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Between Social Democracy and Council Dictatorship

This chapter examines the underlying democratic and socialist impulses in the German council movements of the early twentieth century. It analyses the emergence of council movements in Russia (from the strikes in February 1917 to the crushing of the Kronstadt uprising in 1921) followed by their spread to Germany (from the heightened revolutionary activity of 1917 to the establishment of the Weimar Constitution in August 1919). It examines the council movements through primary documents such as minutes of council meetings, congress reports, newspaper articles, and socialist journals. The typical Cold War framework for interpreting the council movements has been to view them as a transitional phenomenon leading to either liberal democratic institutions or a single-party dictatorship. Moving away from this binary framework, I show that while a diversity of political views were held by participants in the council movements, there was broad support for the deepening and extension of democratic conditions in major political, economic, and social institutions, including the army, civil service, and workplaces.