Richard Müller (socialist)
Encyclopedia
Richard Müller was a German socialist and historian. Trained as a lathe-operator Müller later became a unionist and organizer of mass-strikes against World War I. In 1918 he was a leading figure of the council movement in the German Revolution
. In the 1920s he wrote a three-volume history of the German Revolution.
, Müller left home and started working in the metal-industry after his father died in 1896. He became a lathe operator and around 1906 a member of the Deutscher Metallarbeiterverband (DMV), the German metalworkers union. Around the same time he became a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany
(Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands - SPD) which by then was the biggest socialist party in Europe.
From 1916 to 1918, the strikes transformed into a mass-movement that substantially endangered the political support for the world-war. Müller as the head of an organization called the "revolutionary stewards" was the leading figure behind these mass-strikes. Müller war arrested and drafted to the military three times, but always managed to find a way out and start over his political work.
When after the January-Strike in 1918 a big wave of repression hit the anti-war-movement, Müller and his circle decided to plan an armed uprising within the next months. Preparations began on a slow level, but gained speed in the fall of 1918, when the military catastrophe for Germany became more and more obvious to the public. Müller and the shop-stewards started secret conferences that involved Karl Liebknecht
and his spartacist league but also some representatives of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany
(USPD) who had split from SPD because they opposed the war. Liebknecht in these meetings pushed for action, but Müller and his comrades had a more pragmatic way of organizing things. In order to secure the success of the revolution, they wanted to avoid premature actions at all costs.
. When news about these events came to Berlin, the revolutionaries sped up their preparations and called for action on 9 November. The shop-stewards, who were the only leftist group with a widespread network in the factories, called for a general strike and armed demonstrations formed to enter the city center.
The revolutionaries took Berlin by surprise, almost no resistance was put against their actions. One day after the revolution, Müller became chairman of the "Executive Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Councils" (Vollzugsrat). By then this was the highest organ of the newly declared "Socialist republic of Germany", so that in theory Müller was head of state.
But in fact power concentrated within the "Council of People's Representatives" (Rat der Volksbeauftragten), a revolutionary government dominated by Friedrich Ebert
, leader of the Social Democrats. Müller and the more radical forces in the executive council lost power very quickly. They had to hand over executive powers to the Council of People's Representatives only two weeks after the revolution, and in the summer of 1919 Vollzugsrat was shut down by force after several strikes calling for socialization of core-industries were turned down as well. These strikes in the spring of 1919 were the biggest mass-mobilisation of the German council movement in which Müller was a leading figure. Together with his friend Ernst Däumig
he wrote a very influential conception how council-communism could work in practise. By then, the periodical "The Workers-Council" (Der Arbeiter-Rat), was the theoretical organ of the council movement and Müller was one of its main authors. During the strike Movement in march 1919 Richard Müller was strike-leader for the larger Berlin area and tried to build a united front of all working class parties, but failed.
(KPD) was founded by Karl Liebknecht
and Rosa Luxemburg
on New Year's Eve of 1918, they tried to integrate Müller and the revolutionary stewards because of their credibility among workers and their widespread network wthin the factories. Although Müller was part of the socialist left and sympathizing with Liebknecht, he and his group decided not to join the party. The reason was its intention to boycot the upcoming elections for tha national assembly and to leave the major unions in order to form their own communist union movement.
After the KPD turned away from this ultraleft and more or less sectarian political course, Müller and many of his former comrades joined the party in October 1920. By then, the USPD had split and the left majority altogether had found its way to Communism. By then the council movement was already dead and political parties once again were the main organisation of the socialist movement.
Within the KPD, Müller became Leader of the "Reichsgewerkschaftszentrale", the KPD's central on union affairs. Müller was responsible for the communist agitation and politics within the German unions. He lost this job in March 1921 when he criticised a failed communist uprising in Thuringia. In his views the action was premature and caused by police provocation. But the KPD central committee did not like independent critics whitin the party and tried to get rid of Müller. Due to an Intervention of Lenin and Trotzky on the III.rd World-Congress of the Communist International they had to accept the re-integration of Müller and other critics into the KPD. But when fights within the party started over again later, Müller and his faction lost support from Moscow and left the party.
Müller's writings were the only contemporary Marxist history of the German Revolution
. In addition, they presented a unique collection of sources that Müller had collected during his political career. But in the academia, Müller's conclusions were mostly ignored because of his Marxist point of view. This is a paradox because Müller's works were widely used as a source in almost every standard account of the historical events, since Müller gave the most detailed inside-view on the revolutionary movement. Prominent exemptions are the works of Arthur Rosenberg
and Sebastian Haffner
, two German historians who not only used Müller as a source but also discussed his conclusions. Müller's writings were re-discovered in the 1960s by the German student movement and had a strong influence on its view on the German Revolution.
German Revolution
The German Revolution was the politically-driven civil conflict in Germany at the end of World War I, which resulted in the replacement of Germany's imperial government with a republic...
. In the 1920s he wrote a three-volume history of the German Revolution.
