Revolutionary Stewards

During the First World War (1914–1918), the Revolutionary Stewards (German: Revolutionäre Obleute) were shop stewards who were independent from the official unions and freely chosen by workers in various German industries. They rejected the war policies of the German Empire and the support which parliamentary representatives of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) gave to these policies. They also played a role during the German Revolution of 1918–19.

The SPD, at the time the largest workers' party in Europe, voted for war credits for the imperial government in 1914. Karl Liebknecht was initially the only SPD member of the Reichstag who publicly rejected the measure. He was absent for the vote in August and then voted against the measure in December 1914. With the split between the USPD and the "Majority" SPD there was a party in the Reichstag opposing the so-called policy of "party truce" (Burgfriedenspolitik) between the various political forces. The Stewards supported the USPD's outright opposition to the war.

Since most of the union functionaries supported the political truce, the Stewards created an opposition of industrial workers against the First World War in Germany. This was in part a reaction to the growing number of deaths on the front and the growing social need at home. Their most important speakers were Richard Müller and Emil Barth. The Revolutionary Stewards were especially strongly represented in the Berlin armament industry. They had already had experience with strikes, including the protest strike against the imprisonment of Karl Liebknecht in summer 1916 and the wave of strikes centered on Braunschweig and Leipzig in January 1917.

The Stewards were a crucial force in organizing the January Strike of 1918, which was centred on Berlin, the Ruhr, Saxony, Hamburg and Kiel and in which strikers demanded the end of the war through a negotiated peace and a democratisation of the empire. They were in part inspired by the success achieved by the communist bolshevists under Lenin and Trotsky in the Russian October Revolution only a few months earlier. For this reason, the strikes were also directed against plans of annexation, which Central Powers Germany and Austria-Hungary were pursuing in ongoing peace negotiations with Soviet Russia in Brest-Litovsk. The strikers demanded fundamental political changes within Germany as well as a just peace agreement with Russia that did not include territorial claims by the German Empire against the "New Russia". These demands were not met by the Supreme Army Command (or Oberste Heeresleitung) and the imperial government of Chancellor Georg von Hertling.

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