The Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (, USPD) was a short-lived, left-wing political party in Germany during the late German Empire and early Weimar Republic. It was established in 1917 by members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) who opposed Germany's involvement in World War I. After much of the USPD's membership joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1920, the remainder returned to the SPD in 1922, with the exception of an insignificant faction that lasted until 1931.
The Social Democratic Party officially supported Germany's entry into World War I in 1914, but a small number of members centering around Karl Liebknecht repeatedly voted against government requests for war bonds. The leadership of the SPD began expelling the opponents of the war in 1916, and in April 1917 a group of those who had been ousted formed the USPD. The new party, which included the far-left Spartacus League, agitated actively against the war, supported anti-war strikes and welcomed the Russian Revolution.
When the German revolution broke out in 1918, the SPD quickly took control of the revolutionary movement. They invited an equal number of USPD members to join them on the ruling Council of the People's Deputies, but friction between the two parties led the USPD members to resign after less than two months. The primary point of contention was that the USPD favoured a council republic controlled by workers' and soldiers' councils, whereas the SPD wanted a socialist-led parliamentary republic. The USPD participated in the Weimar National Assembly, which wrote the constitution for the Weimar Republic, although it voted against accepting the final document.
After the radical Spartacus League split from the USPD in January 1919 to form the Communist Party of Germany, tensions remained within the party over the extent to which it wanted to continue to push for a council republic. In 1920, a little over half of the USPD membership joined the KPD. Two years later, the almost all of the remaining USPD rejoined the SPD. A greatly shrunken USPD continued until 1931.
Background War bonds controversy
On 3 August 1914, two days after the German Empire declared war on the Russian Empire and entered World War I, the Reichstag members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) met to discuss the five billion marks in war bonds that Emperor Wilhelm II had requested to finance the war. Fourteen of the 110 members, including Karl Liebknecht and Hugo Haase, the party's leader, spoke against approving them. During the vote in the Reichstag on 4 August, however, they bowed to the party discipline of majority rule, and all SPD members voted in favour, making the Reichstag's vote unanimous. The SPD's approval brought it into the Reichstag's , a political truce between the parliamentary parties in which they agreed not to criticise the government's handling of the war and to keep their disagreements out of public view. The German government had justified Germany's declaration of war as self-defence against Russian aggression, and in his speech to the Reichstag explaining the SPD's approval of the war bonds, Haase spoke of "every nation's right to national sovereignty and self-defence" in accordance with the Second International and stated that "in the hour of danger, we are not deserting the Fatherland".
In December 1914, when war bonds were voted on for the second time, Liebknecht was the only member of the Reichstag to vote against the authorisation. At the next vote in March 1915, SPD deputy Otto Rühle joined Liebknecht in voting no. Thirty other SPD members remained away from the chamber during the vote.
Beginnings of the split from the SPD The signs of a split in the SPD began to become visible in 1915. While some on the far left resigned from the party, the members of the International Group, which Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht had formed in August 1914, fought to change the party's course. An appeal by Liebknecht, published on 9 June 1915 and signed by over 1,000 party functionaries and members, argued that it had become clear that the German Empire was intent on a war of conquest and that the SPD leadership should renounce the and embark on "the socialist struggle for peace".
Ten days later, Karl Kautsky, Hugo Haase and Eduard Bernstein, who had not supported Liebknecht's appeal, published a declaration in the entitled The Order of the Day (). It condemned those in Germany who were calling for peace with annexations and demanded instead a negotiated peace. The document caused a considerable stir due to the prominence of the signatories. After Liebknecht's no vote in the Reichstag, it was perceived as a second major blow against the party executive's support of the parliamentary .
Social Democratic Working Group After 18 SPD members voted with Liebknecht and Rühle against additional war bonds in December 1915, the SPD parliamentary group and party executives began to take administrative action against those who opposed them. Liebknecht was expelled from the parliamentary group on 12 January 1916, Rühle resigned two days later in solidarity with Liebknecht, and the 18 other dissenters were expelled on 24 March. They subsequently formed the Social Democratic Working Group (, or SAG) but continued to regard themselves as members of the SPD. Liebknecht. who was stripped of his seat a few months later following his conviction for leading an anti-war demonstration, opted not to join the SAG.
