In 1916 it renamed itself the Spartacus Group and in 1917 joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), which had split off from the SPD as its left wing faction.

For the Spartacists, his name symbolized the ongoing resistance of the oppressed against their exploiters and thus expressed the Marxist view of historical materialism, according to which history is driven by class struggles.

[3] At the 1912 Basel conference, additional antiwar measures were decided on, including that the working classes should "exert every effort to prevent the outbreak of war by the means they considered most effective".

During the July crisis of 1914 that followed the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, it reaffirmed its rejection of war in nationwide large-scale demonstrations by its supporters.

Even Karl Liebknecht, an outspoken anti-militarist, voted in favor because of the SPD's unwritten rule to maintain party solidarity and unity.

With its approval of the imperial government's war policy, the SPD parliamentary group abandoned three program points that they had adhered to since the party's founding: proletarian internationalism, class struggle and opposition to militarism.

The evening meeting on 4 August 1914 was attended by six guests who, together with Luxemburg, formed the nucleus of the later Spartacus League: Hermann Duncker, Hugo Eberlein, Julian Marchlewski, Franz Mehring, Ernst Meyer and Wilhelm Pieck.

It maintained its pre-war goals and rejected the war as an imperialist genocide by the ruling bourgeoisie directed against the interests of the peoples of Europe and the proletariat.

On 1 January it adopted as its program the "Guiding Principles on the Tasks of International Social Democracy" (Leitsätze über die Aufgaben der internationalen Sozialdemokratie) that Rosa Luxemburg had written while in prison.

Revisionists like Eduard Bernstein and centrists like Hugo Haase and the SPD's former platform writer Karl Kautsky were in agreement with the Spartacists only when it came to rejecting war loans.

At the Zimmerwald Conference, an international antiwar convention held in September 1915, they had refused to defend their rejection in the face of the party discipline of the SPD in the Reichstag.

[20] In October 1918 the German government passed a series of constitutional and legislative reforms, in part in the hope of securing better peace conditions from the Allies of World War I.

The Spartacus Group made reference to the 1848 Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and pledged itself to the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. workers' control of the means of production and operation.

The November Revolution started as a result the Kiel mutiny, when ships' crews resisted an order to prepare for a decisive battle with the British fleet.

[21] The German workers' and soldiers' councils arose spontaneously in sections of the imperial military, local governments, and large industrial enterprises.

To this end, the workers' and soldiers' councils were to assume all power, the Reichstag and all state parliaments eliminated, along with the provisional Reich government under the majority Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert.

In the November Revolution the Spartacus League fought for taking power from the military, the socialization of key industries and the creation of a soviet republic as a future German state.

Rosa Luxemburg wrote its platform, which called for immediate measures to protect the revolution: Over the next few weeks the Spartacus League tried to influence political developments in this direction with its daily newspaper Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag).

The three USPD representatives on the Council of the People's Deputies blamed Ebert and, unaware of his secret agreement with Groener, saw his actions as an attempt to block the revolutionary goals they had jointly agreed on.

Above all, the Polish guest Karl Radek convinced most of the representatives of the Spartacus League, the Bremen left-wing radicals and the International Communists of Germany (IKD) of the prospects and the necessity of unifying.

[31] On 31 December 1918, 127 delegates, including 94 Spartacists and 29 IKD representatives, decided to unite to form the "Communist Party of Germany (Spartacus League)".

The leading Spartacus members Rosa Luxemburg, Paul Levi, Leo Jogiches, Käte Duncker, and hesitantly also Karl Liebknecht, were in favor of the KPD participating in the upcoming elections.

[34] The majority of the party congress shared the view formulated by Liebknecht a week earlier: "The National Assembly means nothing other than a formal political democracy.

It failed when the Reich army that had assembled around Berlin, along with newly formed Freikorps units, put down the uprising on the orders of Gustav Noske (MSPD), the member of the Council of the People's Deputies who was responsible for military affairs.

And the jubilant “victors” fail to notice that any “order” that needs to be regularly maintained through bloody slaughter heads inexorably toward its historic destiny; its own demise.

I was, I am, I shall be!On 15 January the two most important Spartacists and KPD leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were captured and murdered by members of the Freikorps Guard Cavalry Rifle Division.

Franz Mehring died at the end of January 1919 and in March 1919 Leo Jogiches was murdered in prison after being arrested while investigating the deaths of Luxemburg and Liebknecht.

The Spartacus League's founders had therefore criticized both the reformism of the majority social democrats and Lenin's one-party system and its tendencies toward a state bureaucracy after Russia's October Revolution.

After Lenin's death, the KPD leadership increasingly followed Stalin's ideological course and excluded his critics, including former Spartacists such as Paul Levi, August Thalheimer, Heinrich Brandler and others.

Although the Spartacus League had neither created, organized nor led the soviet movement and had no real options for attaining power, conservative and radical right-wing parties also shared the SPD's view, with the result that it became the prevalent one in the Weimar Republic.