Richard Müller (socialist)

Richard Müller (9 December 1880 – 11 May 1943) was a German socialist and historian. Trained as a lathe-operator Müller later became an industrial unionist and organizer of mass-strikes against World War I. In 1918 he was a leading figure of the council movement in the German Revolution. In the 1920s he wrote a three-volume history of the German Revolution.

Born in a small village called Weira in what today is the German state of Thuringia, Müller left home and started working in the metal-industry after his father died in 1896. He became a lathe operator and around 1906 a member of the Deutscher Metallarbeiter-Verband (DMV), the German metalworkers union. Around the same time he became a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands - SPD) which by then was the biggest socialist party in Europe.

In 1914 Müller was chairman of the commission on agitation within the Berlin branch of the Metalworkers Union. Müller was responsible for around 9,000 lathe-operators in the city of Berlin. When the war started, the social-democrats and the leaders of the unions decided to collaborate with the imperial government and to support the war-movement. The lathe-operators, left wing of the Berlin Metalworkers, criticized this nationalist turn of the socialist union-movement and started wildcat strikes.

From 1916 to 1918, the strikes transformed into a mass-movement that substantially endangered the political support for the world-war. Müller as the head of an organization called the "Revolutionary Stewards" was the leading figure behind these mass-strikes. Müller was arrested and drafted to the military three times, but always managed to find a way out and start over his political work.

When after the January-Strike in 1918 a big wave of repression hit the anti-war-movement, Müller and his circle decided to plan an armed uprising within the next months. Preparations began on a slow level, but gained speed in the fall of 1918, when the military catastrophe for Germany became more and more obvious to the public. Müller and the shop-stewards started secret conferences that involved Karl Liebknecht and his spartacist league but also some representatives of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) who had split from SPD because they opposed the war. Liebknecht in these meetings pushed for action, but Müller and his comrades had a more pragmatic way of organizing things. In order to secure the success of the revolution, they wanted to avoid premature actions at all costs.

...
Wikipedia