Page:William Z. Foster - The Revolutionary Crisis of 1918-1921 (1921).djvu/6

 ers set up soviets everywhere, while the soldiers deposed and disarmed their officers and elected new ones from their own ranks. The eventual result was that the Majority Socialists, to maintain their leadership, were compelled to join in the general demand for the immediate resignation of the Kaiser. But the latter equivocated, reluctant to surrender the rich political privileges that his family had enjoyed for centuries. Therefore the workers, on the historic 9th of November, 1918, declared a general strike and in the midst of it sent a committee, headed by Ebert, to the old Government and forced it to resign. Then the Kaiser, seeing that the army had gone over to the revolutionists and that the game was up, quickly abdicated and fled the country. Thus, with hardly a semblance of resistance, the Imperialist regime collapsed and the power passed into the hands of the victorious workers. A paean of joy surged through the whole labor movement—the long-looked-for revolution seemed a fact accomplished.

In place of the deposed Government, the workers set up a Council of People's Commissars, consisting of six members, including Ebert, Scheidemann, and Landsberg, of the Majority Socialists, and Haase, Dittmann, and Barth of the Independents. Karl Liebknecht flatly declined to become part of the council because the Majority group were allowed to sit in it. The Council was given full power to act until the convocation of the National Congress of Soviets, which was recognized from the beginning as the supreme legislative body of Germany.

The National Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Soviets met in Berlin on December 16th, five weeks after the over-