Early life
Born in a small Village called Weira in what today is the German state of ThuringiaThuringia
The Free State of Thuringia is a state of Germany, located in the central part of the country.It has an area of and 2.29 million inhabitants, making it the sixth smallest by area and the fifth smallest by population of Germany's sixteen states....
, Müller left home and started working in the metal-industry after his father died in 1896. He became a lathe operator and around 1906 a member of the Deutscher Metallarbeiterverband (DMV), the German metalworkers union. Around the same time he became a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany
Social Democratic Party of Germany
The Social Democratic Party of Germany is a social-democratic political party in Germany...
(Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands - SPD) which by then was the biggest socialist party in Europe.
World War I. and Anti-War Movement
In 1914 Müller was chairman of the commission on agitation within the Berlin branch of the Metalworkers Union. Müller was responsible for around 9,000 lathe-operators in the city of Berlin. When the war started, the social-democrats and the leaders of the unions decided to collaborate with the imperial government and to support the war-movement. The lathe-operators, left wing of the Berlin Metalworkers, criticized this nationalist turn of the socialist union-movement and started wildcat strikes.From 1916 to 1918, the strikes transformed into a mass-movement that substantially endangered the political support for the world-war. Müller as the head of an organization called the "revolutionary stewards" was the leading figure behind these mass-strikes. Müller war arrested and drafted to the military three times, but always managed to find a way out and start over his political work.
When after the January-Strike in 1918 a big wave of repression hit the anti-war-movement, Müller and his circle decided to plan an armed uprising within the next months. Preparations began on a slow level, but gained speed in the fall of 1918, when the military catastrophe for Germany became more and more obvious to the public. Müller and the shop-stewards started secret conferences that involved Karl Liebknecht
Karl Liebknecht
was a German socialist and a co-founder with Rosa Luxemburg of the Spartacist League and the Communist Party of Germany. He is best known for his opposition to World War I in the Reichstag and his role in the Spartacist uprising of 1919...
and his spartacist league but also some representatives of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany
Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany
The Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany was a short-lived political party in Germany during the Second Reich and the Weimar Republic. The organization was established in 1917 as the result of a split of left wing members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany...
(USPD) who had split from SPD because they opposed the war. Liebknecht in these meetings pushed for action, but Müller and his comrades had a more pragmatic way of organizing things. In order to secure the success of the revolution, they wanted to avoid premature actions at all costs.
German Revolution
Although the Berlin Coalition of Müller's revolutionary stewards, the spartacists and the USPD was the best-prepared group, the Revolution itself started spontaneously as a mutiny within the German war-fleetWilhelmshaven mutiny
The Kiel mutiny was a major revolt by sailors of the German High Seas Fleet on 3 November 1918. The revolt triggered the German revolution which was to sweep aside the monarchy within a few days. It ultimately led to the end of the First World War and to the establishment of the Weimar Republic.-...
. When news about these events came to Berlin, the revolutionaries sped up their preparations and called for action on 9 November. The shop-stewards, who were the only leftist group with a widespread network in the factories, called for a general strike and armed demonstrations formed to enter the city center.
The revolutionaries took Berlin by surprise, almost no resistance was put against their actions. One day after the revolution, Müller became chairman of the "Executive Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Councils" (Vollzugsrat). By then this was the highest organ of the newly declared "Socialist republic of Germany", so that in theory Müller was head of state.
But in fact power concentrated within the "Council of People's Representatives" (Rat der Volksbeauftragten), a revolutionary government dominated by Friedrich Ebert
Friedrich Ebert
Friedrich Ebert was a German politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany .When Ebert was elected as the leader of the SPD after the death of August Bebel, the party members of the SPD were deeply divided because of the party's support for World War I. Ebert supported the Burgfrieden and...
, leader of the Social Democrats. Müller and the more radical forces in the executive council lost power very quickly. They had to hand over executive powers to the Council of People's Representatives only two weeks after the revolution, and in the summer of 1919 Vollzugsrat was shut down by force after several strikes calling for socialization of core-industries were turned down as well. These strikes in the spring of 1919 were the biggest mass-mobilisation of the German council movement in which Müller was a leading figure. Together with his friend Ernst Däumig
Ernst Däumig
Ernst Däumig was a German politician and was the co-chairman of both the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany and Communist Party of Germany .-Early Years:...
he wrote a very influential conception how council-communism could work in practise. By then, the periodical "The Workers-Council" (Der Arbeiter-Rat), was the theoretical organ of the council movement and Müller was one of its main authors. During the strike Movement in march 1919 Richard Müller was strike-leader for the larger Berlin area and tried to build a united front of all working class parties, but failed.
Communist Party
When the Communist Party of GermanyCommunist Party of Germany
The Communist Party of Germany was a major political party in Germany between 1918 and 1933, and a minor party in West Germany in the postwar period until it was banned in 1956...
