriously handicapped from the start by its "parity" composition, that is to say, the fact that power was equally divided between Majority and Independent Socialists without a deciding casting vote in case of disagreement along party lines. If the Independent Socialist cabinet members and the rank and file of their party had comprehended the real character and completeness of the revolution, as it was comprehended by some of the theorists of the party—notably Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein—and if they had avoided their disastrous fellowship with Joffe and other Bolshevik agents, the subsequent course of events would have been different. But they lacked this comprehension and they had been defiled in handling the pitch of Bolshevism.
All the revolutions of the last century and a quarter had been of bourgeois origin. They had, however, been carried into effect with the aid of the proletariat, since the bourgeoisie, being numerically much weaker than the proletariat, does not command the actual brute force to make revolution. At first the bourgeoisie, as planners of the overthrow, took control of the authority of the state and exercised it for their own ends. The proletariat, which had learned its own strength and resources in the revolutionary contests, used its power to compel a further development of the revolution in a more radical direction and eventually compelled the first holders of authority to give way to a government more responsive to the demands of the lower classes. Thus the events of 1789 in Paris were followed by the victory of the Montane party, the events of September 4, 1870, by those of March 18, 1871, and the Kerensky revolution in Petrograd by the Bolshevik revolution of November, 1917.
The German revolution, however, alone among the great revolutions of the world, was, as has already been pointed out, both in its origins and execution, proletarian and Socialistic. The bourgeoisie had no part in it and no participation in the revolutionary government. Any attempt to develop the revolution further by overthrowing or opposing the first revolutionary government could therefore serve only factional and not class interests. Factional clashes were, of course, inevitable. The members of the Paris Commune split into four distinct factions, Jacobins, Blanquists, Proudhonists and a small group of Marxist Internationalists. But these, bitterly as they attacked each other's methods and views, nevertheless presented at all times a united front against the bourgeoisie, whereas the German Independent Socialists, from whom better things might have been expected, almost from the beginning played into the hands of the Spartacans, from whom nothing good could have been expected, and thus seriously weakened the government and eventually made a violent second phase of the revolution unavoidable.
If it be admitted that Socialist government was the proper form of government for Germany at this time, it is clear that the Independent Socialists had a very real mission. This was well expressed in the first month of the revolution in a pamphlet by Kautsky, in which he wrote:
"The extremes (Majority Socialists and Spartacans) can best be described thus: the one side (Majority) has not yet completely freed itself from bourgeois habits of thought and still has much confidence in the bourgeois world, whose inner strength it overestimates. The other side (Spartacans) totally lacks all comprehension of the bourgeois world and regards it as a collection of scoundrels. It despises the mental and economic accomplishments of the bourgeoisie and believes that the proletarians, without any special knowledge or any kind of training, are able to take over immediately all political and economic functions formerly exercised by the bourgeois authorities.
"Between these two extremes we find those (the Independents) who have studied the bourgeois world and comprehend it, who regard it objectively and critically, but who know how properly to value its accomplishments and realize the difficulties of replacing it with a better system. This Marxist center must, on the one hand, spur the timorous on and awaken the blindly confiding, and on the other, put a check upon the blind impetuosity of the ignorant and thoughtless. It has the double task of driving and applying the brakes.
"These are the three tendencies that contend with each other within the ranks of the proletariat."
Indications of the coming split with the cabinet were observable even in the first week of the government's existence. Together with its decree dissolving the Diet, the cabinet announced that "the national government is engaged in making preparations for the summoning of a constituent assembly at the earliest possible moment." The overwhelming majority of the German people already demanded the convening of such a body. Only the Spartacans, who had formally effected organization on November 14th, openly opposed it as a party, but there was much anti-assembly sentiment in Independent Socialist ranks, although the party had as yet taken no stand against it. Richard Müller, the dangerous Independent Socialist demagogue at the head of the workmen's section of the Vollzugsrat, was one of the most rabid opponents of a national assembly and one of the men responsible for his party's subsequent opposition to it. Speaking at a meeting of the Vollzugsrat on November 19th he said:
"There is a cry now for a national assembly. The purpose is plain. The plan is to use this assembly to rob the proletariat of its power and lay it back in the hands of the bourgeoisie. But it will not succeed. We want no democratic republic. We want a social republic."