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Paul Levi
Paul Levi (11 March 1883 – 9 February 1930) was a German communist and social democratic political leader. He was the head of the Communist Party of Germany following the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919. After being expelled for publicly criticising Communist Party tactics during the March Action, he formed the Communist Working Organisation (KAG / ''Kommunistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft'') which in 1922 merged with the Independent Social Democratic Party. This party, in turn, merged with the Social Democratic Party a few months later and Levi became one of the leaders of its left wing. Biography Early years Paul Levi was born on 11 March 1883 in Hechingen in Hohenzollern Province to a well-to-do Jewish merchant family. He attended the Gymnasium in Stuttgart. Levi started work as a lawyer in Frankfurt in 1906 and also joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) the same year. There he became part of the party's left wing together with Rosa Lux ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Communist Party Of Germany
The Communist Party of Germany (german: Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, , KPD ) was a major political party in the Weimar Republic between 1918 and 1933, an underground resistance movement in Nazi Germany, and a minor party in West Germany in the postwar period until it was banned by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1956. Founded in the aftermath of the First World War by socialists who had opposed the war, the party joined the Spartacist uprising of January 1919, which sought to establish a soviet republic in Germany. After the defeat of the uprising, and the murder of KPD leaders Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Leo Jogiches, the party temporarily steered a more moderate, parliamentarian course under the leadership of Paul Levi. During the Weimar Republic period, the KPD usually polled between 10 and 15 percent of the vote and was represented in the national and in state parliaments. Under the leadership of Ernst Thälmann from 1925 the party became thoroughly S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Conscription
Conscription (also called the draft in the United States) is the state-mandated enlistment of people in a national service, mainly a military service. Conscription dates back to antiquity and it continues in some countries to the present day under various names. The modern system of near-universal national conscription for young men dates to the French Revolution in the 1790s, where it became the basis of a very large and powerful military. Most European nations later copied the system in peacetime, so that men at a certain age would serve 1–8 years on active duty and then transfer to the reserve force. Conscription is controversial for a range of reasons, including conscientious objection to military engagements on religious or philosophical grounds; political objection, for example to service for a disliked government or unpopular war; sexism, in that historically men have been subject to the draft in the most cases; and ideological objection, for example, to a perceived vio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Communist Workers' Party Of Germany
The Communist Workers' Party of Germany (german: Kommunistische Arbeiter-Partei Deutschlands; KAPD) was an anti-parliamentarian and left communist party that was active in Germany during the time of the Weimar Republic. It was founded in April 1920 in Heidelberg as a split from the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Originally the party remained a "sympathising member of Communist International." In 1922 the KAPD split into two factions, both of whom kept the name but are referred to as the KAPD Essen Faction and the KAPD Berlin Faction. The KAPD Essen Faction was linked to the Communist Workers International. The Entschiedene Linke decided unanimously to join the KAPD during its congress of 4–6 June 1927. History The roots of the KAPD lie in the left-wing split from the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), calling itself the International Socialists of Germany (ISD). The ISD consisted of elements which were to the left of the Spartacus League of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Council Communist
Council communism is a current of communist thought that emerged in the 1920s. Inspired by the November Revolution, council communism was opposed to state socialism and advocated workers' councils and council democracy. Strong in Germany and the Netherlands during the 1920s, council communism continues to exist as a small minority in the left. History Emergence Council communism emerged in the years after 1918, as some communists in Germany and the Netherlands concluded that the Russian Revolution had led to power being concentrated in the hands of a new political elite. Its most prominent early proponents were the German educator Otto Rühle, the Dutch astronomer Anton Pannekoek, and the Dutch poet Herman Gorter. They were initially enthusiastic supporters of the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution. In 1918, Gorter said that the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin "stands out above all other leaders of the Proletariat" and that Karl Marx was Lenin's sole peer. In 1919, Pa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Leo Jogiches
