Majority Social Democratic Party of Germany
Significant disputes over the direction of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) began with the revisionist debate triggered by Eduard Bernstein.
He and his supporters sought to achieve socialism not through revolution, the original goal of the SPD, but through reforms and democratic majorities legitimised in general elections.
At a conference from 6–8 April 1917 in Gotha, the former members founded the USPD, with the Spartacus group around Luxemburg, Liebknecht and Clara Zetkin as its left wing.
[9] Karl Kautsky, the long-time editor of the journal Die Neue Zeit, and leading theorists of the reform wing also moved to the USPD.
In the remaining Majority SPD, the former left-wing anti-revisionists of the Lensch-Cunow-Haenisch group, who were close to the German-Russian journalist Alexander Parvus, influenced the theoretical debates instead of Kautsky and Bernstein from 1915 onwards.
Its primary achievement was the German constitutional reforms of October 1918, which made the chancellor responsible to the Reichstag rather than to the emperor and required parliamentary approval for declarations of war and peace.
[10] The Spartacus League and parts of the USPD advocated the formation of a soviet republic such as the one proclaimed a year earlier during the October Revolution in Russia.
[13] At the end of 1918, the coalition between the MSPD and USPD collapsed due to a dispute about the use of the military against the rebellious sailors of the People's Navy Division (Volksmarinedivision) during the Christmas crisis.
When the Council of the People's Deputies was attacked during the Spartacist uprising in January 1919, they decided to trust to the troops led by the old imperial officers and leaders of the newly constituted Freikorps.
Noske, who later became the Weimar Republic's first Reichswehr minister, was politically responsible for the murders by Freikorps units of many revolutionaries, including Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht on 15 January 1919.
The government of the Council of the People's Deputies raised wage levels and introduced universal proportional representation for both national and state parliaments.
A series of regulations on unemployment benefits, job creation and protection, health insurance and pensions introduced important political and social reforms.
[18] In the new republic's first presidential election in August 1919, Friedrich Ebert defeated Arthur von Posadowsky-Wehner of the conservative German National People's Party by 73% to 13%.
The assassination of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau by members of the ultra-nationalist paramilitary Organisation Consul in June 1922 and the growth of the extreme Right led both the MSPD and the USPD to the view that saving the Republic was more important than their already shrinking political differences.