Last unified party conference The last SPD party conference with members from both the pro- and anti-war sides present took place in September 1916. Party leaders Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann defended the SPD's support for the war, saying that a German defeat would be worse for workers than the survival of the capitalist system. Hugo Haase represented the anti-war bloc and Käte Duncker representing the Spartacus League (the renamed International Group), since Spartacus League members Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were then in jail. In the discussions that followed, no path to reconciliation between the factions could be found, and the conference ended in failure.
On 18 January 1917, Ebert had the members of the SAG and Spartacus League expelled from the party.
Party history Founding The Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) was founded at the second national conference of the opposition organised by the SAG from 6 to 8 April 1917 in Gotha, the city of the historic socialist Unification Congress of 1875. 124 delegates from 91 Social Democratic constituencies and 15 members of the Reichstag took part in the founding meeting. Hugo Haase and Georg Ledebour were elected chairmen, and Wilhelm Dittmann became executive secretary. Members elected to the Central Committee also included Luise Zietz, and Adolf Hofer. The USPD as a whole was heterogeneous and marked by sometimes openly opposing viewpoints. It brought together social democratic traditionalists such as Haase, revisionist opponents of the war such as Kurt Eisner and Eduard Bernstein, leading theorists such as Karl Kautsky and the Marxist revolutionaries of the Spartacus group.
From its inception, the small but active Spartacus Group had rejected the SPD's participation in the and adhered to the party's positions from the pre-war period. The group published its own illegal periodical, (Spartacus Letters), as well as a steady stream of pamphlets and leaflets. It joined the USPD as a united bloc on the condition of complete political independence. The Spartacus Group consisted of around 2,000 activists in 1917 but was far more influential than its relatively small membership would suggest. Although it had decided to join the party in the face of resistance from within its own ranks, its agitation often ignored the USPD's official line and instead subjected it to constant criticism.
In spite of the varied ideological makeup of the party, the USPD's leadership initially consisted almost exclusively of members of its traditionalist-centrist faction. It saw the USPD primarily as a re-founding of the "old SPD" and accordingly proclaimed in its appeal of 13 April 1917 that "the old social democracy has been reborn in Gotha". In keeping with the sentiment, the Prussian state parliament members who had defected to the USPD referred to themselves as the Social Democratic Parliamentary Group (Old Direction). Rosa Luxemburg criticised its policies as "tragicomic shadow boxing" and accused the party leadership of not addressing "the political roots of bureaucracy and the complete degeneration of democracy in the old party".
The core SPD that supported the war changed its name to the Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany (MSPD, although still generally referred to as the SPD), with Friedrich Ebert as party chairman. A few months after its founding, the USPD had about 120,000 members, while in March 1917 the MSPD had 243,000. The MSPD districts of Greater Berlin, Halle/Saale, Erfurt, Leipzig, Brunswick and Frankfurt am Main, with a total of 36 constituency organisations, had almost completely converted to the USPD, as had important individual constituency organisations such as Königsberg, Solingen, Essen, Düsseldorf, Gotha and Bremen. In the Leipzig district, the region that was the original core of social democracy, the MSPD had fewer than 100 members immediately after the split, while the USPD had over 30,000. In Greater Berlin, there were 28,000 USPD members compared to 6,475 in the MSPD. In the first months of its existence, the USPD's growth came in spite of the repressive actions of the military authorities, who had been instructed to deprive the party of the "opportunity to spread its views among the people". Censorship, bans prohibiting party leaders from speaking, bans on assemblies and newspapers and the targeted conscription of leading functionaries placed the party "in a kind of semi-legality" in many places.
World War I The MSPD's leadership was forced to make a number of policy changes due to the February Revolution in Russia and the almost simultaneous establishment of the USPD. The Petrograd Soviet's demand for "peace without annexations and reparations" found broad support in all parts of the German labour movement. On 19 April 1917, the MSPD party committee backed the statement in a resolution, and at the end of June it urged party leadership to demand that the Reich government clearly state its war aims.
On 19 July 1917, the MSPD joined the Centre Party and Progressive People's Party to pass the Reichstag Peace Resolution. It called for a negotiated peace treaty to end the war and no annexations. The USPD parliamentary group said that the text was ambiguous and a transparent show of domestic and foreign policy tactics. They joined the conservatives and National Liberals in voting against it. The following day, the Reichstag approved a new war bond bill against the votes of the USPD.