(KPD) was founded by Karl Liebknecht
Karl Liebknecht
was a German socialist and a co-founder with Rosa Luxemburg of the Spartacist League and the Communist Party of Germany. He is best known for his opposition to World War I in the Reichstag and his role in the Spartacist uprising of 1919...
and Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg was a Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist and activist of Polish Jewish descent who became a naturalized German citizen...
on New Year's Eve of 1918, they tried to integrate Müller and the revolutionary stewards because of their credibility among workers and their widespread network wthin the factories. Although Müller was part of the socialist left and sympathizing with Liebknecht, he and his group decided not to join the party. The reason was its intention to boycot the upcoming elections for tha national assembly and to leave the major unions in order to form their own communist union movement.
After the KPD turned away from this ultraleft and more or less sectarian political course, Müller and many of his former comrades joined the party in October 1920. By then, the USPD had split and the left majority altogether had found its way to Communism. By then the council movement was already dead and political parties once again were the main organisation of the socialist movement.
Within the KPD, Müller became Leader of the "Reichsgewerkschaftszentrale", the KPD's central on union affairs. Müller was responsible for the communist agitation and politics within the German unions. He lost this job in March 1921 when he criticised a failed communist uprising in Thuringia. In his views the action was premature and caused by police provocation. But the KPD central committee did not like independent critics whitin the party and tried to get rid of Müller. Due to an Intervention of Lenin and Trotzky on the III.rd World-Congress of the Communist International they had to accept the re-integration of Müller and other critics into the KPD. But when fights within the party started over again later, Müller and his faction lost support from Moscow and left the party.
Historian
After he was forced out of the communist movement, Müller wrote an extensive history of the German Revolution. The first volume "Vom Kaiserreich zur Republik" (From Empire to republic) was published in 1924. A year later two other volumes followed: "Die Novemberrevolution" (The November-Revolution) and "Bürgerkrieg in Deutschland" (Civil War in Germany).Müller's writings were the only contemporary Marxist history of the German Revolution
German Revolution
The German Revolution was the politically-driven civil conflict in Germany at the end of World War I, which resulted in the replacement of Germany's imperial government with a republic...
. In addition, they presented a unique collection of sources that Müller had collected during his political career. But in the academia, Müller's conclusions were mostly ignored because of his Marxist point of view. This is a paradox because Müller's works were widely used as a source in almost every standard account of the historical events, since Müller gave the most detailed inside-view on the revolutionary movement. Prominent exemptions are the works of Arthur Rosenberg
Arthur Rosenberg
Arthur Rosenberg was a German Marxist historian and writer.-Life:Born into a German Jewish middle class family in Berlin in 1889, he excelled at the Gymnasium before studying at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin with Otto Hirschfeld and Eduard Meyer. Soon, he established himself as an...
and Sebastian Haffner
Sebastian Haffner
Sebastian Haffner was a German journalist and author. He wrote mainly about recent German history....
, two German historians who not only used Müller as a source but also discussed his conclusions. Müller's writings were re-discovered in the 1960s by the German student movement and had a strong influence on its view on the German Revolution.
Retreat to private life
By the end of the 1920s Müller was an active member of the "Deutscher Industrieverband" (DIV), a small communist but anti-Stalinist union without party affiliation. Little is known about his activity there and Müller left the Organisation around 1929. Afterwards he became an entrepreneur in real estate. Originally, he wanted to become a publisher and founded a company called "Phoebus" in order to promote his third book. But after some time, the firm changed its field of operation and went into construction works. Phoebus built state-subsidized homes for working-class families and Richard Müller acted very successfully as director of the enterprise. By 1930 he had become a millionaire, some time later he left the business and retired. Little is known about his late years, he did not seem to be active in any kind of anti-fascist action, at least nothing like this is documented. Müller died on 11 May 1943 in Berlin.Writings
- Richard Müller: Vom Kaiserreich zur Republik; Wien : Malik, 1924–1925
- Volume 1: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der revolutionären Arbeiterbewegung während des Weltkrieges.
- Volume 2: Die Novemberrevolution. Wien (Malik-Verlag) 1924, Cover by John HeartfieldJohn HeartfieldJohn Heartfield is the anglicized name of the German photomontage artist Helmut Herzfeld...
.
- Richard Müller: Der Bürgerkrieg in Deutschland. Geburtswehen der Republik. Berlin, Phöbus-Verlag, 1925
-
- reprints: Olle & Wolter, Berlin 1979 (Kritische Bibliothek der Arbeiterbewegung, Texte Nr. 3, 4 und 5) and: Richard Müller, Eine Geschichte der Novemberrevolution, Berlin 2011 (all three works in one volume.)
Literature
- Ralf Hoffrogge: From Unionism to Workers’ Councils - The Revolutionary Shop Stewards in Germany 1914–1918, in: Dario Azzellini, Immanuel Ness (Hg): Ours to Master and to Own: Worker´s Control from the Commune to the Present, Chicago 2011.
- Ralf Hoffrogge: Richard Müller - Der Mann hinter der Novemberrevolution, Karl-Dietz-Verlag Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02148-1
- Chaja Boebel/Lothar Wentzel (Hg.): Streiken gegen den Krieg - Die Bedeutung der Massenstreiks in der Metallindustrie vom Januar 1918, VSA-Verlag, Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-89965-320-5 .
- Ingo Materna: Der Vollzugsrat der Berliner Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte 1918/19, Dietz-Verlag Berlin 1978.