Ideological and political evolution of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1920-1922

Abstract

In this article, the subject of research is the internal ideological and political evolution of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany in the last years of its existence (1920-1922) to change the orientation of the party. The main emphasis is not on the organizational incapacity of the party, as was customary in historiography, but on the process of ideological shifts. This approach made it possible to identify the ideological crisis in the USPD in the conditions of the instability of the political system of the Weimar Republic, which turned out to be one of the most significant factors in the disappearance of the party. For historians who look to the experience of the Weimar Republic, the labor movement has always faced a choice between communism and social democracy, while the independents have, at best, the fate of an ill-fated utopian attempt at a "third way" in the post-war labor movement in Germany. The attention of scholars involved in the history of the USPD was mainly focused on the initial period of the party's existence from 1917 to 1920, namely on the reasons for the party's separation from the SPD in 1917 and the split in 1920, when most of the independents went to the KPD. The period from 1920 to 1922 was given a place where the “survival” of the USPD to the merger with the SPD was considered in an overview form, and there are no separate works devoted to this period of time at all.