Leon "Leo" Jogiches (Russian: Лев "Лео" Йогихес; 17 July 1867 – 10 March 1919), also commonly known by the party name Jan Tyszka, was a Polish Marxist revolutionary and politician, active in Poland, Lithuania, and Germany. Jogiches was a founder of the political party known as the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (main forerunner of the Communist Party of Poland) in 1893 and a key figure in the underground Spartacus League in Germany, the predecessor of the Communist Party of Germany, during the years of World War I. For many years the personal companion and a close political ally of internationally famous revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, Jogiches was assassinated in Berlin by right-wing paramilitary forces in March 1919 while investigating Luxemburg's murder some weeks before. Early life Leon Jogiches was born on 17 July 1867 to a wealthy ethnic History of the Jews in Poland, Polish-Jewish family in Vilnius, now Lithuania Lithuania (; ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spartacist Uprising
The Spartacist uprising (German: ), also known as the January uprising (), was a general strike and the accompanying armed struggles that took place in Berlin from 5 to 12 January 1919. It occurred in connection with the November Revolution that broke out following Germany's defeat in World War I. The uprising was primarily a power struggle between the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) led by Friedrich Ebert, which favored a social democracy, and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, which wanted to set up a council republic similar to the one established by the Bolsheviks in Russia. In 1914 Liebknecht and Luxemburg had founded the Marxist Spartacus League (), which gave the uprising its popular name. The revolt was improvised and small scale and quickly crushed by the superior strength of government and paramilitary troops. The death toll was roughly 150–200, mostly among the insurgents. The most prominent deaths were th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Revolutionary Stewards
During the First World War (1914–1918), the Revolutionary Stewards (German: ''Revolutionäre Obleute'') were shop stewards who were independent from the official unions and freely chosen by workers in various German industries. They rejected the war policies of the German Empire and the support which parliamentary representatives of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) gave to these policies. They also played a role during the German Revolution of 1918–19. Their leader Richard Müller stated its goal was a "council republic in the Russian style”. Background The SPD, at the time the largest workers' party in Europe, voted for war bonds for the imperial government in 1914. Karl Liebknecht was initially the only SPD member of the Reichstag who publicly rejected the measure. He was absent for the vote in August and then voted against the measure in December 1914. With the split between the USPD and the "Majority" SPD there was a party in the Reichstag opposing the so-called pol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wilhelm Pieck
Friedrich Wilhelm Reinhold Pieck (; 3 January 1876 – 7 September 1960) was a German communist politician who served as the chairman of the Socialist Unity Party from 1946 to 1950 and as president of the German Democratic Republic from 1949 to 1960. Provenance and early years Pieck was born in to a Catholic family, as the son of the coachman Friedrich Pieck and his wife Auguste in the eastern part of Guben, in what was then the German EmpireWilhelm Pieck timeline Retrieved 10 June 2010 and is now Gubin, . Two years later, his mother died. The father soon married the washerwoman Wilhelmine Bahro. After a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
October Revolution
The October Revolution,. officially known as the Great October Socialist Revolution. in the Soviet Union, also known as the Bolshevik Revolution, was a revolution in Russia led by the Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin that was a key moment in the larger Russian Revolution of 1917–1923. It was the second revolutionary change of government in Russia in 1917. It took place through an armed insurrection in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) on . It was the precipitating event of the Russian Civil War. The October Revolution followed and capitalized on the February Revolution earlier that year, which had overthrown the Tsarist autocracy, resulting in a liberal provisional government. The provisional government had taken power after being proclaimed by Grand Duke Michael, Tsar Nicholas II's younger brother, who declined to take power after the Tsar stepped down. During this time, urban workers began to organize into councils (soviets) wherein revolutionaries criticized the pro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zimmerwald Left
The Zimmerwald Conference was held in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, from September 5 to 8, 1915. It was the first of three international socialist conferences convened by anti-militarist socialist parties from countries that were originally neutral during World War I. The individuals and organizations participating in this and subsequent conferences held at Kienthal and Stockholm are known jointly as the Zimmerwald movement. The Zimmerwald Conference began the unraveling of the coalition between revolutionary socialists (the so-called Zimmerwald Left) and reformist socialists in the Second International. Background Socialist discussions on war When the Second International, the primary international socialist organization before World War I, was founded in 1889, internationalism was one of its central tenets. "The workers have no Fatherland", Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had declared in ''The Communist Manifesto''. Paul Lafargue, Marx's son-in-law, in his keynote address at the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
